What Waited Northwest

A year after the falling stars first called her north, Ashling's own gentle pull turns a second time - not toward the valley she already knows, but northwest, toward a stretch of sky none of the household has ever properly considered.

What waits there is not the reunion anyone hoped for. The twin peaks hold a chamber, a name lost to a century of silence, and a survivor's own final, unanswered plea: someone must be ready to carry what I could not.

As Brennis works to translate a grief older than any of them, and Ashling begins the hardest lessons of her young life under Vaerith's own patient teaching, this household learns something it has never had to learn before - how to stretch itself across considerable distance, and trust that love, properly kept alive in letters and patient waiting, travels every bit as far as love kept close.

What Waited Northwest is the sixth volume of the Kindred Riders, the fourth arc of the Wyrdmoor Cycle - a story about grief honestly carried, distance faithfully endured, and the quiet, unglamorous work of coming home.