Some doors open with keys. Others with ink.

Buried deep in the Archive, where forgotten languages flicker and stitched scrolls whisper themselves out of memory, Anserin Mirelow mends broken spines and minds her silence. She’s a librarian—not a heroine. Not a chosen one. Just a keeper of things half-lost.

Until the day a nameless folio appears on her desk. Uncatalogued. Untouched. Impossible.

When she writes in its pages, the words write back.

So begins a quiet unraveling—of memory, identity, and the boundary between imagination and reality. A girl named Selwyne steps through a dream Anserin never meant to share. A man called Orlen waits in a storm-born archive. And the folio, sentient and strange, begins to build something from the pieces of all her half-forgotten longings.

This is not a story about escape. It is a story about return.

The Spine of the Worlds is the origin novella in the Ink & Elsewhere series by Kohana Vale—a delicate, dream-woven blend of Isekai-style portal fantasy and romantic metafiction, where librarians hold the line between worlds and every page is a threshold.

If you’ve ever whispered to a book hoping it might whisper back… you’re not alone.

Watch for the first full-length novel in the Ink & Elsewhere series, coming June 2025 from Novel Concepts Publishing.
Read. Remember. Follow the ink.