The Vermilion Archivist

Sable Orrin has spent nine years at the Vermilion Tower, copying the world into the Codex: every deed, every level, every fate. She is Level 3 Archivist and intends to stay that way. Then the Codex starts writing entries for events that haven't happened — and one of them is her death, dated, signed in her own hand. To survive, Sable must leave the Tower and walk the Advent, a world where every farmhand has a class and every road has a difficulty rating. She gathers the misfiled: a blacksmith who cannot lie, a warlord with his name deleted from his own memorial, a bard whose instrument hears the Codex thinking. Their quarry is a fellow Archivist who has stopped transcribing and started editing — and deleting people to fit the shape of her perfect ending. Sable was trained to record. She is going to have to revise.