Shattered Ice

A frozen land. A hidden spill. A dragon waking beneath the ice.

Ethan Lawson has already lost too much.

After wildfires drove his family from their farm in Australia, and after the death of his younger sister left them all grieving in different ways, Ethan's latest upheaval takes him halfway around the world to Whitehorse, Yukon. His father's new job in the oil industry is supposed to give the family a fresh start. To Ethan, it feels like another exile.

At first, the North is only cold, strange, and impossibly far from home. Then Ethan meets Noah, a local teen who pulls him into a world of traplines, moose encounters, caribou trails, permafrost lakes, and northern landscapes that are far more alive than Ethan expected. When Ethan is given a razor-sharp shard of obsidian and begins dreaming of a white dragon moving through volcanic mountains and Arctic ice, the line between grief, memory, and something ancient begins to fracture.

The warning signs are everywhere: methane rising from thawing permafrost, caribou forced from old migration paths, emperor penguin chicks dying as sea ice fails, and a polar bear blackened by oil on the frozen edge of the Arctic. What begins as one teenager trying to understand the land around him becomes something much larger when Ethan realizes an oil spill beneath the ice may be spreading in ways no one fully understands-or wants the public to see.

With help from friends old and new, Ethan must decide how far he is willing to go to reveal the truth, even when that truth could threaten his father's job, his family's fragile stability, and the powerful people trying to control the story.

Shattered Ice is a young adult environmental fantasy about grief, climate change, northern landscapes, industrial damage, friendship, and the courage it takes to stop looking away.

For readers who enjoy dragon stories grounded in real-world environmental stakes, coming-of-age adventure, and young heroes confronting the future they are being asked to inherit.