[h3]introduction.[/h3]
[i]The Care and Keeping of the Returning Dead[/i] is a Southern Gothic horror rom-com: dread and decay, dark humour, a slow-burn between two people who'd both rather not, and a magical mystery buried under all of it. A witch inherits her grandmother's funeral home in a small Appalachian town. She expected a house, a business, and a mess. She did not expect the caretaker.

I'm Antlers. 34, she/her, Canadian (MST). I write horror with a sense of humour and romance for grown-ups. Here are my Terms of Service:

[Indent]▸ 25+ partners only. This is for my comfort and is non-negotiable.
▸ While this was originally written as FxM, I'm also 100% okay with it being MxM or FxF. 
▸ Open to writing either role (witch or revenant caretaker). We share the NPCs! 
▸ Quality over quantity. Third person, past tense. Characters who feel like real, complicated [i]adults[/i]. Scenes with forward momentum. The good shit. (Writing samples available!)
▸ I'm usually available to post once a day to every other day. Real life takes precedence. I will never pressure you for a post! 
▸ Expect violence, death, the undead, strong language, and dark subject matter in general. Smut optional; I'm just as happy with fade-to-black.
▸ I like using actor face claims if we use them. Descriptions alone also suffice.
▸ OOC via PM or Discord. IC via PM, threads, Google Docs, or Ellipsus. [/Indent]

Premise below. Don't be shy. Shoot me a message! ✨
[h3]the premise.[/h3]
Black Creek sits in the Appalachian foothills, on the line where North Carolina gives way to Tennessee. The mountains here are so old they've worn down to hills, and the fog fills the hollers like water in a bowl. One main street. A diner, a post office, a pharmacy that hasn't changed its sign since the '40s. Churches outnumber gas stations three to one. Everybody's grandmother is somebody else's cousin. The porch ceilings are all painted the same shade of blue, and nobody will tell you why.

At the edge of town, where the road thins and the trees crowd in, there's a funeral home on a hill. Behind it, a cemetery that runs further back into the treeline than anyone living has walked. There's a creek. It floods in spring. Things wash up. The soil here won't let the dead break down. It holds them whole and patient, long past when they ought to be gone.

The old women uphold the traditions: salt across the thresholds, brooms on the porch, laundry in before dark. They do it because that's how they were raised, and you do [i]not[/i] argue with your grandmother. Outsiders call it folksy mountain superstition.

It is not.

In Black Creek, the dead sometimes come back. The ones with unfinished business are [b]walkbacks[/b]: confused, decaying, more or less themselves. You can talk to a walkback. Reason with it. The old-timers say it the way you'd mention a squirrel in the attic. [i]Oh, the Hendersons had a walkback Tuesday. It was Roy. He wanted his watch.[/i]

The ones that come back [i]wrong[/i] are [b]haints[/b]: empty, nothing of the person left, just something else wearing the body. A haint doesn't want its watch. A haint wants to do harm for as long as the body lasts. The porch paint isn't decorative. The salt isn't for luck.

Somebody has been keeping all of this in check for two hundred years.

He lives on the property. Doesn't sleep. Doesn't eat. Doesn't age. He is not a ghost and he is not a zombie and he is most certainly [I]not[/I] interested in explaining the difference. He's a warlock who did the one thing magical law forbids outright to bring back someone he could not stand to lose. What returned was the first haint Black Creek ever knew. His punishment was to put the abomination he'd created down himself, and then be bound. To the land. The bloodline. Every witch in the family, born and buried. He has outlasted all of them and holds an opinion on each, none of them generous.

The witch who just inherited the funeral home inherited him too.

She got the house. The business. A family library organized by a system that makes sense to no one alive. A magical supply stock running dangerously low. A community that shows up at all hours needing help she doesn't yet know how to give. An extremely old, one-eyed cat who was not consulted and is withholding judgment. And a caretaker who can't die, can't leave, can't touch the magic he still knows by heart — and who, if he could kill her and end two centuries of servitude, absolutely would.

He had a plan for the new witch. Manipulate her, find the loophole, get free. Simple. What he did *not* account for is that she's the first person in two hundred years who looks at him and sees neither a cautionary tale nor a convenient supernatural appliance. She finds him [I]interesting[/I].

This is, by his account, an unacceptable development.

Meanwhile, the haints are getting worse. More frequent. Less predictable. A spectacularly decayed ancestor keeps walking back from the grave to finish business everyone assumed she'd already finished a dozen times over. And an auditor from the regional magical authority has just shown up to scrutinize the grandmother's estate — and they are not leaving until every familiar, covenant, and unlicensed magical service is accounted for. No matter how long that takes or how many people it inconveniences.