The Thornbound Oath

Elara Vant has spent her life drawing maps of places that were never meant to be found , until a stranger walks into her mother's inn carrying a corpse sealed in amber and a chart that rearranges itself when no one is watching. The body is her sister Maren, long declared dead. The oath carved into Maren's bones is older than Greymere itself, and it is breaking. Drowned sailors claw at the harbor walls. Fire-touched children mark doorways in ash. And beneath the black water, something wearing the name Serath remembers a promise Elara's blood was made to keep. With Captain Torvald hunting her as a witch and Mother Cressa's secrets closing like a noose, Elara follows her sister's trail through a drowned city, a specter cartographer's impossible archive, and a forest that hungers for names. The deeper she maps, the more she realizes the oath was never meant to free the lost , it was meant to feed on them. To save Maren, to save the children of Greymere, to save even the drowned, Elara must choose whether to finish what her sister began or shatter an oath that may cost her own soul to break.