Mira Vale

Twelve years ago, Mara Venn’s younger brother disappeared from the Bellweather Hotel. The police found no witnesses, no body, and no explanation for the final photograph on his camera: a brass door marked 407. There was only one problem. The Bellweather’s fourth floor ends at Room 406. Now the hotel is closing, and Mara has returned for one final night before the building is emptied and sold. She expects dust, old memories, and perhaps enough answers to finally stop looking. Instead, the front desk gives her a key that does not appear in the reservation system. Room 407. The staff insist the room has never existed. Old floor plans agree. So do decades of guest records. But Mara’s brother stayed there. And when she finds his name written in a guest register dated twenty-six years before he was born, she begins to understand why some people enter the Bellweather and leave behind no record that they were ever there. At 4:07 every morning, a door appears at the end of the fourth-floor corridor. This time, Mara intends to open it.

In Asterre, every monarch is crowned beneath the silver moon. And afterward, the kingdom begins to forget them. Names vanish from letters. Faces fade from portraits. Memories rearrange themselves until the ruler who once sat upon the throne seems never to have existed at all. Archive apprentice Liora Senn has spent her life repairing the histories that survive each reign. Three days before Crown Prince Aeric's coronation, she discovers something impossible: his name is already disappearing from the royal records. Everyone else insists there has never been a Prince Aeric. Liora remembers him. Her search for proof leads beneath the palace into the forbidden Moon Archive, where erased kings are catalogued like crimes. To uncover what the crown truly demands, she must trust an exiled royal guard, a thief whose shadow moves a heartbeat before he does, and a secret society devoted to silencing anyone who remembers too much. The moon does not bless the kings of Asterre. It takes them.