Where the Wyrms Sleep

When the ground beneath Thornwood shivers in the night, Caelen Thornwood lies awake and listens. He has always listened, to the mist rising off the fen, to Old Wenna's mutterings by the hearth, to the warnings Old Brindle refuses to give and Widow Marell refuses to repeat. His village has lived a quiet life atop something ancient and uneasy, raising cottages on peat and silence, trading stories of the day the wyrms fell from the sky and burrowed into the black water below. They have slept since before the first of them was born. That silence is breaking now. Grebes stop calling on the fen. The shutters warp in the dark. Lysenne Drevane, who keeps the village's old ledgers, finds a name scratched into a page that should not exist, and Brother Gaellen hears the bell of a chapel that has had no bell for three hundred years. Sevran Aldenmere returns from the marshes with peat-black mud on his boots and a look in his eye that Caelen has never seen before. And in the deep places, beneath the root and the stone, the Last Mother stirs, and the wyrms remember what they are for. Caelen was taught to mend nets and mind his own business. He was not taught what to do when the village's oldest bargain comes due, and the only ones who know the price are the women who have already paid it. To save what he loves, he will have to walk into the fen where no one walks, trust the people Thornwood has learned to fear, and listen for an answer in a language older than his own name. The wyrms are waking. Someone must choose whether the village follows them into the dark.