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The Talker follows Zane Zareth as he learns to use a power the immortal Court cannot safely ignore. He’s spent years hiding under a false name, rehearsing cover stories and knowing exactly where the exits are. Eventually, he’d like to enter a room without doing that.

What begins as survival becomes a cultivation journey with Whisper, a living weapon growing alongside him. The training is brutal, the fights keep getting bigger, and Zane has a habit of finding out what he can do while someone much stronger is trying to kill him.

Somewhere between the bad jokes, the blood loss and Whisper’s increasingly unreasonable weapon forms, he starts building a life he actually wants to stay for.

Nyala has carried Ophidia for ninety-three years. She knows the scythe’s weight better than she knows the woman inside it.

She likes her contracts clear and her private life left alone. Most people take the hint. Kiva, a stubborn runner with questions Nyala would rather not answer, keeps turning up anyway.

Across the Aerie, dungeon gates are reporting that everything is safe. The readings are wrong. Nyala has spent a century surviving things other people don’t, but the city is becoming harder to protect—and, inconveniently, she’s getting attached to the people in it.

Back home, a small spirit beast has claimed her windowsill. It has never asked permission for anything. She finds this considerably easier to deal with than people.