Hunt The Ever Wild – SE Kiser

Seasons, hunger, the march of time. More to life than base survival. There wasn’t. There never had been. You didn’t need to be educated, to be sophisticated, to know that. But she had been wrong about one thing. Sy wasn’t a fool. He knew what he asked for; what he did.

If that was what he wanted, well, the forest would happily eat him alive. He did have the rowan branch. Her shotgun. Her wisdom, like birdseed. He may be food, but at least she had not left him without teeth. The afternoon dragged by. She did not stop to eat, breaking off pieces of one of her walnut flour biscuits as she walked. Tasty, filling, but a bit bland. Too salty, perhaps. The melon soup had been good. She might be softer too, if she ate like that all the time.

There had been a bit of mint in it, she thought, but not like the flowering mint she crushed now beneath her boots, releasing an earthy, pungent brightness, nor even the kind she and Johanna once grew in their garden. Flatter. Tamer. More sophisticated. She walked several miles before she realized the thinning crop of beeches had thickened.

That wasn’t right. There should be fewer of them closer to the river, not more. She looked up. The sun, behind the speckled clouds, was behind her, as it had been all afternoon. She was still pointed east. But she didn’t have the slightest idea where she was. A sinking feeling crawled up her gut and held her rooted. She should have been paying more attention. Kept her senses sharp. Especially after this morning. The bear. The fawn. Stopping to rest like a countess at tea.

Melting like sugar at the barest pretense of kindness. Once again, she wasn’t thinking. Unraveling. She scanned the horizon in vain for landmarks, and found nothing familiar. She reached a hand into her messenger bag, feeling for her map. When she couldn’t find it, she pulled the bag off her shoulder, yanked it wide open, and dug.

Johanna’s map was gone. Sy had taken it. The sinking feeling rose up her spine as she heard the crush of leaves behind her, smelled the rush of mint on the wind. For a moment, she thought she smelled pine and pepper – old magic, forest magic. Her breath caught. Mira, come to finish what she’d started. Or her curse had lead Anya closer to her lair, the promise of the phoenix a false hope, a trap all along.

As if in answer, she felt her skin tighten, her bones prickle.

“Kiser crafts a vibrant landscape where the glossy veneer of civilization digs questing fingers into the vicious, untamed, and inexplicable. Alive with timely societal parallels in the moral compromises of fettered city scribes, this is a glorious lyrical debut that haunts long after the reader exits its sentient forest.” Shalini Abeysekara, #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of This Monster of Mine “S.E. Kiser’s lyrical storytelling enchants like the wild itself in this quest for the impossible laced with dark magic and yearning.” Ruth Frances Long “In Hunt the Ever Wild, S.E.

Kiser has crafted a dark story of societal entrapment and hidden desires, which gallops along like a twisted fairytale. An enticing and original fantasy story, the Lichtenwald forest will get under your skin almost as deeply as the characters who try to tame it.” Laura Elliot, author of Awakened “Hunt the Ever Wild is an exquisite debut, full of all my favorite things: enchanted forests, a city that glitters as it rots, and a romance that sparkles.

Through a gaslamp fairy tale of a world, the story grapples with the true meaning of beauty, riches, and the wild. There is such materiality in Kiser’s writing: to read is to be swallowed by the Lichtenwald, by the flora and fauna and magic. If you love folkloric, romantic tales like Howl’s Moving Castle, this book is for you.” Rebecca Brodkey, author of Darker Than the Starless Night OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com ANGRY ROBOT An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd Unit 11, Shepperton House 89-93 Shepperton Road London N1 3DF UK angryrobotbooks.com And the wild speaks.

An Angry Robot paperback original, 2026 Copyright © S.E. Kiser 2026 Edited by Desola Coker and Stephanie Hanlon Cover by Sneha Alexander Set in Meridien All rights reserved. S.E. Kiser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: ea1e053e7141855f
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 3,301,010 bytes (3.148 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781836730071, 9781836730088
• Pages: 406
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 560.87 minutes
• Total Words: 112,174
• Total Characters: 623,970
• Average Words per Page: 276.29
• Average Characters per Page: 1536.87

Most Frequent Words

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