In fourth grade, I entered a school writing contest. I was obsessed with a book series called The Outernet at the time, and I loved it so thoroughly that what I turned in was, on any honest reading, a copy of it. I didn't win.

I have spent a good portion of my adult life doing a more sophisticated version of the same thing.

Not plagiarism but synthesis. I read something, or play something, or watch something, and I pull out the parts that thrill me and start fitting them against the parts I already have. Redwall and Emily Rodda and The Castle in the Attic went in early. Runescape went in around the Dragon Slayer quest, and I filled notebooks with dragons and weapon grades for a world made by someone else. Later it was Stargate fanfiction that never made it past chapter one. Fragments and false starts, for years, aside from the essays school made me finish.

Then I caught COVID my first week back at school in the fall of 2022, got sent home to quarantine, and finally read The Hobbit off my own shelf. I was already deep in Moorcock. I was watching Max Derrat take games apart to see how they were built. And somewhere in there the fragments stopped being separate.

What I built out of that, over the next few years, was a framework. I've called it an Infinite Story Engine, which admittedly is a tad pretentious. It has an architecture. It has cosmology, correspondences, layers that bleed into each other, a whole apparatus for generating worlds.

But what it did not have was a single story.

That's the trap: build a world without writing the stories, and you don't have a legendarium, you have a hodgepodge. A very organized hodgepodge. You can spend years there quite happily.

Luckily, I found four things to dig me out of it.

Moorcock gave me the multiverse, and more importantly, he gave me Balance. That's the thing Marvel took the structure from and then left behind; hell, even THANOS knew how important it was. The MCU has infinite worlds and no fulcrum. Everything is stakes, and nothing is weight. Moorcock understood that Law and Chaos only mean something if the middle is real.

Tolkien gave me the legendarium: the idea that a world can exist whether or not a story happens to be passing through it, and that the depth is what makes the story land when one finally does.

Sanderson gave me some of the most important parts as well. His belief that a hard magic system breeds more creative potential was transformative for me. I had a universe with infinite possibilities, but now I had the wherewithal to temper each idea, to lock it into a clear form that could be built on and gave constraints that would refine the stories. He also managed to ship many of his long-standing ideas.

Max Derrat gave me the habit of pulling a work apart on the table to see which pieces were the spine… which is most of what I do here anyway.

So: Here is a story. It starts at the end of a world, on a planet a very long time before the one this series is actually about, in a city where everything worked perfectly right up until it didn't.

The air over Aethel-Caelum was, as always, perfectly temperate.

Kael had been awake for three days trying to determine why.

He walked the upper plaza with the readings folded in his sleeve, past facades adorned with androgynous figures frozen in regal poses, cast from life itself, the left hand of each one worn to a shine by four centuries of passing touch. Beneath the stone, ten thousand maintenance incantations hummed, each pitched to complement the others in flawless harmony. Three days without sleep had put a grain in the light and a fine tremor at the edge of things.

"It's the cleaning ward," Emris was saying. He pinched the bridge of his nose and adjusted a lapel, Aetheric thread shimmering faintly under the noonday sun. "D-minor. Just loud enough to rattle the glass in my study during the quarterly review. We can sing ten thousand tons of granite into the upper atmosphere. Why can we not modulate a frequency?"

"The pillar's count is off."

"The transportation guild is worse. They promised the orbital citrus before the midday chime, and I ask you — is the three-part phrase beyond them? Is it?"

"Emris. The pillar's count is off by nine."

Emris looked at him with unbothered patience. Behind him, on the seamless floor of the plaza, a child chased a spherical light that bobbed lazily and stayed just out of reach.

"The pillar counts," Emris said.

"Yes."

"It has counted for four hundred years."

"Eleven thousand four hundred and six. Every morning of four hundred years, the same number. This morning it read eleven thousand three hundred and ninety-seven, and I have asked six people what the pillar is counting and not one of them could tell me." Kael heard his own voice climbing and could not get it back down. "We built it. Somebody built it. Somebody knew what it was for."

"Somebody did," Emris agreed, and looked out at the sky where the cargo barges should have been. "Young Lyra botched her recitation yesterday, did you hear? Meant to stabilize a wall with the Voice of the Builder. Put the foreman to sleep instead."

"Emris—"

"The wall came down. The foreman had a lovely nap." Emris smiled.

Kael took the readings from his sleeve and held them out, and Emris did not take them.

At the far end of the plaza, a figure stood at the parapet with their back to the city, facing north, quite still. Kael had noticed them an hour ago and thought nothing of it. He noticed now that they had not moved.

Emris opened his mouth to say something else about the guild.

His face went slack. His eyes fixed above and behind Kael's shoulder, pupils shrinking to pinpoints.

Kael did not hear the sound Emris made. A white-hot roar had already taken his eardrums.

He turned.

Above the towers, above the perfectly temperate sky, something had come through.

The meridian pillar was gone. Not fallen, but gone, as though the city had been built around a void, only to realize it just now.

At the parapet, the still figure raised both arms — not shielding, not reaching. Their hands moved through a shape Kael had never seen and would have sworn was not a shape at all, and the air went the colour of old brass.

They were still making it when the light came down the length of the city.

So — a snapshot of a world going wrong. What happens after, and who ends up having to answer for it, is the actual book.

One word for now: Shellslinger.

More soon. I've got a good deal stacked up behind this one.

In the meantime, there's a bit more Grantchester to get through, and lesson plans to write.