The Root of Mudwick

Georgia, 1905. Some people walk through rooms and feel nothing. Jo Hargrave feels everything.

Three generations of Black women have carried this gift in secret. Practiced in the margins. Died unseen. When Jo learns that a school for practitioners is being built on the very land where her grandmother was enslaved, she goes north without an invitation.

Samuel Whitfield nearly died three times learning what he is. He wants to build a place where no one else has to figure it out alone. The property is beautiful. It's also wrong. Something lives beneath it, older than the plantation, older than the Cherokee who tended it for centuries. Something vast and patient and indifferent to whatever they think they're building on top of it.

To create the school they've dreamed of, Jo and Samuel will have to go down. Through layers of suffering. Through histories that don't want to be disturbed. All the way to whatever's waiting at the bottom.

The question isn't whether they can build something good. It's whether good intentions survive what it costs to build them.