Veilborn: Volume 1

London has always kept secrets. This is one of its oldest... Beneath the city's streets, beneath the history and the noise and the ordinary weight of millions of lives, something holds the world together. A barrier between what humans know and what exists beyond their knowing. Thin in places. Getting thinner. Aarif Nyros is seventeen years old and has spent his entire life feeling slightly wrong. Not broken. Not dangerous. Just adjacent to the world in a way he has never been able to name. Strange things happen around him. They always have. He has learned not to look too closely. Then a crow lands on his window ledge and everything he has refused to look at looks back. The Veilborn are the tradition's guardians, an ancient order of bearers whose inherited abilities are the only thing standing between London and the forces pressing in from the other side. They have squads, captains, councils, politics, and centuries of accumulated secrets. They also have a crisis they cannot solve, a barrier that is failing, and no one who can do what Aarif apparently can. What Aarif carries has no name in the Council's records. It is the absence of a name. It is the space where a name should be. >The world is older than anyone told him. The darkness beyond it is older still. And the clock, it turns out, has always been running.