In the quiet valley of Oakhaven, the shadow of the Lost Grove looms large-a place of ancient legend said to claim the souls of those who enter. For a decade, Mira, a precise and grieving cartographer, has navigated the world through the maps she creates, a fragile attempt to impose order on a life shattered by the disappearance of her beloved brother, Rowan, into that very forest. Her solitary existence is irrevocably altered when she uncovers a secret hidden in plain sight: a mystical map stitched by her mother into the threads of a family quilt, revealing a hidden path into the Grove's deepest mysteries.
Clinging to a fragile hope, Mira follows the esoteric map into a sentient, dreamlike world where the air hums with the energy of stored memories and the laws of nature are fluid. There, she encounters the Grove's guardians, timeless beings who reveal the forest's devastating secret. The doorway at its heart is not a passage but a ledger; it can return the lost, but only by maintaining a cruel balance. To save someone is to rewrite their past, causing another person connected to them to vanish from history, their memory erased from the world as if they had never been born. Mira's quest is suddenly burdened with an impossible moral choice: is her love for her brother worth the cost of another's entire existence?
Her personal crisis escalates with the arrival of Elias Vance, a charismatic and dangerously ambitious collector from the city. Aided by a reluctant historian, Vance has carved his own violent path into the Grove, not to reclaim a loved one, but to seize control of the doorway. He intends to resurrect a long-dead king to reshape the present to his liking, viewing the erasure of lives as a necessary price for his vision of progress. Mira finds herself in an unlikely alliance with a guilt-ridden scholar and a youth who has already suffered the Grove's terrible bargain. Her journey to heal a personal wound becomes a desperate fight to stop a man from weaponizing memory and history itself. At the heart of it all lies the final, unexpected truth of her brother's fate-a choice far more complex and selfless than she could ever have imagined, forcing her to make a decision that will either save her family or the integrity of the world itself.