Half-Life

Ellis Wren

Retelling en 31311 words First published 2026 United States TalesReborn

Adrian Vale, San Francisco's most admired neuroscientist, has split himself in two with a self-made compound: by night a thin, stooped stranger called Silas Crow walks the city and does what respectability cannot. When a retired judge is beaten to death with Vale's inherited cane, estate lawyer Martin Wells follows a will that leaves everything to a man nobody has met — into a vanished suspect, a colleague's sealed letter, and a locked room where a housekeeper has been feeding a voice that is not her master's. The compound never made the violence; it only quarantined it. And the half-life is running out.

A retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, presented by TalesReborn.

Table of Contents

1. 001 The Steel Door 2466 words
2. 002 In Search of Mr. Crow 2567 words
3. 003 Quite at His Ease 2483 words
4. 004 The Fog and the Cane 2555 words
5. 005 The Handwriting 2397 words
6. 006 Dr. Reyes Goes Dark 2588 words
7. 007 At the Window 2790 words
8. 008 The Last Night 2939 words
9. 009 Dr. Reyes's Narrative 2592 words
10. 010 The Statement: Origins 2655 words
11. 011 The Statement: The Serpent's Debt 2604 words
12. 012 The Statement: The Last Entry 2675 words