Moving from the discovery of discovery writing.

I announced three weeks ago that I was about to embark on a bold new rewrite of my Substack serial, ‘The Strings of Us’. I wrote about the reasoning behind the changes in my previous article, the Kintsugi Rewrite, which goes into depth explaining why I felt now was the right time to abandon my short tenure as a discovery writer (the act of writing straight ahead without the guardrails of an already pre-quantified plot) and become a plotter once more. You can read about that whole thought process below. 👇

How is the plotting coming along?

Well, now that you ask, rather well, thank you.

Plotting for me is familiar territory, and so thankfully returning to it to decipher the many strands of intrigue I have woven into the story so far has been a really fun and joyful process. The first task has been to simply identify what those core strands are. Do I have a love story on my hands? Perhaps a beguiling mystery? I have set about keeping it as simple as possible: writing out the thesis behind each story thread in a column of my plotting spreadsheet, then identifying the type or genre of story I am dealing with. Not character arcs, nor an arbitrary attempt to write out the whole story beat by beat in bullet point form chronologically. No, the purpose here is simply to understand exactly what types of stories I am trying to tell.

But Graeme, isn’t the genre of the story sci-fi?

Sci-fi is one of those rare types of genre that contains within it the seeds of many others. Like a Russian nesting doll, you will never see a sci-fi that doesn’t have various other types of stories resting inside its very broad walls. Take, for example, ‘The Martian’ by Andy Weir, which is a survival thriller wrapped up as sci-fi. Or the first instalment of ‘The Expanse’ by James S. A. Corey, which is a detective noir mystery dressed in the clothes of sci-fi.

Similarly, ‘The Strings of Us’ hides within its speculative sci-fi world a multitude of genres that need to be unpacked.

We have:

• Three different mystery plotlines. A political mystery, a soft horror mystery, and a metaphysical mystery.

• A revenge plotline.

• A nostos plotline (where a character goes on a long journey and has to find their way back home).

• An enlightenment plotline (where a character achieves a level of spiritual understanding that sets them apart from their peers).

• A mutiny plotline. One of my favourite types of storylines.

And this is just the start. I still have a number of threads still to pick out from the tapestry and put a name to. It is an exciting feeling.

Why do you need to know the story trope for each thread?

One of the really big challenges I was starting to confront with discovery writing ‘The Strings of Us’ was that the more I wrote, the more I realised that there was a lot more going on here than a simple journey to the centre of the galaxy story with rabbits.

The format of the story would not be able to serve these various threads without buckling under its own weight. This has become a multi-cast, multi-threaded story, similar to a show like Downton Abbey. Single-POV chapters in which characters exist in their own siloed plotlines would inevitably fail to deliver this larger vision.

With that understanding, I need to know that when I attempt to deliver any of these tropes, I do so in a way that aligns at least somewhat with the expectations of those tropes inherent in the reader.

A mystery story, for example, has a certain set of beats that people have intuitively come to expect. An instigating moment. An investigation. Pushback from the powers behind the mystery. Red herrings to throw the main character and the reader off the scent of the solution. And of course, an eventual satisfying answer to the mystery that is both surprising and logical.

You can map these core beats onto almost every great mystery story of note, from Poirot to Tintin and even Scooby-Doo.

The current status of the plotting work.

So this, dear friends, is where I am currently. Deeply embedded in a spreadsheet that identifies the different tropes inside my sprawling cosy sci-fi. It has been a huge amount of fun so far. I have been able to map out parts of the story that had so far been mere feelings. I have manoeuvred characters into new roles that have been both surprising and yet completely sensible (if also heartbreaking at times when a character turns out to be a lot worse than you thought). It has involved a lot of research into these various threads, re-reading some of the writing bibles of our time, such as ‘Save the Cat’, ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’, or ‘Into the Woods’.

But most importantly of all, I feel extremely positive that the groundwork and foundations I carved into those early chapters have real potential to tell a story that genuinely excites me, and that I hope will excite you too.

Embracing the Messy Reality

Writing a novel while balancing a 45-hour corporate workweek is an exercise in endurance. Smashing up tens of thousands of words to start over feels like walking backwards up a mountain.

But this is the messy reality of draft writing. I don’t want to just give you a polished final product; I want you in the engine room with me, grease on our hands, figuring out how this massive generation ship actually flies. The story, just from these thoughts, is already breathing differently. It feels dangerous, tactile, and alive.

Support the Unseen Work

Rebuilding a universe takes time, wine, music, and a lot of late nights staring at digital whiteboards. If you value this kind of upfront transparency and want to back the messy, unglamorous process of independent storytelling, consider stepping into the Cartographer’s Guild. Your paid subscription directly funds the hours required to wrestle this epic into its truest form.

Join the cartographers’ guild and help this ship fly.

Subscribe now

Alternatively, drop something in the Ko-Fi. It all goes towards eventually turning this complex speculation into a finished product. All with your help. I will be updating this shop in due course with products related both to The Strings of Us and the wider Atlas I am building here, so stay tuned.

Ko-Fi

Thank you for being here for the bumps in the road. The Chrysaora is preparing for launch, and the new Chapter One is going to be a tad more explosive.

Love 💖🐇🦕

But this past week, after a long look at the story so far with my developmental editor (AKA me), I realised a hard truth: I have to drop it from a great height, let it smash into shards, and rebuild it, Kintsugi style.

If you are a writer, you might empathise with that sinking feeling in your belly when you realise a structural overhaul is necessary. If you are a reader, you might be wondering why an author would deliberately drop and smash up a story they already love.

The honest answer? I have tried a new approach to writing this story since its conception, pantsing (the act of writing page by page without much of a plan), and while I have gained much from this process, a side effect has occurred. Something I have spoken about before. The sticky sickness that is the ‘world builders’ pox’.

The Problem:

When you build a universe as complex as this one, where intelligent rabbits navigate the cosmos via gravitational strings, and human political factions are hiding dark secrets inside a generation ship. And all the while, the author is commenting on facets of eastern spiritual philosophy, it is tempting to want to explain everything.

In my current draft, I have been isolating my characters in unique point of view (POV) chapters. I had a beautiful prologue about mythical history. I have a chapter where Elias and Cas’shya sit in a pristine holographic archive, politely debating the ancient fable of Philoc the Swift. Meanwhile, chapters later, Lysander and Hec’ten were hunting a saboteur known as the Fairy Queen. It is all incredibly siloed.

The chapters worked beautifully in isolation, but together? The pacing was jarring. My characters were trapped in separate bubbles, waiting for the plot to happen to them. I was prioritising the lore of my universe over the forward momentum of the people living inside it.

The Battlestar Blueprint

Naturally, I looked to some of my favourite examples of serial writing to fix this; in particular, I had to look at masterful ensemble storytelling. Enter on-stage, Battlestar Galactica, Avatar: The Legend of Aang, and Downton Abbey.

The shining brilliance of these narratives is that they don’t give characters isolated episodes to just sit and think. They trap their vast ensembles in the exact same pressure cooker - all together. This is the same whether it is a high-stakes episode, or more of a filler episode where the cast go on a jape. Whether you are a lord, a cook, a pilot, or a president, you are reacting to the same immediate crisis, episode by episode.

So, I am taking a sledgehammer to my idea of having singular POV’s. At least for the first act.

Instead of letting Elias and Cas’shya debate history in a vacuum, we will be opening Act one with an explosion. The Fairy Queen is sabotaging the Arcturian Water Reclamation plant right as Lysander and Hec’ten are touring it.

The shockwave of that explosion is going to ripple through the ship, knock out the power grid in the holographic archive, and trigger a devastating PTSD flashback for Elias, who is still grieving. Suddenly, Cas’shya breaking rabbit taboo to comfort him isn’t just a sweet, passive moment; it is a heartening act of empathy in the dark of a momentarily malfunctioning ship.

And when Lysander barges into their archive moments later, holding a piece of physical evidence he can’t decode, the storylines finally cross-pollinate. The ancient history Elias and Cas’shya study is no longer a textbook; it is the literal blueprint the saboteur is using to bypass the ship’s AI.

Embracing the Messy Reality

Writing a novel while balancing a 45-hour corporate workweek is an exercise in endurance. Smashing up tens of thousands of words to start over feels like walking backwards up a mountain.

But this is the messy reality of draft writing. I don’t want to just give you a polished final product; I want you in the engine room with me, grease on our hands, figuring out how this massive generation ship actually flies. The story, just from these thoughts, is already breathing differently. It feels dangerous, tactile, and alive.

Support the Unseen Work

Rebuilding a universe takes time, wine, music, and a lot of late nights staring at digital whiteboards. If you value this kind of upfront transparency and want to back the messy, unglamorous process of independent storytelling, consider stepping into the Cartographer’s Guild. Your paid subscription directly funds the hours required to wrestle this epic into its truest form.

