The SoundShapers Saga · Book One
On a world where screams are weapons, a rejected prodigy, a beaten-down engineer and a hunted boy become the evidence in a trial among the gods.
First edition hardcover
The first printing, in cloth with a foil-stamped spine.
Also at release from
From the back cover
Corti Lisenia has done everything right. She was top of her class, trained since childhood for the Skaikross Nexus, and the Nexus turned her down with a single word: denied. Now she spends her days in a hospice, reading aloud to a Deepforged miner who hasn’t opened his eyes in twelve years. Until, one day, he does. And the mentor who could restore everything Corti has lost has one final test for her. The answers were all waiting for her. All she had to do… was let someone die.
The miner’s son, Doremond Guraton, is an engineer with a stutter and a brother who settles every argument with his fists, the same brother who has just stopped paying for their father’s care. Doremond spends his days tuning machines for an illegal mine he’s learned not to ask questions about. Across the city, a boy named Spak, found as a baby in the roots of the great world tree, has outrun everyone hunting him. Then a stranger knocks on the hospice door, claiming to be his father.
On Arcelos, all magic is sound. A single corporation keeps 86 of every 100 resees the grid earns. A cult teaches that screams are weapons. And the people who can’t shape at all, the Soundless, are left to the slums. Somewhere beyond it all, a demigod named Fugue stands before a council of gods with three young lives as evidence, arguing that this world deserves to go on existing.
A girl chasing a vanished father, a son whose father has just opened his eyes after twelve years, and a boy hunted by a stranger claiming to be his: three fathers, one world built from sound.
Is it for you?
Hard magic
Sanderson, Islington
Every effect in SoundShaping is physics. Three peoples shape it three different ways. The rules are fixed, and the characters find the edges.
Found family
Klune, Chambers, Cahill
Three kids the world threw away find the family they were never given. You get to choose your family.
Character-first fantasy
Hobb
An anxious overachiever who mistakes success for love. A gentle engineer learning it’s okay to feel joy. A boy who runs from everything until he learns to stand.
Social bite
Kuang, Jemisin, M.L. Wang
One corporation owns the grid that stores the world’s magic. The people who can’t shape are called the Soundless. When the money stops, so does the care.
Systems and engineering
Doremond doesn’t cast spells. He debugs them — tuning the machines for a magic-mining operation, until he starts asking what he’s actually building.
Literary structure
Jimenez, Mitchell
The whole novel is evidence. A demigod presents three lives to a council of gods, and the book you’re holding is the testimony.
The leads
One per chapter, in strict rotation, each a different people and a different way to shape.
Skaikross · The prodigy
Skaikross by upbringing, gifted, relentless, and certain that if she achieves enough she’ll finally be wanted. A single rejection letter takes all of that away, and her new job at a hospice is the last place she ever expected to find a future. Her mentor offers her a way back. The cost is a life.
Deepforged · The engineer
He’s Deepforged: his power lives in bulbs beneath his skin, and his throat glows blue when he shapes. His mind is brilliant, his words stall on him, and his brother hits first. Doremond has spent twelve years being told his father was as good as dead. Now his father’s eyes are open.
Whindant · The boy from the roots
He’s Whindant, with bark-like skin and leafy hair, and he grew up swinging through the roots of the world tree. He was found there as a baby, and no one has ever explained why. Spak knows how to run and how to hide. What he doesn’t know is how to stop.
Fugue—A demigod of the Tempaeos who comes before the Tempaeonic Council with an appeal no one in the chamber wants to hear: that a condemned world, and the three lives chosen as evidence, deserve another hearing.
The world
Three peoples shape it three different ways. One corporation owns the grid that stores it. The people who can't shape at all are left to the slums.
The vessel
They store power in bulbs beneath the skin and release it through a catalyst in the throat.
The channel
Power breathes through their bark-like skin as freely as they open themselves, and not at all when they close off.
The instrument
They shape with breath alone, and have the finest control of anyone.
Read the opening
The first chapter will be published here in full before release.
Chapter One
The opening chapter of Roots of the Resonant will be published here ahead of release, in full, free to read.
Leave an address and it will be sent to you the moment it is ready, before it appears anywhere else.
1
The vault
Annotations, the map, the music, the scenes that were cut — kept with the book they belong to, not scattered across a blog.
Chapter-by-chapter notes on why scenes went the way they did.
A full-resolution map of Arcelos, free to download.
A motif for each people, and the sound of shaping itself.
What was cut, and what it cost to cut it.
Every term of SoundShaping, with the physics behind it.
Questions for book clubs, written by the author.
Details
Content note
Roots of the Resonant is adult fantasy. It includes child abuse, grief, suicidal ideation, body horror, and on-page violence, including a fatal beating.
The first arc
From roots to skies, from depths to heights.
Book I
Roots of the Resonant
Book II
Depths of the Dissonant
Book III
Frequencies of the Fallen
Book IV
Songs of the Soundless
