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The Heart That Doesn't Beat: An exorcist in a dying monastery finds a woman bound for 50 years-and an ancient hunger waiting for the door to open.
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ISBN13: 9798170711048
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.22
Height: 0.93 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.22
Height: 0.93 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
His heart hasn't beaten in fifty-three years. Hers has been chained to a well for fifty.
Darius Kane is the Hollow Man - Deadmouth, some call him - a wandering exorcist whose own heart stopped the night a younger, more reckless version of himself attempted a ritual he did not fully understand. For over five decades he has walked from village to frightened village, mending the small hauntings other people cannot face, feeling almost nothing, wanting almost nothing, and expecting that hollow arithmetic to hold for whatever remains of his unnatural existence.
Darius Kane is the Hollow Man - Deadmouth, some call him - a wandering exorcist whose own heart stopped the night a younger, more reckless version of himself attempted a ritual he did not fully understand. For over five decades he has walked from village to frightened village, mending the small hauntings other people cannot face, feeling almost nothing, wanting almost nothing, and expecting that hollow arithmetic to hold for whatever remains of his unnatural existence.
A minor scholarly errand - a rubbing of an inscription at the ruined monastery of Vet Karal - leads him instead to a well at the center of an overgrown courtyard, and to Mirella: a young woman bound to that place for fifty years, half spirit and half memory, who has spent five decades believing the careful letters guiding her were the only kindness left to her. They were not kindness. They were the patient opening moves of something ancient and starving, and Mirella has been unknowingly widening a boundary that was never hers to widen.
Darius does not walk away. Alongside Sera, a sharp, dutiful hunter of the Order sent to investigate the corrupted site, he and Mirella follow a trail of half-translated fragments north - through a forest that remembers older things than any of them, to a sunless underground city guarded by a being who has kept a single, terrible name in careful silence for centuries.
That name is Moravel - sealed, not destroyed, by the founders of an order long since scattered, and patient enough to spend forty years courting a lonely woman through letters rather than force a door it could not yet open. To close that door properly, Darius will have to offer the one thing fifty-three years of unlife have prepared him, uniquely and terribly, to give: himself, held steady at the exact threshold between what he is and what he was.
It is a strange thing, to be handed a second chance at feeling by the very ruin that first proved you could survive without it - and stranger still to find, at the bottom of your own hollowed-out existence, that you have finally found someone worth becoming whole again for.
If you love: slow-burn undead x spirit romance, morally gray monster hunters, ancient sealed evils, found-family road trips through cursed forests, and self-sacrifice written as devotion - this is your next read.
Darius does not walk away. Alongside Sera, a sharp, dutiful hunter of the Order sent to investigate the corrupted site, he and Mirella follow a trail of half-translated fragments north - through a forest that remembers older things than any of them, to a sunless underground city guarded by a being who has kept a single, terrible name in careful silence for centuries.
That name is Moravel - sealed, not destroyed, by the founders of an order long since scattered, and patient enough to spend forty years courting a lonely woman through letters rather than force a door it could not yet open. To close that door properly, Darius will have to offer the one thing fifty-three years of unlife have prepared him, uniquely and terribly, to give: himself, held steady at the exact threshold between what he is and what he was.
It is a strange thing, to be handed a second chance at feeling by the very ruin that first proved you could survive without it - and stranger still to find, at the bottom of your own hollowed-out existence, that you have finally found someone worth becoming whole again for.
If you love: slow-burn undead x spirit romance, morally gray monster hunters, ancient sealed evils, found-family road trips through cursed forests, and self-sacrifice written as devotion - this is your next read.
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