The Solstice Veil The balance between our world and the realm of Fae is a lie. Elara Vance, a pragmatic Seattle barista who moonlights as a low-level hedge-witch, just wants to pay her rent and keep her small slice of the human world safe. She's inherited an ancient duty she never asked for: guarding the veil between realities. A duty that becomes brutally real when a panicked, squirrel-faced messenger bursts into her coffee shop with an ominous warning. Lord Malakor, an ambitious Fae noble of the Winter Court, has found a way to corrupt the ancient artifact that keeps the peace. With the Solstice rapidly approaching, he plans to tear the veil open and plunge Seattle into an eternal, chaotic winter. Forced into action, Elara must rely on her wits, her grandmother's dusty journal of practical magic, and an improbable cast of allies—including a grumpy ancient gnome and a grumpy local troll. From the hidden magic of the Seattle Underground to the icy isolation of the Olympic Mountains, Elara races against time, facing existential spirits, Merrow politics, and high-society Fae betrayals. The world is spiraling into chaos, and Elara is the only one who can assert the balance. But when the battle escalates to a global, existential war against an entity of pure nothingness, she must decide how much of her humanity—and her life—she is willing to sacrifice to save everything she knows.