The Scaffold at Eventide
A Far-Future Ghost Story

About this book:

High above a poisoned Earth, the Scaffold rots. Once a gateway to the stars, the great orbital ring is now a rusting crown on a dying world, maintained by skeleton crews who weld its seams and ignore the groaning of its ancient steel. Vance and Marra have spent years working the night shift in the Scaffold's shadow, breathing recycled air and chasing hairline fractures with plasma torches. But the metal is changing—drinking heat, sealing its own wounds, and vibrating with a rhythm that feels uncomfortably like a heartbeat. And when the inspection hatches open, the girders don't just show stress fractures. They show boot prints. Collar rings. Things crushed into the iron strata centuries ago, preserved like insects in amber.

The company calls it metal fatigue. The surveyors call it sensor error. Henderson calls it the schedule. But the third shift hears whispers in the girders, and the ballast tanks smell of old blood and lime. As the red giant sun dips below the horizon and the station plunges into freezing night, the Scaffold begins to wake—and it remembers every hand that built it, every body it swallowed, and every promise the architects broke.

A haunting, industrial gothic set in the rusting bones of humanity's greatest ambition, *The Scaffold at Eventide* is a far-future ghost story where the haunting isn't supernatural—it's structural. For readers who love the claustrophobic dread of *Alien*, the decaying grandeur of *Revelation Space*, and the slow-burn horror of *The Stone Tape*, this is a novel about what happens when a machine built to reach heaven becomes a tomb instead.