The Heartwood Pact

In Edgehaven, making a flower bloom is a crime.

Kaelin has spent ten years keeping her hands quiet. Her parents walked into the Elderbranch and never walked out; the village decided she was the reason. Then the Grey-Rot comes for the fields, turning green things to grey ash that smells of old bones, and careful stops being enough.

The forest offers a bargain: nine Laws, nine sigils, each earned through a trial and each paid for in flesh. The first binds stone into her arm and never lets go.

She will need all nine to hold back the Rot. She will not be a girl by the end of it.

And something walks the deep wood behind her. A thing of ash and geometry that erases whatever it touches, that cannot remember her name, and that weeps over the memory of a small hand holding its thumb.

Kaelin is not the chosen one. She is a daughter. She keeps choosing, and it keeps costing her.

Book One of the Elderbranch trilogy. Full audiobook narration also available on YouTube.