Hell's Postulate

by Lia Declan

Winter seals the parish of Wyrmdun when Sister Elswyth arrives with a brass seal and orders to judge a rumored miracle-worker. Ailith’s craft is herb and hand, not spell nor charm—yet breath steadies, fevers break, and the village leans toward her as if toward fire in snow. Watching becomes witness; witness becomes allegiance. When a life hangs by a breath, Elswyth consents to a deed no canon can bless, and love becomes their quiet heresy.

Spring answers with revelation. Elswyth bears the blood of the Nephilim; Ailith is granddaughter to the First Mother. Their union wakes an ancient signal. At Advent, a smiling bard delivers an return by solstice or Wyrmdun will be unmade. Between Church and abyss, the women choose a third road—one carved by conscience, ritual, and the fierce, sovereign freedom of those who refuse every script written for them.

Mythic and intimate, Hell’s Postulate is a winter-bright tale of forbidden love, peril, and chosen kinship—where history’s grain meets living myth, and where two women learn that mercy can be a weapon and tenderness, a vow.

230 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 26, 2025

About the author

Lia Declan is a transgender mythic fiction writer, queer romanticist, and ritual designer whose work initiates readers into sovereign longing, emotional labor, and the reversal of canonical myths. As co-owner of Stargazer’s Book Nook, Lia curates literary thresholds that honor erased truths and celebrate queer imagination.
Her stories—rooted in LGBTQ+ experience, fantasy, and poetic structure—reclaim mythic archetypes through emotionally authentic, often romantic, reversals. Her debut novel, Chosen By Winter, explores misrecognition and ritual love through epic cadence and sovereign myth. She is currently developing a lesbian romance set in 1797 Belfast, where longing, power, and ritual initiation unfold between Brid and Aisling.
Lia holds a doctorate in theology and postgraduate degrees in grammar and classical literature. Her scholarship informs her mythic grammar, poetic cadence, and ritual pedagogy, allowing her to teach mythic narrative to students age 16+ with exacting care and emotional depth. Every flyer, author page, and public invocation she creates is a sacred act—ritualized, refined, and uncompromising in its mythic and queer intent.
As a transgender woman, Lia’s work embodies the transformative power of recognition, reversal, and reclamation—inviting readers into stories where truth is sovereign, love is ritual, and identity is mythic.