The Grief-Smith's Ledger
A Dark Fantasy Novel

About this book:

In the high valleys of Oakhaven, grief has weight. It bleeds from the living into the riverbeds as *lament-ore*—a black, shimmering mineral that only a grief-smith can forge into steel. For forty years, Marris has balanced the ledger: a needle for a seamstress who lost her son, a plowshare for a farmer who buried his wife, each blade tempered with the memory it carries, each name recorded in his iron-bound book. The metal doesn't erase the sorrow, but it gives it a boundary. A shape. A use.

Then the Duke's men kick down his door. A mine collapse has flooded the valley with panic-ore—terror and grief so sharp it drives men mad—and the garrison needs two hundred swords by winter's end. They don't care that mass-forged grief creates blades that hunger for blood, or that the widows and fathers who brought their private sorrows to Marris will be left with nothing but empty hands. They want the ore. They want his furnace. They want his ledger.

Marris has spent a lifetime turning pain into tools that mend. Now he must decide whether to become the weapon that breaks.