☘️ The Rack & Ruin Files: The Lightning of the Gods
Irish Bloodlines, Devil Lore, and the Woman Who Took Notes
{Marilyn’s ancestors knew him. Her enemies fear him. But the books say nothing about what she’s becoming. Irish history doesn’t record all the Deallans. That’s why Mimi is documenting everything.}
Origins, book 1 of the Marilyn Deallan Series, is dropping soon.
By book 4, it might appear to strangers—and even those close to her—that Marilyn is slowly losing her mind.
When she isn’t singing on backlit stages or smoking in half-lit alleys, she spends her hours buried in the dusty corners of a crumbling library, whispering under her breath, ancient prayers to deities she doesn’t believe in and devouring folklore texts like lifelines.
She’s not looking for comfort. She’s looking for documentation. For law. For loopholes.
She’s looking for a way to beat something… omniscient.
And she’s keeping track—of everything.
📓 Excerpt from Mimi’s Diary:
> Lists. I have been logging copious lists of every wrongdoing. I am connecting the dots. I am making the connections. This happened and then that happened. It might be impossible to make sense of random patterns. But these patterns are not random, and this perpetual cruelty seems to be a bit too excessive and strategic to be an accident.
> And the more I read, the more I find that my ancestors did this as well, but the full record of the lists have been lost. The library only has its own cataloguing of lonely, misguided scraps of paper.
What does she expect to find—studying devils, disasters, and the Irish version of damnation?
She doesn’t know. But she keeps reading.
The stories she uncovers show her ancestors lived lives bracketed by catastrophe—especially the women. Daughters reaching marrying age. Something terrible following. Then, silence in the records.
But this library… it knows things. It holds a dictionary of devils. It hosts books of inked incantations and deathless bargains disguised as nursery rhymes. It offers stories where the devil isn’t a man in red, but a smile in the dark. A voice that says, gently:
> “So, you’ve decided to stop running, then?”
It’s Asael. Of course it is. Appearing behind her shoulder just as she dares open a book titled Grimoire, recommended via an annotated library card. Gilded cover. Pre-Alexandrian origins. A pulse in its spine.
☘️ The Deallan Lineage — Seven Generations of Forgotten Fire
The name Deallan first appears after the 1601 Battle of Kinsale—but no Gaelic records precede it. It’s as if the line was conjured into being, pulled from smoke and wind.
Among the first was Birdsong Deallan, who bore a daughter, Erna, after seven years of sorrow. From there, a legacy of women moved quietly through time, some escaping to America, some never seen again—but all linked by luckless turning points.
> Excerpt from Mimi’s Diary — The Family Ledger > > - G⁷GM (Birdsong Deallan) 1700–1730 > - G⁶GM (Erna) > - G⁵GM (Aisling) > - G⁴GM (Laoise) > - G³GM (Fiona) > - G²GM (Mairead) > - GGM (Regina) > - GM (Betty) > - Mother (Gina) > - Me (Mimi)
No married names. No documented deaths. And yet the pattern is clear: something breaks each of them at thirty. Except Betty. Mimi’s own grandmother had a daughter at forty. A breach in the pattern… or a glitch in the curse?
And then there’s Regina. Her name resurfaces in whispers, in weeping, in the arms of a woman named Margaret who clutched at Marilyn’s sleeve as if the memory had muscle.
🦋 Butterflies, Fire, and the Devil’s Favorite Game
> “The name dealan-dé is the ancient Celtic word for butterfly… They are escape artists, Marilyn, slipping through the cracks unseen.”
So says Asael as Marilyn sits in a dim tattoo shop—her wrist burning, her lineage being inked into skin. The tattoo artist doesn’t speak, but the room hums. The air smells like ink and nicotine. And the truth presses deeper than the needle.
> “They were considered the lightning of the Gods, a magical fire.”
Each Deallan woman has met Asael in some form. Each was tested. Some bargained. Some fled. Some didn’t survive. All of their lives were changed.
Mimi doesn’t think she made a deal… but the lines blur. She reads in an old text that a pact isn’t always a trade. Sometimes it’s just a recognition of power. A nod. A whisper.
And then she finds hope—not in holy books, but in loopholes.
> A quibble. > A minor protest. > Some hair-splitting technicality.
The devil can be beaten, sometimes, with the right phrasing. With the right clause. With wit. That’s what the stories say.
Mimi doesn’t know how in Book 1.
But by Book 4, she intends to find out.