The Re-Wilding: Roots of Hell

They call it correction, not punishment.

Supernatural abilities are dangerous when left unmanaged. Those who refuse registration are sent to the Correctional Colonies. Everyone must be accounted for.

Cassia grows up knowing the forests beyond the walls are not the wild wastelands they say it is. Her family tends to the land and it tends to life in return. Wounded things can heal. What dies gives life to something else.

Nothing truly lives alone.

Her magic comes too young and grows too quickly. Cassia can feel the memories and spirit threaded through living things - and sometimes calls life back as it slips away.

Until one terrible day teaches her there are darker things she can do.
Years later, Cassia lives alone, her power hidden away from others. But when a loved one needs her, she is forced out of the wild and into a world of walls, surveillance, and people who have learned to look away to survive. Cassia learns this as well, until someone begins dying in front of her.
She reaches for them.
They live.
But Cassia is pulled into the afterlife instead.

Her heart still beats when she is brought before the Prince of Desire.
He has spent ages learning the shape of want. Lust. Greed. Love. Hunger. Desire reveals what one would sacrifice for the things they crave, which tells him how to sort the souls for intake.
Cassia should be an anomaly to correct. Instead, he keeps her within reach. She despises how easily he sees through her; he is unsettled by the way she looks at him as if there is something beneath worth seeing.

As Cassia is drawn deeper into the afterlife, cracks form in her wake. Forgotten paths appear. Forbidden places call to her. Things long-silent begin to stir. She finds traces of a world that refuses to disappear.
Desire understands longing. Cassia understands connection.
Both know reaching for the wrong thing can destroy you.

But under everything they were taught to fear, something has been waiting to grow.