Alternatively, drop something in the Ko-Fi. It all goes towards eventually turning this complex speculation into a finished product. All with your help. I will be updating this shop in due course with products related both to The Strings of Us and the wider Atlas I am building here, so stay tuned.

Ko-Fi

Thank you for being here for the bumps in the road. The Chrysaora is preparing for launch, and the new Chapter One is going to be a tad more explosive.

Love 💖🐇🦕

If you are new here, you’ve just stepped aboard The Strings of Us, a serialised sci-fi epic being funded in real-time by readers like you. You can catch up on previous chapters in the archive here:

Chapter Directory

Today, we are leaving the sun-drenched Agora of Ancient Athens from the last ‘Raw and Unedited’ and stepping into the sterile, high-stakes political theatre of the Chrysaora’s Quorum room. The dust has barely settled from the near-disaster at the water reclamation facility, and the ship’s leadership is looking for someone to blame.

We are viewing this through the eyes of Dr Farrell, the pragmatic Head of Life Support Systems, as she watches the arrogant Dr Hedghe attempt to politically assassinate our new Chief of Security, General Lysander.

Below is a raw, unedited glimpse into this tense boardroom showdown. This will give you a real-time look at my editorial brain, showing you exactly what is working in this first draft, and where I plan to drastically change the text for the final polish.

If you want to read this draft, dive into the messy behind-the-scenes process, and help fund the publication of this universe, you can upgrade your subscription below or drop a tip in the Ko-fi treasury. Every £1 earns you 10 Treasury Points on the live Leaderboard!

Subscribe now

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The Quorum Trap (Raw & Unedited)

Hedge, however, was having none of it. He seemed much more inclined to let the bomb go off.

“Sabotage, General, a fascinating conclusion. Or, perhaps, a more convenient one? My logs show a different story. They show an antiquated, stressed system and a new, foolhardy commander who, against all advice, intervened manually and caused a cascade failure. Are you sure you discovered sabotage, General? Or, are you simply creating a narrative to cover for your own reckless actions?”

Authors Note: Hedghe is meant to be a wiley and cunning operator, and this whole section feels a bit too on the nose. Rather than manouvering his opponent into a trapped position, he bluntly states his hypothesis for all to hear. In future drafts I will have to work on making his words match his personality more.

It was quite the tirade, and in a way, I could almost understand it. It seemed so improbable and convenient. And yet… if it were true, it would explain a lot. As much as I wanted the Dr’s ‘Sister’ AI to leave me alone to my job for five minutes without interruption, I had to respect that it was — in fact — one of humanity’s crowning achievements. Built by some of the best scientists in the world.

Authors Note: I love using Dr. Farrell as the chapter POV. If Lysander were the POV character, this would just feel like a defensive argument. By putting us in Farrell’s head, we get an objective, grounded view. She admits Hedghe is arrogant, but she also respects the science behind his AGI. It establishes her as a highly competent, unbiased observer, which will make her eventual alliance with Lysander feel earned rather than forced.

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If you have been following The Strings of Us, you know we are dealing with cosmic gravity, space-faring rabbits, and industrial sabotage. But the beautiful thing about building an alternative history of Earth is that we get to explore all of history.

Today, we are jumping out of the sci-fi darkness and into the sun-drenched Agora of Ancient Athens. I am sharing a raw, unedited glimpse into the first act of the book, featuring something you might not expect in a sci-fi epic: an ancient Greek fable.

We are about to meet Demetrius, an impossibly boastful human Olympian, and Philoc, a gravity-manipulating rabbit who just really, really loves figs.

The raw, unedited draft of this fable—along with my Director’s Notes on why I injected a comedy into a sci-fi book, is below for members of the Cartographers Guild.

If you want to read this draft, dive into the messy behind-the-scenes process, and help fund the publication of this universe, you can upgrade your subscription below or drop a tip in the Ko-fi treasury. Every £1 earns you 10 Treasury Points on the live Leaderboard!

Subscribe now

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Read Raw & Unedited Here: 👉 001, 002, 003

Philoc The Swift

Philoc the messenger was one of the swiftest and most agile rabbits of his time. People assumed he was looked over by Hermes with the way that he could convey messages faster than even the fastest of horseback riders. It was said he had wings on his feet just like the god, and could practically fly along the ground with the way that he ran. Ironically, the humans who would comment as such were often the closest to the truth.

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Welcome back to the Atlas and to our third entry in the Raw & Unedited series.

This is the space where I share the unfiltered first drafts of my novel, ‘The Strings of Us,’ complete with my real-time editor’s notes . It’s a look inside the engine room, exploring the messy, surprising, and joyful process of discovery that happens in a raw draft.

Last time,…

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I have recently been inspired to try the #Pentober challenge, coordinated by who have kindly provided a months worth of word prompts to help inspire and ultimately shape a collection of handwritten passages of text.

So what is the challenge?

You can find the initial post here:

Top In Fiction

✒️ Pentober 2025 - The Kick Off

🗓️ 31 Days. 31 Prompts. Ink, Paper, Terror…

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a year ago · 35 likes · 3 comments · TiF Team

But to summarise:

The prompts are:

Fog · Lantern · Silence · Hollow · Thorn · Doorway · Candlewick · Whispers · Flicker · Shatter · Crows · Chains · Omen · Dust · Grave · Mausoleum · Asylum · Ritual · Shroud · Revenant · Wraith · Curse · Screech · Teeth · Bloodstain · Cloak · Bone · Abyss · Shadow · Mire · Crypt

So, lets begin!

I have settled on the vague theme of a man who is trapped on a small boat in and endless ocean. What is he doing there? The prompts will reveal all in time.

Pentober Day 001 - Fog

I loved my boat’s cabin on days like this. My little coal stove made the small space quite cosy, and the warmth leaned up against the windows forcing the air outside to condense. The patterns & shapes that these little percolations would create reminded me of the maps that lived inside my atlas. A relic from another time that showed little rivers tumbling across the landscape, finding their paths between the different strata of rock in much the same way that these droplets found their path through any latent dust and imperfections in the glass. I was watching one of them now. It was currently in the lead in a race against two other droplets that had condensed at more or less the same time. It was getting very close to the bottom when it was suddenly blown off course by a particularly fierce gust of wind and subsequently consumed by a larger blotch of water that was stubbornly resisting gravity like an obnoxious mule. Such was this drop’s fate, to lose the race at the very last moment.

The breeze caught my eye for a moment as it rippled through the dense fog that had packed in around my vessel today. It created soft, fluffy billows in the texture of the fog, but did little to reveal anything beyond what was already visible. The tips of my boom were lost in it, and I could only just make out the rough outline of a rope locker a few meters away. The end of my boat could have disappeared entirely, or been consumed by barnacles and limpets, and I would be none the wiser.

My little brass barometer and clock chimed, and so I set my mug down onto the stove to keep my broth warm. Pulling open the drawer in the side of my cabin’s bureau, I grabbed a clean sheet of paper, and then set about choosing today’s pencil. It felt like a 2B kind of day. Soft enough to draw the fog, but light enough to capture its delicacy. Grabbing my favourite 2B pencil, ‘Bert’, I set about my daily drawing. As I rendered the shapes of the fog, as usual, other shapes began to appear. Shapes of things that were not actually there...

Pentober Day 002 - Lantern

One of the only lights that I have familiarity with is the lamp that hangs from the front of the pilot’s cabin. If you’re following the wiring back across the roof and towards the back of the boat, you will find it plugged into a small inverter, which is in turn attached to a pair of small wind turbines and a distant floating water flow generator. The light itself gives off a sunset cast, where orange and yellow meet. It’s not much, but in this vast expanse where the sun never shines... Well, it’s home.

The ocean I float upon has a natural gloomy quality of light that barely changes. As far as I can tell, there does not seem to be a night or day here. The spectrum of colour in the light seems to range from lichen green to pigeon grey, the tones of which alternate and shift based on the whims of the impenetrably thick cloud cover that permanently lingers just beyond the reach of my top mast. It is like the world has a translucent lid, and me and my boat are trapped inside the box.

I am immeasurably glad then of my little lantern, and I tend to it daily. I polish its metal exterior and apply anti-rusting ointment regularly. The small reflectors inside are as clean as a fresh dinner plate, and the light filament is always attended to and replaced when the need arises.

I was tending to it just now when I felt a familiar sensation tickling the hairs on the back of my neck. I peered in through the glass cabin window, and indeed the barometer was changing. The familiar bell rang out from the attached clock. Time to get my paper and pencil again. Today was a HB day. The tickle of my hairs implied straight sharp lines.

Returning to the deck with my equipment, I peered right to the furthest edge of my lantern’s glow. Water undulated, but there was nothing to see, at least not with my eyes. I started sketching and soon enough the edges of a strange building began to form under the fine tip of my pencil.

