#interesting!!!!

First: I am so close to the halfway point but I am running out of steam and have other things to do :') Tomorrow, though!

Second: I have (mostly) recovered from my various ills and am trying to put my life back together... but here is a pretty simple and messy synopsis of the story so far!

***

So: Ara is a vampire; his memory has been tampered with through some mysterious magical process that has yet to be diagnosed. Most wizards assume his amnesia results from a curse gone terribly wrong, but the magic itself shuts out any attempts to pry into it, so all they can do is theorize aimlessly.

After spending unknown centuries searching for a cure, or at least an answer, Ara gives up. He passes a few decades living and working at a remote monastery, receiving snippets of magical information and news about the outside world from the travelers who pass through, otherwise isolated.

Our story opens when Ara decides to set out again, having forgotten the hopelessness that led him to hide in the first place. He hops trains across a now-unfamiliar landscape, transformed by a period of rapid political and technological change. The world he finds is inconsistent with the shadowy memories he retains; it's more connected than ever (trade, airships, steam trains) but also more divided (policed borders, wealth gaps), and he finds it all very alienating and overwhelming.

Still, he keeps pushing forward. His destination is the house of a wizard who holds his collection of old journals for safekeeping, its address scrawled at the front of his new journal so he wouldn't forget. But police and bureaucracy trap him in the border city-state of Avei, and he's forced to wait.

He only has one contact in the city, a stranger who turns out to be a scholar in the academic study of magic (who we'll call N). N is so fascinated by Ara's case that he agrees to house and study him while Ara figures out his way forward—and offers him work on the side. This is, obviously, a pretty sweet deal for Ara, who accepts.

It's supposed to be a temporary measure, but Ara feels increasingly trapped there. He waits for the local government to find him a way across the border, but they keep demanding bribes as they drag their feet; N seems to have outsourced all of his study of Ara's case to his conman of a wizard, L, who seems disinterested in anything but making money.

With time, Ara ends up increasingly drawn into the competing schemes and loyalties of N's employees as they all try to use him as a pawn to manipulate each other. He has his own mystery to solve—but there's a conspiracy brewing right in front of him, and he's not sure he ever had the choice not to get involved.

***

...and, so far, that's it! The last two paragraphs hint at what's to come, but otherwise this is just where I'm at now, optimistically 1/3 of the way through this story. There's just so much background info I want to explain that I've made it really hard to succinctly summarize this book, lol.