Nocticadia

by Keri Lake · 2023

When her mother dies from a baffling illness, a determined young scholar vows to find a cure and escape the cursed town that abandoned her. Four years later, she receives a coveted invitation to Dracadia University, a centuries‑old institution perched on a windswept island off Maine—an island whispered to be built from the bones of exiled mental patients and haunted by their restless spirits. There she meets Devryck Bramwell, the charismatic yet feared “Doctor Death,” a brilliant pathologist who runs the midnight lab and exudes a dark, magnetic authority. Drawn together by a shared hunger for redemption, their relationship spirals into a toxic, forbidden romance that threatens to expose the university’s most depraved secret. As the dead teach the living, the pair must confront the island’s buried sins before the past—alive in ghostly whispers and skeletal sands—consumes them both.