The Woldwood — Jonathan B. Edvane

The world

The Marchlands

In the Marchlands, there is a tree. The Durn Yew moves through the Woldwood, disappearing and reappearing, never in the same place twice. It is part relic, part living institution, part god that never asked to be worshipped. For centuries it has held a series of supernatural realms tethered to the mortal world.

Edvane lives in the Woldwood. His house moves with the Yew. He keeps the archive — a record of the people and events of the Marchlands. The forty Tales from the Woldwood are drawn from that archive.

Beneath the roots of the Yew lives the Yewdeep — a vast community of root and amber. Within the Yewdeep, a door called the Groaning Gate opens into tethered realms. The first novel follows four people drawn to the Woldwood, down through the Yewdeep and into the Shivering Vale — a kingdom of permanent winter slowly coming apart.

The Marchlands

The world. Dark fantasy of epic scope, ancient magic and forgotten histories.

The Woldwood

A dark forest within the Marchlands. The Yew moves through it. Edvane's house moves with the Yew.

The Durn Yew

The tree. Mythical, living, ancient. Disappears and reappears, never in the same place twice.

The Yewdeep

The community beneath the Yew's roots. Vast, strange, largely unknown to the world above.

The Groaning Gate

A door within the Yewdeep. Opens into tethered realms held to the mortal world by the Yew's power.

The Shivering Vale

The first tethered realm. A kingdom of permanent winter, slowly detaching from the world.

Tales from the Woldwood

The Archive

Forty tales are being drawn from Edvane's archive of the Marchlands, released every Tuesday and Friday on Substack and YouTube. Fifteen are live. The archive grows with each release.

The tales are numbered but not sequential. Each stands alone. You may enter the archive at any point and read in any order. The numbering is archival, not prescriptive.

The Durn Yew · Book One

The Shivering Vale

Jonathan B. Edvane · Coming soon on Amazon · Physical edition

In the Marchlands, the Durn Yew is dying. The host fused to its root-system is failing, and without a successor the tethered realms will collapse or invade. The Yew responds the only way it knows how: it chooses people. Not heroes. Not bloodlines. People who have already survived the impossible and carry the damage to prove it.

Four of them are drawn to the Woldwood by a carved sigil appearing in snow, frost and steel. A veteran making himself small. A healer who knows too much. A thief with a mark on his wrist he has spent years refusing to think about. And a tavern boy who is not what he appears, serving three irreconcilable masters and unable to betray any of them without destroying the rest.

Dark fantasy with epic architecture. In tone: Guy Gavriel Kay and early Robin Hobb, with the ecological strangeness of Tchaikovsky and the institutional moral complexity of Clarke. A book about what chosen people owe the things that choose them.

Physical book only · No ebook · No Kindle Unlimited · Publication date to be announced