Verdantrix Covenant

The night the hill wrote a name across Rustvale's windows, the town learned that counting can hunger. When Eda Sayegh-Rustvale's last registered gloamwright-vanishes into the hill's hidden machine, the Noctivault, her sibling Miran comes home to a workshop full of quiet instructions, a ring that remembers its teacher, and an "offer" from the Office of Quietistry: trade away a sliver of memory to balance a ledger and bring Eda back.
Caretaker Yarel, who keeps the hill honest, calls the machine what it is-a ledger with a maw-and warns that polite words can still bite. Miran refuses to spend names as currency and takes another path: seed a new rule inside the vault's logic with a living word-**Verdantrix**-so the town can "count by root" instead of by souls. What follows is a civic, high-stakes reckoning written in daylight: a counterseal on Saltwisp Bridge; a testimony in the Hollow Oaks where an archivist names the lonely cost of **Nullbind**; two teaching rings interlocked like a figure-eight that means discipline, not infinity; and a room called **Choir** that teaches the device to register presence as song, not sacrifice.
The Quietistry's Saltwisp calls it balance; Rustvale calls it a bargain it will no longer make. VERDANTRIX COVENANT blends lyrical magical realism with razor-edged urban suspense-murkletters on glass, pane-leaves that glint with meaning, a town ledger that learns manners, and neighbors who turn maintenance into a public art. It's a story about siblings and tools, ledgers and mercy, and a river that says "please" exactly once.
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