The Tell of the Tide
Wren Cole crews salvage out of Saltwind and works the dice floors when the coin runs thin. The sea taught her the one law she trusts: you are worth what you can take and fight for and outlive. Nothing comes owed to you. Nothing owns you.
Then a night at the table goes impossibly right — and the luck that has kept her alive since she was small turns out to be the thing that can find her.
A multi-POV epic fantasy of salvage and secrets, found family, and a name someone killed to bury.
- Publisher
- Weathered Bell Press
- Publication
- October 2026
- Formats
- Ebook & paperback
- Press & rights
- Contact Thomas →
More from the Brine Reaches to come.
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Thomas Alton
Thomas Alton writes fantasy from a house outside Chicago, about as far from the sea as a person can reasonably get — which may be the point. Raised on dice, doorstop novels and the maps in the front, he wrote The Tell of the Tide when the world stopped flying and left him, at last, with time.
MORE ABOUT THOMAS →Read the prologue free
The smoke came first, before the screaming, before the water. Smoke the color of wet ash banked too long in a cold hearth, rolling down the long gallery in slow tongues that found the seams of the old stone and pooled there.
Thessaly knew that gallery as he knew the grain of his own staff. He had walked it ten thousand mornings — more than that; he had let the tally go ages back, when counting stopped meaning anything a man could hold. Every column along its length had once been carved with the seal of the house he served. They were carving them away now. He could hear it under the larger ruin, the patient scrape and chock of chisels, men in the dark hacking the old marks from the stone while the marks still meant something, as though hatred could not wait for the sea to do its work.
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