The Nuckelavee's Winter Tide
A Folk Horror Novella

About this book:

On the island of Hoy, the winter has forgotten how to end. The sea lies sullen and black beyond the skerries, the earth has turned to iron beneath the plough, and the kelp rots into tar on the shore. Nineteen-year-old Mairi Cleid watches her father's fire die and her neighbors' chimneys go cold, while the old crofters whisper that the Sea Mither has turned her face away. But the silence rolling in from the Pentland Firth is not the absence of God—it is the patience of something far older, rising from the deep shelves where the water presses cold and dark against the roots of the world.

When the burn chokes on black scum and the gulls drop dead-eyed upon the dykes clutching strands of nightmare weed, Mairi knows the old stories are not warnings. They are instructions. The Nuckelavee rides again—skinless, breath like pestilence, hooves striking fire from the frozen shore—and it demands the ancient tithe that the islanders once paid in blood and marrow. To save her village, Mairi must descend into the rotten heart of the folklore she was raised to fear, and strike a bargain with the thing that wears the winter like a crown.

Atmospheric, visceral, and steeped in Orcadian myth, *The Nuckelavee's Winter Tide* is a folk horror novella that drags the old gods up from the shingle and sets them loose upon a community with nowhere left to run. For readers who love the creeping dread of *The Witch* and the salt-stung mythology of *The Lamplighters*, this is a tale of what crawls ashore when the thaw refuses to come—and what it costs to send it back.