What price is worth paying to hold the darkness back?

 

Three months after the death of her familiar, Ava Corvine returns to the forest to do what comes next. She is deep in the old trees, her purpose clear, when a stranger comes crashing out of the caves below the rowan tree with something ancient and many-limbed behind him.

 

This is not what she came for. She helps him anyway.

 

Orren Blackwell has spent twenty years following old journals to stranger and stranger places. He knows the sort of darkness that lives in the deep places of the world. He is unprepared for Ava and for Pence, the ancient silver fox who arrives to serve as her familiar, dry of wit and burdened with fragmented ancestral memory. And he is even less prepared for what begins to grow between himself and Ava as the village starts to die around them.

 

They will venture into the darkness together to stop what's coming. The darkness, it turns out, was also the only thing holding the world back from something worse.

 

Some bindings hold an ancient hunger back. Some hold two people together before either is ready. ​