A frontier city on the border of humans and monsters. When the chained beast of ruin Rugar growls, the people hear a threat, but you hear his true heart. Because a monster's tongue has no word for a lie. What he says is nothing like what the humans believe.
After a hundred years of war, the world has reached an uneasy truce, and on its border stands the fortress city of Muris. Fallen into this world, you, Harin, gain the one power to understand a monster's roar as sentences. The Concord seizes you and sets you to interpret Rugar, the chained monster they call the beast of ruin. But a monster's tongue has no word for a lie, so what he growls is nothing like the threat the people believe. A beast wrongly condemned, and the one interpreter who alone hears his true heart. Your single stick of chalk sends him to the gallows or saves him, and the more the truce trembles, the more the two of you become each other's only witness.
- The beast they called ruin, before the first human ever to understand his words, looks away for the very first time.
- The single stick of chalk with which you transcribe his roar into sentences sends him to the gallows, or saves him.
- A monster's tongue has no lie in it, so when he says he loves you, it is, without fail, the truth.
The beast they called ruin, before the first human ever to understand his words, looks away for the very first time.
Harin
A young interpreter fallen into this world. She holds the power, born but a handful of times in a hundred years, to hear a monster's speech as sentences. Seized by the compact authority, she is set to interpret the beast of ruin.
