About This Volume
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.
