Howler’s Den (Ebook Edition)

Cyrie Emberton gives too much. Her magic pours warmth into the people around her, making them stronger, faster, braver. It never occurs to anyone to ask why she’s always cold.

After her last group fell apart, Cyrie takes solo jobs from the lowest boards in town. Basement monsters. Missing goats. Work no guild would touch. She tells herself she’s fine. She’s not fine. She’s freezing from the inside out, and the smile she wears is held together with practice and stubbornness.

Then the strays start showing up. Garry, who fights like a wall and talks like a man rationing his last words. Vane, whose ears pick up sounds no one else can hear and who needs silence the way most people need air. Magnus, who has never once entered a room quietly. Finch, who will abandon the group mid-march to examine a beetle’s tunnel structure. And Elara, a painter whose brushstrokes have a habit of becoming real.

None of them fit anywhere else. None of them were wanted. But something in Cyrie’s magic calls to them, a signal she doesn’t even know she’s sending, pulling the lost toward a fire they didn’t know was burning.

The problem is that the fire is burning low. And something ancient is waking in the northeast, rotting the land from the inside, cracking seals that have held for centuries. Fixing it will take everything they have. It might take more than Cyrie can give. And she has never once figured out how to stop giving.

Howlers’ Den is a fantasy novel about broken people building something whole. It’s about the ones the guilds rejected, the ones who didn’t fit the mold, and what happens when they stop trying to earn their place and start making one instead.