Razed
Phoenix

The Book

Forty-five letters from a man who died before he was born. They have come twice a year his whole life, up the same road, in the same hand, carried by a dwarf who has never opened one. They tell him how to lift a load, how to buy boots, what to do with his hands when a man is lying to him. They are the only evidence anyone has ever produced that he was thought about in advance.

Then one arrives that describes something he did three days ago.

Phoenix starts asking who his father was — badly at first, and then very well indeed. Every door gives him the same answer. The name empties a room. Nobody will say what the man did, and nobody grieved when he died. A healer looks him in the face, comes apart, and will not say why. And the two men who carried his childhood up that road for twenty-two years turn out to be the two men who killed the man who wrote it.

What is waiting at the end of that road is not a murder.

And he has spent a year assembling it himself, one kind stranger at a time, without ever once being told what he was for.

Can a bad man write a good one into existence — and if he manages it, is that redemption, or only his most convincing lie?

Genre

Literary fantasy

Release

Coming soon

Author

V.R. Pfalt