Briquette

They called him Briquette – grey, dense, pressed dry. On paper, the boy from the peat rafts does not exist, which means he can be written off anywhere and no one will ask where he went. In Velmar a man is not made by birth but by a line in the register: the entered are real, the struck-out never were. Above the water, in dry Dosmar, sits the Quill – a name spoken in a whisper, feared even by the men who own the drying sheds. Temm cannot read a word. But he can count: other men's debts, other men's fear, the short weight in every tally. From that counting the climb begins – ring by ring, line by line, toward the heavy black seal whose single impression decides who lives and who goes under the ice. Book one of The Quill: a story of the bottom, of the stairway up, and of what a man pays for the right to hold the pen himself.