Sparrow Bone Abacus

by Raymond John

Arthur Pym is a watchmaker living in a world of precise mechanics and ticking seconds. At seventy-eight, his hands tremble, his craft is dying, and he is fading into the dust of his own silent shop. But when he forces open a sealed antique pocket watch destined for scrap, he finds not gears, but a hidden compartment containing a journal written in a script that defies translation.

The journal leads him to Elara, a cartographer of emotions who maps the city’s sorrow and joy rather than its streets. Together, they uncover a secret buried beneath the the Serpentine, a subterranean river that flows backward at dusk, carrying the city's lost memories upstream against the tide of time.

But the river is dying. Marcus Thorne, a ruthless developer obsessed with a sanitized future, is tearing up the city’s foundations. He intends to imprison the river in concrete and monetize its magic, erasing the past to build a hollow future.

Armed only with a dead man’s journal, a star-chart that maps the ground, and a broken watch, Arthur and Elara must descend into the city’s forgotten gut. From the heights of abandoned observatories to the depths of luminous crystal grottos, they are in a race to save the city’s soul before the clock strikes zero.

364 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 22, 2025