The Bone Gauntlet
Taren Volk comes over the last rise into Oathfield expecting the village of his childhood, the stones he and his brother Eamon set as boys still marking the lane. The forest has bled into untended air for years, the ruts are deeper than memory, and the place no longer remembers his name. He has been swallowed by an apprenticeship he cannot explain, and the only thing waiting for him at home is silence, a brother changed by war, and a gauntlet carved from bone that should not exist. As Taren pieces together what happened to the Oathfield he left behind, he finds Gerrick shadowed by dreams he cannot wake from, Maren holding truths too sharp to speak aloud, and Callum Volk alive only in memory and ash. Wynn Farras and Selka Vorne move through the village with loyalties that bend toward the old debts, while Lorek Pale and Sera Coldhollow circle an inheritance the Volk bloodline has been running from for generations. Something without a name has come to collect. The gauntlet is patient, the road is short, and every choice Taren makes will carve another name into the bone. To save his family, he must first decide which of them is still worth saving, and whether an oath sworn in ash can ever be paid back in anything but blood.