They called her a rot-witch. Then they threw her to the dark.

Twenty-four-year-old Sylvia Locke is the only mortician in the cursed village of Oakhaven. Armed with heavy steel trocars and silver wire, she performs the grueling magic of a Sin-Eater, stitching the dead to keep a parasitic sickness known as the Blight from swallowing the town. She is the absolute necessity they despise—the shield they spit upon.

Until the night the Blight mutates, and the panicked town demands a sacrifice.

Betrayed by the very neighbors she protected, Sylvia is dragged up the mountain and forced through the rusted iron gates of the Blackwood Estate. Offered as the "Bone Tithe," she is a peace offering to the terrifying, eldritch Entity that commands the rot. She is supposed to be devoured.

But Kaelen, the ancient Lord of Blackwood, is a towering monolith of pure void and shifting porcelain masks. And when Sylvia crosses his threshold, he doesn't find a weeping, fragile victim. He finds a survivor who looks death in the eye.