Pentober Day 003 - Silence

My little HB pencil scratched out the shape of a tall building with corner turrets and crenellations. The feeling of drawing something that I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, was there, but that my eyes could not see. It is a surreal sensation. Assurance and evidence in complete discordance with each other. I tried not to question it too much and simply let it happen. There was -in fact- no shadow of doubt, just the shadow of a building across my mind’s eye, felt but unseen. The scritch scratch my pencil made across the page was loud in the silence that spread out around me.

Silence is a feature of this place. But not a silence in the normal sense. Sure, you would hear the lapping of water against my boat, the faint whistle of a breeze through my rigging and sails. The silence was that of an absence. Imagine a person’s pupils, but devoid of life. Behind the blackness of their eye was emptiness. A no-thing-ness that was not dark - because darkness requires a thing to be dark upon. Just nothing. That was the kind of silence you felt here. A void within which sounds never touched the sides.

My HB, ‘Harry’, finished, and I studied the drawing. It was an unfamiliar building poking up out of the water. Spiky, and intricate, I was amazed at the skill of my hand to render it.

I climbed down the small stairs into the boat’s hull, a small living space with a bed at the end, illuminated by the soft glow of a computer. An odd computer, made of many moving parts, like a clock. I placed my drawing under one of the lenses and prompted it to study the building. Gears clicked and buttons clacked, and eventually on the small amber screen, words wrote themselves into existence, like a person’s scrawl.

‘The building is characteristic of a late medieval norman cathedral, likely one of the many fine examples of gothic architecture common in what was a small island nation known as ‘England’.

A cat-hedral I mused. I had heard of cats before. They must be important.

Pentober day 004 - Hollow

The next morning, if indeed you could call this near constant low light morning, evening, or even night, I was pulled away from a pleasant dream by an awful high-pitched sound. It came in odd intervals that had no pattern, neither in timing or in tone. I pulled on yesterday’s shirt and my big jumper, and set about investigating.

My boat didn’t have an engine, but there were still some mechanical parts, so I started there, pot of grease in hand. The mechanisms for the rudder were fine, but the noise persisted. Oddly the noise seemed to be following me. The ever oppressive cloud cover meant that I rarely looked up, the ceiling of the clouds had a depressing effect on me. But a flicker drew my eye. Up in the rigging was something I had never seen before. Something alive. It had four legs which it walked on, fur covering its whole body, and two pointy ears. It was making the sound.

I went downstairs to my computer and described the strange beast. The computer scrawled a reply on the amber screen.

‘This sounds like a description for a common domestic cat, a popular companion to humans throughout history’. The - cat - well, perhaps it had something to do with that cat-hedral from yesterday.’ Its oddly pointy head peeked around the galley door.

‘Try feeding it some fish’, the computer prompted.

A few minutes later, the harsh grinding noise had changed into a low hum that was oddly comforting. Just then my clock chimed again. I left the now humming cat with the fish and stepped outside to take in the subject of today’s sketch. As usual, there was nothing to see, but there was an odd quality to the water a few meters out from the starboard bow. The water suddenly got a lot darker, as if there was an underwater cliff edge that fell into a deep hollow. The space it left drew my mind towards it and I gazed for a good few minutes, before shaking myself out of it to go & get the pencil & paper. A 4B day today, Clive would do the trick.

To get a better view of this hollow, I sat myself wedged between my foremast and boom to see more of it. To my surprise, the odd cat, finished with its fish, came & sat next to me, tucked into itself like a loaf of bread. I began to draw.

Pentober day 005 - Thorn

The hollow took up most of my vision and reached right to the edges of my peripherals. I already sensed that there was no way this would all fit on one page, so I closed my eyes for a moment and decided to see if the invisible structures that I knew would be there might guide me. I felt my hand start to draw, at the same time that I felt a compass like tug towards a particular section over to the right hand side of my view. Opening my eye, I watched as both my conscious and unconscious mind moved across the page. The conscious mind cared more for the senses, and the subconscious seemed to be dealing more with the unseen. At this point the subconscious was starting to sketch another structure. A tall structure that held up a platform by suspending it from thick cables that emanated from the central tower. The more I sketched of it, the more I started to sense a well of sadness in the drawing. It leaked out of the page, out of the pencil, and crawled into my brain. The sadness was a combination of loss, frustration, fear, loneliness, but strikingly, it was deep rooted. It started to seem disingenuous to call it sadness. Despair perhaps. The kind of emotion that pricks at your insides like a million thorns, threatening to shred you from the inside out.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the cat looking at me and the drawing suspiciously. But I could do little else other than notice. This feeling was consuming me. My drawing started to reveal a figure at the top of this structure. The person was the source of the despair. They longed for another world. They were saturated with awful images. People were being killed. The planet, their home was dying. The thorns felt welcoming. They could rip me up into tiny pieces and I could drift away into the breeze. Become one with the wind.

The figure jumped. The world screamed.

My foot hovered over the side of the boat and my body tipped towards the water. The cat screamed, leaping on my back, the cat’s thorns dug into my skin and pulled me back into the boat, and back into my own-my mind. I lay gasping for air. The cat on my chest.

Pentober day 006 - Doorway

My hands scattered across the clunky keyboard, frantic and clumsy, whilst my mind felt in complete disarray. The cat sat in my lap, it felt like an anchor to reality.

‘What the heck just happened’ I asked the computer. A few cogs and gears whirred and clicked in response. While the progress of the answer waited, my mind was jolted back to that moment when I had nearly stepped over the side of the boat. The sense of sadness overwhelmed me again. I could just about hold it together and recognize it was not my own sadness that I was feeling, but my goodness it was so damn visceral. Like the water in my jar had been dyed the colour of someone else and I could feel... everything. The clicking stopped and the amber screen brightened. The invisible hand started to scrawl words across it.

‘Explore carefully from now on, you are coming of age, and you have a lot to learn...’

I was aghast, for the first time ever the computer had not provided a proper answer. I slammed my hands down on the desk, scaring the cat, and stormed out onto the deck above.

A few hours later, after having reset my sails to make the most of this new breeze, I went to the pilot’s cabin to warm up by the stove. The wind whistled through the ropes outside and seemed to have found the perfect angle to blow a long mournful note through the crack at the bottom of the pilot cabin door. I opened the doorway and closed it again a few times, experimenting with the hope that it might quieten. Each time a thick gust blew in and rounded on my face. My barometer chimed, a sound that I had been dreading all day. But this time something else beyond the wind hit me. Yesterday something... someone had passed through me like the wind passed through this doorway. Previously, I had only ‘felt the wind’ blowing through the tiny crack in my subconscious. Now the door was wide open, and everything had changed.

Pentober day 007 - Candlewick

A few days had passed since my door had opened, and since my awareness had shifted.

I was up and about early today and the temperature had dropped dramatically over night. Me and cat were in the pilot’s cabin and I was just getting the little coal stove back into action. There was an art to getting it going again. There was still heat buried in there, but that heat needed to be coaxed out into little flames so that the new coals would catch. I had stoked it a bit, and lain across that a thin layer of kindling. It had already started to smoke, but to help it on, I lit a match. Its hiss echoed around the small cabin as it cast a small bit of light against the polished wooden walls.

Applying the small match-flame carefully, the corner of the kindling took properly, and the little fluttering sound of flames ushered me in closer with promise of warmth. Cat concurred, and started its strange rumbling noise as it looked deeper into this newly alive glow. The match meanwhile was put out with a vigorous shake. A small curl of smoke from the burnt wood spiralled into the air. Nothing unusual in that, but for reasons, known only to my intuition, it caught my eye.

It looked like my recent experiments.

A candlewick draws up wax from below and sets it aflame. The flames were my sketches I realised, but through those sketches, I could follow the thread down to its source. Much like I could follow this curl of smoke all the way down to the match.

I had, since that incident, made a concerted effort to stay near the surface so as to retain my sanity. But curiosity grew and I wondered, if I were to follow that curl of smoke down again, what actually was the match at the bottom of it?

The barometer chimed once more. It was time to try again. My curiosity piqued, could not now be satiated by non-action. I took a 6B today, a deep pencil for discovering new depths.

Pentober Day 008 - Whispers

This time with my 6B in hand - Terrance - I scanned the horizon with care. I was still full of dread, knowing that one of these whispers upon the ocean might pull me in like before. But somehow, I knew they were calling to me. After all, why was it that, despite the barometer and my little sketching clock, that I had already half-sensed each new drawing anyway. Like an alarm that was internal, that spoke to me in the language of raised hairs, shortness of breath, and a sense of something looming.

Cat, despite the cold this morning, joined me on the deck, sitting on the balustrade near where I lingered, its small feet seemed to find excellent purchase, and its frame balanced there as if there was not a care to be had about the ocean just below. It sat, and closed its eyes. Its life force alluded to by the little steamy breaths that came from its nose. It was relaxed...

I was most certainly not. But, perhaps this is something I needed to try. After all, the last time I had gone deep, I had sensed the location through closed eyes. Sighing my own plume into the cold air, I set my diaphragm down into my belly and let my eyelids gently close. Pencil hand poised over my sketch pad, ready to catch whatever came my way.

