Silhouettes

In the mountain valley of Eldhollow, grief has a new name — and it sounds like relief. When seventeen-year-old Evan Eldholm finds his father dying on the ridge, pressed into his hands is a blade he doesn't understand and a single word: Remember. In the days that follow, Evan discovers that Eldhollow has been quietly learning to forget. His father's name goes unspoken. A missing old man is filed away without a search. A sick boy on Tanner Lane is isolated without anyone saying his name aloud. And a travelling preacher named Sevrin has been moving through the hollow's rooms and taverns, offering grieving people something they didn't know they were waiting for — permission to let go. Evan refuses. His refusal costs him. The town doesn't punish him for it — it simply stops meeting him where he stands. And as Sevrin's influence deepens and the Hall of Names begins arriving at conclusions before the truth does, Evan understands that the hollow isn't failing to remember. It is choosing to forget. Alongside Anya Halewyn — sharp-eyed, steadfast, and losing her own father to the same slow erasure — Evan begins to resist the only way left to him: through private record, attention, and the insistence that names spoken aloud are names that cannot be taken. But the force pressing at Eldhollow's edges is older and wider than one preacher's doctrine, and the blade Evan carries is not only steel. It has a name. And he is only beginning to understand what it means to wield it.