Thirty days before the Vigil, Pathfinder’s Crumb is already full of ghosts. Not the kind that moan in corners—quiet ones: the worn peel where it always leaned, the scorch-mark on the oven door, the flour-sack patched with a scrap from an old cloak. Liora stands in the front room with her breath clouding in the cold and looks at the candles people have brought in—smooth ones poured by careful hands, lumpy ones made by children with proud cheeks. All of them waiting. All of them asking her to speak for a man who is no longer there to speak for himself.

Winter presses in the way it does when a year has already taken too much. Grain is counted more carefully. Stew gets thinner. Smiles, too. The village feels it in the lines at the well, in the hush that follows a rumor, in the way people glance toward the road as if it should be bringing relief and keeps bringing only more waiting. The Crossroads was built for travelers, but now it has to figure out how to be a home under strain—how to keep the promise of warmth when warmth is costly.

And grief doesn’t stay neatly inside one bakehouse. It spills into meetings, ledgers and old arguments that never fully healed. Brookfell and the Crossroads watch each other across the valley like two hands gripping the same loaf from opposite sides—both convinced they’re the one being asked to give more. Ash, never fond of speeches but stubborn about what’s right, refuses to let decisions be made about Brookfell without Brookfell in the room. The Flame Circle begins to fill again—not just with candles, but with voices. Not just with mourning, but with choices.

Book II is the valley learning what happens after the story everyone wants to tell. It’s the hard work of carrying a legacy without turning it into a pedestal. It’s learning that the light was never meant for one lantern, and the burden was never meant for one set of hands. The Way of the Pathfinder is not a straight road you can point to and be done with. It’s something shared, something chosen, something still unfinished—on purpose.