J.A.BAILEY
Author of The Hollowblade Saga
The Hollowblade Saga
The Hollowblade Saga is a four-book fantasy series that begins as YA dark fantasy and expands into adult literary fantasy — growing in scope, darkness, and complexity with each book, designed to accompany the readers who discover it young into the full weight of what the story becomes.The world of the saga is one in which forgetting is not a symptom but a force. The Veilborne are entities that feed on absent memory, gathering in the spaces where names go unspoken, where records are smoothed over, where communities quietly stop asking what they have lost. They do not attack. They accumulate. And by the time a place understands what is happening to it, the understanding is often the last thing to go.Seventeen-year-old Evan Eldholm grows up in Eldhollow, a mountain valley community in the late stages of an erasure it cannot name. When his father dies leaving him a blade he does not understand and a single instruction — remember — Evan inherits both a practice and a weight that was never designed to be carried by one person. Together with his closest friend Anya Halewyn, whose gift for observation makes her the first to truly see what is happening to their world, he leaves the valley and begins to understand the scale of what he is up against.The series' human antagonist is Severin Ashcroft, a former member of the Order of Witness — the only institution ever built to resist the Veilborne — who concluded from the inside that memory itself is the source of suffering. His doctrine of release spreads wherever grief has been building without outlet, which is to say almost everywhere. He does not deceive his followers. That is precisely what makes him dangerous.As the found family assembles across the four books and the journey widens from a single dying valley to the full breadth of a world far older and stranger than any of its inhabitants realise, the series builds toward a single, hard-won truth: that what is carried alone will break the bearer, and that what is remembered together is the only thing that has ever truly endured.SILHOUETTES · REMNANTS · BURDENS · MEMORIALSBook One: SILHOUETTES is out now. The complete four-book saga is fully planned and actively in progress — now is the perfect time to step in at the beginning.