Years before the story begins, Elara — the family's most talented Lie Catcher — vanished during an expedition remembered only as "the Incident," in which she and her husband Sully encountered an ancient, mist-shrouded being known as the Guardian. Sully was publicly blamed for failing to protect her; privately, she'd left behind a letter, never shown to their son Trick, insisting the Guardian transports rather than kills. Sully spent the years since secretly believing she might still be alive, taking over the family's Lie Catching work and falling deep into debt — and, through his partner Treacher's disreputable connections, into the orbit of the Shadow Conclave, the secret society controlling Father Mahoney.

Trick, wanting nothing to do with any of it, left the family trade behind. He's pulled back in when a Lie Side expedition goes wrong: Sully and Bendy are both badly hurt, Treacher barely drags Bendy out alive, and Sully himself is taken by a massive shadowed creature. Now caring for an unconscious Bendy and carrying his mother's journal, Trick is drawn into a widening web — Alibi's Lounge, where his bag of captured lies is stolen under circumstances that are still murky even to people close to him; the Protectorate's Justice Complex, sitting atop one of the largest known rifts; and a hospital care system that ties his brother's survival directly to his family's ability to pay.

Along the way, Trick learns that several people close to him are not what they appear. Treacher's own history includes a secret, decades-long devotion to Elara and a plan to steal and sell the family's lies to fund a search for her — even as he risks real harm, including his own worsening blindness, protecting Sully and Bendy on the page. Bendy, it turns out, had secretly been drawn into a relationship with an undercover Truthseeker named Justine and had quietly planned to hand the family's lies over to the Protectorate himself, before his injury stopped him. Justine, in turn, works the same circles as another undercover agent, Grigori, neither aware the other is playing the same game.

The deepest revelation is Elara's: she was herself a Guardian of Truth, who gave up her old life to stop a catastrophic lie from merging the Lie Side with the human world — the very scheme Father Mahoney has been coerced into serving for the Shadow Conclave. The monstrous presence that took Sully is, unknown to every character on the page, Elara herself in that Guardian form.

In the end, Trick confronts and stops Mahoney's plan — but the cost is the Lie Side and the human world being severed from each other for good, and Trick is left on the far side of that divide, inheriting the Guardian of Truth role his mother once held. His last act is a message sent across the divide to Bendy, who is recovering: felt only as a light breeze.

Status key: DRAFTED = full narrative prose exists. OUTLINE = beat notes only, no scene written. GAP = not yet started.