The Soot of Oakhaven

The Soot of Oakhaven

In the industrial heart of Oakhaven, the sky hasn't been blue in living memory. Instead, a bruised and permanent purple twilight hangs over a city fueled by twelve massive Great Public Boilers, where the air is thick enough to chew and breathing is a taxed luxury. Amelia Featherstone, a thirty-one-year-old mechanical engineer with a stained workspace in the Iron District and a prosthetic glove of her own design, spends her days repairing the complex machinery of a world built on soot. But when a local clockmaker is found flash-frozen by a mysterious "cold-steam" leak, Amelia is drawn into a subterranean mystery that defies the laws of Victorian engineering.

Joined by Silas, a blacklisted rigger with a haunted past, Amelia ventures into the Deep Grid—a series of ancient, bone-white layers hidden beneath the city's iron foundations. There, she discovers that Oakhaven was never meant to be a center of industry; it was built as a containment sigil for the Primal Engine, a living geothermal force that is beginning to wake up. As an ambitious industrialist prepares to breach the Engine's casing for absolute power, Amelia must embrace her secret heritage as the Keeper of the Valve. The Soot of Oakhaven is a journey through a world of atmospheric tension and mechanical wonder, where the cost of progress is written in the lungs of the poor and the only hope for a clear sky lies in the hands of a woman who knows exactly how the world is put together.