When a Covenant Learns to Burn (1723–1765)
Every family secret reaches a breaking point.
For two generations, the guardians of the covenant believed that vigilance and quiet obedience were their only shield. They believed that if they watched closely enough, kept their silence, and carried the weight of the three spirits from mother to daughter, father to son, the balance would hold.
Forty-two years after the trials at St Hallows Gate, the cycle turns once more.
On All Hallows’ Eve in 1723, the role of Anchor passes into the hands of Beatrice Ashwell.
Beatrice is not content to merely endure. Pragmatic, resolute, and weary of watching her family wither beneath an unyielding supernatural debt, she arrives at a fateful conviction: the pact cannot be negotiated with, nor should it be quietly tended. It must be buried.
Her plan is deceptively simple: gather the accumulated relics, the recorded bindings, and the physical manifestations of the covenant, and entomb them beneath the crumbling stone of Blackthorne Abbey, a desolate, coastal ruin on the windswept Somerset shore.
She believes she can seal the tomb and walk away.
She is terribly, tragically mistaken.
A World of Elegance and Shadow
The Ashes of Blackthorne Abbey carries the series into the Early Georgian era—a period defined by striking contrasts.
On one side lies the golden splendour of Bath, with its sunlit Palladian colonnades, grand assembly rooms, and fashionable society. Yet behind closed parlour doors, bored aristocrats and ambitious physicians dabble in the occult, eager to purchase or coax into the light secrets they are wholly unprepared to handle. Men like Lord Aldous Fenwick, who believes ancient power can simply be bought, and Dr. Josiah Pell, who seeks immortality in esoteric lore, begin probing the edges of Somerset’s oldest whispers.
On the other side lies the rugged, storm-lashed coastline around Minehead and Watchet. Here, amidst sea mists and smugglers’ caves, men like Captain Elias Rook transport illicit cargo without asking what ancient forces cling to the stone beneath their boots.
When an old, cursed foundation stone is dredged from the tides and brought toward Blackthorne Abbey, the worlds of Bath society, coastal contraband, and the seven bloodlines collide.
For the very first time in the series, outsiders notice the pact before the pact reaches them.
The Fire That Changed the Rules
The tragedy of Blackthorne Abbey is not born of malice, but of good intentions. Beatrice Ashwell does not wish to unleash darkness upon the world; she seeks to free her descendants from it forever.
Yet the covenant is not a simple lock to be snapped shut.
When the sealing at the Abbey goes catastrophically wrong, fire sweeps through centuries of dry oak, ancient tapestries, and sacred ground. But flame does not cleanse the debt.
The fire teaches the pact a new way to live.
Up until this moment, the covenant required two things: a bloodline and a physical place.
The ashes of Blackthorne Abbey shatter that rule forever:
- Ash on the Wind: The smoke carries the presence across fields, into coastal villages, and onto the clothes of passing strangers.
- Portable Relics: Burned fragments, tarnished rings, and scorched pages scatter into hands that have no blood connection to the seven families.
- Inherited Dreams: Mediums and dream-carriers begin hearing voices in dialects they do not speak and remembering deaths they never died.
- Rumour as a Vector: In the salons of Bath, the “Blackthorne Curse” becomes fashionable gossip—and every time the story is repeated, the reach of the pact expands.
By attempting to destroy the bargain through force, Beatrice inadvertently cracks the forty-two-year cycle wide open.
What to Expect in The Ashes of Blackthorne Abbey
- A Clash of Eras: The refined elegance of Georgian Bath set against the lawless smuggling coves and haunted peat bogs of the Somerset coast.
- The Journals of Joana Blackwood: Beatrice’s closest confidante and Witness, whose ink-stained notebooks begin tracking how the pact mutates when stone fails to contain it.
- The Peril of Good Intentions: A poignant, gothic exploration of a woman who tried to do the right thing and paid the ultimate price for underestimating what she inherited.
- The Spreading Contamination: The first terrifying moment in the series where innocent people with no ancestral ties begin to feel the pull of the spirits.
- A Shifting Supernatural Rulebook: The realization that destroying an ancient evil does not kill it—it merely takes away its cage.
The Question Beneath the Cinders
As Joana Blackwood writes in the closing pages of her journal, warning all who come after:“We believed the earth was the only thing that remembered. We believed that stone was a wall. But the fire has given it wings, and it no longer asks whose blood it rides upon.”
When your ancestors leave you a curse, you may dream of burning it to ash.
But what will you do when the ash begins to speak?
The Ashes of Blackthorne Abbey is currently in progress. Stay tuned for further excerpts, character reveals, and glimpses into the secret history of Somerset.
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