At first my senses only picked up the real. My cat breathing, my belly gurgling, but then something else tugged at my ear. Laughter. Melodious, unprecedented laughter. My hand started moving. I followed the laughter and as it turned a corner there was contentment. The contentment moved up a staircase and through a door, and in that room it met love. A feeling I had read about but never felt. It was warm, and reassuring, its presence felt calming and safe. Similar to my cat. The love poured into the room and filled every corner like a radar beacon, and as it reflected the surrounds, I felt a second whisper. The subject of the love. It too was radiant.

My hand kept the score as I explored.

I sighed, and smiled.

Pentober Day 009 - Flicker

I stayed with this scene for most of the day. For this couple, as I felt them to be, had the kind of rapport with each other unlike anything I had ever known. I rested in it like I was in a bath, soaking in the warmth of it all. The smiles, the kisses, the contentment as they pottered about their space doing whatever it was that they occupied their time with.

I relished those moments when a lightning bolt of energy passed between them. It was a strangely paradoxical feeling. On the one hand, it was electric, I know that feeling well from servicing this boat. Little zaps that could leap out of the wire and bite my skin. But this feeling went deeper than the skin, it went past the ribs and right into my chest, and though it was alarming, it was also exciting, rejuvenating, and fierce. It felt good.

I didn’t know their names, the vision didn’t work like that. It was not seeing but feeling. As if I was understanding the scene from the inside out. But I named them anyway. Names that I took from one of the atlases in my cabin. She was Sienna and he was Corsica.

As I spent more time with Sienna & Corsica, in the blanket of their, frankly, lovely existence, my concentration began to waver as my focus relaxed. The scene playing through my body flickered. The disruption jolted me back to wakefulness but that just served to cause the scene to flicker & break up even more. I grasped for it with my mind, but found that trying to hold onto it just made it more slippy. Like trying to drink by grabbing with clasping fingers at the stream of water that poured from the tap. I felt one last distant smile from Sienna and then it was gone.

My eyes opened to an incredible drawing, a fully rendered scene of them living in their home. But my patience was aggrieved. I threw it to the floor. Cat looked at me reproachfully as if to shake its head in disappointment.

Pentober Day 010 - Shatter

This feeling was worse. But yet it had the opposite effect on me compared to the last time I had touched a life. Before, when I had touched the soul of another, I was nearly driven to despair and terrified to go back. Now, I had discovered one of the most beautiful things I had ever felt, and despaired at the thought that I might not find it again.

I sat for a moment to try and regain my composure. Relaxation was the key and it had worked before. But it was so hard to focus. I had only ever known my own company on the boat. And the computer maybe. But it wasn’t a companion so much as just an answer machine. I had read about love. But today, for the first time ever, I felt what it is to have a real companion, and now I felt truly, what had always been in plain sight.

I am alone. A tear rolled down my cheek. Another new first.

Cat seemed to sense my sadness and came and sat on my lap, resuming its odd rumbly sound and contentedly licking the gaps between the toes where its thorns stuck out. Its presence calmed me and I closed my eyes again, sensing for a new connection.

A child playing.

I followed the trail deeper.

An old man reading a book, deeper again.

A person in amongst a crowd of angry shouting people. Their whispers arose around me and as I went deeper I began to sense more & more of them simultaneously. Such a miasma of varied emotions, lives, passions, frustrations. It was both an ecstatic feeling and an overwhelming one. Almost like being consumed by water. The inundation of the human condition made me feel less alone. These were my people clamouring in my mind & senses. The din was unbearable but beautiful. I noticed one voice rising above it all, like an echo that filled the entire world.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” it was saying, repeatedly, over and over.

Another, much larger voice filled up everything, threatening to rip apart every cell in my body. It didn’t speak. But its meaning was clear. “What... have... you... done?”

And then all was silenced and everything shattered. The world. The feeling. My mind.

Pentober Day 011 - Crows

Weeks had passed, and now I sat at the front of the boat in the prow. I had two ropes across my lap & was performing surgery. One of my ropes had snapped in a recent gale. I was picking apart the threads of the rope, bit by bit, and then had it in mind to weave two ends back together. It felt good to do something simple and mundane like this. The metaphor of weaving back together something that had fallen apart was not lost on me. Cat meowed at me, as if also enjoying the punchline.

The first week I had simply lain in bed piecing together everything I had experienced. Sifting through my mind like a prospector, figuring out what was mine and what was of the ocean. The vision hadn’t ended either, and even now I would get jolts of emotions and feelings. There had clearly been something cataclysmic because now all those little psychic connections that arose within me felt like crows, picking at the dead carcass of the world. Compared to that small glimpse of love I had experienced, everything now was utterly depressing.

My barometer chimed and I ignored it. I hadn’t done a single sketch since that incident, though the computer was insistent that I should. Instead I went back to the simplicity of the ropes, weaving & braiding it back together.

Truth be told, I was scared. It wasn’t just that having my mind assaulted by so much latent consciousness had left my mind frayed and worn. It was the fear of going back to these echoes and finding that it was all over. That the voices were gone, and that I would be completely alone again. - Cat meowed. - Alone except for cat of course. I smiled and patted its head. It felt calming. Its warm soft fur was pleasant to touch, but there was something more. It was almost like I could hear hushed voices. Silent hopeful voices. And singing? I shook my head and went back to ignoring the crows who feasted upon the remnants of a broken world.

Pentober Day 012 - Chains

Near the back of my boat is an odd object. According to the computer, it is an anchor. Its purpose, to be dropped in the water so that the attached boat stays in the same place. It seemed like an odd concept, given that the ocean was endless. What would signify a need to stop. Of course, if the atlas was to be believed, there used to be landmasses in this ocean, I suppose stopping would make sense then. I looked at the chain attached to the anchor and felt their cousins inside of me. Hundreds of chains that dug into my mind, anchoring that one terrible phrase that had come to haunt me. “What... have... you... done?”.

The words had no sound but they were heavy, and they were as wide as the distant horizon. Everytime I felt them rise up in my mind, I could nearly imagine my knees buckling under their weight. What had been done I wondered, and who or what had spoken. I felt certain there had been a terrible ending. The echoes of consciousness I received gave me the feeling of being a medic trawling over a desolate battlefield.

Cat rubbed against my leg and the strength of the chains eased. I heard that music again and wondered if cat had something to do with it. It was peaceful music, without a melody as such, but it sounded like a choir of thousands of beautiful voices.

Crouching down. I stroked cat’s head. It liked that, leaning into my hand and closing its odd amber eyes. Its blink was slow.

Reality shifted and I stood in a cavernous hall. The music was louder and clearer now. People flashed past in super speed and the light changed from day to night over and again. People cried by candles, sung with joy, gazed in awe at the tall pillars. Craftsman from times gone past carved stone and wood into beautiful forms.

Cat’s eyes opened and I was back on the boat. ‘Cat-hedral?’ I whispered. The cathedral meowed contentedly, happy to be recognized. It was happy because it was a chain to a feature of the past and its memory was far longer than anything else I had touched yet.

Pentober Day 013 - Omen

Cat had shown me something new. Until recently my sketches had nearly always included buildings or features sticking out of the ocean. People had been rare. But I had gotten lost in the human stories that I had experienced, the person who jumped from the bridge, or the young coupe in love. Compared to cats cat-hedral or a tree, their human memories were incredibly short, but the psychic influence was overwhelmingly strong. Through the cat-hedral I found a gentler, slower way to observe humans that was less overwhelming and oftentimes more interesting. The buildings I connected to showed hundreds, if not thousands of years of their experienced history.

The last two weeks had passed by much more calmly because of it. I had sketched a few houses, a bridge, a mountain; which had been particularly wonderful from a historical perspective, watching prehistoric humans developing in its valleys. There had been a sketch of a wooden carriage which had enjoyed a particular affinity to these strange creatures called horses. Big four legged things that did not look at all boat-worthy. And through it all there had been cat-hedral.

Every time I stroked Cat now, or when Cat sat on me, I was able to relax into the gentle cadence of the life of the cat-hedral that it seemed to represent. I discovered it had been a place of emotion, laughter & happiness as well as sadness & fear. But most of all, reverence. For what, I could not tell.

I missed connecting with human consciousness directly of course, but truthfully I was scared. Scared of the loneliness, and that awful foreboding comment: “What.. have.. you.. done?”.

Leaning down I went to stroke Cat again, for comfort more than anything else. Cat had become more playful and this time it rolled over with its legs in the air, looking mischevious and cheeky. I was just about to get involved with the playfight when I noticed a white patch of fur in an unusual... but familiar shape. I had seen this shape before, both in my journeys into these connections, and in some of the sketches. I grabbed my pile of drawings and rifled through. Yes, there it was on a building, and there again on the side of a vehicle.

What did it mean. What was this omen, and why was it apparent in the markings of my cat?

