The Black Monastery

Passau is dying.

As plague consumes the city and bodies fill the streets, Sir Matthias von Falken—an already disgraced knight with a terrible secret of his own—is given one last assignment: travel into the mountains and discover what happened to the monks of St. Ivor.

The monastery has been silent for eleven weeks.

Its final message was brief:

“Do not come. We have begun speaking with the dead.”

Matthias is sent with a small company: hardened mercenaries, a disgraced priest, and a healer who has already lost nearly everything to the plague. None of them know what awaits them beyond the monastery gates.

They find no massacre.

No army.

No obvious explanation.

Instead, they find a house that seems to remember its dead.

A bell that rings when no hand pulls it.

Footprints that end where no person could have vanished.

Monks who disappeared without leaving their beds.

And beneath centuries of prayer and silence, evidence of a secret the Church has guarded for generations—a secret involving confession, guilt, and something that has been listening from beneath the mountain.

Then the voices begin.

They sound like the people the travelers have lost.

They know their names.

They know their sins.

And they offer something no priest, soldier, or healer can give them:

relief.

But there is a price for laying down the burdens of the past.

And the thing beneath St. Ivor does not lie about what it will take.

As Matthias and his companions descend deeper into the monastery's forgotten history, they must confront a terrifying question:

What if the thing haunting the dead doesn't want to kill you?

What if it only wants you to tell the truth?

The Black Monastery is a historical horror thriller of plague, forbidden faith, ancient evil, and unbearable secrets—where the most dangerous thing in the darkness may not be what is waiting for you, but what you are willing to surrender to escape yourself.