Novels by Clare Felix

The downfall of House Croft was sudden and complete. It was not a loss in battle or in money. It was a social and legal destruction. In a period of mere hours after Felix's announcement at the ball, the Baronet's creditors, sensing vulnerability, drew upon their loans. By dawn, heralds openly erased the Croft name from the lists of nobles, their coats of arms emblazoned defaced on public memorials.The family didn't only lose their position; they lost their identity. They were nothing. Less than nothing—nothing at all—they were a joke. "As false as a Croft" joined the common phraseology overnight.The other noble houses watched in stunned silence. They had seen Felix employ truth as a weapon before, but this was different. This was not a policy denunciation or a record clarification. This was an existence attack. He hadn't just disproven a fact; he had disproven a person. He had eliminated their purpose for being.The Court of Quills became a ghost town. No lord wanted to advance thei

The stress of maintaining the illusion of the war was a ceaseless, grinding burden to Felix's mind. Each edited report was another brick added to a psychic burden that slumped his shoulders and etched new creases of weariness into his eyes. He moved through the capital as though possessed, his focus inward, maintaining the gossamer, unseen constructs of untruths that were propping up the kingdom's spirits.It was during this exhausted vigilance that the Codex had started whispering a different, alternative truth. Initially, it had been but a faint thrum along the edge of his perception, a discord in the Unseen Tide that had no connection to the fields of war or grain tithe. It was more delicate, more intricately threaded into the power matrices of the city.He walked with Liora through a plaza ruled by a row of commanding statues—the "Hero-Kings" of the great noble houses. Valerius, Croft, Montague. Each accompanied by an ornate plaque presenting a glorious pedigree back to the First

The war was not going well. News, filtered through the king's censors and delivered in sternly controlled broadsheets, spoke of "strategic withdrawals" and "gallant holding actions" along the northern border against mountain clans. But the Codex, always analytical, saw the shapes in the spaces.Annotation: Royal War Bulletin #14. Claim: "Enemy repulsed with heavy losses at Serpent's Pass." Cross-Reference: Northern garrison grain shipments increased by 300%. Medical spirit deliveries increased by 500%. Chances of "Victory": 2.3%. Chances of disastrous defeat and rout: 97.7%.The king was losing a war. And he was lying about it in order to maintain an illusion of power and continue imposing the taxes for it. The reality of the Founding Writ already had weakened his power domestically; a defeat in war could end it entirely.Felix knew this was a vulnerability. A desperate king was a dangerous king. He would lash out. He would look for scapegoats. The “heretic” who had weakened the natio

The popular applause was a crown of thorns for Felix. They offered him a weak, populist armor, but at the same time, they made him the perpetual foe of the powers that be. The nobility's first indignation had become cold, calculating anger. They could not strike him openly, not with thousands watching his every move. So they sought an instrument to strike in the darkness he had led them into.They found it in a familiar form: Kael.The Storm Blade had not left the kingdom. Embarrassed and angry at his defeat at the Academy, he had been wallowing in the Seed's worst parts, drinking his house's empty purse and faking his indignation. He was a spark over tinder, and the royal faction were all too keen to provide the kindling.He was called to not a resplendent palace, but to a modest townhouse owned by a shell company that traced back to Duke Valerius. The one who welcomed him was not a lord, but a spymaster named Vex, a man with the dead fish stare and the bearing of a statue.Your batt

The news was not confined to the throne room. It could not be. It was too explosive, too fundamentally world-altering. It spilled out of the Citadel with the courtiers and functionaries, a wave of truth rippling through the layered strata of the city.At first, it met with disbelief in the lower echelons. A rumor. A dream. The idea that the First King himself had forbidden the backbreaking taxes and the lord's prerogative to keep them tied to the land was too good to be true.But the rumor was specific. It had a number: one part in ten. It had a phrase: "shall not be bound to the land." And it had a source: the strange, fact-finding academic from the Academy who had defied the king and the whole court.Felix and Liora, expecting arrest or worse, had barricaded themselves in their room. The knock on their door that evening, though, was not from the city watch. It was from a delegation of the Baker's Guild, their aprons still dusty with flour, their faces etched with a desperate hope."

The lead-lined coffer lay on the rough table of their rented room, a low, ominous mass that seemed to suck the light from the air. The Ward on the ancient scroll within wasn't just a lock; it was a presence, a silent, sleeping guardian of immense power. Felix could feel it even through the lead, a low, threatening hum that resonated on the lowest levels of the Unseen Tide.He didn't attempt to open it for days. He simply sat and held it, his hands on the chill metal, his consciousness extended. He wasn't trying to break the Ward. He was trying to learn its language.Annotation: Royal Ward of Secrecy (King's Edict Variant – Lv. 99). Purpose: To protect. To conceal. To punish presumption. Mechanism: Psychometric trigger. The Ward is not activated by force or ingenious unlocking spells. It is activated by the reader's intent. To deactivate it, one must show one's intention is aligned with the Ward's innermost, truest purpose—not to discover, but to protect the truth it guards. Penalty fo

