Grace Pritchard is no longer what she was.
The wood grain has been spreading across her skin for four years - the mark of someone who has been touched by something ancient and survived it, who has gone from infected to transformed, from victim to something the cursed objects recognize and choose not to fight. She can feel them from miles away now. She knows what they carry before she touches them. She is becoming, piece by piece, something the buried intelligence beneath her mountain never accounted for.
An Oracle.
For four books she and her team have hunted the fragments of a felled confession tree - forty-three objects carved from its wood by a man compelled to shape them, scattered across Appalachia, working their way into the lives of people who never asked for what they found. Each object retrieved. Each one buried in the Garden. Each burial tightening the prison that Grace has been building from the pieces of what once called itself mercy and was only ever hunger.
The final objects are coming home.
The Garden is almost closed.
Someone has to stay inside it.
Grace Pritchard has fought contamination, sacrifice, grief, and the living rage of a tree that does not want to be contained. She has lost people and buried them and kept going. She has been changed by this work in ways she is still learning the shape of.
She is not done.
She is only just beginning to understand what she is.
The Oracle. Book Four of The Darkwood Legacy. The end of one war and the beginning of the next.
R.D. Parrish is an American author whose work blends atmospheric horror, Southern Gothic melancholy, and deeply human storytelling. A Marine Corps veteran and longtime resident of the American South, Parrish draws inspiration from the quiet places-flooded fields, forgotten towns, and the heavy, humid stillness where memory clings to the earth.
His debut novel, Hollow Ground, is an intimate rural-horror tale set in the fictional Mississippi Delta community of Gethsemane Parish, where relentless rain awakens an ancient, listening intelligence beneath the soil. Parrish is known for crafting horror that is slow-burning, emotional, and rooted in character-stories where fear emerges not from monsters, but from misunderstanding, grief, and the fragile ways humans try to connect.
Parrish writes with a focus on atmosphere, psychological depth, and the strange beauty of the natural world. When he isn't writing, he enjoys time with his family, exploring small-town history, and working on the next haunting story set in the world just beneath our feet.
He lives in the United States with his wife, De.
