Echoes in the Forest

In the ruins outside Ashmere, magic is a memory and a crime — until Elara pulls a corroded, humming device out of the dirt and wakes something that hasn't stirred in twenty years. She's spent her whole life scavenging the wreckage of the world before the Sundering, the catastrophe that turned every magic-user in the Ministry's territory into a hunted thing. She never expected to become one of them. She never expected the device to answer to her blood specifically, or for a man who already seems to know her name to come looking for it before she's even understood what it does. Elara falls in with the Exiles, a scattered resistance who believe magic and technology were never the real threat — only the people who weaponized them. Together they follow the truth about Project Nexus north through dead cities and forests thick with residual power, chasing fragments of a family she doesn't remember and a cover-up that never really ended. But the Ministry isn't finished hunting, and the device isn't finished showing her what it cost to bury the truth the first time. Some secrets don't stay buried. Some debts come due generations late — and Elara is about to find out exactly what she's inherited. Echoes in the Forest is a story about the weight of power, the cost of memory, and the family you choose when the one you were born into has already been erased.