There are systems so old, so vast, and so carefully maintained that most people never think to question them. They are simply part of life. Part of order. Part of the price of comfort.
Across a series of interconnected lives, this novel follows people living inside such a system, some protected by it, some trapped within it, and some only beginning to glimpse its true shape. In villages haunted by fear, in rooms built for obedience, and in places where appetite is dressed up as tradition, ordinary people struggle to love, endure, and remain human under pressures designed to strip that humanity away.
What begins as unease slowly takes on a clearer shape. The further these lives unfold, the harder it becomes to tell where custom ends and cruelty begins.
Haunting and provocative, this is a novel about complicity, survival, and the quiet, terrible ways people learn to live with what should never feel normal.