Chapter 1
Moon Over Marisol - Book 1: The Ghost Town Forest
Alright, here we go.
This is where it all starts—Marisol, the full moon, and a one-way ticket to a time period she didn’t ask for. She’s a 900-year-old witch, yes, but still super young in witch years, and like most of us she’s in tremendous debt—except hers is truly cosmic. And then there’s Tibby, her cat, who has opinions but only shares them when it’s maximally inconvenient.
Welcome to Book 1, Chapter 1. Let’s dive in.
CHAPTER 1
Moon Over Marisol - Book 1: The Ghost Town Forest
I saw the full moon through my kitchen window and stopped mid-pour. The coffee streamed onto the counter in a dark puddle that I didn’t bother to catch. There was no point. In about thirty seconds, none of this would matter.
“Ugghh.”
It wasn’t my favorite mantra, but it was certainly mine and certainly appropriate. I said it again, with feeling: “Ugghh.”
Behind me, sprawled across the kitchen table like he owned every square inch of it, Tibby lifted his head. Twenty pounds of orange and gray tabby cat, ears swiveling forward, green eyes already locked on the window, on the moon, on what was coming. He knew, of course he knew. My baby, my infinite-life cat, always knew before I did.
“Maybe it won’t,” I said, even though we both knew I was lying.
Tibby’s tail flicked once in sharp dismissal.
I set the coffee pot down with more force than necessary. No point finishing the cup now. I wouldn’t be here to drink it. The coffee would sit there getting cold while I was god-knows-where, doing god-knows-what, for the next thirty days straight.
The moon cleared the roofline across the street, round and fat and completely indifferent to my evening plans. I’d been hoping for a few more days of peace, maybe even a week. Time enough to finish the book I’d been reading, to sleep past seven a.m., to exist in my own century without cosmic interference. But the moon didn’t care about my schedule. It never had.
The pull started then, right on cue.
It wasn’t sudden. It never was. It built slowly, like pressure gathering behind my sternum, a gentle tug that I knew from experience would become an insistent drag, and then an unstoppable force that would rip me backward through space and time whether I was ready or not.
Spoiler: I was never ready.
“Typical,” I muttered, watching the edges of my kitchen start to blur.
Tibby hopped off the table with a solid thump that rattled the salt shaker and made the coffee pot wobble. He padded over to me, winding his heavy body between my legs, fur warm against my pants. He was solid and real and here, at least for the moment.
“You don’t have to come,” I said, looking down at him.
He didn’t dignify that with a response. We both knew he’d follow me. He always did. He’d been following me for longer than I cared to think about.
The pull intensified, and my ribs ached with it. The edges of the kitchen blurred more dramatically now, like someone had taken their thumb and smudged the air itself, making the walls soft and the counters uncertain. I could feel the moon now, not just see it through the window, but feel it like a bright, relentless hook buried somewhere behind my heart, pulling me backward through time and space and every inconvenient dimension in between.
I grabbed Tibby and he went limp in my arms, completely relaxed, like this was just another Tuesday evening and not the start of thirty days of cosmic nonsense. For him, maybe it was just Tuesday. He’d been through this enough times to stop caring about the details.
“Here we go,” I said to no one in particular.
Then the kitchen disappeared.
The transport felt like being yanked through a tunnel made of static and bad decisions. Colors bled into each other, red into purple into something that wasn’t quite blue and wasn’t quite black. Sounds stretched like taffy, pulling thin and strange until they didn’t sound like anything recognizable anymore. Gravity became a suggestion rather than a rule, and up and down stopped meaning much of anything at all.
I held Tibby tighter. He was the only solid thing in all the chaos, warm and purring and utterly unbothered by the fact that we were currently being dragged through the fabric of reality itself.
The transport lasted five seconds and five years simultaneously. Time was meaningless in the space between worlds, and my brain never knew quite how to process it. Was I moving or standing still? Was I breathing or had I forgotten how? The colors bled together until they stopped being colors at all, just sensation—pressure and cold and something that tasted like copper and felt like falling, even though there was no up or down to fall toward.
I’d been doing this for nine hundred years. It never got easier.
Then, with no warning at all—
Thump.
I landed.
Dust puffed up around my boots, and I could taste it immediately. Grit and ancient earth and something that had baked under this sun for longer than most civilizations lasted. Dry air hit my lungs, hot and clean and nothing like the cool spring evening I’d just left behind. It stripped the moisture from my mouth before I’d even taken a second breath. The smell was different too: sun-baked wood and ancient dirt and something older, something patient, something that had been waiting here a very long time.
My knees complained about the landing. They always did. I straightened slowly, brushing dust off my pants and squinting against the sudden brightness.
Tibby hopped down from my arms, shook himself once to remove any trace of indignity, and immediately started sniffing a rock like we’d just arrived at a perfectly normal destination and not been yanked backward through time by cosmic forces beyond our control.
I looked around, taking stock. This was an actual, honest-to-god ghost town.
