The Canticles of Cypress| ongoing

The dead do not forget. The land does not forgive.

Cypress Manor, Louisiana, 1859. Azélie Baptiste is a seamstress, an herbalist, and a keeper of secrets she never asked for. When she touches old fabric, she sees the past. Every scream, every whip, every child sold away before their name was learned.

Théodore Delacroix is the plantation heir who despises slavery but profits from it. He returns home to a dying father, a guilty conscience, and paintings that paint themselves in the night.

Between them stands Maréa Rouge, a ghost burned alive a century ago, cursed to wander the cane fields in a wedding dress of ash. She offers Azélie a bargain: power in exchange for memory. Freedom in exchange for self.

But Maréa does not want justice.

She wants to live again.

As a hurricane gathers over the Gulf and the dead rise from the bayou, Azélie must choose to either save the man she loves, or become the vessel for a woman who has been burning for a hundred years.

She cannot do both.