The Lantern Road That Shouldn't Exist: A Sorethel Novel

Sanna is a Metsik path-finder. She reads the root-pulse of the forest the way others read a map, and there is no way through her woods she does not know. Then she finds the straight line that should not be there: a road of lanterns that burn without fuel, maintained by no one, running arrow-true through a forest that has never held a straight line in its life. Her grandmother Liisi walked it once, and came back silent, and never found a path again. Sanna walks it anyway. And the road begins to teach her - that the lanterns behind are never the lanterns she passed, that the season at the far end does not match the one she left, that the wrongness can come, slowly, to feel like a different kind of right. The road does not repeat. It moves through the walker, and the walker is changed, and the only direction that exists is forward. A hypnotic, unnerving novel about wayfinding, transformation, and the roads we cannot un-walk.