Tethered

The description below assumes you've read Books 1 and 2. If you haven't, it will spoil Unbound's ending.

The territory-holders are broken. The talisman network that caged the basin is ash. For the first time since the splintering began, the Unbound of Delaney Rim are free to build something no one in either world has seen: a community held together by teaching instead of tether.

Freedom, it turns out, has teeth.

Winter comes down on the rim like a verdict, and with it come the creatures — dire wolves, mammoths, bears that watch with eyes that promise memory — driven south from Yellowstone by something older and stranger than hunger. At the heart of their migration lies a thermal pool that should not be aware, and is.

Esah, carrying three capabilities that shouldn't coexist, must hold a scattered alliance of settlements together through siege, starvation, and the first murder the new world has ever had to judge. Hoda, the teacher who once held a wall alone, discovers that the stone itself has begun to answer him. And above the frozen basin, a raven with a mind like a blade begins speaking back.

From the winter siege of Horse Trap Canyon to the trial that will decide whether the Unbound become something better than the tyrants they toppled, Tethered asks the question the survivors have been avoiding since the day they arrived: if a capability binds you to the land, and the land binds you to each other, what — exactly — is holding the two worlds together?

The cage is open. The tether remains.

Performed by Luke Daniels — Audie Award winner with over 1,000 titles narrated, including The Three-Body Problem and the Iron Druid Chronicles.