Lord of the Mysteries

Zhou Mingrui goes to sleep with a headache and wakes up in another world: a land of gas lamps, steam trains, top hats, and a crimson moon hanging over everything like an unblinking eye. The body he now wears belongs to Klein Moretti, a history graduate in Tingen City of the Loen Kingdom, a man who by all appearances just died at his own desk, a revolver beside his hand and a strange notebook open before him.

The notebook records a ritual meant to improve one's luck. Klein performs it half in disbelief, and finds himself standing above an endless gray fog, before a long, mottled bronze table, inside a palace that exists outside reality. There, on instinct, he does what any sensible person would do with a godhood he does not understand: he lies. He leans back in his seat, affects an ancient and unfathomable air, and answers when two strangers who have wandered into the same place address him as a hidden deity.

Thus is born the Tarot Club, a secret gathering of Beyonders who meet above the gray fog, bound to mutual aid and the exchange of secrets, presided over by "The Fool that doesn't belong to this era." Its members are more dangerous and more desperate than they look: a noblewoman chasing the truth of her family's occult ties, a sea smuggler haunted by prophecy, a boy from a sunless city besieged by monsters. Their "god" is a poor young man bluffing for his life, and their faith may be the only thing keeping all of them alive.

For to be a Beyonder is to walk a razor's edge. Power comes through Sequence potions distilled from the characteristics of monsters and madmen, and every potion drags its drinker toward losing control, unless the drinker learns to act: to live, breathe, and think as the role the Sequence demands. Act well, and madness becomes mastery. Act poorly, and you become the thing your neighbors whisper about. Klein joins the Nighthawks, the night watch that handles Tingen's occult cases, and learns the trade in blood: haunted séances, cursed artifacts, and cults that worship existences older than the gods themselves.

Because the gods are real, and so is whatever came before them. In the fragments of Emperor Roselle's diary, left behind by a man who crossed over from the modern world in a tongue only Klein can read, lie clues to angel families, dead deities, buried epochs, and a Cataclysm that rewrote the world. Every path upward winds through those secrets, and every secret has teeth: hidden orders that harvest believers, angels playing chess with nations, and things beyond the stars that regard humanity the way farmers regard livestock.

Armed with divination, disguise, paper charms, dead men's faces, and a habit of talking to himself, Klein climbs from seer to mystery one step at a time, one lie at a time, keeping one eye on the abyss and the other on his wallet. The fog above the table hides answers. The city below hides knives. And somewhere between the two walks a young man pretending, with total commitment, to be a god: a detective of the extraordinary in a world where the truth, once learned, is rarely survivable.