When the forest remembers blood, it comes to the door.
Thane Skattebo is a Timberbound Warden of North Cascadia-a man built for wet granite, iron winters, and the old pact between saw and root. Across his shoulder rides Stormbite, a double-bitted axe forged from fallen sky-iron. The blade hums. In the high passes, that hum is a heartbeat. In the deep woods, it is a beacon.
Three days on a Storm-Hollow trail, and Thane comes home to kindling. His cabin is blasted inward. Black bile stains the foundation. Three claw marks tear through honest cedar, wide as a man's torso. The rot smells of ozone, marsh water, and the Eastern Veins.
The settlement below still believes in stew, silver, and the next sled of timber. Stormroot Hall still stands in a hollowed titan-cedar. Runa still runs the taps with an iron hand. Then a logging wagon comes back empty. The oxen are bleeding from the ears. Cole's felling axe lies snapped in half, the steel bleached white, as if the life was sucked out of the iron before it broke. The tracks lead to the river-and vanish.
Something old is waking in the silt. The elders called it a guardian once. Now it is a River-Wight: bark-skin, elk-skull, three claws, and a hunger for the foreign heat in Thane's blade. It does not take one man. It takes the line.
Thane will not leave Cole to the mud. He will not leave the axe to the river. The hunt pulls him out of the hall and into a sky-splitter storm-alongside a retired Warden who still knows the old names, a tavern-keeper's daughter who refuses to stay behind the bar, a Deep Wilds Ranger who speaks for the first ford, and Kael Thornbarrow, the Iron Bastard: a Reclaimer captain who once fought beside Thane and later broke him for a contract. Out here, survival makes ugly allies. Silver still wants the roads open. The forest wants the iron buried.
To stop the blight, Thane has to carry the thing that called it.
Stormbite is dark frontier fantasy for readers who want grit, myth, and a cost that does not reset at the next campfire: cursed steel, a poisoned river, and a north country that records its dead in the bark of the hall.
Book One of the Stormbite saga.
