The Hollow Covenant

Kairan Voss has been mapping Ironmere's Hollow Grounds since he was eleven — since the night his mother walked into one and didn't come back. The Hollow Accord says there are eleven Hollow Grounds. His notebook shows nineteen. They say the things wandering inside are mindless. He has watched them long enough to know better. They say the deaths are natural causes. Eight bodies with the same wrong shadow say otherwise. Someone has been lying for sixty years. The Remnants wandering the Grounds were people once — practitioners the Accord built by lying, then used as justification for their own authority. Now the same people are building something beneath the old city that will give them permanent control over every practitioner everywhere. Stopping it requires a natural Witness. Someone prepared for this without knowing it for eight years. Kairan has three weeks. One memory left to surrender. And a mother somewhere in the still fog who comes to the boundary every morning and waits.The cost is permanent. The truth is worth it. Maybe.