A Riftwood Chronicles novel
When four college freshmen from Vermont; Avery, Maya, Elias, and Noah; are yanked out of campus life and dropped onto the Ridge of Whispers, nothing about magic looks the way fantasy promised. Weather is invoiced, bridges tattle, and dragons fly on harnesses of glass and debt. Villages don't need heroes; they need people who can make the world behave.
Each of the four carries a strange knack; iron that drinks panic into tone, a cloth that turns chaos into room, chalk bands that lay down enough, and a body that knows every hinge a place was built to bear. When a nameless Buyer arrives to "sell protection" by turning storms into bills, the ridge braces for ruin. To save the hill-town of Braeholt, the four must learn the Ridge's quiet arithmetic; two-short, one-long; and unwrite the Buyer's laws before he can teach the sky to charge rent.
From kiln-seamed slopes to the Drowned Shelf and up the needle-cut stairs of a counting tower, their fight is not for prophecy but for practice: turn spectacle back into work and make new tricks old.