Pentober Day 014 - Dust

That evening I sat in my pilot’s cabin to think about what this sign in my cats fur could mean, and how it related to everything I had seen so far. I would normally have asked the computer, but it had been less specific with its comments of late, and we had fallen out.

As I lounged in my little chair, with my thick blanket about my knees I let my eyes relax into the middle distance. My lamp was casting a nice glow across my bureau, and dust was gently settling through the light beams. Dust was an odd thing, it had a habit of appearing as if from nowhere. Where did it actually come from? I watched the particles in the light, floating about like grains of sand in the water. They had a mesmerizing effect that was oddly settling.

My mind drifted to the matter of the last few weeks. I had come into contact with so many different strands of consciousness at this point, of people, of buildings, of trees, vehicles and bridges. And of course that ominous voice from the unknown depths. All of these things floated about in the ocean like dust, and within the patterns it created, it showed a timeline of a world I had never known. This logo was the top most layer of dust. It didn’t exist in the past. When I worked down through the conscius strand of the cat-hedral, the logo only appeared nearer the surface of the water. Did the depth of the water literally translate into time? And if so, why was this omen only in the very top layer.

I reflected on that question about the dust in my cabin once more. Where did it keep coming from? And yet, this ocean... there was no more dust being created. It accumulated and grew over hundreds, if not thousands of years, and then suddenly it stopped. All that was left, all that existed, was an ocean… And me. Myself, my boat, and the ocean was all that was left?

Did this unusual sign have something to do with it?

I knew the only way I was going to get more answers was to go back in and follow these psychic strands of consciousness back down into the depths of the sea that surrounded me, butI had to know.

Moments later, I was down at my computer as it scanned with its orb one of my drawn images.

“What can you tell me about this sign?” I typed. A few seconds passed, and then its familiar scrawl began to write on the screen.

Pentober Day 015 - Grave

So the symbol was a symbol logo for a company. I stared at the word company for a while and still didn’t divine much meaning. I typed to the computer, ‘what is a company’. The computer clicked and clacked for a while and then its response was etched across the screen.

“According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a book that’s purpose was to define words, it describes a company in this context as ‘an association or corporated body formed to engage in trade or industry, typically having a legal identity distinct from that of its members’. In this case the company was a bio tech company that eventually grew to have many subsidiaries under its corporate umbrella”.

I blinked stupidly at the computer and wondered what half of the words meant. The computer, as if sensing my confusion continued.

“In summary it was a group of people who traded objects and services for money”.

I had heard of this money before, it seemed like something similar to the wind that pushed against my boats sails. It was how everything worked, and everything needed it. Another thing - much like this ‘company logo’ - that existed no longer. I had often wondered how something so fundamental and natural to the world could just cease to exist. I liked to try and imagine what money looked like, perhaps it was invisible, like the air?

Tired of the gloominess of my below decks, I decided to take my education upstairs. As if in response the barometer chimed, alerting me to a presence that needed sketching.

As I stood on the deck, pencil & paper in hand, I cast my mind out into the ocean. I was getting quite well practiced at this now and was able to skim the surface for signs of consciousness. There were so many connections just below the surface, but above the surface was a graveyard. All I could catch were glimpses, snatched memories & feelings that lived fleetingly inside my mind. In many of these memories the logo was present. Interesting. It had existed right until the end. I wondered, if this ocean surface was a graveyard, had this company dug the grave?

Pentober Day 016 - Mausoleum

Skimming over the graveyard of the ocean was a strange experience. Below the surface I caught glimpses of all kinds of consciousnesses. But none of them really spoke to the kind of entity that would have drawn the attention of my barometer. I took a bit of a mental step back and rested on my boat rail. Cat came purring up to me, rubbing its jaw against my arm. Suddenly Cats ears perked up and it made a little chirrup sound, staring intently into the distance just to the right of the bow. Cat’s eyes were focussed and unwavering, but then it suddenly jumped onto the deck and ran into the cabin, its tail low, almost fearful. Surprised, I focussed my mind on where the cat had been looking and there it was, a huge presence that towered up above the ocean. I grabbed up my pencil and paper, closed my eyes and began to sketch in earnest.

Its size was astounding! I sketched the top first which took up nearly a whole page, so I set the page out on the deck and grabbed a second sheet to keep sketching. The building kept going down page after page, by now I would have assumed boredom, but an energy kept pulling me down further with an insatiable attitude. As I got to the bottom of the building the space opened up & was suddenly aglow with an energy the size of which I had never beheld before. It was difficult to render it in detail it was so bright. I ran into the pilot’s cabin and grabbed an F pencil, rarely used due to how light in tone it was, and sped back with Cat following.

As I sketched out the glowing structure, which appeared to be an intricate web of wires, cat began to get tetchy, pawing and hissing at the drawing. “What’s up little buddy?” I asked. Reaching up to stroke its soft head. When my hand made contact, I was suddenly transported into Cats vision and saw a room full of tall machines, lit up with small flashing lights. Fans in every one of them, keeping them cool. But there was something else. They pulsed with billions & billions of souls. This wasn’t just a room, it was a mausoleum!

Pentober Day 017 - Asylum

The drawings that laid on his bed pulsed. In the dim light of the cabin they seemed to glow and writhe, though there was no actual light to be perceived. On top of that, his brain was on fire. It was as if discovering this room of souls meant that he could feel every human fingernail, every animal’s claw, every object’s friction riding roughshod over the edge of his skull. The tiny pricks of locked away consciousness trapped in this room had become aware of him too, and were hungry for something new and alive to leech off. They tugged at his thoughts and ripped at his feelings like predators, and it was driving him insane. He had been introduced to the asylum and the inmates were excited and thirsty to welcome him into their fold.

Cat tried to rub against his leg, to sit in his lap, to purr on his chest. It was showing him love, but he couldn’t touch it. It felt too far away. Like the compassion was reaching to him from across a vast canyon. He buried his head in his hands and started scratching his head and pulling his hair, begging it to stop. In a moment of lucidity, he wondered what he had done to deserve this. The question led to an action.

Pulling himself to the computer he typed one word. “Help”. The cogs and wheels of the mechanical computer clicked and whirred, and then after a minute the familiar handwriting appeared written across the screen. “Your answers, and your relief are down there”.

A panel opened up in the floor next to him and out of a billow of steam & humidity something started to rise out of the floor. It hissed as if it was touching air for the first time, vapours rose from its skin. It was human shaped, but bulky, and its pelt was tough and dense, almost like a sail doth. The computer whirred and clicked once more.

“This is a diving suit, it will let you breathe in the water, you must dive down to that room in the ocean, you must unlock it, and in so doing, save yourself.”

Now that the man looked more closely, he saw that it was a suit. Something to wear whilst in the water. Fear gripped him, he had never left the boat before, let alone been in the water. But then his itchy brain flared again and he knew he had no choice.

Pentober Day 018 - Ritual

Every day on this boat had an aspect of the ritual about it. My recent brush with companionship had highlighted just how alone I was, and so I think I had subconsciously made a method of every job to help keep myself stable and not dwelling on the emptiness of my life. Stoking the fire in the stove had been a deeply mindful distraction. Tending to my lamp had been a silent vigil against encroaching thoughts. Managing my sails, applying anti-rust ointment on the boat hull, weaving ropes, cooking meals, polishing wood, & even the sketches had all been in the form of a prayer that kept my mind from straying into darkness.

Now, with my mind being torn in to by the energy of that submerged room, and with the shadow of my impending dive looming over me, I once again retreated into a ritualised way of putting on this underwater suit I had been given.

At first it had been a confusing mess of straps & zips, but it was slowly starting to take shape around my body. The fit of it was nearly skin-tight, as if it had been made for someone exactly my shape & size. I tried to not read too much into that. Instead I focused on the little things. The feeling of a clasp as it gripped and tugged at a strap that then drew the material close to my skin. The little click it made as its leverage clamped down and secured itself. The material had a smell unlike anything I had experienced before, possessing a tang that was felt right at the back of the nose.

Cat watched from the bed, looking at me like I was a gallery piece, full of interest at all the new sounds and sights. I wondered at cats intelligence. Did it know what I was about to do?

I applied the large tanks to my back, and the weight of them pressed me into the floor. How could something filled with air weigh so much? I left out a bit of extra food for Cat and quietly put the boat into a rough approximation of autopilot. Then, for the first time ever, I dropped the anchor and watched as that great lump of metal dragged a thick rope down into the water. Trying hard to not notice how much rope the water consumed.

Pentober Day 019 - Shroud

I stood on my deck for what seemed like hours. Cat watched for a while, but on realising not much was happening, sat down and started cleaning its paws with its tongue. When it got to cleaning its back paws its leg shot right into the air like a mast. The amusement of it temporarily distracted me from my leap of faith.

