Lord of False Faces
WSA 2025 Entry Contestant
-Chapters after 5 will be in-between 1k-1500k words
-Jack Summers awakens in a stranger’s body—a scholar named Michael Vaelborne, dead just days before—beneath the veiled skies of Noxhollow, a city drenched in soot, steam, and silence. Here, alchemical guilds debate metaphysics in candlelit salons, telegram wires hum with cryptic messages, and clockwork airships crawl across the heavens like metal leviathans. Marble columns meet wrought iron walkways; gaslamps burn beneath cathedrals lined with gears and forgotten names. The world is beautiful, brutal, and ruled by secrets.
With no answers and too many eyes watching, Jack does what he does best: he lies.
To survive, he claims Michael’s identity.
To thrive, he becomes someone else entirely.
In a society governed by reputation and rumor, Jack assumes the role of a detective—not official, not sanctioned, but dangerously observant. He digs into forgotten crimes, vanishing names, and truths too dangerous to name. Every mask he wears reveals another piece of the world… and hides another piece of himself.
The more he investigates, the more tangled the world becomes: ancient conspiracies, arcane sciences, and something hidden in the folds of the Unwritten Archive, a forbidden system whispered about by mad scholars and ink-stained archivists.
But Jack is no ordinary liar.
And beneath every false name he wears, there stirs a deeper truth.
A forgotten persona, laughing in the dark.
They call him the Jester.
And soon, the world will know why.
