The Runaway Alphabet

Etta Vey knows a book is dangerous when men stop asking its price. Called to the Northbridge Manuscript Institute to authenticate a damaged grimoire tied to the Hartwell Language Preservation Fund, Etta discovers something impossible hidden inside the binding: a missing leaf connected to the Voynich Manuscript. But this is no ordinary fragment. The glyphs on the page do not simply describe language.
They change it. After reading a single marked line aloud, Etta becomes entangled in a terrifying force tied to forgotten alphabets, abandoned tongues, and a presence older than scholarship itself. Words begin disappearing around her. Exit signs lose meaning. Catalog cards blank themselves. People forget names they have spoken for decades. Then Etta loses the title of her favorite childhood book. And realizes the language is starting to read her back.
Hunted by Julian Hartwell, a powerful collector determined to bury his family's connection to a vanished tongue, Etta is forced into the wreckage of her late father's research, where she discovers the horrifying truth:Some languages do not die. They run. Atmospheric, literary, and deeply unsettling, The Runaway Alphabet blends dark academia, manuscript mystery, occult suspense, and psychological horror into a thriller about memory, grief, inherited obsession, and the terrifying cost of preserving what history tried to abandon.
For readers of manuscript thrillers, literary suspense, and mysteries where language itself becomes dangerous.