And the Darkling Reefs Abide: a novel

On the shoreless deeps of the seas of gloom
Sailing, we venture afar and wide,
Where ever await the tempests of doom,
Where the silent maelstroms lurk and hide,

And the Darkling Reefs Abide

Beneath a never-setting sun, jellyfish live in worshipful subservice to the feathered gods that created them. They guide with grand benevolence — except for one treacherous god, cast out of their ranks to protect jellykind.

With nothing to live for, the jellyfish Ruwene takes the first order he's given. He swore upon a dark altar that he will kill the high priestess of the sun god, lord of the pantheon. His knows his story won't have a happy conclusion — but better to have a conclusion.

Author's Note

AtDRA was a story that started around 2019-07-26 with nothing but a single striking line, a vague mental image (it was how we wrote, in those days), and existed an exercise in writing sprints: every chapter of AtDRA was written in one or two sessions (often with only a small break between), lasting 30-60 minutes, where I wrote an at about 20-30 words per minutes, done in cooperation with Alexander Wales (yes, that one). I learned a lot.

Alas, this project died when I wrote the beginning of the second interlude, left for a walk, and came back to discover our laptop had died, losing all of our progress. It was a setback that, (coupled with the burnout of writing 4k words a day for more than a week), killed our drive to work on the project. And of course, introducing new characters and scenarios is always hard for me, being the place where so many of my projects die. It was a perfect storm of bleh.

Note that this story in its current form is barely presentable — the first few chapters have received some edits, but it only gets rougher as it goes on. There are currently no plans to clean it up; no one is reading it.

And the change and ruin of stars is a song
That rises and ebbs in a tide of fire—
A music whose notes are of dreadful flame,
Whose harmonics ever leap high'r
Where the suns and the worlds expire.
Is such music not fit for a god?
Yet ever the deep is a dark,
And ever the night is a void,
Nor brightens a word nor a mark
To show if our God may hark.

(excerpt from "Song of the Stars", by Clark Ashton Smith)

Serpentine Squiggles

And the Darkling Reefs Abide

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