Seventeen-year-old Mia is promised to a man she has never met. He is the newly crowned king, Clyde, the once-forbidden lover of her mother. To secure a fragile political truce, Mia is forced to leave everything she knows and travel across the continent to her future husband’s remote stronghold. She is escorted only by her four fiercely loyal guards and her beloved maid, Astrid.  

Whispers follow them every step of the journey. The king’s castle is haunted. The dead walk its ramparts. The walls, remember screams. Mia expects shadows but finds something far more dangerous. The king she is to marry is cruel, erratic, and passive with the lands of her new country in ways she cannot understand.  

Mia quietly works to reunite the scattered royal armies under her banner, discovering that she possesses the charisma—and the legitimacy—the king lacks. In the midst of court politics and ghost-ridden corridors, she meets Sen, a gentle, sharp-witted castle worker who becomes her confidant and the unexpected light in her new life. Their forbidden connection deepens into love, even as the king’s paranoia tightens around her. 

But Sen carries a secret buried deeper than the castle’s catacombs. When the truth emerges, it shatters Mia’s world.

Otto is a thirteen-year-old boy from Buenos Aires, Argentina, who begins documenting his thoughts in a notebook, hoping to make sense of the mysteries that haunt his family, especially those surrounding his secretive, oppressive grandfather, Opa. 

Through his journal, he relives his childhood visits to Opa's hidden house, deep in the Argentine jungle, a place clouded in danger, silence, and unspoken rules. Opa, strict and mysterious, offers affection and approval only rarely, using small treats as tools for both reward and control. As Otto grows, he becomes increasingly aware of the secrets and expectations that weigh on him and leans on a wide array of conspiracy theories to help him answer the lingering questions he has about history, truth, and the nature of change. Through these stories, Otto explores the idea that the victors often shape history and that some truths are left deliberately hidden.  

In a world locked in endless ice, a girl grows up believing the cold will kill her the instant she steps outside her safe and comfortable home. After her family leaves — looking for help one by one — she finally risks stepping into the frozen wasteland, only to find her brother alive and living with effortless ease in the very world she feared. It is a discovery that shatters her and shows how deeply alone she truly was.