The main street stretched ahead of me, wide and empty, lined on both sides with buildings that leaned like tired old men who’d been standing too long. There was a saloon with half its sign missing, a general store with a collapsed porch, and something that might have been a church, though it was hard to tell with the way the walls tilted. All of it sun-bleached and silent, baking under a sky so blue it hurt to look at directly. There were no people, no movement, no sound except the wind pushing through the gaps in the wood and the faint creak of a sign swinging on rusty hinges somewhere down the street.
“Of course,” I said to the empty air.
Tibby sneezed, a small, precise sound of disapproval.
I turned in a slow circle, taking in the full scope of where I’d been dumped. The Old West, or at least some fantasy version of it. The kind of place that looked like it had been abandoned mid-sentence, like everyone had just walked away one day and decided never to come back. The buildings were weathered gray-brown, the wood so dry it looked like it might crumble if I touched it. The street was dirt packed hard enough to crack under the relentless sun.
The sun itself hung low on the horizon. Late afternoon, I guessed. The light was golden and slanted, painting long shadows across the empty street and making everything look even more desolate than it probably was in full daylight.
I stood there and waited, because I knew what came next. Any second now, the assignment would show up. It always did, one way or another. Sometimes it was a slip of paper that appeared in my pocket. Sometimes it was a voice in my head that made my teeth ache. The delivery method changed depending on where and when the moon dropped me, but the assignment always came.
Here, in this ghost town under this too-blue sky, it was simpler than usual.
The air in front of me shimmered like heat rising off pavement. Then words appeared, hanging in the dusty light like they’d been written in smoke by a very precise hand:
REPLANT THIS GHOST TOWN TO THE BOUNTIFUL FOREST IT ONCE WAS.
I stared at the words, waiting for them to make more sense. They didn’t.
The letters hung there, solid and clear and completely unhelpful. They didn’t move, didn’t clarify themselves, didn’t offer footnotes or helpful diagrams or literally any context whatsoever that might make this assignment something other than completely impossible. The message was just that one sentence, just those words.
I looked down at Tibby, who was sitting now, tail wrapped neatly around his paws, watching me with that expression cats get when they’re waiting for humans to figure out something obvious.
“Replant,” I said slowly, testing the word out loud like that might help it make sense.
He blinked at me once, slow and deliberate.
“Replant what?” I gestured broadly at the empty street, the cracked and weathered wood, the endless expanse of dry dirt stretching in every direction. “There’s no forest. There’s no trees. There’s nothing here but dust and...”
I stopped mid-sentence and squinted at the horizon, because something had caught my eye. Actually, now that I was really looking instead of just gesturing wildly, I could see something far in the distance, maybe a mile out past the edge of town—a shadow, a line of darker color against the pale dirt and scrub brush. It was hard to tell from this distance, and the heat shimmer didn’t help, but it looked almost like trees. Or just more nothing, more dust and dirt and emptiness pretending to be something else.
The words hung in the air for another long moment, giving me time to memorize them. Then they began to fade, dissolving like smoke in wind, until there was nothing left but clear air and the smell of dust.
I let out a long breath and looked up at the sky. “Who comes up with this stuff?” I asked the universe at large.
And the universe, as usual, didn’t answer. Tibby didn’t either, but that was more typical. He was already walking down the street, tail held high like a flag, like he knew exactly where he was going and I was just supposed to follow along like always.
I watched him for a moment. Orange and gray fur bright against the dusty street, completely unbothered by the heat or the impossible assignment or any of it.
Then I followed, because what else was I going to do? Stand here and argue with the smoke words? Refuse to do the assignment and see what happened? I’d tried that once, years ago. It hadn’t ended well.
Thirty days, I thought as I walked. Thirty days to replant a forest that probably didn’t exist in a ghost town that was definitely dead. Thirty days to figure out what “bountiful forest it once was” even meant.
Tibby’s tail swished ahead of me, leading the way down the empty street. I took a long breath, sighed, and I followed.
Next: Chapter 2 drops sometime next week.
New here? This is Chapter 1 of Book 1. You’re in the right place.
QUICK TOUR OF HOW THIS WORKS
Welcome to the Moon Over Marisol corner of the internet. I’m your host on this journey with a 900-year-old witch and her sarcastic cat.
What you’re getting: Two posts a week. One’s story content—chapters like the one you just read. The other’s me pulling back the curtain on how this whole thing comes together. Writing updates, character insights, scenes that got cut, the craft decisions that keep me up at night. The good stuff.
The plan: We’re going through Book 1 together, chapter by chapter. After that, we’ll dip into the rest of the books, mix in bonus content, and keep the story moving. You get to spend time with Marisol’s adventures twice a week, and I get to share this journey with you.
Want to read ahead? Books 1-6 are available now. You can grab them anytime if waiting a week between chapters isn’t your style. No judgment either way—some people love the weekly rhythm, some people like to read straight through. Both are wonderful.
Print editions? The Kickstarter’s live for limited edition hardcovers, paperbacks, and an ebook collection: [link]. Once the campaign ends, these versions won’t be available anymore.
Got questions? Thoughts? Feelings about Tibby? Hit reply. I read everything and I genuinely love hearing from you.
Thanks for being here. This is going to be fun.
See you soon for the next post.
—Dennis