Every seven years, Briarfell crowns a child and gives them to the wall.

For a hundred and forty years the Briar - a living wall of black thorn - has stood between the valley town and the Sere, a grey blight that turns everything it touches to ash. The bargain is simple, or so the town believes: on the longest night, they set a crown of living thorn on one chosen youth, walk them through the Hollow Gate, and the wall holds for another seven years. Twenty children. Twenty names in the ledger. It is the price of staying alive, and Briarfell has always paid it.

Seven years ago the crowning fell on Rowan Marsh's brother. Nine years old, she ran into the thorns after him - and the Briar, which has never given anyone back, spared her. It laid a scar across her palm and let her out, and ever since, she is the one living soul the wall will part its thorns for.

Now the Sere is coming early. The wall is failing weeks before its night, the town is terrified, and the Warden has decided the Briar wants the one child it once refused to keep. When Briarfell moves to crown her, Rowan does what no Hollow Sovereign ever has: she walks the Hollow Gate on her own terms - and comes back out.

What she finds beneath the thorns is not the monster the town has fed for a century and a half. It is a lie - one that turns everything Briarfell believes about the wall, the wreath, and the price of protection inside out.

The only soul who might help her prove it is Elias Fenn: heir to the Hollowguard, the order that walked her brother to the Gate, and the last person in Briarfell she ever meant to trust.

Together they have until the longest night to break a hundred and forty years of lies - before the town crowns the next child.

The Hollow Crown of Briarfell is a standalone young adult romantasy - a sentient-forest fairy tale of a village's darkest bargain, an enemies-to-understanding slow burn, and a marked girl who walks into the wall no one else can cross. Clean, closed-door.