Ash & Hollow: A Raven and Sparrow Novel
Vicki Castellan doesn't do quiet.
At fifteen, she's the girl who lights up every room at Stella's Academy-quick-witted, fearless with a fencing foil, and trailed by a growing swarm of Heartlings that follow her like moths to a flame. She makes people laugh. She makes Evan Hale blush. She makes the ancient walls of the Academy hum in ways they haven't hummed in centuries. She's the kind of person who fills every space she enters-who leaves the world slightly brighter and louder and more alive than she found it.
She has no idea what any of it means.
Neither do Mara and Julia Veryin-two students who share a surname, matching crystal pendants, and a connection neither of them can explain. Mara fights like someone who learned survival before she learned manners. Julia watches and waits and sees things other people miss. They circle each other warily, drawn together by something written in crystal and blood and a history that predates the Academy itself. Whatever binds them runs deeper than coincidence. Deeper than they're ready to look. The pendants remember, even if they don't.
Then there's Lucien. Quiet. Watchful. Carrying a pendant that mirrors theirs and a weight he can't name. He notices things-the way the pendants pulse in unison, the way Room 314 opens its door before anyone knocks, the way the kettle inside pours for exactly five and never spills a drop. He's been noticing things his whole life. He's starting to suspect that the things he notices have been noticing him back.
When that sentient room reveals itself, they begin to uncover a truth older than the walls around them: a story of She Who Is Unnamed and the Void Dweller, of three children born of light and darkness, and of a war called the Sundering that shattered the heavens and scarred the world below. A war that never really ended. A war that left something behind-patient, hungry, and watching. A war whose echoes never stopped. They only went quiet. And silence, in the Academy's bones, has always meant something was listening.
Now students are discovering abilities that shouldn't exist. An ancient kettle is adding mugs to its shelf, one name at a time. Jax Calder hides behind charm and a pendant he touches when he thinks no one's looking. Doors that have been sealed for centuries are opening-and what waits on the other side isn't waiting patiently anymore.
And then someone goes silent.
Not quiet. Not sad. Not withdrawn. Silent-as if something reached inside and took everything that made them them. Eyes open. Heart still beating. But the person who filled every room they entered has become a window into a place where no one lives.
Evan held a face in his hands and searched for a flicker of recognition. A spark. Anything.
Just air. Just breath. Just the mechanical function of lungs that hadn't gotten the message yet.
The sky sang, and the world answered. But the answer came with a price no one was ready to pay.
Ash & Hollow is the first novel in the twenty-five-book Raven & Sparrow series, set within the Cycles of Eternity universe. A sweeping YA fantasy of ancient mythology, fierce loyalty, and the devastating discovery that the darkness doesn't always come for the weakest among us-sometimes it comes for the brightest. For the loudest. For the ones you cannot imagine a world without.
For readers who love The Raven Boys, Ninth House, and The Bone Season.
Step inside. The kettle is warm. There's a mug with your name on it.
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