The Pious Commonwealth rules within the walls of The City. All is well for those who abide by their rules and laws. Those who don’t have much to fear, however. Not only will they have to answer to The Pious Commonwealth, but they will also have to answer to The Holy Being above them.

That fear keeps them in line. That fear runs The City.

In Nicolas Ryan Moore's debut novella, we follow a man and a woman as they are paired together in a controlled society and attempt to get by day-to-day, only to start seeing that perhaps there are cracks in the world they live in.

Once she was Adrienne Satti. An orphan of Davillon, she had somehow escaped destitution and climbed to the ranks of the city's aristocracy in a rags-to-riches story straight from an ancient fairy tale. Until one horrid night, when a conspiracy of forces—human and other—stole it all away in a flurry of blood and murder.

Today she is Widdershins, a thief making her way through Davillon's underbelly with a sharp blade, a sharper wit, and the mystical aid of Olgun, a foreign god with no other worshippers but Widdershins herself. It's not a great life, certainly nothing compared to the one she once had, but it's hers.

But now, in the midst of Davillon's political turmoil, an array of hands are once again rising up against her, prepared to tear down all that she's built. The City Guard wants her in prison. Members of her own Guild want her dead. And something horrid, something dark, something ancient is reaching out for her, a past that refuses to let her go.

Widdershins and Olgun are going to find answers, and justice, for what happened to her—but only if those who almost destroyed her in those years gone by don't finish the job first.