Lyrical Slavic dark fairytales of old gods, honest bargains, and love that outlasts a mortal life — where Polish folklore runs deeper than magic.
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No one crosses the line
of salt and iron.
"The only power left in the valley
does not answer prayers —
it answers terms."
A village on one bank. A forbidden wood on the other. A line of salt between them that no one crosses — until the year the rye stands grey. Touch the marks to learn the land.
She walked into the god's forest to save her people. She walked out bound to the one thing she can never outlive.
Mira, the chieftain's daughter, was raised half to rule and half to a guardian-rite she has spent her life refusing — because that rite killed her mother young, serving a forest no one dares enter. Now the valley is out of choices, and she crosses the salt line to ask its keeper for rain.
The Leszy is older than the valley's memory: shifting, watchful, neither kind nor cruel. He does not give. He bargains — and every bargain is honest, binding, and costed.
| Genre | Slavic fantasy romance · mythic romantasy |
|---|---|
| Series | The Undying Wood, Book 1 — complete story, no cliffhanger |
| Heat | Clean / closed-door (1 of 5) — slow burn, high longing |
| Ending | Earned, bittersweet-triumphant — grief turned into a beginning |
| Setting | Pagan Slavdom, ~9th century — a Carpathian river valley |
| Best for | Folklore-rooted slow burn, immortal × mortal, honest bargains |
Content notes: war and battle, grief, death of a parent (backstory), the foreknown mortality of a beloved, themes of religious change. No on-page sexual content.
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The dust knows my name before I do.
It rises grey and warm around my ankles as I cross the yard, fine as milled flour, warm as a hearthstone long after the fire has gone out. Weeks yet to Kupala, the midsummer feast, and the ground should already be black with rain, the Wiselka loud in its bed, the rye standing green to my hip. Instead the river has shrunk to a bright wire threaded through pale stones, and the rye stands the colour of a dead man's beard.
I stop at the well and lay my hand flat to the earth. This is the thing I have never told my father, the thing old Milena knows and pretends not to. When I put my palm to the ground, I hear it. Not words. A pressure beneath the words, the way you feel a cart on the road before the sound of the wheels reaches you.
Today it is quiet in the wrong way. Not resting. Holding its breath, like a child before it decides whether to cry.
He does not give. He bargains — and each renewal costs more than the last. The oldest price is the one her own foremothers concealed.
Small, almost fair. The rye greens. The valley breathes. And the door to the wood does not close behind her.
The war-chief's spears turn back at the tree line. But a guardian's regard, once earned, is a debt that compounds — and she is mortal.
Buried beneath them all: the covenant her foremothers concealed. Generation after generation, or the god fades — and the valley with him.
Some bargains are cages. She means to make hers a choosing — and found a thousand-year line on something stronger than need.
"A kept thing outlasts a taken one."
The Greenwood Bargain is the origin of a saga that runs a thousand years — from pagan Slavdom to the long war of forgetting, as a new god rises on the horizon and an old covenant must survive by hiding in plain sight.
Each book follows a daughter of Mira's line and the bargain she inherits: a faith that endures, a forest that remembers, and a love that refuses to be doomed.
Liliana Brzeska writes literary Polish fantasy romance grounded in Carpathian folklore, bargains, and the cost of choosing your own fate.
Her voice is folkloric without exoticism: names have power; everyday objects — kerchief, beeswax candle, bread, salt, iron — carry folkloric weight in Polish domestic space. Winter is not just setting but an active force shaping who survives. Romance serves folkloric logic, not contemporary emotion rules: the bond is negotiated, not fated. HEA is earned. Sacrifice is honored. Consequence is real.
Lyrical mythic fantasy romance — folklore-rooted, slow-burning, clean on the page and aching beneath it.
She writes from the borderland where Polish forest meets magic.
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