The Palace Builder

Sable Maren is twenty years old when she apprentices to Oram, a dying master navigator who commissions her to build something impossible: a Memory Palace designed to preserve an entire culture's heritage — a palace that will sustain itself long after its builders are gone.

As Sable constructs the palace, she discovers that the project has enemies, that Oram's motives are more complex than mentorship, and that the ancient entity companion who chose her carries knowledge older than any navigational tradition. When Oram dies, Sable inherits the unfinished palace and its dangerous secrets — and must decide what she's willing to build and what she's willing to become.

The Palace Builder is the first novel in The Navigations, a ten-book literary fiction series set in a world where consciousness is landscape and architecture is love.