Human Foundation · 1349–1375 · 26 years. The twenty-eight, before they were anything more than children of the forest.
Published October 2025 · approx. 73,000 words · ebook on Amazon (AU, UK, US) and Apple Books
Morning finds Waldheim exactly as a deep winter morning always finds it — smoke from a dozen chimneys, frost on every rooftop, Wilhelm's hammer ringing from the forge. Ordinary, if bitterly cold. That's the forest's gift: it lets Waldheim feel unremarkable, so its people never have to carry the weight of what they truly are.
At the height of the Black Death, twenty-eight children are born within the same turning of the moon, across four hidden settlements the world has forgotten to look for. They grow up together and apart — in gifts that emerge unbidden, in a death at seven years old that reshapes everyone who witnesses it, in a village destroyed by an enemy no one can name, and in a fragile, hard-won alliance between four communities who were never meant to need one another.
Watching from Vienna, a Baron who has learnt what the old manuscripts call them — and how long he has to wait. And underneath it all, patient and unseen, a second and more dangerous hunter: the Sanctum Order, who believe the twenty-eight are not miracles but abominations.
On the eve of their twenty-sixth year, the twenty-eight face a choice no generation before them ever completed: to offer blood freely to the forest that raised them, and become whatever the old, half-burned fragments of the Covenant promise they will.
A whole childhood, unhurried and natural. The plague gives the hidden settlements their cover — a world too busy dying to notice four villages quietly raising something else entirely.
Black Death peak in the German lands — the twenty-eight are born.
Plague aftershock waves ripple through the settlements' childhood years.
Transformation — the twenty-eight become Guardians, and the covenant clock begins.
Twenty-four chapters carrying Waldheim's seven, and the wider network of twenty-eight, from a winter morning in 1349 to the boundary stones in 1375.
Early Goodreads reviewers have called it a striking dark-fantasy origin story, praising the slow-burn medieval atmosphere and the weight given to every character's choices — several draw comparisons to Katherine Arden and Naomi Novik.
Reviewers have highlighted the book's restraint — spare, unfussy prose that trusts readers to sit with discomfort rather than softening it, likening the feeling to Uprooted's unraveling or the dread of The Bear and the Nightingale.
Others point to the grounded historical setting and the focus on community, faith and impossible choices as the book's real strength — a confident, atmospheric opening to a series reviewers expect to run deep.
Meet the twenty-eight, walk the four villages, or trace the covenant clock across all eight books.