DeAnn Smith

The world stopped listening a long time ago. Elowen never did.

In Hollowmere, the forest is something to fear, and the girl who hears it is something to fear right along with it. Elowen has always caught what no one else can — the ache of a dying elm, the grief held in old stone, a whole living world nobody believes is listening back. The town has never once let her forget it.

Then a voice reaches her, ancient and dying, calling from somewhere the surface world has long since forgotten. Elowen follows it down through the roots of the world into a realm the surface believes doesn't exist.

Below, the old magic survived — a fractured kingdom of elves, dragons, and creatures still bound by a single law: you may ask the living world for what you need. You may never take it. Because once, long ago, someone chose to take instead of ask, and the world has never healed from the wound that choice left behind.

The same voice that lets Elowen ask the living world for what it needs could just as easily command it. And commanding never once, in all the world's long memory, ended well for anyone who tried it.

As she learns a magic she was never raised to want, falls for an elf who's loved her quietly for longer than he's ever let himself say, and uncovers a danger old enough to remember exactly how the world broke the first time, Elowen is handed the one choice her whole story has been building toward: hold the line that everything now depends on, or become, just once, exactly the thing she was taught to fear.

Some lines cost more to cross than anyone ever tells you.
Elowen is about to learn exactly what hers will cost.