There are places in this world where stories do not vanish. They settle—quiet as coal dust—into the cracks of old floorboards and ledger spines, into the margins of parish books and the backs of photographs.

Even when the ink has faded from parish rolls and work ledgers, their traces remain.

Small things—too small to shape the great telling of a life, but never too small to matter. From time to time, these fragments resurface: a memory kept alive in a family, a story muttered over a glass, a line in an old minute book that refuses to be ignored.

The river itself has a habit of giving back whatever men try to hide in its belly.

When enough of these echoes gather, they form a tale of their own. These Lost Chapters—this first volume—are nothing more, and nothing less, than such a gathering.

They sit alongside the Ashes and Iron novels rather than inside them: side doors into the same valley, stories you don’t need to know to follow the saga… only to feel it more deeply.