The Whispering Flats

The Underlandia is waking up something worse than silence.

It is February in Eden Prairie. Jackson Hollow has a routine now - caramel lattes at Grounds on Tuesday mornings, texts to Ethan that say I'll be back soon, crossings through the hidden door in the Mall of America every few days like breathing. He has Finn by the river in the amber light. He has Miles through the bathroom wall at night. He has, for the first time in his life, something that feels less like almost and more like enough.

Then Wren comes running out of the trees.

Something has woken in the Whispering Flats - a creature that has been sleeping for five hundred years, vast and serpentine and ancient, whose breath empties everything it touches in a single exhale. The Deepborn call it the Varek. Nima has been waiting for it for fifty years. And it is not moving on its own.

Beneath the Varek, directing it, is something older still. Something that has no name - not because no name exists, but because it consumed its own name centuries ago. Something that has been patient and hungry and watching since before the Underlandia took its current shape. Something that has been looking, across decades and centuries, for the specific person who is almost full enough to matter and not yet full enough to be safe.

It has found Jackson.

As the Varek moves toward the settlement and the Twin Fires send delegates who cannot agree on anything, as Kael appears at the tree line with a message from Vaedryn and almost-empty eyes, as Miles starts reading symbols he was never taught, Jackson must face the truth that Nima has been preparing him for all along: the only thing that has ever driven the Varek back is full presence. Complete, unguarded, emotionally open presence.

Which means that before he can face the breath, he has to finish becoming who he is.

The Whispering Flats is the second book in the Underlandia Series - darker, larger, and more dangerous than the first. It is about ancient monsters and ancient secrets, about the fall-out that happens when you keep the people you love at the outside, and about the word that is the opposite of almost.

That word is always.