Viridian Deep

About the Viridian Deep series

Terry Brooks's Viridian Deep trilogy is a young-adult fantasy separate from both Shannara and Landover, following Auris Afton Grieg, a girl who escapes a Goblin prison with no memory of her past and discovers she's connected to Viridian Deep, a hidden magical realm of the Fae. Child of Light introduces Auris's fight to reclaim her identity and protect her young adopted sister, Char, from the Goblin forces hunting them both, while Daughter of Darkness deepens the threat as darker Fae politics and enemies close in around the sisters. Sister of Starlit Seas shifts its focus from Auris to Char herself, now grown into a reckless, directionless young woman forced to find her own footing and purpose within the same dangerous Fae world that shaped her sister.

Aimed at a younger readership than Brooks's adult Shannara fiction, Viridian Deep applies his familiar mix of found family, hidden magical heritage, and creature-filled quest fantasy to an entirely new setting, with the point-of-view handoff from Auris to Char across the trilogy giving it a structure distinct from his earlier, single-protagonist series.

How to read this series

Read in publication order -- Child of Light (2021), Daughter of Darkness (2022), Sister of Starlit Seas (2023) -- which is also the internal chronology, following Auris and Char's story continuously across all three books, including the viewpoint shift to Char in the third. No knowledge of Shannara, Landover, or any other Terry Brooks series is needed or relevant -- Viridian Deep is a fully separate world. A fourth book has been discussed by some retailers with an unconfirmed estimate, but no official title or date had been confirmed as of this curation pass, so it isn't listed here.