The Hollow Vale. Act i:The Crumbling Road - A Chronicle of Memory and Mist in the Last Days of Rome - Alexander Paul Burton

Book One of the Tharion Cycle

In the mist-drenched marshes of a dying empire, the land begins to forget-and so do the people.

As Rome crumbles in a quiet corner of Britannia, a hidden girl with starlit blood begins to dream of a Bell that tolls not in sound, but in memory. Caelwyn has lived her whole life in Elderglen, veiled from the world, raised by a seer who speaks in silence. But when the mists thicken and the rune-stones begin to hum, she's forced from hiding-into a world where names vanish, roads shift, and even time no longer flows as it should.

Across the hills and haunted fens of Tharion, a former legionnaire searches for meaning in a land that no longer answers to his gods. A child with no name leads travellers through the Wyrd. And in the mountains, something ancient is waking-something that remembers everything.

Drawn together by prophecy, silence, and the slow unraveling of the world, a fractured fellowship must find the last Bell-and learn whether tolling it will seal the Hollow... or summon it.

The Hollow Vale is the first book in The Tharion Cycle, a mythic fantasy saga steeped in folklore, lyrical prose, and the quiet magic of things that were meant to be forgotten. For fans of Tolkien, Le Guin, and Tamsyn Muir, this is a story where memory is sacred, silence is dangerous, and language is the last line between the world and what waits beneath.