Facelesme
Four scholars. One unbroken code. A forest that never forgets.
In the vaulted, limestone halls of the Colchian Institute of Transitory Texts in Georgia, twenty-year-old Maitreyi "Rye" Keller lives for the dead. A brilliant student of Archaeo-Linguistics, Rye prefers the predictable safety of ancient fragments to the chaotic realities of the modern world. But when her eccenteric prefessor, Dr. Alistair Finch, vanishes under mysterious circumstances, he leaves behind a single clue: a heavily encrypted notebook pointing toward a mythic, erased city hidden deep within the Transylvanian wilderness.
Determined to find him, Rye assembles her closest academic crew: Astrid Holtz, a fiercely capable field expert who refuses to back down from a fight; Caleb Hayes, a pragmatic logician and tech whiz who trusts data over destiny.
Guided by FInch's notes, their journey leads them to a shadowed valley in Romania, where they collide with Matei Thorne- an enthusiastic adventurer, who happens to look for something he found in his parents' old memories, which he had no clue of, and his company.
To the history books, the nearby ruins are Dacia Inferna, a Roman-conquered underworld. To Matei and his company, it is Corvinia- a cursed crumbling stone citadel swallowed whole by the twisting roots of the Whisperingwood.
As Rye and her crew use their crytology skills to map out a forgotten pre-Latin language, they quickly realize they aren't just translating a text- they are unlocking a map. The deeper they venture beneath the singing canopy of the Whisperingwood,the more the forest begins to change, watching through the eyes of stone ravens and bleeding shadows.
Rye's mind can solve any puzzle, but Corvinia requires a different kind of sacrifice. And some secrets are better left untranslated.