Join the Realm

Behind the veil of chapter 18 of The Lady in Flesh

Autumn 1898 at Concord State Normal School brings the first students to Sarvey Hall, where Appalachian stillness hangs heavy, books change overnight, and a sealed room awakens. As the ridge grows quiet and the halls begin to breathe, Rebecca Morgan becomes the first girl taken, her absence marked by ritual, whispers in the walls, and a bell that now calls without sound.

A grieving caretaker records the slow awakening of Concord’s halls, where folklore, faith, and a hungry bell reveal that the school itself has become a living body.

The creation of chapter 15 and the orphan bell

Making of Chapter 14

“Foundations of Fear” was built where history and haunting collide. Drawing from real construction deaths at Concord and bending the dates, I treated Athens Ridge like a wound being built over—each fallen worker another brick the Tear and the Lady claimed long before Room 316 ever existed.

In the wound-shaped cathedral beneath Room 316, the Lady in Flesh lifts her arms and the choir answers. Hands rustle, teeth sing, clocks stutter. Kithra beckons, Murnak coils, the Closet Twins knock, Brother Grin giggles, Elpit smiles with the needle, and Father Plume opens his black gospel. The pit glows like an eye. This is the psalm the Shadow Realm loves—where pain learns a melody and new names are added to the hymn.

In Room 316 the wall breathes. Not drywall—muscle. A wet dragging moves behind paint like a worm through meat. It speaks in borrowed voices: your mother’s lullaby, your dog’s bark, the last words you hoped to forget. The seam unfurls and Yekkath peers through, a face woven from nerves, fingers like black threads tugging at memory. It doesn’t take flesh. It unspools who you were, and the room learns your name.

The Shadow Realm isn’t a place; it’s a wound that refuses to scar. Corridors inhale, light leaks from living walls. She floats past doors that whisper older-than-prayer, back to the chamber of flesh where names are carved by teeth—Kayla, Zoe, Madison—each one pulsing. Evelyn remains a stubborn scar. Ahead, a blank door throbs with the future. The number isn’t hung yet, but she knows it: 316.

Footsteps end at the light. The threshold doesn’t move—you do. “She stepped forward. Into the slit. Into the wound. Into the hunger.” Not...

Spring arrives early, but nothing feels clean. Ice does not sing; it shatters. The village moves like it is holding its breath while Wenonah’s edges go wrong, shadow bent and voice threaded through the wind. The Tear’s appetite has clarified, innocence is not a symbol anymore, it is a price. To keep an offering pure, Wenonah makes a decision that breaks the home from the inside and carries what remains up Yula’mek. The altar does not hum now; it breathes.

Deep winter turns predatory on Yula’mek. After the first offering, the Tear proves choosy, hungry for innocence, not pain, and a brief trespass called New Prosperity draws its gaze. At 3:16 the sky doesn’t open; it rips, reshaping Wenonah, the altar, and the rules of the land.

Midwinter turns feral on Yula’mek. Hunger drives neighbors to raid, an unnamed boy becomes the first offering, and at 3:16 the hill opens—shifting the story from haunting to cosmic fact. This chapter asks what we owe the living when the body itself becomes a door.