When the wards that protect your village have been stealing from visitors for three hundred years, do you keep the secret – or break it?

Mira Thorne is the apothecary of Mossmere, a village famous for its warm hearths, glowing lanterns, and wards that have kept its people safe for generations. She checks her doorframe sigils every morning, brews remedies for her neighbours, and trusts the magic that has sustained her home since its founding.

Then a travelling merchant collapses in the village square, and Mira’s diagnosis reveals something that shouldn’t be possible: his vitality has been drained – not by illness, but by the wards themselves.

What begins as a single medical mystery becomes an investigation that takes Mira from the wardstones at the village boundary to the archives beneath the coven hall to the roots of the Great Oak at Mossmere’s heart. What she finds there – a hidden clause in the founding text, a secret passed between village elders for centuries, and a cracked keystone that threatens to bring the entire system down – will force Mira to choose between the comfortable safety her village has always known and the harder truth it has never been told.

Lanterns Beneath the Oak is a cozy witch fantasy about community, honesty, and the courage it takes to rewrite the foundations of a place you love – not because it’s easy, but because the people who live there deserve to choose their own safety with open eyes.

For readers who love: the warmth of T.J. Klune, the village intrigue of Travis Baldree, and the quiet moral complexity of Becky Chambers.