Fiction · Digital book

The Weight of Roots

By Sikho

In Hollow Fen, magic has always had a price: every working a grovewarden draws from the ancient anchor tree Ysolde costs them a memory, taken and kept forever in the tree's rings. Twenty-year-old apprentice Tamsin Vell has watched that bargain hollow out her own mother, once the village's full grovewarden, now a woman who cannot remember her daughter's name. When failing harvests force Hollow Fen to accept a Concord contract for a 'small, controlled harvest' from Ysolde, the ritual goes catastrophically wrong -- wounding the tree, killing the village healer, and revealing a truth far larger than one village's grief: the Concord's industrial distillation process isn't just draining trees, it's tearing at the Deepwood's shared continental memory itself, and the whole network may collapse within three moons. Alongside a defected Concord surveyor and an itinerant Rootwalker who has spent forty years watching this exact catastrophe accelerate, Tamsin travels the root-paths toward Bellmoor to stop it -- uncovering, along the way, a secret her own mother buried before she lost the memory of ever having kept it. This is an epic fantasy about extraction economics wearing the shape of magic: a system that calls theft 'efficiency,' an antagonist genuinely convinced she is the humane alternative to something worse, and a heroine who has to invent a third way between one-sided giving and outright theft -- knowing, the whole time, that some of what's lost along the way will never come back. No easy restorations. No villain who twirls a mustache. Just the real, permanent cost of every kin

300 minutes estimated reading

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