📖 This is a location teaser for my upcoming novel Echoes of Rowan.

The Living Town

Alive, Rookrest is warm. Sunlight spills over red-brick storefronts and the glinting lake beyond them. Porch swings creak lazily as neighbors call out greetings from across the street. The scent of fresh bread drifts from the bakery each morning, mingling with the briny breeze off the water.

The streets are worn but familiar, painted in the comfortable palette of a town that knows its own rhythms. It’s the kind of place you’d swear you’ve seen in a movie once—frozen in golden light, rolling credits promising “happily ever after.”

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The Astral Mirror

But in the astral Rookrest—the one Rowan walks—warmth is only a memory.

The sunlight is gone, replaced by an unbroken twilight that stains the sky in bruised shades of violet and gray. The lake is darker here, flat as polished stone, swallowing the moonlight without a trace.

Storefronts stand like hollow stage sets: bricks dulled to ash, windows reflecting only the ghost of what once stood behind them. Porch swings hang still, their chains whispering faintly in a wind you can’t feel. Even the air tastes different—thin, metallic, like breathing in the remnants of a fire long extinguished.

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A Town That Chooses

It’s the same Rookrest, down to every cobblestone and weathered sign. But here, change comes slowly, like moss crawling over stone.

And every shift feels deliberate—
as if the town itself is deciding what to keep…
and what to let go.