The Aether Heart Chronicles: On The Trail...

The world's magic (Aether) has long since turned its back on humankind. What power remains belongs to relics, and those born touched by other blood. But in the harbor town of Runner's Rest, a woman named Nora Delway returns with a child who should not exist. The girl, Grealis, can shape aether with her own will; no focus, no stone, no charm to guide her. For the first time in living memory, something ancient stirs in human veins.

Nora turns to Jack Willows, a hunter of things best left unnamed. Their history runs deep, tangled in guilt and sorrow. She asks him to protect the girl from the thing hunting her: a pale creature that feeds on magic itself and leaves the world colder wherever it walks.

Their road leads west toward Rat's Nest, a town steeped in rumor and rot, where the cellar of a madman's house still waits with its doors half open. Along the way, they gather others touched by hardship and half-light: Bill the Bull, a stone-skinned fighter with debts and loyalty carved in equal measure, and Antoine Zerimar, a silver-voiced bard who carries more truth in song than courage in silence.

Through taverns and graveyards, over storm-soaked roads and the bones of a dying age, they chase the faint hope that one child might change what the world believes is possible. Yet hope is a dangerous thing, and every fire they kindle draws the shadows closer.

Told from the far end of memory, this is the story of a world that learned too late what it had lost, and of a handful of souls who refused to stop searching for the spark that made it human.