About this ebook
Tovan Reyl can walk through time and space with nothing but a knotted grey cord. He can step into any place, in any age, on any world. But the cord always takes something in return. First it was a street name. Then his grandmother's voice. Then, on the night the Wardens came for him, it took his sister's face.
Now Tovan is running, and he is running out of things to lose.
On Earth, seventeen-year-old Mara Ellison counts the till at a bookshop she never wanted to work in. Her days are the same: the same bus, the same toast, the same customers. Two centuries earlier, fifteen-year-old Wren Fothergill ties broken threads in a cotton mill, where the overseer's strap falls harder than her mother's cough. Neither girl believes in magic. Both believe in leaving.
When a strange, tired boy offers them a door to another world, neither stops to think twice.
But on Earth, a third door is opening.
Desmond Quill is the smartest student at his school and the easiest to hit. He keeps a notebook called Things That Are Wrong With Everyone, and it has four hundred and twelve entries. When Dez stumbles through a tear in the air and lands in a city of glowing ribbons, where science and magic work as one, he finds something he has never had before: people who want to teach him. He learns fast. Too fast.
Because the more Dez learns, the more sure he becomes that he has the answer to everything. If cruelty comes from pain, then he can simply take the pain away. All of it. From everyone. Whether they ask him to or not.
And he knows exactly how to reach every person on Earth.
Now Tovan, Mara and Wren must chase Dez through glass deserts, hidden cities and forgotten centuries. They will have to master gifts they barely understand. They will face the fears they ran from. And they will have to decide if the boy at the centre of it all is a monster, or just someone who was never heard.
Because the most dangerous person in the world may also be the loneliest.
A standalone adventure about time, choice and the weight of being ordinary.
If you love:
Portal fantasy and time-hopping adventures
Unlikely friendships that grow across worlds and centuries
Villains you almost understand
Magic that works like science, and science that feels like magic
Stories that end with heart, and end for good
...then step through the door.
No cliffhangers. No sequels. Just one complete journey, from the first knot to the last.
