Jess Rae

When nineteen-year-old Elara returns to her grandmother’s ridge house in the Appalachian hollow, she finds more than heirlooms waiting. A sycamore tree as pale as bone stands watch, a cracked pocket watch stops at 10:17 each day, and a ledger filled with rules whispers what it costs to live here.

In a world held together by a fragile lattice of ancient magic, darkness stirs beneath the surface—an unstoppable tide led by the Hollow King, a merciless force bent on unraveling all that binds the realm.

The forest crowned her. The thorns obey her. But power never comes without sacrifice. Seryth has survived the Hollow—but not unscathed. No longer the voiceless girl feared and forgotten, she now wears the thorns of a sovereign bound to a land that hungers for blood and memory.

When Celia Vale inherits the crumbling estate of Graysmire, she expects loneliness and ruin. What she finds instead is a house that breathes in silence, watches through its walls, and whispers with the voices of the dead.

The hive is not dead. Though Celia and Ambrose sever its first heart, the silence spreads deeper, twisting roots into the soil of the village itself. As suspicion turns the townsfolk into enemies, the pair must descend into tunnels no one dared enter, where skulls whisper and memories bleed.

What grows in the silence after power falls? Seryth was never meant to carry the Hollow’s voice. Raised by the Rite to obey, not question, she only knew two things: keep her head down—and survive.

When Jerica Whitthorne returns to Briar’s Hollow to claim her late grandmother’s house, she expects peeling paint and bad memories—not a blood-deep curse that wakes the moment she steps onto the porch.