So why does victory feel like a wound that won't close?
Then a wandering seeress arrives carrying a fragment of bark that shouldn't exist, black, weeping, cold with a cold that belongs to no season. It came from Yggdrasil. The World Tree. The living spine that holds all nine realms in the architecture of its roots.
It's dying.
Summoned by Odin and sent into the deep places of the world, the frost-wars of Jotunheim, the grey silence of Helheim, the primordial dark of Niflheim. Astrid and her companions follow the roots downward and find, at the bottom of everything, a secret buried for forty-seven years. A decision made in fear by a god who should have known better. A force older than creation locked inside the very thing all life depends on.
The deeper they dig, the darker the truth gets.
Some sacrifices are extracted. Some are freely given.
Only one kind holds.
Roots of the Ashen World is the second book in the Iron Vale Saga, a sweeping dark fantasy rooted in Norse mythology, where the gods are real, fallible, and afraid, the magic is old and costs something, and the heart of every story is the people inside it.
Can be read as a standalone. Better with Book One.
Perfect for fans of Joe Abercrombie, Madeline Miller, and Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology.
Book Two of the Iron Vale Saga. Follows Echoes of the Iron Vale.