NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: Sleep Maps and Signal Ghosts — Out Now

 ✨ Five speculative stories. One haunted city. Endless echoes.

Hey readers—

Seraphine Vale here. 

I’ve got a new release coming this summer, and it’s the kind of book that feels like it crawled out of a dream I didn’t mean to remember.

Sleep Maps and Signal Ghosts: A Collection of Speculative Short Stories arrives August 1, 2025. And honestly? I’m still recovering from writing it.

📍Set in the surreal, grief-stitched city of Avalon, these five stories aren’t fast-paced thrillers. They’re slow-burn spells. Quiet horrors. Meditations on identity, memory, technology, and all the versions of ourselves we never got to be.

Here’s what you’ll find inside:

• A woman inherits a closet that unravels other lives she might’ve lived.

• A dream cartographer gets stalked by a hotel made of her regrets.

• A washed-up radio host receives a signal from his own future.

• A sound scavenger finds an audio parasite that feeds on empathy.

• And two strangers—one who tailors grief, the other who broadcasts ghosts—meet in a dream library that refuses to let go.

It’s speculative fiction that leans psychological. Tender. Surreal. Sometimes sad. Always sincere. These stories aren’t about escaping the world—they’re about peeling it back and finding the secret seams.

If you’ve ever felt like grief rewrote you, or like your memories were glitching in the background of your day-to-day life... this book might just haunt you the right way.

Excerpt:

Title 1: She Stitched Herself Twice

The shop sighed in dust and old light.

Arielle moved through the space like a reluctant ghost, her fingers trailing across bolts of silk and brocade like she was afraid they might bite. Shelves lined the walls—pressed with neatly folded fabric, tins of antique buttons, spools of thread wound too tight. Everything smelled of cedar, lavender, and the ache of something once warm.

She had inherited the place six months ago. It had belonged to her grandmother, who believed that clothes held memory the way mirrors held ghosts: passively, persistently, and always at the edge of being forgotten.

The tailor shop sat near the end of Natsume Street, tucked beneath the ivy-choked overhang of the Duskbound Labyrinth. Above it, an empty train station hovered like a secret. Below, a flooded tunnel whispered rumors to itself. Arielle didn’t ask questions about the geography. Avalon bent space like grief bent time.

She took her tea cold. She stitched by hand. She spoke to no one unless she had to.

And she never opened the closet.

It sat in the back of the shop, past the velvet curtain and the mannequin missing an arm. A tall built-in closet framed by curling cherrywood trim, its handle sculpted into the shape of a camellia. The door was always warm to the touch, like something breathing behind it.

She had tried, once. On the first week.

The door wouldn’t budge.

She had tried again the night after the funeral, when the grief had settled in her throat like wet wool.

Still locked.

And then one day, it simply wasn’t.

No creak. No glow. Just open. Just waiting.

Inside hung six garments. All black, save for a single ivory shawl at the end, embroidered in thread so fine it shimmered when she exhaled near it. She did not remember making them.

She stepped back. Then forward.

"What the hell..."

She reached out, touching the shoulder of a long coat she would never have sewn—the buttons shaped like calla lilies, the seams precise to her own curvature, as if the cloth had mapped her body in dreams.

She tried it on.

It fit.

And as the lining touched her skin, she remembered.

Not her own life.

But a life where she had been kissed under falling cherry blossoms by a woman with hair like autumn. A life where she had said yes instead of sorry. Where her hands had held brush and ink, not needle and thread.

The memory left her breathless. Not because it hurt—but because it felt real. Like muscle memory. Like longing retrofitted into flesh.

"Who were you, then?" she whispered.

She stood there for a long time, wrapped in someone she could have been.

When she took the coat off, she was trembling.

The closet door was closed again.

And locked.

The next morning, the coat was gone.

Arielle searched the shop top to bottom, pulling aside bolts of linen, crawling beneath the counter, checking the corners like a woman half-mad. Nothing. No coat. No sign it had ever been there.

"I didn't dream it," she muttered aloud. "I couldn't have."

But the closet was open.

Inside: five garments.

The shawl shimmered more brightly now. The air around the closet pulsed with a scent like violets and old smoke. It felt like standing near a memory about to be confessed.

She chose a dress this time. A long, layered thing of midnight tulle and storm-colored velvet, heavy with unseen history. She held it to her chest and felt her breath catch on a sob she didn’t know she’d been holding.

