Fascinating Short Stories of Ayden DeLorge

By Mrs Amy Wertz

Ayden DeLorge is no hero-he is a haunted man of circuits and code, a burned-out computer engineer whose brilliance makes him both visionary and cursed. Drawn again and again into contracts, projects, and obsessions that blend the ancient with the digital, Ayden finds himself the unwilling scribe of horrors that refuse to stay buried. Each story in this collection chronicles a different descent, where myth bleeds into machine and technology becomes the vessel for monstrosity.

The Scribe's Curse
A simple digitization project awakens the Aqrabuamelu, a scorpion-man of Mesopotamian legend. Branded its unwilling scribe, Ayden discovers that the ancient glyphs he transcribes spread like a viral plague across modern networks, turning the city into a living epic of ruin.
Marcus
Ayden's closest friend harbors a monstrous secret: Marcus Thales is the last heir of the Minotaur's bloodline. As Marcus fights to contain his transformations within the ordered labyrinth of code, Ayden must choose between friendship and survival-knowing that even the digital world may not be enough to hold the beast.
Seraphina
When a facial recognition algorithm produces the impossible face of a crimson-eyed woman, Ayden inadvertently resurrects Seraphina, a Pontianak spirit of Southeast Asian folklore. No deletion can erase her-every replication only strengthens her. Soon, she is everywhere: on screens, in reflections, in the very infrastructure of the modern city.
Elara
Grief drives Ayden to engineer The Lazarus Algorithm, resurrecting his dead lover from her digital remains. But Elara returns as both memory and monster, dragging corpses back into a semblance of life while blaming him for her torment. In trying to escape loss, Ayden dooms himself to the same fate.
The Eye of the Deep
Ayden's sonar drones capture proof of the Loch Ness Monster-proof that becomes a curse. The monster's gaze, encoded in pixelated runes, spreads across the internet, compelling viewers to surrender themselves to the water. Ayden believes he can destroy the curse by destroying the data, but the abyss gazes back-and leaves him forever transformed.

Together, these tales form a modern Gothic cycle, where the haunted castle is replaced by the server farm, the priest by the programmer, and the monster by an algorithm wearing ancient skin. Through Ayden DeLorge, we trace the fragile boundary between the digital and the mythic, and the price of trying to command forces older and darker than technology can contain.

Each story stands on its own, yet woven together they create a portrait of obsession, grief, and the inexorable pull of the uncanny-where every keystroke is a prayer, and every screen is a window into something that should have stayed buried.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FP99P3B7
• ISBN13: 9798262861781
• Release Date: August 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 812 Pages
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"