The Keeper

The Confession Tree doesn’t just take the guilty. It cultivates them. Reuben Carrow spent thirty years believing he was the keeper of the Confession Tree. He tended the land, walked the sinners to the ridge, and told himself the taking was part of the balance. The tree never corrected him. It had no reason to. Not yet.

Some debts don’t get called in until they’re worth the most. And the tree has always known exactly when that is.

The Keeper is part of the Lost Confessions, a growing collection of standalone short stories set in the world of the Darkwood Legacy series. Each story stands on its own, but together they map the dark geography beneath the main series, the old obligations, the unquiet dead, and the hunger that runs through these mountains like a root system nobody’s ever fully traced.