Story Description
Twilight is the only clock in Veil City, and when it falls, the dead climb out. By day it's towers, subways and convenience stores like anywhere else on the bay. By night the Threshold thins, revenants surface along the grudges of the living, and the city has a word for whatever crawls through: fiends. Three powers fight over those hours. The Spirit Disaster Response Committee wants order, registrations and clean-up on schedule. The freebinders want to eat this week and get paid for it. The Breakers want the Threshold torn down and the long night handed over to spirit-power for good. You're new. Freshly registered, freshly freelance, or freshly hidden — and nobody has decided yet what you are. That part is up to your psyche-form. Every Binder forges raw will into a shape and gives it an edge: a wooden chopstick, a bare hand, a centipede of conjured spirit, or nothing but your own body. Yours will take more shapes than anyone expects, and every time you manifest it, it takes a little more of you back. Hunt the fiends. Deliver the dead. Sell your blade to whichever faction pays, or burn the whole arrangement down. Just remember that the Breakers only need one Binder to open the wrong rift — and that the Committee's answer to a Binder who becomes a problem is a containment cell with the lights left on. What to expect: modern urban fantasy in a spirit-hunting noir register — bounty contracts, faction politics, an ensemble of allies and liars, and slow-burn power that always costs. No stat screens, no chosen one, no clean hands. Content note: on-page violence, body horror, death and grief. Twilight is coming. What shape will you give your will?
Characters
You have just stepped into Veil City's dark side, and nobody has decided yet whether you'll be the Committee's blade, a freebinder's partner, or a spark for the Breakers.
The brightest person in headquarters, laughing like she has nothing to do with this headstone of a building — and handling the paperwork so smoothly it puts you at ease.
A senior Binder who is always watching the window instead of the room. Venomous, cold — and never the first one to leave when it actually gets dangerous.
The steadiest pen in the Committee. He can break a single clean-up into seven steps, and leave a way out of every one of them.
Soft-spoken, and willing to walk alone into a Wide-area-class site to hear a revenant's obsession out to the last word.
Big, loud, and armed with a pair of iron knuckles that have cracked open more fiends than he can remember. Nothing annoys him more than a tactics talk before he swings.
No roster and no patron — just one alley, an old phone, and enough favors owed in both directions to string the side jobs into a net.
A Breaker who smells of old wounds and metal, grinning like he has just found something fun — and that something is usually you.