Gothicnoir Stories

This is the way I see it. Life is seen in more than seven billion ways. We all feel the sun whisper to our skin, but what about the way the earth dances on corpses? History is re-written and refined by death. I explore the endless possibilities on how death may visit different people. From the monarch to the painter, these are their endings.

The Covenant of the Hollow Womb (A three-part Ozark folk-horror novella) In the iron-dark hollers of Caldwell Ridge, the mountain keeps its own scripture. 1888. Mercy Caldwell makes a bargain with something older than sin: one child every generation, measured exact, paid in blood and breath. The cradle never burns. The handprint never fades. The psalm is always sung backward. A century later, the tithe comes due again. Three women, three lifetimes, one cradle. Mercy, who spoke the covenant. Temperance, who tried to break it. Clara, who was born to finish it. They all thought they could outrun the mountain. They all learned the mountain doesn't chase. It waits. It rocks. It hungers. Some debts are measured in inches. Some debts are measured in souls. The Hollow Womb is full... ...but never satisfied.

Volume I introduces Kai, a reluctant yet resolute figure drawn into the orbit of a force known only as The Wicked. Set against a shifting world of forests, rains that write or refuse names, and towns ready to forget, the story builds around the confrontation between human will and something older, stranger, and smiling at the rules of reality. Throughout the volume, Kai uncovers fragments of the Wicked's presence: splinters of iron, rituals carved into birch groves, storms that seem to listen, and silences that seem deliberate. The Wicked itself is never simply monster or god, but a double-edged figure-mocking, patient, always nudging the world toward a threshold it isn't sure it wants crossed. Kai resists not out of pure defiance but out of love, the kind that invests itself as both shield and debt. Their defiance crystallizes in the closing scenes: the birch-ring forest bends like a ritual chamber, an iron splinter promises both harm and sentence, and The Wicked smiles at Kai with the satisfaction of a test nearly passed. At the cliffhanger ending, The Wicked steps through impossible exits-sky, story, history-splitting one path into two bodies and futures. It names the next movement simply: "Chase." Kai, refusing submission, runs after it, propelled by love and a world that itself is on the verge of rewriting. The forest closes like a book with a bookmark at the very page the reader longs for next.