The Twin Fires

Jackson Hollow is seventeen now. He has two worlds, two loves, and a grandmother he never knew who went through a door just like his sixty years before he was born. And through the Gateway at the Mall of America, something ancient is finally choosing to speak directly to him.

The Twin Fires is the third book in the Underlandia Series - the one where everything Jackson has been building for two years gets tested at its center.

When war breaks out between the Twin Fires, the two city-states that have been feeding their conflict into the deepest crack in the Underlandia for two centuries, Jackson crosses through to find out what's really at the bottom of it. What he finds is a fissure that goes all the way down - and something at the bottom of it that has stopped cultivating conditions and started speaking to him directly, in the oldest language that exists, with his true name.

The Nameless is no longer in the background.

At the same time: Nima is cursed. Ethan goes through the door. Miles levitates a desk in his sleep. Vaedryn steps into the light. Kael walks out of the forest and puts his hand in the river. And Jackson Hollow goes into the Great Serpent's memory alone, changes one thing in a past moment, and comes out carrying both versions of what happened - while the downstream changes around him in ways he couldn't predict.

The Twin Fires is a book about choosing and instead of instead of. About what it costs to extend the web all the way down. About the Nameless being, underneath everything, lonely - and what it means to be the one thing it has encountered that is full enough to show it something different.