Rootbound

Savage Daughter of Seven, ROOTBOUND

When a mysterious fog swallows a Chicago alley, taking seven souls, including his father, seventeen-year-old Eli Carter discovers the buzzing in his head isn't anxiety. It's power. Power that should have protected everyone. Power his father spent years suppressing.

Aneska has been running her whole life, bouncing between foster homes with only fading memories of her murdered mother. But when she saves Eli from the same otherworldly fog, the light that erupts from her hands reveals she's far more than the nobody she's always believed herself to be.

Thrown together by forces beyond their understanding, Eli and Aneska must navigate the Spirit Realm, a dimension where demons bargain in blood, ancient creatures feast on memory, and the bridge between worlds is failing. Both carry birthrights they never asked for: Eli as the heir to a dangerous legacy his father tried to hide, and Aneska as something the Spirit Realm has been waiting centuries to find.

But in a world where heroes die and monsters survive, they'll both have to decide how much of themselves they're willing to sacrifice for the power to save what they love. And when every mentor hides their own agenda and every victory demands a terrible price, the line between salvation and damnation becomes impossible to see.

Dark, visceral, and unflinching, Rootbound is an epic fantasy that explores the price of power, the weight of destiny, and what happens when two teenagers discover that becoming strong enough to save everyone might mean losing everything that made them worth saving.