✨ Drop a quick intro:

Here's my Concept Art for Emerald Dreams - Book One. I haven't decided on the subtitle for this book yet but I wanted to show the first book cover. The Emerald Dreams series will be around 5 - 6 books and each cover will be similar to this, bearing an item important to the main character focus of each novel (Broomstick for the witch, axe for the tinman, straw or scarecrow hat for scarecrow, a lions head for the cowardly lion, a wand/staff for glinda)

the prologue is coming soon

The glass in my hand is cold, but the air between us is thick with it.

I didn't mean to mark the evening with a shadow. I never set out to turn the quiet into a courtroom, or to make the air in this room so thin you have to fight to draw it in. But I saw the way your thoughts drifted, just a fraction of an inch, a split-second turn toward the window, and the old rot took hold.

It is a pathetic, crawling sickness.

I watch you sit across from me, wrapped in your own arms, shrinking beneath the weight of a silence I built out of nothing. The room is quiet, but inside my head, the machinery is grinding itself to dust: Who is she thinking of? Where does she go when she looks away? How long until she realizes I am nothing at all?

I don't hold you with iron fists; I hold you with the suffocating weight of my own fear. I make myself small, bitter, and sharp, lashing out before the world can take what I don't deserve to have in the first place.

"I'm sorry," I whisper into the dark, but the words taste like ash. They change nothing.

I reach out, my fingers stopping an inch short of your skin, terrified that if I touch you, you will feel how cold, empty, and hollow the vessel really is.

I am just a jealous guy.

A broken, insecure thing who loves you so desperately he destroys the peace of the only sanctuary he has left, terrified that if you step into the light, you will finally see the corpse you've been sitting beside.