KNocturne
What if the oldest thing you ever touched touched you back?
When Iris Calder, freshly graduated, broke, and spectacularly unimpressed with adulthood, lets her best friend drag her on a ziplining tour through the redwoods, the last thing she expects is... a conversation. With a tree.
Not just any tree - Thalen, a thousand-year-old spirit who's on the verge of becoming something more. He's ancient, ethereal, and, inconveniently, gorgeous. He also blurts out phrases that sound like Shakespeare got stuck in a forest for a millennium.
Iris should laugh it off. She should keep job-hunting, keep paying down her student loans, keep pretending she's fine. Instead, she keeps going back - first for answers, then for him.
What starts as sarcasm and disbelief twists into a bond that blurs the line between human and something else entirely.