The Ruins

Five days sailing in a storm that didn't exist six days ago. Chasing an impossible light in a sea of endless sky.

Vincent Locklear and Mercy Larkin have been set adrift. Their lives upturned, Vincent stripped of his captaincy, and newly purposeless, the pair now sail through a storm. Their course takes them five days into a storm that is less than six days old, birthed by a flash of light that, for just a moment, drowned out the sun.

Mercy Larkin has lived a lifetime in someone else's world. Taken from her people, raised in indentured servitude, and finding her footing in Volante's navy, having the opportunity to change the course of her life is strange and terrifying. But she has chosen to return to the people who forswore her, and reconcile with the reason she chose her surname Larkin.

Vincent Locklear has never managed to belong to the people he lives alongside. A child of the Monastery; a coven of secretive custodians of old science, he was cast out years ago to make his own way. Despite being an outsider and forced to keep his childhood a secret, he rose to become a ship captain, only to be cast out again.

But what these two will find in the darkness of the storm, will set their lives on a course both demanding and unalterable. To find their way as children of unkindness.