Money he knew of, magic he knew some of, clothes and tools and Pearls he seemed to understand, but his own body was wholly gone from his memory. Everything pertaining to his self—his name, his history, his preferences, the contours of the body he had spent his entire life with—it had all been excised, every single small bit of it.
He ran his hand along his calf. His own skin was older than he was. His muscles knew more than he did. His fingers had done more than he had, decades more. His body belonged to someone who had died last night.
He hungered to know who that was. Who was the person that had killed a man with his own dagger, alone in the woods? Who was the person who felt it irresponsible to sleep until a quarter to nine in the morning, who expected to handle a number of concurrent projects, who felt uncomfortable in idleness? Whoever that person was, he had inherited him. His life, his thoughts, his habits, his muscle memory. His lungs, his heart, his mind, his eyes. Someone, or something, had all but eliminated this man from the world, and the empty place where he had once been—the empty, lonely place where he was all that was left of that mind—hungered at the scraps around the edges of that hole.
After waking up with no memories beside a corpse of his own making, all Lin has is a desperate need to fill his own empty past; but when he begins to attribute crime after crime to his old self, he’s faced with a decision. Turning his back on the person he can’t remember being, he decides to act against all of his well-laid plans in a desperate bid to become a good person.
In a regency fantasy world with four genders, where magic and presentation are as vital to interpersonal success as money and status, Lin’s natural talent in lies and manipulation become the tools he needs to navigate a nobility he doesn’t understand. But when his past finally starts to snare itself around him, it may not be enough.
