Echoes of Broken Gears | Writings & Worlds

Enter Aethelburg, a city beneath strange skies, where ingenious machinery shapes everyday life and nothing is quite as ordinary as it seems. A city divided by family status, wealth, skills, luck, and fate. From the immaculate avenues of the Spires to the crowded streets of the Shrouded Quarter and the soot-stained tenements of Sootfall, every district bears the marks of a different life.

Beneath Aethelburg's strange skies, in a Rift-driven world shaped by catastrophe, forgotten places and buried secrets remain woven into its streets. Splendour and hardship exist side by side, and the past is never quite as distant as it seems. It comes calling whenever it pleases.

In a city rebuilt on the chaotic power of the Rift, the age’s greatest inventor is found dead in his workshop. The Ministry calls it an accident. His daughter calls it murder.

Karl Kaalstrom

A washed-up private investigator looking for work. He has a power that lets him see what others miss, and a past he drinks to keep buried. When Elara Harrington offers him a job, he takes it.

Elara Harrington

Daughter of the city’s greatest artificer. She doesn’t want a courtroom verdict. She wants the truth the official reports refuse to give.

But some secrets were never meant to be seen. And someone is willing to kill to keep them that way.

The Districts of Aethelburg

From the Prologue

The sky finally turned grey on the third day.

Until then, it had glowed orange.

What had started as a cascade failure at the Consolidated Ironworks foundry had become something else entirely; a conflagration that levelled six city blocks and showed no signs of stopping. The flames were not ordinary flames. They burned too hot, too bright, too wild, fed by the chaotic energy of the Rift that had been harnessed to rebuild a world on the brink of extinction.

Those who survived said the sky had split open. A column of light—too bright to look at, too wrong to comprehend—had risen from the foundry's core...

Status: Part One is currently in preparation. Join the reader list for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes glimpses into Aethelburg, and news about the upcoming release.