The Hall Of Tales: Tales Of Lexerot, #1

In Crosscandle, stories are public property—and Antonio Lexerot is the city's most celebrated public nuisance.

He can turn a pear-stall dispute into a civic legend, hold a crowded tavern with a single pause, and improve almost any tale beyond recognition. Then Master Archivist Edren Valecourt dies at his desk only hours after asking Antonio to return the next morning.

Edren's final testament leaves the four-hundred-year-old Hall of Tales to the one man least suited to run it.

Antonio inherits leaking roofs, exhausted workers, suspicious Keepers, creditors circling the building, and debts large enough to endanger an entire district. His only instruction is to finish Edren's catalog—a task that appears simple until Antonio opens the ledgers and finds an account renewed in secret for centuries:

THE LANTERN ACCOUNT—STANDING.

Beside its latest entry, Edren left a single question mark.

The mystery deepens when volumes vanish from the archive and Sister Hesper Vey discovers pages cut from Crosscandle's most authoritative histories. The alterations are not the work of one thief. Skilled hands have been editing the city's memory across generations, removing the same people, roads, songs, and obligations until a practiced deception has become accepted truth.

To uncover what was erased, Antonio forms the Company of Questions: Hesper, whose devotion to accurate records makes her his fiercest critic; Elira Quill, a copyist who can trace absence through language; Brannik Gellik, a smith who reads iron like testimony; Nib Trundle, a finder who understands doors, locks, and hidden routes; and Osric, the Hall's quiet steward, messenger, and conscience.

Their investigation leads from sealed archives and forgotten ledgers to road songs, children's rhymes, ancient tools, vanished settlements, and a concealed chamber beneath the Hall. The evidence suggests Crosscandle was founded not by the seven roads celebrated in its festivals, but by nine—and that the city's peace may have been built upon a truth its leaders decided the public was never ready to carry.

Someone is determined to keep it buried.

A coordinated campaign turns rumor against Antonio, transforming every paid witness into a purchased liar and every discovery into another example of his talent for embellishment. With the Hall's confirmation hearing approaching and the Festival of Seven Fires placing the whole city in one square, Antonio faces an opponent who understands his greatest weakness perfectly:

People believe a beautiful story faster than they believe a difficult truth.

To save the Hall, protect his companions, and restore what Crosscandle has forgotten, Antonio must become something he has never been—a storyteller willing to surrender the performance, admit what he does not know, and let the evidence speak without improving it.

But truth has consequences. Once the missing story is returned to the city, Crosscandle will have to decide whether memory is merely something preserved on a shelf—or a debt the living must finally pay.

The Hall of Tales launches Tales of Lexerot: A Crosscandle Chronicle, a humorous literary fantasy series of hidden history, civic absurdity, found family, tavern philosophy, institutional intrigue, dangerous stories, and one unforgettable storyteller learning that memory is work.