Rules for Returning: Seven Tales of Loss, Identity, and Rebirth

Across marshes lit by ghostly lanterns, through markets that trade in names and memories, down corridors made of time itself—seven travelers cross the borders between loss and becoming.In these strange, luminous tales, grief wears a mask, mercy keeps its own sharp teeth, and the price of passage is always something tender: a hope, a memory, a dream of being seen. A sister carries her brother’s last light home. A craftsman mends a city’s false faces. A child bargains for belonging at a feast of ghosts. A girl steals back her stolen name and walks into the dark to make the rules her own.Each story in Rules for Returning explores identity, surrender, illusion, and rebirth—the quiet power of what we keep and what we choose to let go. Written in lyrical, folkloric prose and steeped in mythic tenderness, this collection is a map of thresholds and reckonings, where every return leaves the traveler changed.If you could cross the line between who you were and who you might yet become—what would you give to come back whole?