Truth

About the Truth series

Alissa is a headstrong foothills girl whose father vanished when she was five, leaving behind stories of the Hold, a mountain fortress where gifted people are trained as Keepers of knowledge and magic by mysterious Masters. When her mother finally sends her to find it, Alissa falls in with Strell, a wary plainsman musician carrying one of her father's old maps, and the two discover the Hold nearly emptied: its Masters sent on a false errand and its remaining Keepers being systematically murdered by Bailic, a Keeper obsessed with finding the First Truth, a book of world-altering power he believes Alissa and Strell can lead him to.

Dawn Cook -- the byline Kim Harrison used before The Hollows made her famous under her pen name -- builds a classic coming-of-age quest fantasy around Alissa's discovery that the magic she never believed in is real, and that she has more of it than anyone expects. Across four books the series widens from a single besieged fortress into a larger conflict over who controls magical knowledge and how it should be used, carried by the same instinct for institutional intrigue and slow-earned competence that later defined Harrison's Hollows novels. It's for readers who want a grounded, character-first epic fantasy quest rather than a sprawling multi-POV saga.