NOW AVAILABLE!
I grew up thinking my mother’s story began the day I was born.
In East Bay she was just “Mom.” She packed my lunches, corrected my homework, checked the locks twice at night, and flinched whenever the observatory tower light swept across the harbor. I knew she loved me. I knew we were hiding from something. I did not know what she had already done before I took my first breath.
Twelve Winters is the story of those missing years.
It begins when she is twelve winters old in the steppe, long before anyone has heard my name. A former Orra-Kai rides into her tribe and looks at a Nominkhuu girl who thinks her life will be weaving, chores, and river work. Instead, she is asked to leave everyone she knows and travel to Skelderheim. No promises. No prophecy speeches. Just a choice that will quietly set the course for my entire life.
The mini-series follows the questions the main book only hints at:
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What did the Veil actually teach my mother to do, besides fight?
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Why did Sayaana, the last Orra-Kai, trust a child from a distant tribe enough to hand her the future of the Flame?
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How did my mother and Izrah go from strangers to the kind of friends who would split a city’s danger between them without speaking?
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What did Myles see in Amara-Kul that made him ask her, out of everyone in Skelderheim, to become Protector of the Flame?
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You will see the Veil from the inside: not as mysterious guards on the edge of the hill road, but as women who argue over prices in the market, repair cracked stairs, learn lullabies from tired mothers, and slowly shape a twelve-year-old into someone who can hold a newborn and not flinch when the world leans on her.
You will walk with my mother as the Resonance Array changes tone for the first time in years and Myles realizes what that sound means. You will see the moment he brings her the idea that will change both their lives, and the quiet way she says yes. You will ride with Amara-Kul and Izrah across the steppe, from campfire rumors to the tiny village on the angry river where a woman named Bala-Shu has just died in childbirth and a child waits in a woven cradle.
The main novel shows the night the portal closes behind us from Myles’s side. Twelve Winters shows it from hers.
These chapters live in the members-only side of the site, tucked behind the usual pages. That is where I can ask harder questions without breaking the main line of the books:
What does it cost to leave your tribe at twelve and never really go home again?
How heavy is a promise that lasts across two worlds?
What kind of person chooses to become a mother on purpose in the middle of all that?
If you want more than the hints in Myles’s journal and Izrah’s brief stories, if you want to stand in the observatory room with Amara-Kul before anyone has heard of Anna or Zaaya, this is where that story waits.
