Dark Fade
She made a living preserving what fades.
Then she began to fade.
Iria Vale is a restoration artist-trained to recover damaged photographs, to coax lost images back into clarity, to rescue beauty from time's mouth. When she's commissioned to restore a set of antique plates and a silent film reel from the abandoned Marrow Theatre on the coast, she expects dust, mildew, and the ordinary grief of decay.
Instead, the work watches her.
In the flicker of restored frames, Iria finds a woman whose face is almost hers-close enough to feel like theft. Soon after, people hesitate over Iria's name. Memories misfile themselves. Mirrors lag, as if her reflection must be persuaded to stay.
An archivist with impossible recall offers warnings he doesn't fully understand. A velvet-voiced patron offers something worse: control. And the theatre-sealed for decades-begins to feel less like a building than a ritual waiting to be completed.
As fog tightens around the coastline and the projector's beam becomes a kind of altar, Iria must decide what it means to remain intact.
Because disappearance is not always an ending.
Sometimes it is a metamorphosis.
DARK FADE is an atmospheric, existential gothic novel of identity dissolution, forbidden beauty, and the seductive terror of being seen-then slowly, exquisitely, no longer.
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