Raziel Magus arrived in Washington with a scholar's broken dreams and a promise to forget. Georgetown offered him a second chance — quiet libraries, a teaching post, a life without shadows.

Then Congressman Ethan Sullivan hands him a pocket watch that once belonged to José María Navarro, his oldest friend, dead and buried in Sevilla. Beneath it, a letter sealed in black wax: an eye, ringed in thorns. A warning. A vow. Three nights to find the Fox, or the Watch — and everything it protects — falls to someone else.

What follows is not a dream. Not quite. A white fox with a golden watch of its own. A faceless guardian named Thane, who speaks in riddles older than scripture. A tower of broken clocks that climbs toward a threshold no sane mind should cross.

The Labyrinth of the Shattered Hourglass is the first novel in the Septem Codex — a series where astrology is architecture, symbols are weapons, and the line between political conspiracy and ancient ritual has already dissolved. Raziel Magus must decide what he's willing to remember, and what it will cost him to see clearly.

The rain clung to the windows like old regrets. It still does.