Grave Empire

The first installment of The Great Silence series is set in a world resembling 18th-century Europe. The Sovan Empire, the dominant power, has outlawed magick for two centuries even though the afterlife is acknowledged as real. Sova wages a colonial war against the Principality of Casimir for control of the Kasar Kyarai, the homeland of the wolfmen. The Stygion, or mer-men, dwell beneath the Stygion Sea.

The novel follows three storylines. The first belongs to Peter Kleist, a young Sovan Army lieutenant reluctantly posted to Fort Ingomar on the contested colonial frontier of the New East. In a letter to his father, Peter admits he accepted his commission out of shallow social pressure. En route to the fort, he discovers four soldiers violently dismembered by enormous claws. At Fort Ingomar, commanded by Major Haak, aethereal screaming penetrates even wax earplugs at night, and Peter encounters a hallucination of a legless soldier warning that "they" are coming. The dead soldiers' weapons reveal catastrophic panic: jammed muskets loaded with multiple rounds.

The second storyline introduces Renata Rainer, secretary to Ambassador Didacus Maruska in the Stygion Mer-men Office, a neglected outpost in the basement of the Imperial Office in Sova. Colonel Glaser introduces Renata and Maruska to Brother Herschel and Brother Guillot, monks of the Bruta Sarkan, a secret order practicing illegal séance from their fortress at Zetland. Herschel explains that the monks have lost all contact with the spirits of the afterlife, fulfilling an ancient prophecy called the Great Silence: the extinction or mass relocation of all spiritual forces. The monks request help consulting the Stygion Psychic Conclave, the world's foremost magickal practitioners. Glaser authorizes the mission.

Two days later, a bomb explodes beneath Renata's coach, and an assassin shoots her half-sister Amara, a linguist at the University of Sova, in the shoulder. A mysterious stranger saves Renata during a knife fight at the Dynast's Palace. Amara's wound becomes virulently infected.

The third storyline introduces Count Lamprecht von Oldenburg, a wealthy nobleman who has secretly amassed forbidden arcane knowledge. His agent Broz was the stranger who saved Renata. Von Oldenburg concludes that the Selureii, a death cult rooted in the pagan religion of Draedaland, are suppressing news of a plague in Draedaland and have tried to kill the diplomats. His consort Yelena Tesařík, a Draedist witch-healer, assists his work on a brass "thaumaturgic amplifier" designed to harness energy from the afterlife.

Peter leads an expedition north to the Ena Split, where Casimiran forces are building a fort. Supernatural disturbances intensify: a voice whispers the pagan word pistu, meaning "crush," moments before a cannon barrel falls and kills a man, and the dead soldier's organs appear arranged in a ritualistic pattern. Peter leads the assault on the fortification, and Captain Furlan, Fort Ingomar's artillery officer, proves decisive. A captured prisoner warns that monsters attack from the north during the "blood moon."

The diplomatic mission departs Sova by stagecoach with Renata, Maruska, the monks, Glaser, and Madam Ozolinsh, a thaumaturgic engineer from the Corps of Engineers. Herschel, Ozolinsh, and Renata all sense something fundamentally wrong with reality. At Zetland, the fortress is abandoned, its gates daubed with "DO NOT ENTER / ALL DEAD INSIDE." Herschel admits the monks planned a dangerous summoning ritual and the entire order may have perished.

Von Oldenburg and Yelena travel into Draedaland to investigate the plague. In Toutorix, they discover townsfolk standing motionless in a field: alive but mindless. When soldiers touch the vacants, they are instantly infected. Von Oldenburg concludes the mind rot is arcane, transmitted by skin contact. At Castle Oldenburg, he experiments with a captive vacant. When Yelena cuts a runic ideogram into a man's forehead, the victim becomes docile and obedient, "en-thralled." Von Oldenburg fills the amplifier with blood and uses it to vacate a servant, proving the mechanism can transmit the mind rot independently. Yelena warns he may be an unwitting tool of a malign supernatural force.

