The House of Midnight

Silas Vane arrives at Dracadia University to catalog shipwreck artifacts, but he is hunting something personal: the Black Journal left by his great-grandfather, once a patient in the asylum that became the university. Afflicted by the first tremors of Voneric's Disease and cursed with synesthesia that turns sound, scent, and stone into a private map, Silas believes Dracadia may hold a cure. Instead, its Weeping Wing offers him a truth written in black ichor and salt.

Behind the Gothic prestige of the cliffside school, Dr. Helena Thorne and the Seven Rook Society are reviving the Lithification Project, an experiment born in 1753 that uses Casteyon, Noctisoma larvae, and human bodies to create living fossils. The statues in the halls are not memorials. They are witnesses, victims, and warnings.

As Silas follows erased names through quarantine ledgers, shipwreck crates, and sea caves, he is drawn deeper into a conspiracy that wants his failing body and singular senses for its final ritual: the Obsidian Vow. Only Cassian Crowne, a hard-edged diver with secrets of his own, understands what the university is pulling from the Atlantic depths and what it will cost to stop it.

To survive Dracadia, Silas must decide whether to flee the disease consuming him or become the one person capable of breaking the stone's silence. But some houses do not release their captives. Some choose them.

The House of Midnight is a gothic horror dark academia novel of forbidden science, body horror, cursed archives, coastal dread, and a haunted bond forged in the cold spaces between flesh and stone.