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.The breathing works. That is the problem.What begins as grief management becomes something else entirely. A presence makes itself known, ancient and patient, and it brings a question that refuses to leave him alone. What if the oldest story humanity tells itself is not mythology but a record? The flood. The ark. The fall. Something taken, and something buried.The question has been asked before. An institution older than the church it shelters behind has spent centuries making sure it is never answered.Luke's practice leads him north, to a monastery in Norway and to chambers beneath its stone that predate every faith built above them. What he finds there has a price. And the truth it reveals, about what was severed from humanity and what might still be recovered, cannot be unlearned.Severance is a metaphysical novel of grief and spiritual awakening, for readers who suspect the oldest stories are not stories.