The Keeper of the Gate
Karst is a city built in a wound in the earth — walled, fog-drowned, always a little rotten. Roan has kept its Low Gate for nine years, and he is proud of the iron key he carries. A gate-warden’s whole life is one vow: open for those who should pass, and hold for those who should not.One night, out of mercy, he breaks it. He opens the gate to a reed-seller and her family fleeing the fens — and lets a plague into the city he was sworn to keep. But this is no ordinary sickness. The dead of Karst will not stay still; they rise, and change, and claw downward through the floors. The rot spreads through sleep, calling the living down into dreams of the ones they have lost. And far beneath the streets, something ancient and patient is waking — the thing the old world buried, the thing every warden was truly born to keep sealed.The gates are locked. The city is dying. And Roan learns the only way to hold the last gate against what is rising: to burn Karst to its roots, with everyone still inside, by his own hand. He let it in. He is the one who has to end it — and live, afterward, as the man who murdered a city to save the world.A dark-fantasy horror novel of guilt, mercy, and the unbearable weight of what our own hands have done. Complete and standalone.
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