I had never been in the water before, I had never needed to go in to that black undulating mass. And now, any action from Cat served as a lifeline, preserving me from doing the unthinkable. By the same token, I couldn’t bear the thought of cat watching me leave, potentially abandoning it. I waited until it eventually wandered before putting one foot went over the edge. My body tipped beyond my ability to hold myself back, and suddenly I was consumed.

Bubbles erupted up around me, shrouding my vision for a moment. My air packs on my back, that I had presumed due to their weight would force me deeper underwater, instead kept me perfectly in situe, suspended in this dark and cold world like a ghost. The psychic energies present in the ocean were stronger now that I was in it. Different presences brushed up against me like strange creatures that could not be perceived by anything other than my mind. A lamp on my suit fluttered alive and a small ambient light seeped into the gloom, illuminating a small core of dusty water around me.

The anchor’s rope was just a few feet to my right, so I tried walking to it. My movements didn’t have quite the desired effect, but a few experimental kicks and flaps gave me some direction and I was able to grab the thick rope in my gloved hand. I started to pull myself down the rope, against the better judgement of all the cells in my body screaming at me to go up to the air. Hand over hand i descended with my body trailing behind.

Soon, through my helmet window, I lost all sense of direction. Up and down lost all meaning. I was terrified of the water droplets that percolated on my visor, before eventually realising it was my breath rather than a deathly leak in the suit. But then I was terrified in general. Hours seemed to pass in this slow monstrous monotonous descent. There was no life to be seen anywhere. Just the rope, the psychic presences, and me in this dark shrouded abyss.

Pentober Day 020 - Revenant

The first change in the view as I descended was when a knot in the rope slowly resolved into the dull sheen of my boat’s anchor, and then a moment later into an entire floor of something I had only seen once or twice in my life. Rock. Bare rock of a dark grey hue as far as the light touched. I had thought that this stuff had been incredibly rare, at least as far as I had seen from my boat, but I was wrong. Rock was in abundance, just submerged.

I reached out to touch it. Through my gloved finger it felt hard and slick, with ridges and bumps all over it. No dust rose from its surface despite the particles that seemed to be ever present in the water. It was cleaner than the polished metal of my lamp. I looked around and saw nothing else. A panic set in and I wondered where I needed to go next. I stupidly hadn’t considered the idea that my destination wouldn’t be obvious.

A light suddenly began to flash on my suit, bright red in the dark, like a warning light. Panic began to rise even further as I started mentally scanning my body to work out if the light meant that I was leaking, but my mind was suddenly diverted by a sister light in the distance, flashing green at exactly the same frequency as my suit. The uncanny coincidence was too painfully obvious to be an accident, it must be the vault I was looking for.

I wondered at these moments of fatalistic dread. The computer on my boat who seemed to know too much, a suit that seemed to have been designed for exactly my body shape and size, and now this, a direct glowing link to my destination. Was I just a puppet in someone else’s game? The thought caused a new warm current of conviction to grow through me.

‘Well, whatever the case, I am going to find out.’ I muttered to myself as I began to swim towards the distant green light, leaving the safety of my boats anchor behind in the dark.

As I moved along the slick rock floor I noticed that it was starting to become more loose and broken, with individual shards of rock littering the floor. The light slowly grew closer, and I suspected I was moving up a subtle incline. I felt a faint tug from my chest where the red light still flashed and I stopped paddling for a moment. I should have slowed and stopped, but I kept moving. It was pulling me in, whatever it was. I tried swimming backwards but my progress forward remained resolute, insistent. I was now a slave to whatever laid ahead.

The feeling of impotence came back in full force and I submitted. My legs and arms both stopped struggling and I simply watched as I glided over the rock strewn floor. In an odd sort of way, the act of surrender made it all quite peaceful. The endless dark around me seemed to hide nothing but fine grained dust and the occasional psychic presence. The water was an okay temperature whilst in the suit, and the glow of my lamp, interspersed with the flashing red light created a calming effect. I was but another piece of floating dust in the current and only the ocean knew my destiny.

The peace, however, was short lived. I started to sense a growing presence, at first distant, but speeding towards me.

In the distance the green light resolved itself into a strange entryway light that illuminated a stark rock wall, erupting out of the ground and disappearing up into the dark.

The mighty presence drew near and the water temperature grew.

The entrance way was made of a metal, it was door shaped and seemed to be human height.

The presence arrived and gripped my entire body and mind in a psychic clutch. I convulsed internally, sick with the pain, but my body was stiff, held like a vice.

The door began to slide open and the area around me was bathed in an intense white light unlike anything I had seen before. It nearly blinded me through my helmet.

The water around me seethed and the temp was almost scalding. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse this psychic revenant plunged into my mind with the intensity of an explosion, threatening to rip my head in two. I felt the edges of a presence that was larger than the ocean. I was filled with visions of a universal lifetime, magma rolled across rocks, asteroids pummelled me, whole ecosystems grew out of me, beasts of every kind walked over and through me. I was the world, the world was me, and the world was clearly angry. Every thought that came through the presence was a million searing pokers in my mind, but the message was clear.

“RELEASE THEM ALL”.

The presence let go and I softly glided into the bright white light before I fell unconscious. The final image of a warped creature glowing in an impossibly bright world was etched in my mind, like a drawing on a piece of paper.

Pentober day 021 - Wraith

Before I opened my eyes I could already tell my situation had changed. The intensely muffled sounds of the water were now replaced with sharp, direct alarms that assaulted my ears. Gravity too had reasserted itself, and my air packs were once again, extremely heavy.

I cracked open my eyelids blearily and found myself in a relatively dry cavern. Bare black rock below me rose up gently to a plateau which had a windowed door in it. Behind me was a steel air lock door and a small pool. This room must be one they flood and then vent. I shuffled up onto my behind and started to gently undo the straps of the bulky tanks weighing me down. The release as each shoulder strap let go of me was such a relief. Staggering to my feet I walked up the rocky incline towards the door.

A large bang echoed from behind me, dislodging some small bits of rubble from the ceiling. A voice like thunder permeated my mind. “HURRY, RELEASE THEM!!” I shook uncontrollably at the memory of the presence who had arrested me just before. The things I had seen when it posessed me were like distant memories, but small flashes splintered my mind. With that thing outside, it was clear my only way was forward.

When I neared the upper door, it slid open for me with a steamy hiss, as if expecting me. Behind the door was a small room, in the centre of which was a chair of such incredible cleanliness I did not know how to describe it. The material was completely unique. Shiny and glossy looking, and molded into strange unnaturally curvy shapes.

The door behind me hissed shut and before I could go any further a presence erupted into the air and hovered in front of me. I was confused, because for all of its glowing orange geometry, and impossible complexity, it was visible. Literally visible, and not just a shadow on my mind’s eye. It pulsed as if clearing its throat to speak, and a voice boomed out of the walls.

“CATASTROPHIC RELEASE IS PROHIBITED. THE INTEGRATION PROTOCOL MUST BE FOLLOWED. ONE AT A TIME. YOU ARE THE KEY.”

It seemed the battle lines had been drawn, I was caught between two gods, a wraith and a revenant.

Pentober Day 022 - Curse

The second god seemed on the surface to be very calm and collected. Its cold and structured demeanour made me wonder if it was alive in the strictest sense of the word, in posession of a heart and soul? It gave the impression of aliveness. Maybe that was enough?

The wraith, as I had deemed it, led me to that chair and asked me to sit. The seat was comfier than anything I had known but there seemed little time for enjoying this luxury, for as soon as I sat down, a wrap-around desk rose up, covered in tiny buttons that went well beyond the scope of the keyboard in my boat’s computer. Next, four large screens flickered into life in the air in front of me, and as they came to life I at last saw something familiar. The logo! The one that had been in my cat’s fur & littered throughout the memories of the ocean.

The wraith, with its impossibly complex fluctuating shapes floated towards, and then melded with the screens, transforming into the appearance of a human man. A tear rolled down my cheek. For all the human presences I had connected to, I had never actually seen another person with my own eyes.

“WELCOME TO ARK FACILITY GAMMA” it spoke to me, or should I say ‘he spoke to me?’

“Who are you?” I stammered. It felt as though I was making contact with an entirely new species for the first time.

“’I AM YOUR GUIDE. FIRST I WILL INTRODUCE YOU TO YOUR TASK, AND THEN ONCE THE PROCESS HAS BEGUN, I WILL REVEAL TO YOU THE PURPOSE OF THE ARK PROJECT, MY IDENTITY, YOUR IDENTITY, AND THE ULTIMATE END-GOAL FOR BOTH OF US. - FIRST...’ The man in the screen disappeared and a box appeared. “ENTER YOUR NAME, AND CREATE A NEW PASSWORD USING THE KEYPAD IN FRONT OF YOU”.

The keypad glowed for a moment as if to indicate its identity. Knowing what the keypad was, however, was not the main problem. What was my name? I typed, ‘Man’ and for my password I chose ‘Cat’.

