Walnut Ridge

On a farm in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, Grace Pritchard hasn't slept through the night in months. The Oracle inside her doesn't rest the way it used to. The garden at the center of her property, sixty feet of carefully tended soil with forty-three carved objects buried beneath it, is changing. The warmth below has shifted. Something down there is finally paying attention.

It isn't alone in that.

High on the walnut ridge above the farm, something has been waiting since before anyone alive had a name for it. It's been patient for a very long time. Now a calling has gone out through the root network and the cold ground, and the things that serve it are moving. And the people who've survived the Darkwood before are being pulled back toward Grace's farm, drawn by threads they don't fully understand to a place they know they shouldn't want to return to.

Because what's buried beneath the garden is worth fighting over.

Both sides know it.

The siege of Walnut Ridge has been building for years. It arrives in October. Not everyone who stands in that hollow when it's over will still be standing.

And when it's done, something crosses the sky. Something none of them expected. Something that wasn't what they'd been fighting.

Something worse.

Book Nine of the Darkwood Legacy. The reckoning that changes everything.

A is tighter and hits harder for readers already in the series. B works better if KDP is placing it in front of cold readers browsing Appalachian horror. Which direction is landing for you, or do you want me to pull elements from both?