The Choosing (The Four Paths)

The ChoosingNell Aldric notices things. The map her father has been correcting for three days, always wrong in the same place. The way the village falls quiet the morning after the Night of Lanterns. The compass that points somewhere that is not north.She has been noticing things her whole life. She is about to find out why.When the Choosing ceremony calls all four of them at once — Nell, Bram, Brynn, and Frank, four friends from the same overlooked border village — it sets off something the village elders have no language for. Four portals. Four academies. Four children who have known each other since before they could read, now bound for entirely different worlds.Nell goes to Spellreach, where floating crystal spires hum with three hundred years of accumulated magic and a bitter faction war determines every friendship before it begins. She arrives with an ability neither faction knows what to do with and a habit of noticing things she is not supposed to notice. Including the fractures.The fractures are growing. They point in the same direction. And four students who were working near them are no longer here.The Choosing is the first book in The Four Paths series. It follows Nell, Bram, Brynn, and Frank through their first year at four rival academies — four different worlds, four different pressures, and one slowly assembling picture that none of them can see from where they are standing.The village they left behind is not as ordinary as it looks. It never was. Read more