The ember-star had guided them through so many epochs: the First Forgetting, the Newborn Echoes, the bridges of remembrance, and the ceremonies that bound forgetting to become. But with each rebirth, there came the question that had hung unspoken, carried like a shadow across centuries:What of those who sought to come back?The spark above pulsed, quiet and watchful, but had never given orders. Forgetting had been freedom. Echoing had been grace. Rebirth, however—the deliberate return of a soul—was other, something the world was not yet accustomed to. Some cursed it as dangerous, an invasion of the natural order of forgetting. Others whispered it was charitable, a chance for love and family to continue.It was not until the tenth generation of Echo-children were born that the scandal came to a head. These children, going into their own echoes and bringing back fragments of stars, rivers, and futures, were beginning to ask questions their forebears could not answer."Why must I forget

The First Forgetting had already changed life's texture. It stilled the trouble of older folk, assuaged grief, freed bonds of memory, and taught the survivors that rejuvenation was not always in keeping but in letting go. But the sparks, with their mischievous largesse, were not yet finished.The ember-star above the village pulsed differently on one night, its light softer, finer, as if it were inhaling and exhaling with the rhythm of infant lungs. The villagers noticed it immediately. Mara, now an old woman and nearly hunched over double, lifted her staff and said, "Something new approaches. Something smaller than memory, but larger than time.The miracle arrived softly. A babe was born to the glow of the ember. While the midwives cleaned the infant and swaddled him in cloth made of silk threads, they noticed sparks flashing near, not to the parents, not to the elders, but to the baby himself. The sparks kissed his tiny fingers, his closed eyelids, his trembling mouth. And thus the

The fire of the Ember did not vanish after its dancing night. It was left suspended in the air like a small sun that burned day and night, but softly shone in harmonious imitation of the hearts of those who had made contact with it. Children pointed at it, calling it "the new star." Elders bowed to it in reverence. Scientists stared at it for hours, struggling to measure its light. But nobody could really inform them what it was, except that it had given them a present too bizarre to be ignored: the present of forgetting. It started in little ways. Individuals first looked upon forgetting as an accident, something that happened when a spark struck their chest. They laughed when they forgot their own names for a second's span. They cried when they forgot their grieving and once more discovered it softer than before. They marveled when they stepped out of their gates and pressed the world as if it was utterly new. But then the villagers began to seek forgetting on purpose. They sat tog

The evening after the hill burned on the night of the fall of the Memory of Everything was not like all the evenings before. The villagers were sleeping, but their sleep was vigilant. Some dreamed that they were strolling in halls of light and with every breath of their life, it was being performed in front of them like a song. Others saw lives that had not been lived, futures shining dimly as if waiting to be decided. Children laughed in sleep, their merriment like the chiming of bells. Elders lay still with quiet tears streaming down their cheeks. And the Thread in the land hummed less vigorously now, motionless, like a great and exhausted heart after toil.Mara, the old farmer, rose before dawn as always. But this time, as she stepped out into the field, she found the ground radiating with a gentle light. Each clod of dirt, each root, each worm buried alive vibrated with a light. She fell to her knees and placed her hand in the dirt, speaking, "You remember too, don't you?" The ear

The sky was wide with stars, every one of them looking nearer than they ever had before, as if the heavens had curved themselves to listen. The Thread ran through the ground, a strand of light through houses and rivers and trees and hearts. But this night it beat differently—slower, thicker, deeper. People stirred from sleep, travelers emerged from the road, and those that had carried pieces of the Thread across seas felt it tug in their hands, calling them.Liora was lost, her form concealed beneath the hill beneath which Jacob had started to sing his gratitude. But her essence did not cease. She remained in dreams, between gasps, in children's laughter and silence of the old. And now, with the beat of the Thread intensifying, it carried her remembrance louder than ever.Mara, the elderly farmer, leaned on her cane and climbed the hill, muttering to herself, "It beats like a heart too big for this world." She was not alone. People gathered from all corners, their faces lit up by the

The hill on which Jacob had returned had never been the same after the sparkle of his voice. The villagers climbed it nightly, not out of ritual, not out of obedience, but because air itself was a magnet to them. Something intangible pulsed there. At times it was a quiver in the chest. At times it was a warmth in the hands. At times it was just a silence more alive than sound. Liora could not stay away.She would go out before light, when the fog lay low and the ground was wet with dew, and push her hands into the earth. She didn't know what she expected to feel, but there was always that humming, a gentle but positive one, as if strings vibrated under the ground. The first time, she put it down to imagination. The third time, she knew it to be something else."Jacob said he was sown," she breathed one morning. "And if that is the case, then what are you becoming?"The thrum pounded in her fingers, as if it were another's heartbeat. She turned around, whirling, and for a moment of tim