The True Glass

In the mirror-city of Selvane, your reflection is your soul—and someone has learned to steal it.

Every citizen keeps a true reflection set into silvered glass at the Hall of Faces, a living record of who they really are. It can be tested with a simple breath: an honest true fogs and clears a half-beat behind the world, deep as a well, while a stolen or borrowed face lies too smooth, too perfect, a painting of a mirror rather than a mirror. And a true can be polished, swapped, or shattered. Whoever loses theirs slowly forgets they were ever real, until they fade to smoke at the city's foggy edge.

Orla Sennen, seventeen, has always lived with a faint, half-set reflection that never properly took—a girl the glass gives back like a watermark, barely a suggestion of a girl. It left her one strange gift: she alone can tell a true face from a false one. She keeps a wax tablet the way her failing mistress keeps a ledger, scratching each day into it as proof it happened, because a girl whose reflection won't hold can never be quite sure her own memory will either.

Then her sister comes home wearing a stranger behind her eyes, and Orla knows the real Maris has been swapped away. The same quiet crime has been worked on councillors, judges, and the beloved old Speculate himself. With a generational Renewal only days off—a rite that will make every stolen face permanent—Orla must trace the thefts to the woman who keeps the city's faces, and free the trues locked among the kept dead, before Selvane forgets, forever, what is real.

Atmospheric, tender, and quietly terrifying, The True Glass is a fantasy of memory and identity set in a drowned city of quicksilver and fog, where being seen is everything and forgetting is a kind of death.

Step through the glass. Discover who you truly are.