BAELOR
The Cornelius Duet: Part One
Father Roman-Cornelius Baelor is a chain-smoking, black magic-wielding priest who has spent years exorcising demons from the innocent—at the cost of their lives. Now he is back in Sweetness after the priest who replaced him is accused of murdering his wife and found hanging in his prison cell with the word, Lilitu, scratched into the wall behind him. Did the priest summon one of the Inferno's most powerful demons before his death? As Father Baelor unravels the mystery, he’s pulled into a web of diabolic forces, each thread tightening as a tragedy slowly unfolds, where the line between familial devotion and indulgent obsession blurs. What begins as a hunt for the truth quickly becomes something else entirely—because once you let the devil in, he locks the door behind him.
"At its core, Baelor is a story about addiction, addiction to faith, to power, to substances, and to people. Roman-Cornelius Baelor isn't just an addict in the traditional sense; his dependency on black magic, his unravelling faith, and his self-destruction through vice all paint a picture of a man who is both a victim and a perpetrator of his own downfall. The story explores how addiction warps identity, how it intertwines with trauma and how it drives people to cling to corruption when salvation seems out of reach."
J.K Albers
Meet Roman-Cornelius Baelor
"Will guilt ever release its grip on me? Unlikely. God’s sense of humour, it seems, leans toward the ironic. It’s as if—honestly, I mean it—He derives some kind of celestial amusement from my suffering! It’s ridiculous. It is."
The poet choking on his tongue. The story belongs to him, but no ballad will ever sing his name.
Meet Vincenzo Sinclair
"Under his persistent gaze, I can only question why everyone behaves as if there are standards to be met. And sweet simpleton Vince is a king who’s hard to please, but they don’t know the same Vince I do. They don’t know how he craves the touch of his mother or misses the man who tries his hardest to hold onto the past even though it’s already slipped through his fingers."
The hangman tying his own noose. Chance despises him, and Chaos desires him.
Meet Alice Rhodes
"Alice resides in my chest, among the tubes and canals that have learned to make room for friends, family and passion, but she isn’t a friend and she isn’t family, not really, not anymore, and she most certainly is not a passion. … She’s something else, that’s for sure. An enigma, really. She reminds me of that feeling—I can’t put a name to it, but can only refer to it as a specific type of temptation, such as when someone tells you not to do something you weren’t going to do in the first place and now you want to do it.
Whatever that feeling is, it’s how I feel when I think of Alice."
The angel half-erased in the telling. Flawless on the surface, but her edges are smudged by another’s hand.
Meet Cooper Rhodes
"Cooper Rhodes, you see, can be intense. Overly serious and intimidating to everyone. There’s that semi-frown, a set line of lips shrouded under his Stetson that hardly ever breaks into a smile, a narrow, scrutinizing gaze set across rich, expressive eyes. His expression is always permanently serious. Grumpy and surly even, but for all his brusque mannerisms and frosty behaviour, Cooper can be surprisingly indulgent."
The puppeteer burdened by too many strings. A good man falters, but a good father endures.
Meet Atticus Rhodes
"I have to believe history’s wrong, that cycles can be broken, or else this ends with Atticus, too—a fool, confused and besieged—chasing a life that’s gone."
The fool with a lack of sense. Effort isn't his flaw, obedience is. He should have listened to his father.