Stories

Nemi has spent his whole life fixing things on Pell. Nets, walls, boats, the hinge on old Dato's door that swings wrong every third week. He knows every inch of the island, the strange stones in the grove, the tide that pulls the wrong way, the light that comes up through the water instead of down from the sky. He's never questioned any of it. It's just home.

Then a stranger washes up half-dead, asking about the stones.

What the stranger knows turns Pell from an ordinary island into something older and stranger than Nemi has words for, and it hands him a job bigger than anything he's ever mended. To do it he'll need people he's never met, in places he's never been, past water he's never sailed. All he has is a boat that isn't finished, a direction, and the only skill he's ever had.

This is the arc where a man who has never left home leaves it. Where the warmth of what he's giving up is exactly what makes the leaving cost something. The islands are the adventure. What Nemi carries out of Pell, and who he becomes trying to reach the next one, is the story underneath.

Some places just feel different. You've probably noticed it yourself. An old hospital that makes your skin crawl even though you can't see anything wrong. Your grandmother's kitchen that wraps around you like a hug the moment you walk in. A battlefield where the air itself feels heavy with something you can't name.

Most people shrug it off. Practitioners don't have that luxury.

In Mudwick's world, magic isn't about wands or spells or chosen ones destined for greatness. It's simpler than that. And messier. Every intense emotion, every death and birth and heartbreak, every moment when someone felt something deeply leaves a residue behind. That residue soaks into places and objects and the land itself. Centuries of human experience, just sitting there, waiting.

Practitioners are the people who can feel it. They can sense what a place holds. Some of them can draw on it, pulling courage from battlefields or focus from libraries or warmth from family homes. A rare few can do even more.

Eli Lawrence is one of these people, but something's off. They don't read places like everyone else. They read people. Touch someone's hand and feel their buried grief. Lock eyes with a stranger and know their secrets. It's been making their life in small-town Ohio pretty much unbearable.

Then someone shows up with answers. A hidden school in Appalachia called Mudwick. A place to learn control. People who understand.

Sounds great, right? Finally somewhere to belong. Finally people who won't flinch when Eli accidentally knows too much.

But Mudwick has history. The families who run the practitioner world have been doing so for generations, and they didn't get that power by asking nicely. There are students who arrive at Mudwick full of potential and leave hollowed out. There's a woman named Miriam destroying sacred places across the country and everyone says she's dangerous. There are teachers with secrets and alliances that go back decades.

The hidden world isn't some magical escape from the regular one. It's got the same problems. Power concentrated in the hands of people who were born with it. Systems that chew up the vulnerable and spit them out. The question of what you do when you discover the institution that promised to help you might have built itself on extraction and exploitation.

Eli just wanted to stop feeling like a freak. What they found instead was a world where feeling too much might be exactly what someone designed them to do.

In Mudwick, the land holds on to everything that ever happened on it. Every grief, every act of love, every death soaks into the ground and the walls and the objects people leave behind, and a rare few can feel it under their hands. These are their stories. Small ones. A kitchen, a garden, a quilt, a stretch of holler where the ground stayed warm long after it should have gone cold.

There's no world to study first and no series to have read. Each story stands completely on its own and drops you straight into one life and one body in a single page: a person who can sense what a place is still carrying, and the ordinary, human moment where that becomes too much to hold. Some of them borrow strength from where brave things were done. Some of them feel a loss in the soil that isn't theirs and can't put it down. All of them pay for what they can do, because in Mudwick you never take from a place without taking some of the place into yourself.

This first volume gathers the earliest of these shorts under one cover. They're quiet and they turn one strange, tender idea over and over, that grief runs cold and the land never forgets, until you feel it in your own feet.

The best door into Mudwick for anyone who wants the world without committing to the books. Open to any story and you're inside it.

Nora carried sixty-two names. She thought she'd sent them all to die.

She was wrong about that.

A routing code on a forty-year-old file leads her to a town that barely exists, a hardware store full of files that don't match any system she's ever worked, and a logbook entry written three weeks ago. The names in that logbook are hers. The status next to each one is a single word she wasn't supposed to ever see.

Someone has been pulling people out of the chain. Someone has been doing it for decades. And the eighty-year program built to find people like Nora is starting to suspect that what it's been removing isn't going away. It's spreading. Through proximity. Through contact. Through the simple act of one real person standing in a room with people who only know how to perform.

Hollowed Arc 2 follows Nora past the edge of the system she used to enforce, into the small towns and back roads where the thing the program was designed to eliminate has been quietly multiplying. Some carriers break under the weight of it. Some recover. Some never knew they had it.