"If this vanishes too, I swear to god..."

When she put it on, the world changed.

The floor beneath her feet was not cedar anymore but stone, slick with riverwater. A lantern hung in her hand. Music echoed from somewhere above, something stringed and wild.

She turned, and there was a boy with ink on his cheek and stars in his eyes.

They danced. Not like strangers. Like people who had once known the shape of each other’s laughter.

She forgot the cold shop. Forgot the tea she’d left steeping. Forgot the taste of her own name.

She danced until the light faded.

When she opened her eyes, she was alone.

Back in her shop.

In the mirror, the dress remained. But her hair was damp. Her feet bare. Her lips tasted of rain.

The closet was closed again.

And this time, something had been scratched into the wood.

Three more.

The script was hers.

But she hadn’t written it.

The bell above the shop door rang with a tired chime.

Arielle blinked, disoriented. It had been days since someone walked in.

"You’re open, right?" The voice was familiar. Smoky, amused.

Koharu.

She stood in the doorway, still in her courier uniform, helmet under one arm and a baguette tucked under the other like a bouquet. Her eyes flicked to the counter, to Arielle, to the closet door behind the curtain—partially ajar.

"You look like you’ve seen a ghost," she said.

"Maybe I have," Arielle muttered.

Koharu raised an eyebrow. "New commission? You look like you haven’t slept."

Arielle opened her mouth. Closed it. Considered lying.

"There’s a closet. In the back. It... I think it’s doing something to me."

"Oh good," Koharu said, walking straight to the counter. "We’re doing cryptic horror today. You make tea, I listen."

As they sat across from each other, Arielle explained in pieces—the coat, the dress, the impossible memories stitched into the seams. She expected laughter. A joke. A sideways glance.

Instead, Koharu frowned.

"There are closets like that," she said quietly. "My mom used to call them griefkeepers. Places the city forgets, but emotion remembers. Avalon’s full of them."

Arielle stared. "Why didn’t you tell me this before?"

"Because you didn’t need to know."

Koharu stood. Her gaze drifted toward the curtain. Her fingers trembled slightly.

"You’re not going to stop, are you?"

Arielle didn’t answer.

She didn’t need to.

The closet was open again.

The shawl remained. The others had subtly shifted, like actors waiting backstage. A blouse caught her eye this time—sheer sleeves, delicate pearl buttons, embroidered stars curling at the cuffs.

"Third time's the charm," she said to herself, trying to steady her hands.

The blouse felt fragile in her grasp, like a breath stitched into silk. When she pulled it over her head, the world tilted.

She was standing on a balcony in the rain. Neon lights flickered far below, painting her face in red and blue. She held a cigarette she didn’t smoke, wore earrings she didn’t own.

Someone leaned against the railing beside her.

"You never did tell me what you lost."

It was her own voice. Older. Weary. Beautiful in a way that scared her.

She turned—but the other her had vanished.

This life didn’t belong to love. It belonged to loneliness. And the power of surviving it.

She woke up on the tailor floor, curled around herself. The blouse was gone.

But the scent of rain and burnt tobacco lingered.

Koharu returned with ink-stained fingers and a face that said she hadn’t slept either.

"I looked into the closet. After you fell asleep. Just for a second."

Arielle stared. "And?"

"I saw a wedding dress. Hanging by itself. It looked like mine. Except I’ve never owned one."

They sat together in silence, steeping in implication.

"Does it only show us what we miss?" Arielle finally asked.

Koharu tilted her head. "Maybe. Or what we refused to become."

The closet creaked open that night without Arielle touching it.

There were two garments left.

The shawl still shimmered. The next piece: a robe. Deep plum. Gold thread at the sleeves. A weight in the hem that whispered responsibility.

She slipped it on and was standing in a classroom, chalk in her hand. Students murmuring. A girl crying in the back row. Arielle walked to her without hesitation.

She knew this role. Had lived it once, long ago, in an almost-life.

In this echo, she had not run. She had not hidden.

When she returned to herself, she wept. Not for what she saw.

But for the version of her that had known how to stay.

It was raining again—fine, needling rain that sounded like whispering needles against the windowpane. Arielle didn’t bother drying off when she stepped into the shop, droplets clinging to her lashes like tears too proud to fall.

The closet waited.

The next garment was half a jacket. Just one sleeve, finely tailored, silk brocade with a lining the color of bruised lilac. Arielle knew that fabric. It had belonged to her mother. A kimono too beautiful for Arielle to touch as a child, too delicate to survive the city’s damp heart.

