The Breath of Decay

On the Orkney coast, the old stories were never dead enough to trust.

When Alastair walks into the fog beyond Skelwick to bargain with a curse and never returns, his sister Eilidh is left with only his knife, a village full of half-truths, and the first signs that something ancient has begun breathing again. Sheep are found ripped open in the fields. Barley blackens overnight. A rune-stone sweats blood. And when the fog parts on the moor, the thing standing inside it is worse than any softened fireside tale.

The Nuckelavee has awakened.

But the beast is only the first horror.

As Eilidh joins Hamish, Morag, Fergus, and others in a desperate fight to survive, they uncover a deeper history beneath Skelwick’s fields and standing stones: a laird’s old crime, a witch’s binding, a murdered child erased into silence, and a broken pact between land and people that has begun to call its debts due. To stop the rot spreading through the village, they must descend into old hollows, recover forbidden tools, restore water to violated ground, and name what powerful men buried under weather, fear, and inheritance.

The Breath of Decay is dark folk horror about the Orkney moors, the return of the Nuckelavee, ancestral guilt, broken oaths, and the terrible cost of forcing a haunted land to remember the truth.