The Thornwood Keeps: A Veilborn Chronicles Prequel Novella
Elias North
Before the commission. Before the sites. Before her son learned to suppress everything he was in order to survive.
Lysa Crane knew the moment the intake classification came back what it meant. The Sealing's mechanism had found him. Her nine-year-old boy, already extraordinary, already marked. She had two choices: wait for what was coming, or make the one move the mechanism couldn't follow.
She chose the Thornwood.
What no one tells you about disappearing to protect someone you love is that the disappearing doesn't end. You simply learn to live inside it. Eleven years inside a practitioner-responsive forest that knows exactly what you are. Eleven years of feeling your son through a circuit he doesn't know exists, watching him lock himself away from himself, watching him grow up and begin to find the thing she always knew he'd find.
Watching, and waiting, and keeping.
The Thornwood Keeps is the untold story of the woman at the center of The Veilborn Chronicles — told before you meet her, so that when you do, you already know everything it cost her to be there.
