Short Fiction
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Completed, First published Mar 02, 2026

A creeping mist clings to the shadowed corners of these tales, each a whispered confession unearthed from forgotten hearths. MacDonald’s prose, though deceptively simple, weaves a labyrinth of spectral longing—not for grand horrors, but for the ache of absence, the lingering touch of what *could* have been. Here, the boundaries between dream and waking fray, and the mundane is haunted by a melancholic grace. Rooms exhale the scent of dried lavender and regret. Children vanish into orchards choked with silver fog. The weight of unspoken grief presses down, heavier than any tombstone. These are stories not of monsters *in* the darkness, but of the darkness *within* the heart, made visible in the pale moonlight spilling through attic windows. A pervasive stillness—the kind that precedes a snowfall, or a revelation—drenches each narrative, leaving a residue of icy wonder and the faint, echoing chime of lost things. Expect not jump scares, but the slow, deliberate unraveling of hope, rendered in hues of gray and the sigh of wind through barren branches. The air itself tastes of decay and remembrance.
Copyright: Public Domain
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Chapter List

97

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14 Part
Dust hangs thick in the Louisiana cane fields, mirroring the suffocating secrets that cling to the decaying grandeur of the plantation house. Here, the line between the living and the dead blurs with every whisper of conjure, every flicker of swamp gas rising from the bayou. John Westerly, a white man haunted by ambition and a creeping dread, finds himself entangled with the power of the unseen after his wife’s illness leads him to seek the aid of a root woman, a woman steeped in the old ways. But her healing comes at a price, a debt paid in shadows and steeped in the lore of a people who’ve held onto their magic through generations of bondage. The air is heavy with the scent of jasmine and decay, laced with the metallic tang of fear. Every glance from the enslaved, every rustle in the Spanish moss, carries a weight of unspoken knowledge. The narrative coils around itself like the vines choking the ancient oaks, revealing a slow unraveling of sanity as Westerly descends into a world where his rational mind clashes against the potent reality of folk magic. He’s drawn into a claustrophobic world where the conjured spirits of the enslaved seep into his dreams, and the boundaries of his own identity begin to dissolve into the miasma of the swamp. It’s a world where the shadows lengthen with each passing night, and the price of power is measured not in coin, but in pieces of a soul willingly surrendered to the darkness. The house itself breathes, groaning with the weight of forgotten histories, a silent witness to the bargains struck in the humid Louisiana night.
32 Part
A perpetual twilight clings to the shadowed corners of New Moon, a desolate, windswept inheritance haunted by whispers of misfortune. The orphaned Emily Byrd, a creature of wild imagination and fiery spirit, arrives to claim her legacy—a decaying ancestral home steeped in the lore of a cursed lineage. But the house breathes with a sorrow that seeps into Emily's very soul, mirroring the spectral grief of her mother, a phantom presence woven into the very fabric of the moors. The narrative unfolds as a slow, melancholic descent into a world where dreams and realities blur, where the scent of heather and brine mingles with the bitterness of forgotten promises. Each chamber of New Moon holds a fragment of the past—a tarnished mirror reflecting a forgotten face, a faded portrait hinting at a tragic fate, a diary bound in leather stained with tears. Emily’s burgeoning poetic gifts become a conduit to the unseen, drawing her closer to the secrets buried within the family’s history. She is watched over by the silent, watchful eyes of the old servants, their faces etched with the weight of generations past. But the beauty of the landscape is deceptive, for the moor itself seems to possess a hungry darkness, a longing to reclaim what was lost. As Emily’s heart blossoms with both love and loss, she finds herself entangled in a web of family secrets, shadowed by the looming possibility that she too is destined to be consumed by the curse of New Moon. The novel is a slow burn, a haunting exploration of loneliness, resilience, and the enduring power of memory—a place where the boundary between life and death feels fragile as a moonbeam on a stormy sea.
29 Part
Dust devils dance across a land bleached bone-white under a merciless sun, mirroring the ghosts that haunt the Oklahoma Territory. Cimarron unfolds not as a chronicle of westward expansion, but as a slow unraveling of dreams swallowed by the prairie’s vast indifference. The scent of sage and decay clings to the weathered timbers of the Ysobel family’s hacienda, a crumbling testament to a Spanish heritage decaying alongside the land itself. Each generation feels the weight of the wind’s mournful howl, the land’s relentless claim on those who dare to build upon it. The narrative is steeped in the amber light of dying embers, the shadows of ambition stretching long and skeletal across the plains. A suffocating heat rises not just from the earth, but from the simmering resentments and buried betrayals within the family. The story doesn't celebrate conquest, but the erosion of certainty, the quiet fracturing of lives against the unforgiving backdrop of a landscape that both promises and denies salvation. It's a tale of inheritance built on quicksand, where the boundaries between ownership and obsession blur until all that remains is a haunting echo of what was lost – a legacy of sun-baked desperation and the slow, creeping realization that even the most stubborn roots can be torn free by the relentless prairie wind. The silence between chapters is thick with the grit of dust and the weight of unfulfilled promises, a land breathing with the loneliness of forgotten souls.