Every year, the village offers its eldest daughters to the Winter Hunt. The sacrifice is called sacred. Elara knows it is murder dressed in prayer. If she refuses, her younger sister Mira will take her place, so Elara walks into the frozen darkness expecting to die. Instead, she meets the Four Riders. Requiem, Ruin, Dominion, and Hollow are the creatures behind generations of whispered terror, powerful beings tied to the Winter Saint and to rules Elara has never been allowed to understand. The hunt is not what her village claimed. Neither is the fate waiting at its end. As Elara is drawn deeper into a world of black stone, sacred springs, ancient bargains, and dangerous immortals, fear begins to transform into something more complicated. The Riders are frightening, possessive, and bound to one another by secrets older than the village itself. Yet they offer Elara choices her own family never did. For the first time, survival might mean more than simply enduring what others decide for her. But freedom comes with a price. The curse surrounding the Winter Hunt reaches beyond one sacrificed girl, and Elara's disappearance will have consequences for the sister she left behind. The farther she travels from everything she knows, the more clearly she sees that the people who raised her may have feared the wrong monsters. Elara has spent her life being told her body, future, and duty belong to someone else. In the North, beneath a merciless winter sky, she will have to decide whether she can claim any of them back before the next stage of the Hunt begins.
Every year, the village offers its eldest daughters to the Winter Hunt. The sacrifice is called sacred. Elara knows it is murder dressed in prayer. If she refuses, her younger sister Mira will take her place, so Elara walks into the frozen darkness expecting to die. Instead, she meets the Four Ri...