Mothlight Kindle

Synopsis

Portal fantasy as a means for psychological horror, whodunnit murder mystery, and explorations into dissociation.

After eighteen years learning to be normal, Aspen started to believe in *the* happy days—lazy cicada summers with her brother Jamie, Mother working late, daydreaming about a world of blue mushrooms and sap-filled fairies to escape the weight of pretending.

Then her daydream answered back.

She wakes in a stranger's corpse. In Hinter, a village carved into a dying god-tree, everyone's identity arrives as scent. Aspen has none. She shouldn't exist. The Hinterfolk can smell that. They know she's not one of them.

But nobody asks where she's from.

The council has names from tarot. Hanged Man. High Priestess. Hierophant. Why is their society built on concepts from *her* world?

Her new body is mutating—wings, synesthetic filaments, sap-swirls in her palms that pulse with energy. She has six days to learn the rules of a world written in scent, dream, and ritual. Six days before the Omen returns. The thing that murdered the girl whose skin she's wearing.

She's starting to suspect this wasn't random. She doesn't plan to win. She just wants to go home, even if home is a world away.

But memories of her brother are fading. Her new limbs feel more real than phantoms. And Hinter's spirits are watching, waiting to see what she'll become.

The human in her wants to burn. The sinner in her feels she deserves it. But the moth in her loves this.

After all, these moths don't burn.

They ascend.

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