Lunathir's Heir
Nettie Hargate catalogs other people's histories for a living. Provenance, finding aids, custodial records — the paper trail of families who kept better track of themselves than hers ever did. Then the records start leading home: to the limestone hollows, to seven salt rings laid down to hold something back, and to a family frequency that generations of suffering worked hard to hide.
The Seven Salt Rings are failing. What comes through the Threshold feeds on memory, and the only thing that can close the rift lies in the Sunken Vale, where an archivist would have to give up a piece of her own history to reach it.
Read the first pages, free.
An archivist finds her family's secrets in a box from the Ohio River, and something in the water finds her. The Prologue and first three chapters of Lunathir's Heir, Book One of the Shadowroot Trilogy.
The Campaign
Lunathir's Heir comes to Kickstarter with illustrations, an interactive family tree of the Hargate bloodline, and the field notes that built the world.
Pre-launch opens December 18. The campaign runs March 23.
Follow the pre-launch page and you'll be told the hour it goes live.
The field notes
Vol. 01 · No. 01
A story from the woods
From the Archive
[ARCHIVAL RECORD: BAKER FAMILY DIARY, OCTOBER 1948] Subject: The Smolder in Spencer Observations by: Cordelia Baker Context: Visiting family in Spencer, West Virginia, during the comic book burning.
The Incident
Lord, the smoke today wasn’t like any brush fire I’ve ever smelled. I stood on the sidewalk in Spencer and watched those children toss their stories into a burning heap. There had to have been close to 600 children there! They said the burning was to save their minds from unclean material, but the way they danced around the flames… it didn’t look like salvation.
The Observation
I saw David Mace leading them, eyes bright with a fever that burned for a jealous God. They think they are burning paper to save their souls, but I just can’t see how burning books ever solved anything. They are always trying to cleanse the uncanny from the valley, but it just keeps getting pushed deeper into the hollows and caves. I worry for Spencer. My own kin in Augusta always said that when you try to burn the truth, it just turns into a grit that gets into your teeth and stays there.
Caitlin Hall
I write dark fantasy out of the Ohio River Valley, and I keep a folk apothecary — Elder Creek — a few miles from where the books are set. The same plants show up in both. One gets tinctured; the other gets buried in a field note.