Prologue: A Town Too Quiet for Trouble

Ashwick was a town where dreams went to sulk, a gray smear of neon and rain that never let up. I’m Felix Carver, twenty-two, college dropout, and the guy you’d find scrubbing grease at the diner, dodging Marge’s glares while dreaming of a life that didn’t suck. My nights were spent scribbling stories in a beat-up notebook, half-baked tales of heroes I’d never be. Ashwick didn’t care about my dreams it was too busy hiding its own.

The town had a pulse, faint but wrong. Whispers of shadows moving without light, of glowing eyes in the woods that weren’t raccoons. Old-timers at the diner muttered about “death omens” over their pancakes, and I rolled my eyes. Ghosts? Please. I had enough trouble dodging late rent notices and my own bad choices.

Then she showed up.One night, trudging home through a downpour, my sneakers squelching, I heard it a low clop of hooves, like a horse had wandered out of a myth. I turned, expecting a stray dog, but there she was: a rider cloaked in shadow, astride a massive black beast snorting steam. No head, just a smooth stump, and a glowing skull in her hand, its green eyes grinning like it knew I’d flunked out of college.

 Lirien, she called herself. A dullahan, harbinger of death, middle manager of the afterlife, with a whip made of enchanted bone and a voice that could sell me on anything.Ashwick was waking up, and not in a fun way. A banshee’s wail haunted my dreams, sharp enough to carve my nerves. 

A man in a patchwork coat lurked in alleys, collecting things that weren’t coins or bottle caps. And something bigger stirred something tied to the Veil, the fragile line between our world and one where monsters didn’t play nice. The air felt heavier, like Ashwick was holding its breath, waiting for me to step into a story I wasn’t ready for.I should’ve run. 

Should’ve stayed a nobody with a coffee pot and a notebook. But Lirien’s voice, smooth as whiskey and sharp as a blade, hooked me. My boring life was over, and Ashwick’s secrets were about to become my fight whether I was ready or not.