The High and Faraway Books in Order

The High and Faraway starts with a contemporary setup and then gets weird, fast. Errol Greyson is a young man in pain, and what looks at first like a story about ordinary life veers into portal fantasy, body swapping, and a hidden world that has been sick for a very long time. Aster, the strange and gifted girl at the center of that shift, is the one who opens the door. Veronica, who carries her own history of death and return, quickly becomes just as important.

The other world is a network of magical realms often called the Kingdoms, and they run on old rules, old bargains, and very old damage. The deeper the series goes, the clearer it becomes that this is not just a parallel fantasy land with castles and monsters. It is a place shaped by stories, curses, inherited power, and a wound at the heart of reality itself. What happens there spills back into the lives of the characters who came from our world.

That is the hook.

Across The Reign of the Departed, Kingdoms of the Cursed, and Realms of the Deathless, the main arc grows from a personal rescue story into something much larger. Errol has to decide who he is when even his body and his place in the world stop feeling fixed. Aster has to face the consequences of the magic she uses. Veronica's role keeps widening, especially as the books explore what it means to be brought back, changed, and still expected to choose a side.

The tone is darker than the fairy tale language might make you expect. There are dragons, living constructs, ancient evils, and big magical set pieces, but there is also a steady sense of grief and unease under everything. Keyes is interested in friendship, guilt, sacrifice, and the way young people can stumble into responsibilities they never asked for.

It also gets more cosmic as it goes. By the final book, the danger is not just to one kingdom or one family. The Curse reaches into the structure of the universe, and the story pushes beyond castles and forests into stranger, higher realms.

If you like portal fantasy that begins with recognizable emotions and then keeps opening into larger, stranger spaces, this series is a good fit.