Duppy Rising

She said she would go. She went.

Zara Cross has crossed the boundary between the living world and the Duppy Realm - and come back. But the crossing changed everything.

For two thousand years, the Architect has waited inside the island, watching from the deepest root of the Duppy Realm, asking one question: Is this sufficient? Seven months ago, it stopped working against them. Now it waits to see if what they're building is real - or if they only think it is.

The group moves deeper into Cottonroot's interior, carrying what the Elder Grove gave them and what they still don't understand. Zara's father is alive in the Realm and holding. The return crossing is possible - but nobody has ever done it. The Council of Chains has sent someone south. The cylinder in Deepbush has been waiting three hundred years for someone who can read it. And the water has been warmer at the source for seven months, reading something the River Mumma has not yet named aloud.

The Water Reads is the third book in the Duppy Rising series - a dark fantasy rooted in Jamaican folklore, mythology, and language. It is a story about what people carry across impossible distances, what institutions do with the truth, and what two thousand years of waiting looks like when it finally gets an answer.

The Chronicles of Niyamland
Book One: Duppy Rising - The Chain Rattles
Book Two: Duppy Rising - The Skin Sheds
Book Three: Duppy Rising - The Water Reads