A five-book epic fantasy series by Donald Quill
Forgotten Rites Publishing
The land remembers everything.
That’s the problem. And it’s the only solution.
The world
Tura is a single large island — roughly the shape of Ireland but not identical to it. The people of Tura have always lived in relationship with the land: a living compact, built generation by generation through presence and trust, that lets a trained Rememberer speak the true name of a place and have the land answer.
For thirty years, that compact has been under assault.
The Iarnach occupation, led by a conqueror named Maelon, operates on a specific doctrine: if you name something, record it, and enforce that name with enough legal and military weight, you own it. They have spent three decades systematically renaming rivers, hills, settlements, and springs. Replacing true names with registry entries. Severing the compact between the people and the land, one erasure at a time.
The occupation doesn’t think of itself as destroying anything. Maelon believes in his civilizing mission. That’s what makes him dangerous.
The story
Corra is eighteen years old and has spent all of them making herself unremarkable. She has a reason for that. Her mother was a Rememberer. Rememberers in occupied Tura are hunted.
Then a surveyor arrives at the well her grandmother tended. He renames it in thirty seconds. And something in Corra’s chest responds before she has any idea what she is.
The water rises. The surveyor orders her marked. And by the time soldiers come to her family’s house that night, everything has already changed.
The Waking Ground follows Corra from that moment through the full restoration of the living compact between Tura and its people. Each of the five books delivers its own contained conflict (a battle won or a kingdom reclaimed) while the larger war continues. The series doesn’t ask you to wait until Book Five to see progress. Corra is fighting from the first chapter. The land is answering.
The series is also, at its core, about sovereignty. What it means to be sovereign over yourself, over your land, over your relationships. And the argument it’s making, quietly and across five books, is that power taken without relationship destroys everything it touches.
Book 1: The Waking
Coming from Forgotten Rites Publishing
Corra had one rule: don’t be noticed.
The surveyor noticed.
When a colonial administrator arrives at Tobar na Gréine, the well Corra’s grandmother spent her life tending, and renames it in under a minute, something in Corra surfaces that she didn’t know was there. The water rises. The surveyor orders her marked. Her aunt and uncle are dead before morning, killed because they refused to say what she is. Her cousin Tad is taken to a work camp north of Dunmore. And Corra escapes into the dark with a branch wound through her thigh and no idea yet what she’s become.
What she finds, eventually, is a woman named Senna, the last trained Rememberer in three kingdoms, who will teach her not what the land’s names are but how to become someone the land might trust enough to tell.
This is not a story about a girl who discovers she has special powers. It’s a story about what those powers cost, what they ask of you, and whether a relationship built in a time of crisis can still be real.
Book 1 of The Waking Ground is in progress.
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Books 2–5: Coming
The five-book arc is planned in full. Each book covers one stage of the war.
Book 2: The Gathering — The resistance takes shape. New alliances. Old betrayals.
Book 3: The Breaking — The occupation strikes back. Senna’s fate. The cost of being known.
Book 4: The Long War — Corra reaches Dunmore. Tad is found. Cael makes his choice.
Book 5: The Reckoning — Corra speaks Tura’s name at Cormount. All five compacts restore at once. The land answers.
If you want to follow this series from the beginning, the newsletter is the best place to start. Release dates, excerpts, and progress updates all go there first.
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