Beneath The White Tree

Some roots go deeper than memory. Some never stop growing.

In the waning light of the Half Rift, where spells hang like mist and old magic stirs beneath the soil, Rineke Bossaert keeps to the edges. Her apothecary hums with quiet wards and half-remembered rites. Her mother is long dead. Her familiar is not what he seems. And the White Tree-once sacred, now whispered of like a warning-still lingers in the corner of her mind.

When the wards fail and ash falls from a sky that shouldn't mourn, Rineke finds herself drawn into a forgotten inheritance buried beneath chapel stone and lichen. Her mother's journal speaks in fragments. The forest answers in thorns. And the covens, watching from afar, are beginning to remember what they once chose to forget.

With Niene at her side-ever sharp, ever steady-and Ryo pacing the edge of her wolf-nature, Rineke must decide what she's willing to uncover. What she's willing to become. Because something has woken beneath the roots.

And it remembers her name.