Stick begins with Eddigan, an elderly one-eyed wizard with diminished powers who lives alone in a forest with a raven. Eddigan’s hermit-like existence delays his inevitable surrender to the Arcansil, “the abandonment of magic, […] a process that strips the arcane from all magical beings” which is tearing its way through Eddigan’s Draywood Forest and the Celt-lands as a whole. The Arcansil causes beings with arcane powers to lose their minds, abandon their beliefs, and eventually turn violent and feral. On a supply run, Eddigan and the raven discover and rescue a diminutive being attacked by feral faeries on the road and take him back to Eddigan’s cottage to recover. This person is Jacqaan “Stick” Maalik of Dorveth, member of the near-mythical Terralin civilization of “smallfolk” with gold-ringed eyes and webbed fingers. (While not belonging to the same universe, the Terralin may remind readers of the River Folk in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.) When Stick claims to be the last of the living Terralin (and near death himself), Eddigan urges Stick to share his life story to “keep them alive a little longer.” Stick agrees, and over long evenings of storytelling he shares how his people’s persistent love of peace in the face of clear threats eventually led to their enslavement. Stick has witnessed atrocities, and many of his loved ones have died horrible deaths, but he remains tender in his retelling. In the present-day Draywood, the Arcansil continues to take its toll on Eddigan, which leads to additional horrors between tellings (readers beware: There is animal death, and caretakers/patients with memory-related illnesses should steel themselves). Nevertheless, the stubborn resilience on display in Stick is softened by a sense of love and mutual care. An era may be ending—Stick’s life, Eddigan’s, the magic in the world—but Eddigan and Stick believe that life is precious even when time is short, and “it is better to know” than to turn away from their painful histories.