Ember Hollow

THE EMBER HOLLOW

Three years after the sealing, the world is green again.

Maren and Aldric rule a kingdom built on recovered ground, a kingdom where the Ember is understood rather than feared, where the relationship between the source and the people above it is simply the nature of the place. Their daughter Lenne is two years old and already talking to the ground. Their heir Sera is twelve and training toward something neither of them can yet name. The work is hard and the work is good and the work, they are learning, is never finished.

Then the cracks appear.

A faction that never accepted the sealing wants what Lenne carries. A religious movement believes she should not exist. A neighbouring kingdom's dying land is producing armies. And somewhere inside the council that built Ember Hollow, someone has been passing its secrets west.

The war outside and the betrayal inside arrive at the same time, as they always do - and at the centre of all of it is a two-year-old who draws the source's name on the floor in chalk and points east and says: more are coming.

The Ember Hollow is a story about what it costs to protect a good thing, the specific treachery of people who love the right thing for the wrong reasons, and what happens when the relationship the world forgot it had begins to remember itself - everywhere, all at once.

The sealing was the beginning. The establishment is the after. And the after is always the most important part.