Anatomy of a Ruin

In the soot-choked gutters of Port Veridia, death is a daily commodity. But for Dr. Severin Hale, it just became personal.

Night after night in Trauma Bay Three of St. Jude’s Municipal Ward, Dr. Severin Hale plunges his hands into shattered chests, holding back death with cold, surgical detachment. In an industrial city rotting from coal smog, typhus, and dockside bloodshed, Severin has survived by feeling nothing.

Until he comes home to Flat 4B.

The heavy oak door hangs splintered on its hinges. Two yellow municipal evidence seals flutter in the cold draft. On the pine floorboards, his wife’s antique cello lies crushed in half beside a pool of dried blood. Mireille is gone—vanished without a trace into the foggy underbelly of the Lower Canals.

With the police calling it another unsolved harbor casualty, Severin refuses to let her become just another statistic. Guided by a trail of illicit black-market chemicals, severed anatomy, and forged inquests, he leaves the sterile comfort of the operating theater to hunt the city's most elusive predator: Aldis Pyke, the dockland butcher known only as The Ferryman.

Armed with a surgeon’s scalpel and an unrelenting obsession, Severin descends into the rain-slicked abyss of Port Veridia. But in a city where human life is traded by the pound, how much of his own humanity will he have to cut away to find the truth?