The High Tower of Glass

When her sister Greta returns from the forest border with empty eyes and a hollow chest, Clara knows the old stories are true — and that they always ask for payment.

She catches Greta's vanishing voice in a silk handkerchief and steps past the moss line into the Black Ridge Wood, where fairy-tale logic is law and every gift has a price. Guided only by a crust of wine-soaked bread, an unblessed iron nail, and the warnings of the border-spirits she meets along the way, Clara crosses the Great Bog to bargain with the Lord of the Hollow Glass himself.

To unlock his mirrored palace and win back her sister's voice, Clara will have to give up something of her own — the shadow of her left arm — and unravel a three-hundred-year-old secret sealed inside a vanishing carpenter's watch.

A dark, atmospheric fairy tale for readers of Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke, The High Tower of Glass is a short story of about 9,000 words that opens Book 1 of The Hollow Glass Series. Book 2, The Hall of Salt and Bone, follows.