49 pgs.
When behavioral scientist Dr. Sarah Kim arrives in Millbrook Hollow, a fog-bound Appalachian town recovering from a catastrophic mine collapse, she expects to find a traumatized community. Instead, she discovers something impossible: the townspeople are thriving. They display no signs of grief or PTSD – only a serene unity that borders on the unnatural.
Through interviews with Dr. Rachel Kovac, local residents, and a frightened teenager named Jake Morrison, Sarah learns that the town’s transformation stems from the nearby Grief Fen, a sentient wetland once revered by the Seneca as a place “where sorrows go to sleep.” The fen appears to absorb emotional pain through spores that link human minds into a collective consciousness-an ancient symbiosis reawakened by tragedy.
As Sarah studies the phenomenon, she becomes torn between her scientific duty and a growing personal connection to the community’s peace. Her reports to the CDC trigger a full federal containment operation led by Dr. Robert Hayes, who interprets the phenomenon as a biological weapon. Military teams move in to sterilize the valley, using antifungal agents that begin to kill both the mycelial network and the people bonded to it.
In a desperate act of defiance, Sarah allies with Jake to preserve what remains of the symbiosis. Their collaboration – combining modern science with Seneca wisdom-awakens the fen’s ability to balance individuality and collectivity. But the government’s assault sparks a “Dreaming War,” where soldiers, townspeople, and the ecosystem itself merge and fracture in waves of shared grief, empathy, and transcendence.
Years later, Millbrook Hollow endures as a strange, divided landscape: some residents remain fully human, others part of the living network, and many suspended between. Sarah documents this new frontier of consciousness alongside Jake, now a lonely intermediary between individuality and unity. Children born afterward-like Luna, a girl who can commune with the fen directly – embody an uncertain evolutionary future.
A Symbiosis of Sorrows is a haunting exploration of collective trauma, biological consciousness, and the limits of human individuality. It asks whether true healing lies in shared empathy or whether dissolving the self is the ultimate form of surrender.
FIRST PAGE EXCERPT
“Dr. Sarah Kim arrived in Millbrook Hollow on a morning when
the fog refused to lift. It clung to the valley like a living thing,
thick and green-tinged, carrying the scent of ancient decay
and something else – something that made her sinuses burn
and her thoughts feel strangely permeable. The GPS had died
twenty miles back, leaving her to navigate by instinct through
roads that seemed to shift when she wasn’t looking directly at
them.
The rental car’s engine coughed as she descended into the
valley, as if the machine itself was reluctant to enter this place.
Through the windshield, she could see Millbrook Hollow
emerging from the mist like a town from a fever dream. The
houses were too neat, the streets too clean, the people
moving through their morning routines with a synchronicity that
made her skin crawl.
Six months after the mine collapse, the town should have been
a textbook case of collective trauma. Sarah had built her
career at the CDC’s Behavioral Health Emergency Response
Team on the predictable patterns of disaster psychology – the
way grief metastasized through communities like a slow
cancer, leaving behind broken families, substance abuse, and
the hollow-eyed stare of the permanently damaged. She had
seen it in coal mining towns across Appalachia, in factory
communities along the Rust Belt, in agricultural regions
devastated by environmental disasters.
Her expertise in crisis intervention had made her the CDC’s
go-to specialist for rapid containment of psychological
contagions. She had developed protocols for identifying and
isolating communities at risk of collective breakdown, methods
for preventing the spread of trauma-induced social collapse…”