Aethendan

Aethendan is an epic fantasy about memory, identity, survival, and the dangerous promise of perfection. Fourteen years after a mysterious fire destroys her home and takes her family, Wood Elf Karliah Moonshadow has built a life defined by solitude. She survives by staying unseen, trusting the forest, and keeping the rest of the world at a careful distance. Then she meets Jett Dawson, a sharp-tongued Human rogue with impossible instincts and an unsettling ability to notice what others cannot. Their paths collide just as something ancient begins spreading across Aethendan. Forests fall silent. People disappear. Living things return changed. At the center of it all stands the Sunless Spire, calling to the world through a force known only as the Grey. Joined by a battle-worn mercenary, an Orc smith carrying the weight of his people, an enigmatic Dark Elven scholar, and a celestial priest with secrets of his own, Karliah is drawn toward a truth buried beneath generations of history. The Grey does not believe it is destroying the world. It believes it is saving it. To stop it, Karliah and her companions must decide what makes a life worth preserving—and whether a world without pain, grief, disorder, or choice is truly alive at all.