The Last Light-Keeper of Orio

About this book:

On a rogue planet drifting through the lightless void, three hundred thousand souls survive only by the grace of the Sol-Nodes—massive artificial suns burning brass, glass, and captured lightning. But the light is failing. The golden glow has turned a sickly violet, then a pale, heatless blue, and the frost is eating the city from the outside in. With the primary conduit ruptured deep below the Frost Line—a realm of ancient machinery and absolute dark sealed for thirty years—the ruling Council faces a simple arithmetic: three days until the Nodes gut themselves and the long night claims Orio forever.

Twelve-year-old Kael has spent his apprenticeship mastering the pressure tallies and vibration frequencies of the dying system. He knows every bolt, every bypass, every schematic the Council has forgotten. But knowing the machine on paper and crawling through lightless, sub-zero ducts to restart a planetary heart are two different things. Beside him walks Master Corin, a keeper with rust in his joints and thirty years of deferred maintenance on his conscience, descending only as far as his broken body allows. From there, Kael goes alone into the core vaults, armed with a First-Keeper's clockwork lantern and the terrifying truth that the city's survival rests on a boy who has never seen the stars.

*The Last Light-Keeper of Orio* is a steampunk survival epic where every degree of heat is a currency paid in blood and ingenuity. In the tradition of *The City of Ember* and *Mortal Engines*, it descends layer by layer into a meticulously built world of hissing pistons, mercury tubes, and the ghosts of the engineers who first tamed the dark. As the pressure rises and the eclipse closes in, Kael must decide what he's willing to burn to buy a single dawn—and whether the light they've guarded for centuries was ever truly theirs to keep.