The Water's Edge

Aiden Talmhain has always been different. Plants speak to him of their pain. The earth pulses beneath his feet like something alive. He has learned to keep these things to himself.

Then the Druids come.

Pulled from everything he has ever known, Aiden begins a journey that will take him five hundred miles across Tír Litha — through ancient forests, across the vast lake at the world's heart, and into the company of people who will become his family before he understands what that word truly costs.

The Spirit of Water is the first. It will not be the last.

And something ancient is already moving through the forest behind him.

The journey continues.

The world grows larger. The stakes grow higher. And Aiden Talmhain begins to understand that the gift he was born with is not simply unusual.

It is impossible.

And impossibility, in a world where ancient powers are waking, has a way of making a person a target.

Into the desert.

The Wanderer Families have survived for generations by knowing their enemies, reading the stars, and trusting no one outside their own blood. They have never met anyone like Aiden Talmhain.

At the edge of Fire Lake, where lava meets sky and the oldest of the elemental Spirits holds court, the war that has been coming for a thousand years finally arrives.

And Aiden is not ready.

Everything has been leading here.

The twin oaks of the Eastern Grove. The ancient wrong that started everything. The woman who waited a thousand years between the roots for someone from her own bloodline to finally come.

The Guardian of Nature must become what he was born to be.

Or everything ends.