Peter takes 30 soldiers into the foothills of the Great Northern Barrier Range, where they are attacked by monstrous catmen: tall, black-furred creatures with leonine features. Only five soldiers survive, including Furlan and Olwin, a Black Mountain pagan scout. The catmen carry their prisoners into the mountains and subject them to vivisection with a golden spearhead, removing and replacing organs while keeping victims supernaturally alive. During a failed escape, Peter receives visions: the catmen's origins and an enormous circular door guarded by a three-mouthed entity. Furlan, transformed into a catman but retaining partial cognition, explains the creatures, called the Kato, are magickally "inert," shielded from the aethereal disturbances. Peter's own transformation is interrupted, leaving him alive but missing vital organs, with a hand turning to wood.

The diplomatic mission reaches the war-torn Kyarai. Captain Joseph Lyzander, a Sovan officer recruited for his knowledge of Port Talaka's hidden passages, guides the party into the besieged wolfmen capital. Inside the city, Guillot stabs Maruska to death, and his face sloughs away to reveal a golden plate inscribed with runic script. He calls himself the Knackerman and declares the mission cannot stop what is coming. Broz shoots Guillot, and Lyzander rescues Renata. Through storm drains, the group reaches the Spiritsraad, the Kasari spiritual congress, where the Dwelkspreker, an elderly priestess, hands over a ruby artefact called the Blood Stone.

Renata and Lyzander pass through the Door to the Sea to contact the Stygion. At Maris, the Stygion capital, the blind head channeller Muirgen reveals the cause of the Great Silence: the Vorr, interdimensional predators that consume conscious spiritual energy. Released from a prison dimension, the Vorr have devoured all spiritual entities in the afterlife. The mortal contagion occurs when practitioners open their minds to the afterlife and are stripped of consciousness. The Blood Stone could open the Eye of the Sea, the only gateway between the mortal plane and the afterlife.

Yelena absconds with von Oldenburg's notes and mechanism; he realizes she was a Sovan intelligence asset. Renata returns to Port Gero to find it under Casimiran assault. The Stygion Thrice Queen commits her forces to the defense. Renata and Lyzander locate the Blood Stone, but Glaser refuses to surrender it. During the struggle, Glaser accidentally shoots Herschel, and the Knackerman possesses the monk's corpse, blinding Glaser before a roundshot destroys the body. The Blood Stone vanishes in the chaos.

Peter, carried south by the transformed Furlan, reaches a Sovan garrison where his account is dismissed. He learns that Major Haak shot himself and that Cathassach, the Black Mountain scout who translated the captured prisoner's earlier warning, was hanged for desertion after trying to relay Peter's message. Repatriated to Port Gero, Peter collapses, his body a medical impossibility.

At the deserted Selureii stronghold of Verdabaro, von Oldenburg has amassed thousands of Draedist thralls. Broz delivers the Blood Stone, stolen during the battle. Von Oldenburg reveals his plan: weaponize the thrall army to invade Casimir's northern provinces and establish himself as emperor of a Third Sovan Empire.

At Zetland, Renata finds the order's skeletal remains in the sealed basement. Peter wakes from a catatonic state, and Renata brings him and the paralyzed Ozolinsh to Sova. Sova's Empress orders a task force led by Renata to stop the Vorr, signs a peace treaty with the Stygion, and orders von Oldenburg hunted. Yelena confirms von Oldenburg's experiments. Renata visits Amara's grave, confirming her half-sister died from the infected wound during Renata's absence. In the Temple of Nema Victoria, the statue of Akhaber, one of Nema Victoria's divine children and patron saint of siblings, seizes Renata and delivers a vision: heaven itself is under siege by the Vorr, and the goddess Nema rallies all remaining souls, including Amara's, to defend the afterlife. The novel ends with Renata galvanized by the revelation that her sister's soul endures and that the war for existence is fought on both sides of the mortal plane.