Roots of Dawn. Verdant Vale, #2

The forest calls her its Bridge. Aedria calls her its last hope. The shadow she reversed calls her the crack in its cage. Elna wants to be only the woodcutter's daughter again, but the land and its wounds refuse to let her. In a blighted orchard far from the Verdant Vale, a girl born on the edge of shadow, hears dead roots whisper of a soldier carrying the same darkness that marked her hand and a pull that leads straight back to Elna's work.
Together, their threads brush the same unseen web, and the shadow learns new ways to move. Because the forest remembers what was taken. The shadow remembers what it almost had. And the threads running between them have begun, quietly, to choose their own direction.