Demithysia

In 1547 the Church sealed it in silver and prayed it would sleep until the end of the world. It would take one grieving mother, almost five centuries later, to want it awake.

Dr. Eleanor Demithysia has never believed in God. She believes in data, in the scalpel, in the cold honesty of physics and against everything biology has ever told her, that her six-year-old daughter does not have to stay dead.

Raised by a woman whose faith was strong enough to let her own son die unmedicated, Eleanor has spent her life at war with the one law she cannot forgive: that everything she loves is made to decay. When the cancer takes Lyra, she does not grieve. She prepares. To return her daughter to a life that can never be taken from her again, she needs a vessel that has already conquered death: behind thirteen silver chains and the name of a Pope, something has waited five hundred years for a hand reckless enough to lift the lid.

The cost will fall on the one person who loves her without condition.

Composed as a Passion in six movements, from Genesis to Ascension, Demithysia circles the question medicine and scripture have always shared and never resolved: if death could be refused, should it be? And whose salvation would the refusal truly serve?

In the tradition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, written with the moral intensity of Dostoevsky.