Elena was nine years old when she first noticed the castle had grown a new hallway that shouldn't exist. She was the daughter of the royal cartographer, a man named Marcus who held the important position of mapping every...
The winter came early to the village the year Thomas turned eleven. Usually, the first snow arrived after the harvest festival, after the crops were stored and the animals prepared for cold months. But this year, snow fell in...
Lucy was ten years old when she first noticed the footprints were wrong. She'd walked the forest path a thousand times—it connected her family's cottage on the eastern edge of the woods to her grandmother's cottage on the western...
Daniel was eight years old when he first realized his shadow was watching him. Not just following, the way shadows are supposed to—but watching. With intent. With awareness. With something that felt uncomfortably like curiosity about what Daniel might...
Robert lived in a village split in two by a wide, dark river. On the north bank lived about forty families, including his own. On the south bank lived another forty, including his best friend Michael's family and his...
Eleanor had been looking forward to festival day for three whole months. In the village where she lived—a bustling place of perhaps three hundred families clustered around a central market square—festival day came only twice a year. Once in...
Brother William was the youngest person living at Saint Aldred's Monastery, and some days he felt like the only one who remembered what silence actually meant. The other monks—twelve of them, all considerably older than William's fourteen years—moved through...
Henry had been a shepherd for exactly three months when he found the flute. Before that, he'd helped his father in the village smithy, pumping the bellows until his arms ached and learning to shape iron while sparks danced...
Thomas had always loved the old well. It sat at the very edge of his village, where the houses ended and the wild grasslands began. Nobody used it anymore—there were newer wells closer to the market square, ones with...
Amara never meant to find magic that day at the market. She'd gone looking for salt and maybe some dried apples if the traders had any, but what she came back with was something that would change everything.
The village...
