The Covenant

Deep in the sealed community of Harrowmoss, healing has always come at a price. For generations, the people of Harrowmoss have kept their covenant with something ancient that lives in the mud at the edge of the forest. It heals their sick and calms their dying. In return, it demands blood — and it chooses its own. A potter named Dawai falls into a trance and sculpts a ceramic jug bearing the face of the next to be taken. The community calls this the Settling. They have built their faith around it. They have never questioned it. Until a young woman named Ada finds a jug bearing her own face. Ada is already carrying two secrets that would destroy her in Harrowmoss: she is pregnant by her own brother, and she has been promised in marriage to a boy she cannot love. When she discovers the jug, she makes a decision that sets everything else in motion — she buries it. She hides herself from the covenant. The pit does not forgive delays. It does not wait. It begins collecting what it is owed from everyone around her instead — her friends, her family, the innocent, the guilty, all of them paying the interest on a debt that is hers alone. The Covenant is a folk horror novel about what happens when a closed system meets a person who refuses to disappear quietly — and what it costs everyone standing too close when she finally breaks.