The Star-Marked Record · Entry No. 01
The Registry is open.
The Council keeps one kind of record. This is the other kind.
Every entry in this record pairs with a dispatch from the Star-Marked Registry — my free newsletter. The Record holds what lives on this site. The Registry sends what never leaves it anywhere else.
This entry’s file: THE WREN
A complete Star-Marked prequel novella · why-choose · explicit · free, no gate, no signup required
Before Astra Verita ever saw a Council car, her mother walked out of Zenith Hall at seventeen with her file stamped Withdrawal: voluntary. Unresolved. The Council’s complete record of what happened next is three lines long: intake, assessment, referral.
This novella is the rest of it. A river town called the Ford. A ferryman who talks, an assessor who lies in beautiful handwriting, an orchardist who keeps a crooked tree for the wrens. Three Pulls the school said were impossible, a silver brooch that will one day ride pinned to her daughter’s coat, and the year one woman stopped surviving and started living.
In the Registry only: “The Far Bank”
There is one scene the novella keeps from you on purpose: the first crossing, from the other side of the rope. What the ferryman felt at midriver, what he decided on the dock, and why he never once asked her to stay. The Far Bank — Bram’s side of Chapter One — goes out in the Registry’s first dispatch and lives nowhere else. Subscribing is free.
The Star-Marked — the whole series is already written
Zenith Hall — out now · Zenith Tower — preorder · Zenith Court — preorder