Severance

Luke is thirty-two, recently orphaned, and barely functioning. His parents died in an ordinary accident on an ordinary evening, and the world that followed is one he moves through without quite inhabiting. When his aunt presses a phone number into his hand and mentions a woman who teaches breathing exercises, he goes. Not out of belief. Because he has nothing left to lose.

What begins as grief management becomes something else entirely. A presence, ancient and patient, begins to make itself known. And with it comes a question that refuses to leave him alone. What if the oldest story humanity tells itself, the flood, the ark, the fall, is not mythology but a record of something that actually happened? Something deliberately taken, and deliberately buried?

His research leads him to a centuries-old institution operating in the shadows of the Vatican, one that has spent thousands of years ensuring that certain questions are never asked. His practice leads him north, to a monastery in Norway, and to chambers beneath its stone that predate every faith built above.

What he finds there will cost more than he expected. And what it reveals about the nature of humanity, about what was taken and what might be recovered, does not leave him unchanged.

Severance is a work of literary fiction about grief, awakening, and the oldest suppression in human history.