Mudwick

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.

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.

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.

Eli Lawrence returns to Mudwick for a second year with a story everyone around him agrees on. The bad thing is over. The people responsible are gone. The school sent an email, the matter is closed, and he's supposed to settle in, find his friends, and learn to carry what he can do.

He can already tell it's a lie. Something in the school's hidden network is dragging, a stutter under everything, a weight hanging off a system nobody can explain. He feels it the moment he arrives, in a place that isn't supposed to be able to feel wrong. And folded into a book in his bag is a note he chose not to think about all summer, from someone who told him he'd finally see these people for what they are, and that when he was ready to do something about it, there was help waiting.

Trouble is, the adults he's meant to trust are the same ones who are always kind, always patient, always holding something back. The deeper Eli looks, the harder it gets to tell who's protecting him and who's managing him, and the more he understands that the rot he thought he'd found the bottom of goes down further than anyone let him believe. Book 2 is the year the ground gives. Friendships get tested, the cost of what he can do keeps climbing, and every warm moment starts carrying a weight he can't quite name.

It's a darker, tighter turn of the screw, still grounded, still sensory, still a story about a teenager learning to feel everything in a place that would rather he stopped asking what it's all for.

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?