Ash Choir

In the cathedral-city of Verlaine, the annual Carnival of Ashes drowns the streets in wine and forgetfulness. But beneath the mask of revelry, a collective crime unfolds—thousands of citizens, in a trance of shared ecstasy, rewrite tax ledgers, redirect tithes, and sign death warrants for those who remember. Special Investigator Elara Voss, herself a child of the Carnival, must profile a crime that has no single perpetrator, only a chorus of sleepwalkers. Each profile she draws reveals not a killer, but a shard of God's abandoned shadow. To stop the carnival, she must first accept that she is not the hunter, but the last unmasked reveler.