Physics, myth, and the long memory of consciousness.

TIDES

Adult fantasy with romantic elements · 90,000 words · Standalone with series potential

Heidi Delacroix-McCormick puts on her dead mother's armband, and the ocean answers. The band won't come off, her eyes change color, and she becomes the newest host of a 12,000-year-old consciousness — the Lady of Waters.

A quantum physicist and startup founder, Heidi has spent her life trusting that the universe keeps its promises — that everything, in the end, obeys a law. The Lady breaks them all. As powers rise in her that no equation will hold, she does the only thing she knows how: she turns the scientific method on the impossible, and her startup team treats her unraveling as the most important experiment of their lives, certain there is no magic — only physics no one has discovered yet. But the deeper she reaches into what she is becoming, the closer she comes to dissolving into it: forgetting the shore, forgetting her own name, forgetting she was ever human.

Two men hold her intact — safe, and human. Philippe, an art historian, and his half-brother Bastian, a venture capitalist, belong to the Keepers — the society that has guarded the Lady across centuries — and they are the only ones who can pull her back each time she goes under. What grows among the three of them is not indulgence; it is the price of going under and coming back — a bond sealed in mind, body, and spirit, chosen as much as it is needed. To stay herself, Heidi has to let herself be loved, and let herself need.

Then a rival faction tears a hole in reality and steals the four artifacts that would complete her awakening. With her triad, she races from Southern California to the Alps to the fortress of Alamut to take them back. And when she casts her consciousness through the rift, she finds something waiting in the dark between worlds — and makes it a promise that may define everything that comes after.