The Root Engine | Sylvia Corven

Veyr has always sent its costs downward.

Cecily Arkwell has spent eleven years trusting the systems that keep the vertical city warm, watered, and moving upward. Then an archive packet returns with the wrong seal.

The discrepancy points to a buried history—and to the living system beneath Veyr's celebrated machinery, a system never meant to be consumed forever.

Cecily's husband works inside the administration that keeps the city running. Officials insist every sacrifice is temporary. In the districts below, people have already learned what continuity costs.

When Cecily refuses to stop asking questions, she loses the protections that made those costs easy not to see. But the resistance does not need a savior from the Crown. It needs evidence, routes, workers, and a way to change a life-support system without killing the people trapped inside it.

To be useful, Cecily must learn the difference between exposing a system and owning the solution—and decide what remains of a marriage built inside the same machinery.

THE ROOT ENGINE is a standalone adult industrial fantasy of class, complicity, marriage, and revolution.