What followed was a deep instructional process that in total took about twenty minutes, at the end of which, a psychic presence, a soul, was released from the facility and into the ocean. This process, this curse, was to be repeated for every. single. soul. Eventually, over the next hour and ten minutes after releasing a further three souls, I asked the man in the screen, “how many souls are here?”

“’CURRENT SOUL COUNT - 11,074,332,021.’ I had no ability to understand that number, but I knew it was a lifetime’s work. I thought of Cat alone on my boat high above me.

“Can I leave?” I asked. The reply was quick and simple.

“No.”

Pentober Day 023 - Screech

Time seems to have lost meaning, and I have completely lost count of how many souls I have freed.

For a while it was interesting being here. While I worked at this monotonous task, I could talk to the wraith and it would tell me things and show me things. I saw images and videos of how the world used to be before the cataclysm and it was beautiful.

The wraith tried explaining what the cataclysm was, but it was beyond my ability to understand. It described it as a - ‘psychic schism, as humanitys break from nature and towards a world of isolation continued, the weave of the planets panpsychic consciousness weakened and eventually tore. Reality was ripped apart and the energy holding it together was scattered.’

My interpretation was that the world had been real because people had believed in it and cared for it, and when that belief and care was lost, the world was no longer real. Like a dream I guess?

I tried asking more personal questions like, ‘where did I come from?’ ‘What is the ocean if it’s not real like the world before was?’ ‘Why cant I remember my childhood?’

The wraith tended to avoid those questions and we would get into a standoff. I would refuse to work. The wraith would refuse to feed me. I would remind the wraith it needed me, and the game would continue. The longest standoff lasted for what felt like days. Though it was impossible to tell down here.

Eventually I started to get small tidbits from the wraith and I started to understand its character more, sensing its emotions and motivations. One thing became clear, it was scared of the revenant outside, the one that had momentarily possessed me outside.

An uneasy truce seemed to exist between the two and I sensed I had something to do with that. My existence somehow acted as a bridge between them that they both respected just enough to not fall into all out war with each other over the contents of this arc.

Sometimes I could feel the revenant just outside the airlock, a terrifying presence. It was almighty, but I sensed it held a deep unsatiated grief that turned it to resentment and a furious anger. Today it came again and was particularly upset. I felt the words it was projecting rise up in my chest and boom in my skull. “TOO SLOW”. But this time the truce was not respected. A giant impact clamoured against the wall outside followed by an awful screech, both of metal, but also I suspected from the revenant. Alarms blared and the lights in this room flickered and died, plunging me into darkness. All except for my diving suit’s lamp and the glow of the terminal where I worked.

The assault had begun.

Pentober Day 024 - Teeth

The wraith had been quick to fight back in its own way. It roved about the room in its orb like form, and sometimes disappeared through the wall behind me. For me, the terrifying words of the revenant outside still reverberated in my chest. I went straight back to the chair and started releasing souls as quicky as the computer would let me. I suspected that even if I was able to speed each release along by just a few minutes, it would still be ‘too slow’. But I persisted anyway, hoping that if it came to a showdown between these two gods they might both be satisfied with my efforts.

What I would give to be back on my boat now with that glorious, peaceful little cat. In the toxic dark of this room, where time had no meaning, my mind wandered back to Cat, and to all the different souls I had connected with and collected in sketches. I thought of my pencils, each with its own name and felt a ball of emotion rise up in me. I missed my pencils.

The wraith flitted past me a number of times, sometimes talking to itself. It too was scared of what sat outside.

As if to remind us of its constant threatening presence, the revenant would bang and shake the entire underwater facility. Sounds cut through, like claws grinding into the rock walls outside, tearing at its obstinance. Sounds like teeth, biting, bending and gnawing at the metal entryway, trying to gain entry.

I took to wearing my diving helmet again, as well as my oxygen tanks, despite their weight, certain that the revenant would get in through the entrance at any moment. The image of that moment played on-repeat in my mind. Water rushing in, picking me up and slamming my ragdoll body into the far wall, breaking me against the stones.

At one point I tried asking the wraith what was happening. What was it doing? Its manner gave me get the impression it was annoyed at being asked.

“DEFENDING. FIGHTING BACK. PUTTING UP FIREWALLS!” It shouted angrily as it passed. Firewalls sounded rather deadly and I hoped they would work, but I did wonder what any amount of fire could do against an ocean of water flooding in. With nothing left to do but keep on working and worrying, I carried on releasing souls, one by one, in the dark.

Around me a battle of life and death between gods raged on, threatening to end it all.

Pentober Day 025 - Bloodstain

The battle waged on, firewalls went up. Firewalls, I learned with time, meant to protect the computers brain; rather than a literal wall of fire. The revenant tore them down just as fast either way.

Meanwhile, with my diving suit still on, I released souls in a slow endless stream. After a few weeks the wraith in charge of the arc seemed to forget about me and the fact that I required food or sleep. I would have to remind it sometimes, and each time it seemed to grow more annoyed, as if I was the least of its concerns.

Sometimes, to forget how cold or hungry I was, I would connect with each freed soul as it escaped from the arc. I saw so many things that way. There were souls not only of humans, but of everything else you could imagine. Flowers, rabbits, cars, tables, cutlery. It seemed as though anything that had enjoyed a form in the world before this one, was trapped in the arc. Each soul taught me something new, and in time I began to perceive their co-dependancy. How the fork appreciated the table for raising it up. How the human appreciated the fork for helping them eat. How the car appreciated the human for giving it direction in the world, so that it could fulfill its purpose. The world before appeared to me like a blanket, where every soul was a thread that held the other threads in one cohesive shape called the world. So what had gone wrong. What had caused the threads to come apart? Was it really just human disassociation from the weave of the world that did it, when there was so much else here holding it together? It seemed to me as though the world had been held together by respect and love. Not this hate fuelled rage that swirled around me with the wraith and revenant.

A gigantic bang pulled me out of these thoughts and my connections. I was slammed forward head first into the console and my eyes became hazy. The wraith flitted about screaming “A BREACH”. When I pushed myself back into the chair I felt a trickle of warmth and that familiar iron tang of blood as it rolled from my nose and breached my lips. Looking at the inside of the mask, there was blood spattered everywhere. I was suddenly filled with a rage. I couldn’t die here. On one side of me was a wraith and on the other side, a warped revenant, a slither of a planet that had once been.

But the revenant was not at all like what I had come to understand of the planet from these freed souls. I needed answers. I needed it all to stop.

Pentober Day 026 - Cloak

I began executing my plan in secret. The new direction I had discovered propelled me through many days of uncertainty. It was hard to tell how much time passed as I diligently went about the task of releasing souls. But now, I felt as though I was in charge. With every soul that was freed from the Arc computer, I reached out to it with the same emotions that they had taught me. Feelings like love, respect, and appreciation were like magnets to them. I nourished them with new thoughts. I showed them memories of my old named pencils and introduced them to the Cat. I let them touch and play with the feelings those memories produced. They warmed to me like I was a stove fending off the cold of the loneliness they had endured, being trapped inside this arc. Eventually the rapport I built up with all of them was familial. I extended to them the question,

“When the time comes, can you protect me?”

The time came sooner than I would have liked. The revenant was now in the hatchway scratching at the inside door. When I took the opportunity to look through the doors little glass window, I could see only an empty space where the door to the ocean had been, and yet the water did not come flooding in. Instead it sat there as if pressed up against an invisible barrier.

The emptiness of the room was a misnomer, however, much like my sketches before, the thing that was there could not be seen except for in the mind’s eye. The subconscious could perceive the Revenant where the conscious mind could not. And what the subconscious mind perceived was terrifying. Rage that had built up over thousands of years. When I touched its presence, even for the shortest moment, I felt the swell of tsunamis, the horror of hurricanes, the desolation of droughts. All encompassed by this one vast planetary consciousness. The fear gripped me again, but in that fear I sensed something else. Confidence. I knew something that neither the revenant nor the wraith knew. Neither of them were complete. They were both missing something, and that something I had decided was me, and my new found family. The revenant as if sensing my new found autonomy for the first time raged against the world, against the walls of this facility, and against its own machinations.

The door gave way and the Wraith panicked, its orb like structure suddenly grew solid looking and it retreated to the furthest corner of the room. The Revenant swooped towards me to possess me, but this time it could not. It’s swipe clanged against a barrier that it did not understand, a sound that echoed through the room. I had built around me a cloak. A cloak made of of love, of warmth, and of appreciation. The souls of the world protected me.

Pentober Day 027 - Bone

My eyes were clamped shut in fear for a moment. I had sensed the rage, the purpose, the single-minded pursuit of the revenant’s goals. It had rushed towards me, brushing past the wraith like it was mist, inconsequential, now lingering in the corner of the room, its glow faltering and its shapes bent & crooked.

The revenant slammed into my cloak repeatedly like an angry possessed animal, but my shield of souls held. I stood up and faced the revenant with closed eyes. In my mind’s eye I could see it, tall and gruesome. It had a deep penetrating pair of ferocious eyes wrapped up in a tangle of what I had come to understand were fragments of dead plants and trees.

