A Woodsman Traded His Breath for Fire

von Carlos Rodriguez

150 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

In the frozen gorge of Verdeloch, winter is not merely a season-it is a three-hundred-year curse. Encased in perpetual twilight and suffocating black ice, the dying mountain settlement faces absolute extinction. When starvation threatens to claim the valley's last children, Rowan Mercer, an ordinary woodsman, undertakes a desperate descent into the abyss beneath the mountain's petrified roots.Beneath the world, Rowan seals an irrevocable bargain with the slumbering Hollow Hearth: he trades his living breath for an inextinguishable White Ember. Returning to the surface with permafrost lining his hollowed ribs and no vapor pluming from his lips, Rowan delivers the white coal to the village brazier.Instantly, an impossible miracle unfolds. Blinding, milky-white warmth washes across the square. Snow vanishes, frost-wheat bursts through frozen earth, and the villagers rejoice in ecstasy. But as Rowan's mortal flesh begins an irreversible petrifaction-his skin hardening into rough spruce bark and his veins running with black heartwood sap-he uncovers the grotesque horror underpinning their salvation.The white fire does not merely thaw the permafrost; it devours conscience, memory, and grief. Bereaved mothers laugh with bright, vacant eyes as they toss their dead children's mittens into the furnace. Blacksmiths smile beside decaying corpses, cleansed of all pain and remorse. Under the white glare, the villagers have traded their humanity for survival.Alienated and hardening into living timber, Rowan finds an unexpected kindred soul in Eleanor, a mute orphan who shuns the brazier. When a mountain briar cuts her forearm, she bleeds not blood, but luminous green sap-revealing herself as the dormant spirit of the valley's murdered Spring. But Elder Frederick Meyer, an ageless parasite who has orchestrated this cycle of hollow peace for centuries, readies an iron scaffold atop the brazier to burn the girl and rekindle the waning fire.Meanwhile, a monstrous cadence echoes through the blizzard. The living animus torn from Rowan's lungs has taken physical form as the Ivory Stalker-a towering demon of rime and razor-ice butchering the mountain border, exhaling with the exact rhythm of Rowan's stolen breath.With the Solstice at hand and his wooden limbs creaking toward immobility, Rowan must mount a harrowing final stand. To save Eleanor and shatter the elder's tyrannical reign, he must confront the rampaging ghost of his own vitality and decide how much of his humanity he is willing to destroy to break the cycle forever.Atmospheric, visceral, and emotionally resonant, A Woodsman Traded His Breath for Fire is a spellbinding dark fairy tale. Exploring the seductive poison of numbness and the sacred necessity of grief, this is an essential read for fans of Katherine Arden, Naomi Novik, and classic folkloric myth.

• Themen: Belletristik Traditionelle oder kulturelle Geschichten und Nacherzählungen Märchen und Volksmärchen / Märchennacherzählungen
• ISBN: 9798182776295
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 15.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Elizabeth Cruz