The system is patient. It's been winning for a long time.

It's losing now. It just doesn't know how badly.

Six people who work inside a system designed to find and remove what it considers defective. Six routine assignments that go exactly as planned. Six reports filed with clean data and no anomalies detected.

Except something is off. A four-minute gap in a parking lot. A word that won't leave. Details that don't serve the checklist but won't stop arriving. A recording that captured something the screener's face did without permission.

The system measures everything. But the thing that's changing the people who run it is below the threshold. And once you start noticing what the instruments can't see, you can't go back to not seeing it.

Collections is a thriller told from inside the machine, where the most dangerous thing isn't what you're hunting. It's what happens when you start to feel something about the hunt.

Some people are born without something. No soul, no inner life, just a perfect replica of human emotion. They smile when you smile. They grieve when you grieve. They never slip up. Society has developed tests to identify them and institutions to deal with them. The Hollowed are considered dangerous. Not because they've done anything, but because of what they might do.

The detection system is thorough and normalized — regular screenings, behavioral assessments, a whole bureaucratic apparatus. People report neighbors, family members, coworkers. A positive identification triggers removal. What happens after removal is handled quietly. The institutions don't publish reports.

It's time we explore even more tales within Mudwick. How does saturation affect those who don't share the same history? How did the first people who learned saturation not abuse the power they've come to understand?

Dao Reyes is fourteen, a practitioner with a conflict affinity he's barely learned to control, and he's about to spend the summer with a father he hasn't seen in years. Rafael lives in a studio apartment in Jackson Heights, works at a warehouse, and makes adobo from a recipe he looked up online. He doesn't know much about Dao's world. What he knows is that his kid just got off a plane and needs a place to sleep, and the fold-out couch is ready.

New York City is loud in ways Dao wasn't prepared for. Every block hums with layered history, and something underneath Manhattan is pulling at him, patient and old and familiar. The summer was supposed to be simple. Stay with his dad. Keep his head down. Figure out what to do with the thing he took from Mudwick. But the city has its own plans for a kid with the Reyes name, and the ground remembers more than anyone told him it would.

His brother Danny is dead, and someone has to close out the house. So he goes back.

He hasn't been to that house in years, but the key sticks exactly where his hand expects it to, and the light switch is right where he reaches without looking, and the neighbor keeps starting to call him the wrong name. In the one photo of the two brothers as boys, there's only one boy. The death certificate has been amended, and the date on the amendment is wrong in a way that makes his hands go cold.

The Understudy is a thirteen-part suspense series that starts as a grief story and slowly stops being one. Each part turns on its own twist and ends on its own cliffhanger, and the deeper he digs into how his brother really died, the less the answers look like anything he was prepared to find.

Somebody lied about Danny. He means to find out who, and why.

He should have asked a different question.

Everyone is born under a sign, and the sign gives you one power for life. Nobody tells you the power comes with a bill.

Born Under is twelve standalone stories, one for each sign, each about an ordinary person and the price of what they are.

A mother who can shield anyone but herself, on the night a stranger comes to the door for her son. A father who can only reach his boy by hurting him, and feels every second of it. A con artist wearing a dead man's face, who realizes the face gets loved and he never did.

A hunter who goes blind the instant she aims, and a daughter standing somewhere behind her. A nurse who can save one dying patient only by lowering the other. A widow who slips into her comatose husband's dream every night and can no longer feel her own body in the chair.

No chosen ones. No saving the world. Just twelve people at the exact moment their gift asks for everything, in kitchens and hospitals and driveways that look exactly like yours.

Every story runs on the same rule. The power is real, the power is a curse, and the two are the same thing. You do not get the shield without being the one left exposed. You do not get to be certain without going blind to everything else. You do not climb without paying in years and scars you cannot hide.

Read them in any order. Read one and put the book down. They will still be sitting with you.

Dex Holloway is a broke pocket hunter living in his car, testing random objects at estate sales for the one-in-five-thousand chance they contain a pocket dimension. Most days he finds nothing. Today he finds a travel mug containing a cave.

Except the cave keeps getting bigger. And there are doors inside leading to other impossible spaces. And someone built all of this.

This is the discovery that will prove he matters. The big score that changes everything.

Then he gets trapped inside with his only two friends, and the entrance seals behind them.

Now Dex has to choose between exploring deeper to understand what he found or getting his team out alive. Between the glory he's always wanted and the people who actually give a damn about him.

The pocket goes down forever. The way out is somewhere in the dark. And time is running out.