She slipped it on anyway.

Half-covered. Half-vulnerable.

The world shifted again—not violently, not like the first time, but like breathing backwards.

She was in a small room, sitting across a lacquered table from a woman whose cheekbones matched her own. Her mother? But younger. Less brittle. Less disappointed.

“You never asked why I gave up the shop,” the woman said, voice low, calm.

Arielle blinked. “I assumed you had no choice.”

“There’s always a choice. I chose to become someone softer. But I had to kill a part of myself to do it. Did you?”

“I don’t know,” Arielle whispered. “I think... I left parts behind.”

The woman leaned forward. “Then sew them back in. Bad seams can be restitched. You’re still yours.”

The room folded. Arielle found herself kneeling before the closet again, the sleeve gone.

But her mother’s scent—plum wine and camphor—lingered.

The garment this time was a scarf.

Simple. Threadbare. Embroidered with cheap silver floss, catching the lamplight like cracked glass. The kind of thing teenage Arielle would’ve worn to look older, cooler, invisible.

When she tied it around her neck, her breath caught like fabric snagging on a nail.

Suddenly, she was back at the train station—fifteen, furious, running away from a future she hadn’t yet refused.

A girl sat beside her. Not Koharu, not anyone Arielle remembered clearly. But she had the voice of a friend Arielle had failed to keep.

“You think running makes you strong,” the girl said, idly drawing shapes in the condensation on the bench rail. “But sometimes staying hurts more. And healing hurts most.”

“I didn’t know how to stay,” Arielle admitted.

“You still don’t. But you’re learning.”

The scarf unraveled like smoke.

When she woke, Arielle’s fingers were cramped from gripping scissors too tightly. The scarf had vanished, but the memory remained—sharp, unyielding, and stitched with shame.

She jotted a note into her sketchbook: Design for pain. Tailor for grace.

The sky above the shop cracked open at dawn, bleeding soft gold into the corners of the tailor studio. Arielle hadn’t slept. She sat on the floor near the closet, knees hugged to her chest, as the first light spilled across the wood grain like liquid forgiveness.

The robe was folded neatly beside her. Its scent lingered: chalk dust, ink, and autumn leaves.

There was only one piece left.

She approached the closet with reverence now, not fear. As if it were a shrine. Or a wound.

The final garment was different.

Not a coat, or blouse, or velvet dream. This one was a slip—simple, pale, translucent. Like mourning spun into silk. The embroidery along the hem read in tiny hand-stitched kanji:

You lived more than once.

Arielle didn’t hesitate.

When the slip touched her skin, the world fell silent.

No rain. No music. No smell of tea or ghosts.

She was standing in her shop.

And across from her stood... herself.

Not younger. Not older. Just different. This version of her wore the shawl. Her hair was longer. Her eyes calmer.

"You’ve worn all of us now," the other Arielle said softly. "Do you understand?"

"I think so," Arielle whispered. "You’re all versions of me. But also... not."

"We’re the pieces you shed to survive. We stitched ourselves into silence. Into memory. Into thread."

The shop blurred. The seams of reality puckered and pulled.

"What happens now?" Arielle asked.

The other her smiled, tender and tired.

"You choose which version to stitch into your bones."

Then she was gone.

The closet door eased shut with a soft click.

Arielle stood alone.

But not hollow.

Koharu returned that afternoon. No baguette. No bravado.

Just her.

Arielle met her at the door with red-rimmed eyes and the scent of cedar clinging to her clothes.

"It’s done," she said. "The closet is closed. For good, I think."

Koharu didn’t ask what that meant. She only stepped inside, sat on the floor beside her, and leaned her shoulder against Arielle’s.

For a long time, they said nothing.

Then Arielle whispered, "I was never just one version of myself. I see that now. I don’t have to mourn the lives I didn’t live. I just have to choose who I want to become next."

Koharu tilted her head. "And who is that?"

Arielle smiled.

"Someone who makes her own patterns. Even if the stitches are crooked."

Outside, Avalon breathed.

The Labyrinth shifted in its sleep.

And Arielle, tailor of lost selves, began to design her future with both hands steady—not because the past had disappeared, but because she had finally made peace with its echoes.

🌙 Preorder here: https://books2read.com/u/bQwL9Z
(The link will be updated as more ebook retailers come online.)