Fearbread - A Cozy YA Fantasy of Culinary Magic, Small-Town Secrets, and the One Feeling She's Spent Seven Years Running From

The Only Person Standing Between This Town and Disaster Can't Be Scared. And That's the Whole Problem. Wren Hallow has one magical gift and one enormous flaw, and they are the same thing. When real fear grips her mid-bake, whatever she's working hardens into a protective ward - the only known defense against the cold, hollow wrongness spreading through Hollow Creek's food stores. The flaw: she cannot be scared.
Not since she was nine, not since she decided, quietly and completely, that letting herself feel things all the way through was a risk she wasn't willing to take. Now pantries are turning to ash overnight. A neighbor's starter - the living kitchen culture every family in town keeps and names and feeds daily - reached back when Wren touched it. Something old and patient is waking up beneath the town's oldest stones, and every household in Hollow Creek is looking at a sixteen-year-old apprentice baker with flour on her sleeve and asking her to be afraid enough to save them.
Wren's intention is simple and almost impossible: find out what this thing is, figure out how to stop it, and do it before the Harvest Festival - ten days away - hands the threat the one night a year it is at full strength. She gets a disgraced knight-in-training as backup. He is allergic to the bakery he must guard. She gets a Guild-trained rival as an unlikely ally. That rival is carrying more than she knows.
And she has Gerald - her family's beloved sourdough starter, fed every day of her life, named by her at age seven, sitting warm and patient on the kitchen counter. Gerald, as it turns out, is the most important object in the entire valley. Wren just doesn't know it yet. Every family in Hollow Creek keeps a starter. A living crock of flour and water, passed down through generations the same way a name is passed down - with care, with habit, with the unspoken understanding that you don't let it die.
Wren has fed hers every single morning of her life. She has talked to it. She has complained to it about her day. She named it when she was seven years old and has never once questioned the warmth she feels through the clay when she presses her palm to its side. It was always warm. That was just Gerald. But the night the second pantry turns to ash, in a kitchen gone dark and still, Wren presses her hand to Gerald's crock the way she always does - and this time, the warmth presses back.
Deliberate. Aware. Like something that has been waiting for her to be ready to notice, and has finally decided she is. Something has been living on her counter for nine years. Something that knew what was coming long before she did. Something that her family has been feeding - and protecting - for reasons no one ever told her. And the threat hollowing out her town, the grief-old darkness spreading through every shared crock and cold cellar in Hollow Creek, knows exactly where Gerald is.
It has always known. What has she been feeding every morning of her life - and what has it been keeping at bay?