The Sanguine Passages is an illustrated dark fantasy about Wesley Grove, a young half-elf trying to navigate an Earth altered by the presence of Fae magic, and the people around him ensnared by consequences of its misuse.
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When the Fair Folk came five hundred years ago, they brought Diapheros with them; they called it a gift. Its sweet shimmer blinded the humans who stared a moment too long, but opened the eyes of those who couldn’t see. In trace amounts, it healed dire wounds. Only a hair too much warped and twisted flesh. It opened a Passage to the place the Fae came from, and they poured out to live among us.
There’s a way to corrupt any gift.
In 1915, Diapheros was used to level cities; to rain fire. To animate dead men, and disfigure enemy soldiers. It got in the water. Great hidden beasts went belly up.
Now the spilled blood of Men and Fae tears open another kind of Passage.
It waxes and wanes with the moon, releasing slavering beasts who crawl out to feed their insatiable thirst. It tempts like a bottomless wishing well, and begs lost souls to plunge in. It swallows whole the traitor and the betrayed. The precious few who escape its maw are changed.
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In 1947, on the edge of a little coal town somewhere in the mountains of Appalachia, ten year old Wesley Grove finds a beast chained in the backyard shed. The night that his half-elfin blood produces a shocking effect on the creature, the adults in his life see a chance to understand the horrors they’ve lived through.
The man raising him, Salem Whittaker, searches for answers about the hell he endured in the first World War. Sal’s closest friend, Philip Hess, wrestles with an all-encompassing grief, grasping for a way to bring back what he’s lost. An older boy, Bernard Rowe, resents the power Wes’s blood has robbed him of.
Wes adapts to and grows up in the liminal space between normalcy and nightmare, mischief and horror. But as time goes on, the people around him aging, the beasts he encounters growing stranger, he finds himself on the precipice of complete consumption. When a wayward young stranger with a horrific secret stumbles into their nowhere town, the situation escalates to a point that once seemed impossible, and there may be no way to turn back.