
Barter of Names
About the Story
A coastal town’s Remembrance House offers brief returns from the dead at the cost of living memory. Mara, an apprentice haunted by her missing brother, trades for Finn and watches the city pay in vanishing knowledge. When the House’s appetite spirals, she volunteers a final, impossible sacrifice to stop it.
Chapters
Related Stories
The Orchard of Borrowed Voices
Evie Hart returns to her coastal hometown for her brother's funeral and discovers an orchard that speaks with the dead. Its fruit replay lost voices, but every listening exacts pieces of memory. Confronting guilt and a town hungry for closure, Evie faces a terrible bargain.
The Lantern of Lost Bells
In a fogbound port, instrument restorer Maya Kessler finds a brass lantern holding a child's voice and a clue to her missing brother. To rescue him she must penetrate a subterranean Archive, bargain with memory, and confront those who silence the city — at a cost.
The Last Line
When her brother vanishes near a shuttered seaside pavilion, sound archivist Maya Sorensen follows a humming on the wind into an echoing hall between worlds. With a gifted tuning fork, an unlikely guide, and her grandmother’s lullaby, she challenges the pavilion’s keeper to finish the song he’s held open for a century.
The Hush at Lyric House
When acoustics engineer Juno Park returns to stormy Greybridge to help restore a derelict theater, she finds a silence that steals voices. With a lighthouse keeper’s tuning fork, a sharp-eyed barista, her brother, and a stray dog, she must retune a haunted house and return a stolen song.
Harbor of Hollow Echoes
In coastal Greyhaven, Nora Hale, an archivist haunted by her drowned brother’s reappearance as an Echo, uncovers a ledger that treats memory as currency. When the town’s recovered dead cost living recollections, Nora faces a sacrifice that will restore the community at the price of her most intimate memory.

