The Gravemason

By Rowan Ashvale

Stone remembers. The empire forgets. One girl can hear the difference.
In the Empire of Sarevail, grief does not fade - it grains itself into the stone beneath the world, where the licensed masons of the Recollect can wake the memories of the dead, or seal them in silence forever. Courts swear on stone. Treaties are cut in it. And the empire's two-hundred-year peace rests on a single founding memory no one is permitted to question.
Senna Vareth is nineteen, unlicensed, and hiding a gift that carries a death sentence: she can hear stone without touching it - even stone the empire has sealed shut.
When a stilled grave at the bottom of a flooded quarry begins to scream - an impossibility her dying father's craft swears cannot happen - Senna follows the voice into the empire's oldest crime: a full year cut out of every stone in Sarevail, a mother who was never given a grave, and a courteous, brilliant old man at the head of an office built to make the whole world forget.
To reach the truth, she will have to walk in through the front door of the people who would drown her for what she is, wear the gloves they hand her, and learn their craft to its forbidden summit. And the secret she finds at the center of the empire is not what she feared.
It is worse - because it is beautiful. And Sarevail will bury her alive to keep it.
Some memories are sealed to protect the world. Some are sealed because the world deserves to hear them. Senna Vareth is about to learn the difference - and teach an empire to sing.
The Gravemason is the first book of The Hollow Year, a standalone-complete epic fantasy of memory, grief, and the price of forgetting - for readers who love morally complex villains, original magic systems with real cost, and a heroine who wins with her mind and her heart instead of a sword.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H7K8YW24
• ISBN13: 9798185422083
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"