Midwinter Mage

At midwinter, the lanterns are lit to guide the lost home. This year, something answers.

Kadaris expects cold roads and polite obligations while helping with her family's annual gift deliveries. Instead, a broken wagon leaves her in Rook's Bend, where warm hearths, shared meals, and village festivities offer a welcome she hadn't realized she needed.

But one family has little to celebrate. A woman is missing in the mountains, and her son refuses to believe she won't come home.

The village has customs for that: lanterns for lost travelers, bread at ancient stones, songs whose meaning no one quite remembers. When the boy pieces those fragments together to guide his mother back, a long-dark watchtower beacon begins to burn—and the road beneath it no longer leads where it should.

Kadaris has spent years gathering scraps of forgotten magic. Now, alongside the woman who tends the village's old rites, she must untangle the boy's desperate working without destroying the ancient magic beneath it.

Someone is still trying to find her way home. And she isn't the only thing walking the old road.

A standalone holiday fantasy filled with old magic, winter mystery, and the hope of homecoming.