Glenn Redyns has been practicing for eight years without knowing what he's practicing.
On the fourteenth floor of an unnamed neon city, he runs a copper still through the night, translates manuscripts in dead alchemical dialects, and keeps meticulous logs of things he can't fully explain. He has ADHD, PTSD, a TBI with locked memories from Afghanistan, and a mind that finds correspondence between everything it touches.
When a centuries-old manuscript arrives at his door, it doesn't teach him something new. It names what he's always been doing.
The manuscript calls it the Great Work. The first stage is calcination - the burning away of everything that is not essential. Glenn has been burning for years. He just didn't have the word for it.
"The Language of Fire" is the first book in The Azoth Codex, a six-volume dark literary fantasy series structured around the alchemical stages of the Great Work.