The Coven of Old Salem

They didn't just hang the innocent. They foreclosed on their souls.Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. History calls it a hysteria-a fever of religious paranoia that tore a community apart. But beneath the screaming afflicted and the whispers of midnight specters lies a colder truth: the Witch Trials are a calculated, supernatural heist.As the gallows claim their victims, Prudence Blackwood and the Coven of Old Salem work the shadows. They are using the town's panic as a smokescreen to legally seize the prime riverfront real estate of the condemned. But the Coven isn't just hoarding land. Bound by a blood-inked ledger, they are siphoning the spiritual unrest of the executed, trapping their souls in unhallowed ground to power an untouchable financial empire.Dark magic, however, is strictly transactional. The earth keeps its own ledger, and every stolen acre generates a supernatural bankruptcy known as the Silent Blight. To keep their own estates blooming, the Coven dumps this necrotic rot-their metaphysical transaction fee-into the village's wells, winter stores, and the bloodstreams of the residents.Three unlikely allies stand in the crossfire, realizing the true evil resides in ledgers, not the dark woods. Elara Alcott, an archivist's daughter burdened with the "Sight," is racing to decode the Coven's accounting before the river valley is consumed by the blight. She is forced to rely on Thomas Vance, a colonial heir who foolishly signed the Coven's contract and is now watching his own flesh decay into ash as the debt collects its due. They are joined by Reverend John Hale, a minister fighting to halt the hangings while physically gagged by a magical rot spreading through his throat.From the crushing stones placed upon Giles Corey to the subterranean forging of the Iron-Heart Chalice, this prequel unearths the origins of Salem's darkest conspiracy. The hysteria will break and the blood will wash away, but the land-and the ledger-remains.Trading cauldrons for magical foreclosures and blood-inked contracts, The Coven of Old Salem is dark historical fantasy with a ruthless edge. Welcome to Salem, where innocence is a liability, and survival is just a matter of balancing the books.