The Hollow and the Hour: The Thread That Would Not Break

By Asif Shah

The forest does not attack. It remembers: every regret ever buried beneath its roots, every traveler who wandered in still owing something to someone. The company has to cross it anyway.

On the far side waits a mountain hollowed out by a people who vanished, and the one member of Kasim's company who has spent eleven years lying about why he will never go home. Coming home is about to cost him everything he was protecting them from finding out.

Deeper still is a cave where time refuses to move forward, a loop with a memory as bait, built to keep exactly what it catches. Kasim has already lost people to places that do not let go. He is not sure he survives finding out what this one wants from him specifically.

Every step closer to the answers he needs is a step further from the people trusting him to lead them out again. And the debt he carries, the one he has spent a thousand years believing was simple, is about to reveal a second, crueler arithmetic. What he owes the dead may not be the same as what he is willing to spend the living to collect.

The Hollow and the Hour is the fifth volume of The Thread That Would Not Break, where trust curdles into betrayal, and Kasim comes closer to unmaking himself than the Void ever did.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H8JC3F19
• ISBN13: 9798186778103
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"