The Fate Intercessor
Calvin Mercer is an ordinary man living an exhausting life in Buffalo, New York, working double shifts to pay for his wife Nora’s chronic illness. He has no grand ambitions, only one wish: to return home to the woman he loves.
Then, on a snowy night, Cal dies.
Instead of finding peace, he awakens in the Hollow, a living darkness that offers him a second chance. To earn his return, he must enter the bodies of people standing at the breaking point of their destinies and resolve their unfinished business. Each completed mission rewards him with fragments of life, bringing him closer to the world he left behind.
But every choice comes with a cost.
Some hosts deserve forgiveness, while others have committed terrible wrongs. The cruel path sometimes promises greater rewards, while the right choice demands painful sacrifices. As Cal moves from one life to another, he inherits their memories and experiences, slowly losing pieces of his own identity.
His only guide is the Intercessor, a mysterious figure with a shifting face and a voice that sometimes sounds strangely familiar. The figure explains the rules but hides the truth behind Cal’s death and the system governing his missions. One detail unsettles the Intercessor more than anything else: a streetlight going dark before a fatal accident.
As Cal gathers fragments and uncovers connections between his hosts, he begins to suspect that his second chance is not what it seems. His memories of Nora are fading, and the face he desperately wants to remember is becoming a stranger.
With every mission, Cal moves closer to his promised reward—and toward a final truth that could change everything.
If returning home means losing the memories that made home worth returning to, how much of himself can Cal afford to sacrifice?
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Chapter: Chapter 10: Paid in FullRian came up through me the way a swimmer comes up from deep water: slowly at first, then all at once.I was sitting on the Hales’ couch in a living room that smelled like lemon cleaner and old coffee, with Mrs. Hale across from me and Marcus’s father standing at the window with his arms folded. A cup of tea cooled in my hands. I’d been talking for maybe two minutes, telling it clean and in order the way I’d practiced on the walk over. Then my throat locked up, and it wasn’t the old lock. It was softer than that. It felt like a hand on my shoulder.I’ve got it, somebody said, very small and very far off.I knew the voice. I’d been wearing it for three days.You sure?No, Rian said. But it should be me.I let go. It was the strangest thing I did in that whole job, harder in a way than holding Hale over the edge: I stopped steering. My hands stayed where they were, but they were his again. His breath filled his chest. His voice came out of his mouth, a little cracked, a little too fast,
Last Updated: 2026-10-29
Chapter: Chapter 9: What Hale Did With ItHale didn’t forgive me. I want that on the record, because I’d half expected him to.He sat there with the watch shut in his fist and his knees pulled up, and the longer he sat, the less like a bully he looked. Without the jacket squared on his shoulders he was just a tall, worn-out kid with a split knuckle and mud on his jeans.“I don’t forgive you,” he said finally.“Okay.”“I’m not saying it to be a jerk. I just don’t. I don’t think I can.” He turned the watch over. “I keep waiting to feel better, and I don’t. I feel the same. It’s just that now it’s true instead of something I made up.”“That’s fair.”“Don’t say that’s fair.” His mouth twisted. “Everybody says stuff like that.”I shut up. We watched the creek.After a while he said, without looking at me, “I came out here to jump.”The words just sat there. I’d seen it, in a way. I’d seen him standing on that tie with his shoes on the edge. But there’s a difference between suspecting a thing and having it said in a quiet voice by
Last Updated: 2026-10-28
Chapter: Chapter 8: Say It Out LoudWe didn’t move for a long time.The orange went out of the sky by degrees, and the light under the trestle turned the color of old pennies. My shoulder had gone from a scream to a low, steady throb, and every breath pulled at something under my ribs. Hale lay a foot away with his arm over his eyes. Neither of us said anything. Down below, the creek went on being the creek.I had it all. Every piece of it was lined up and ready, and I could feel it sitting behind Rian’s teeth like a swallowed stone.And it wouldn’t come.That was the part I hadn’t planned for. I’d thought, somehow, that once I’d decided, the body would just do it. But the second I opened my mouth, Rian’s whole throat clamped shut, like a hand closing around a pipe. My tongue went dead. My face got hot. And underneath it all, in a voice I now recognized as clearly as my own, came the old, practiced line: You didn’t push him. You didn’t do anything. It wasn’t your fault.Two years of that. It had worn a groove so deep th
Last Updated: 2026-10-27
Chapter: Chapter 7: The Edge of the Tie“He’d have been thirteen in March,” Hale said.He still hadn’t turned around. His voice carried back to me across the trestle, flat and quiet, the voice of a kid reading something off a card.“He wanted a drum set. My dad said no because of the neighbors. I told him I’d help him get one anyway.” The wind pushed at his jacket. “I used to think about that a lot. Stupid, right? That’s what I thought about. A drum set.”I stepped onto the first tie. The wood gave a little under me.“Marcus.”“Don’t.” He turned then. His face was wet and blotchy, and the red rims around his eyes had gotten worse, like something had been rubbed raw. “Don’t say my name like we know each other.”“Okay.”“You were there.”I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. The words were sitting right behind Rian’s teeth, and every other muscle in this body was clamped down on them.“Kyle told me.” Hale laughed, short and ugly. “Not on purpose. He was wasted at a party in April, and he said something about Rian Delgado looking at hi
Last Updated: 2026-10-27
Chapter: Chapter 6: What Rian KnewHale never showed up behind the field house.I waited twenty minutes on a patch of dead grass, with the wind coming off the lot and the practice squad shouting somewhere out of sight. Nobody came. Finally Owen Pruitt wandered around the corner with his hands in his pockets and said Marcus had walked straight out the front gate during the assembly and hadn’t come back. Dre had called him twice. Nothing.“He’s done this before,” Owen said. “Every year, around now. He just goes.”“Go where?”Owen shrugged, but his eyes slid east, toward the park, and that was all the answer I needed.Ridgeway Park was half a mile from the school, and the bus didn’t go there. I walked. The sun had started to slide behind the apartment blocks by the time I reached the gravel lot at the edge of the trees, and the air had that metal taste it gets in October, right before the cold really settles in.There was a trail past the baseball diamond. I didn’t need to look for it. My feet knew it. That scared me more
Last Updated: 2026-10-27
Chapter: Chapter 5: The Boy on the FlyerOwen Pruitt found me at lunch, which I hadn’t expected.I was in the stairwell again, working through a carton of milk and a bag of pretzels from the vending machine, when he came down the steps two at a time and stopped three feet short of me, like I was something that might go off.“He says okay,” Owen said.“Who does?”“Marcus. After the assembly. Behind the field house.” He kept his eyes on the wall behind my head. “He said you could talk, and that’s all. You said nobody gets hurt.”“I did.”“So that’s what I’m telling you.” He swallowed. “Don’t say anything about the pharmacy. I’m not doing it again. I just needed something for my little sister, and the guy at the counter wouldn’t...” He stopped himself, shook his head, and left.I sat there with a pretzel halfway to my mouth. Whatever he’d taken, it hadn’t been for himself.I added that to the pile of things I wasn’t proud of.The school library was a long room with bad carpet and six computers that took a full minute to wake up
Last Updated: 2026-10-27
