The Last Dryad of Brocéliande
A Novel of the Arthurian Forest

About this book:

In the ancient heart of Brocéliande, a dryad named Caelia has slept inside the Great Oak for twelve hundred winters, feeling the forest's breath as her own. But the iron axes have arrived at the southern border, cutting a road for a young warlord called Arthur and his enigmatic advisor, Merlin—a man whose amber eyes see the old magic not as myth, but as a riddle to be solved. As the Pendragon's realm rises on felled timber and forged oaths, the forest's boundaries shrink, its springs run thick with iron-sand, and Caelia must decide whether to remain a voice in the wood or become its weapon.

Steeped in the language of root and rain, *The Last Dryad of Brocéliande* reimagines the Arthurian legend from the perspective of the land itself—where kings are temporary storms, roads are permanent scars, and the oldest gods do not die quietly. Here, Merlin is no mere wizard but a architect of empire who carries rowan and cold iron, and Arthur is a man who tastes the bitter water of Barenton Spring and calls it merely cold. Between them walks a dryad who remembers every hand that ever laid axe to oak, and who knows that when a rope is spun tight enough to bind a kingdom, it chokes everything it wraps around.

Lyrical, visceral, and steeped in the mythology of the wild, this is fantasy that feels like folklore remembered in the bones. For readers who loved the mythic depth of *The Mists of Avalon* and the green, breathing world of *Uprooted*, Caelia's story is a lament for what is lost when civilization arrives—and a testament to what endures in the deep dark of the heartwood, waiting for the spring.