The Long Shadow

The disappearances began quietly, as the worst things do. A farmstead left empty in the night. A merchant convoy that never arrived. A face remembered wrong — or not at all. For Tarren, a traveling sellsword with no fixed destination and an instinct for patterns that trouble him more the clearer they become, the signs have been accumulating for months. They all point east. For Seleria of the Aethenveil, three hundred years of ranging the border of her people's ancient forest have taught her what belongs there and what does not. Eight orcs with a map of sites older than elven memory do not belong there. Neither does the mark someone carved into stone that has not been touched in four centuries — fresh-cut, deliberate, left to be found. Together, though neither of them planned it that way, they are beginning to understand the shape of something vast and patient. Something that has been preparing, in the dark, for a very long time. The forest has been watching. So has everything else.