Fantasy Romance WIP

Every child born within sight of the first forest grows up with the ancient rule on the tip of their tongue: you must not break a vow, and you must never forsake a bargain. The monstrous first forest might not cover the whole world anymore, but its bloody, flowering prison gates are close enough that Rowan Harlowe has known the rule his entire life. And still, during the wild hunt — the one night the fey have free reign of the mortal realm — he went outside to face their cursed revelry and broke the most sacred promise there is: he came back.

Sixty years later, his mistake has brought the village of the Marrow to its knees. Flowers rot, fruit turns hollow, and each generation grows weaker, smaller, and more bitter. As their immortal, unaging, and now only hunter, Rowan uses the very curse that marks him to protect the people he damned. But when a false spring erupts overnight and twists the village's fields into an all consuming, terrible bloom, his hunt for the source leads him to a fatal mistake — he mortally wounds Loifa, the god of the forest who once pulled him from the wild hunt's grasp and then disappeared for sixty years without a word.

Loifa's death will be the final blow to the Marrow, and so Rowan reaches for the same dangerous thread that once doomed them all: he makes a vow. He will keep Loifa alive, no matter the cost. But Loifa is proud, angry, and far from forgiving, and in a world where oaths are woven into the fabric of reality and a broken promise carries a lifetime of misfortune, the cost of keeping his word to a capricious god turns out to be higher than he expected — because the closer he keeps to Loifa, the more the transformation the curse started sixty years ago edges toward completion, and the more their uneasy alliance deepens into something neither of them had planned for or known how to want.

Rowan has spent six decades making himself small enough to be kept. Now, with the false spring devouring what little the Marrow has left, his family caught in the village's call for a witch hunt and the people he has spent a lifetime protecting forcing him to choose between who he is and where he belongs, he must decide what he is actually willing to become — and whether the life he spent sixty years earning was ever truly his to lose.