The Hearth Between Paths

There is a place travelers find only when they need it. Where impossible roads meet, the Hearth burns for anyone who crosses its threshold. Its halls offer warmth, rest, and the promise that no one need go alone. Yet the Hearth is more than a refuge. It remembers every traveler who has ever passed through—even those the world has forgotten. When Wingate arrives, she expects shelter. Instead, she finds strangers whose roads should never have crossed, each carrying a private reason for traveling and a question they cannot yet name. The paths are changing. An ancient journal appears to know more than it should. Somewhere beneath the welcome, an old story is stirring. Why has the Hearth brought them together? What does it remember that they do not? And when a forgotten road opens before them, will it lead toward the truth—or reveal why some paths were lost in the first place? The Hearth Between Paths begins Tales of Aethros, a character-driven fantasy of living roads, buried histories, unlikely fellowship, and the quiet dangers waiting wherever the lost are welcomed.