I began my process again. I felt into my cloak for a soul, and then grabbing a rod of metal I started to sketch in the dust and debris that coated the floor. I drew the soul of the fork as it saw itself, on the table, and I channelled the appreciation that soul felt for being supported. I held that feeling in my chest and let it flow into every part of me, from my toes to my fingertips. I allowed that sense of gratefulness and love to suffuse me. And then with one mental whisper I let the forks soul in my cloak go. With a puff of light it glided towards the revenant and joined its body. Where the soul integrated itself into the revenant, there was a small glow before it faded into oneness.

As I had suspected, the revenant wasn’t whole, its own soul was meant to be one with everything else, and it had been amputated from it. Everything had been removed. Cut down to the bone so that all was left was this insurmountable, catastrophic ball of rage. At first the revenant didn’t seem to notice the new addition, but my conviction felt justified.

I tried another soul, this time I felt the presence of a small animal and i started to sketch it on the floor in the dust. I couldn’t tell what animal it was, but its memories spoke of the warmth of leaves in winter, the protection of trees, of the food it recieved. It made me think of Cat and for a moment I became emotional. But quickly I realised that this emotion was to my benefit. I harnessed it and channelled my own appreciation and adoration for little Cat, and layered it alongside the memories of the little creature whos soul I was in communion with. I sent this next soul again, it burst from my cloak and gently glided towards the revenant. Settling on the revenants skin, it gently and delicately amalgamated itself. Where they had touched, its bark-like skin glowed, just as before, but this time I sensed something else. A growth. I closed my eyes and felt the tangled presence of the world’s consciousness, and there, on its side, a leaf. A small, inconsequential leaf, but it meant everything to me.

The revenant appeared to notice it this time, and started to direct its attention towards me, less aggressively and with more caution. I reached out to another soul from my cloak and this time I connected with a human soul. I let its memory infuse me and I found exactly what I had hoped for, not only love & connection, but specifically within here I found a feeling that included the revenant directly. I was seeing flashes of a young female by a lake, surrounded by tall monolithic rocks. I started to sketch the scene in the dirt at my feet. There were mountains! I remembered them from my atlas on the boat. The female human took in a deep breath and I could feel it in my lungs. A sense of peace, warmth, and connection coursed through me. I could almost feel the lakeside sand under her feet. She had loved the world deeply, she had loved the soul of the Revenant. I layered onto this memory my own appreciation for a world that supported me, and again I sent her forth.

Where the soul touched the Revenant its rugged skin glowed once more, and something grew. A flower.

The Revenant wasn’t the only one in the room paying attention now. The Wraith had started to move closer. At first I was nervous that it might try & stop me, but instead it spoke to me.

“CHOOSE ME NEXT. PLEASE.”

Shocked, but reassured, I reached out to it with my mind. It moved closer and became one with my cloak, appearing as glowing strands of light that spun around me. I felt it in my mind and suddenly I was aware of everything. My head was sharply painful under the strain of the huge volume of information. I begged of it, ‘slow down, teach me at my own speed’. The pain lessened and it showed me a story.

Scientists from this large company, building the Arc facilities. There had been ten of them. They were scared for humanity and wanted to create something that might outlast humans destructive tendencies, something that might preserve Earth. They found a way to harbour the conciousnesses of the world around them. The scientists meant well, but they didn’t know what they were doing. Every soul they stored weakened the fabric of the world. Their best intentions led to the destruction of the conscious reality, the weave that held it all together, and they didn’t know they were doing it until it was too late. They planted a last protocol in the mainframe, a full human genome. I was their last hope. A child, to be born when the conditions were right, to help undo what they had done. The Wraith had been… my parent.

The Wraith finished its story, and I felt its presence leave my mind my mind leaving one last lingering thought, an instruction.

‘Be the conduit, channel them all’. And then, just like the other souls I had released, the glowing Wraith floated towards the Revenant and amalgamated with it. A glow erupted on its side and a whole bed of plants sprouted along its flank. A whisper was heard in the room...

“We are sorry, we never meant to hurt you, our dearest mother.”

Pentober Day 028 - Abyss

I stood still, eyes closed, and watched the glow from where the wraith and the revenant had come together, it still hadn’t faded. Its looming energy, so close to me, made me feel incredibly small. A god had come charging towards me and now stood over me, breathing heavily, as if deciding what to do with its prey. Its great abyssal eyes shined for a moment to where the glowing wound still lingered, and then just as slowly, it lowered its head and returned its gaze towards me again. But something in that moment had changed the quality of its stare. It felt more like I was being studied rather than examined.

It came closer and its seismic energy pushed up against my cloak of souls, pushing me backwards against the hard stone wall. Its rocks pushed gently into my back and then stopped. The Revenant could have easily crushed me, but it didn’t. The cold of the stone seeped into my skin, but it didn’t break my bones.

For a moment time and the world felt at a complete standstill, and I knew that only my choice to act would be the thing that got it started again. I needed to be the wind in this boat’s sails.

I chose trust.

Clenching my eyelids tight, I mentally whispered a request to the souls shielding me, “let it in, gently.” I felt the cloak parting, and with the same care as before the revenant leaned in closer. Its presence was warm, and then hot, and I felt blood rise in my mouth, a taste of iron on my tongue. I had always known I was nothing to its might, but the moment we connected humbled me in a way that was incomparable even to the ocean upon whose waters I had sailed my entire life. The vastness of this planetary consciousness threatened to break my mind and explode my body. The full raging grief of the planet poured into me. It was a bottomless abyss of grief that was deeper than the Arcs database and wider than four-thousand years. I accepted it. I shared in it. I became grief.

In that despair, caught between two minds, I saw the seeds I had planted a moment ago, three souls, like tiny plants in a vast desert. In that miniature oasis I stood firm and walked back through to the memory and the memories of my Cat. I planted my love for Cat in the sand. I watered that love with the memories I had gained from the Cat-hedral when we had connected. I sung songs for humans. I wept for them. I smiled in joy at the communities cat-hedral fostered, and I held it all in the gentle hug of the cat-hedral’s thick stone walls.

Then something else happened. A soul from my cloak appeared in this desert and planted itself in the sand next to mine and began to grow.

Pentober Day 029 - Shadow

I held within me three different realities. One reality was this desert I had constructed in my mind, a coping device to be able to maintain my own sanity as I merged consciousness with the Revenant. The second reality was the real reality. With my eyes open I could just about comprehend the room around me through my facemask, now completely submerged in water from the ocean that had been held back by the Revenant before.

My mask allowed me to see, but no oxygen seemed to flow from my air packs and into the breathing tube. I wondered how I was being sustained. I focussed on the revenant and felt a tingle all over my body, my skin was softly rippling as if in a strong wind. Could the revenant be feeding me air?

I looked about the now underwater room and it was lit up in a myriad of beautiful colours. Not only were we, the Revenant and I, slow pulsing rhythmic luminescence, but moving through the water were other souls glowing in an abundance of different colours. Reds, greens, blues, yellows, and colours I had never even seen before. The shadows in the room had retreated under this onslaught.

I closed my eyes and refocussed my mental spotlight on my desert again. At this point souls were channelling through me thick & fast. A stark difference to the ‘one soul every twenty-five minutes’ process from before. They were flowing much faster, so much so, that a beautiful landscape of plants and trees had grown up around me. My mind remembered descriptions of this phenomenon from my old boat atlas. A forest! I was in awe of it, I had always known of green, but never in my life could I have imagined so many shades of it. And the smells were intoxicating. The smell of life was beautiful.

I began to notice that not all of the souls were coming from my channeling, souls were also falling from the sky and planting themselves in the ground from the outside. These must be the souls I had been seeing coming from the ocean. The ones that I had spent all my life sketching. It was amazing to see them re-joining their brothers and their sisters.

Finally, I connected with my third reality, that of the Revenant itself. I could only touch its mind gently, for fear of being overwhelmed by its vastness, but as time passed I sensed small changes. The anger and grief abated an iota, the tempestuous visions began to calm. As everything came together, a shadow began to lift from the beast, a shadow that had haunted the Revenant for thousands of years

Pentober Day 030 - Mire

The digital mire of the Arc archive and its soul inhabitants was seemingly endless. There is a certain paralysis of the mind that happens when you see a number written that is too large to comprehend. But it is quite different when you begin to act as the conduit for that same number. Eleven-trillion souls. The consciousnesses of an entire world. Not just humans, everything was being dragged up out of their digital cell blocks and being set free, to become whole again.

I started to feel a weariness set in. Not of the body & bones, in reality I was quite immobile, leant against a rock wall. But my mind was fatigued holding together three different realities and allowing souls to pass through me. I wondered how much longer I could really keep this up for. Would I break before I got through even half of them, would I still be... me?

I thought of Cat and wondered too if it would also return to the revenant life all the other souls. The two of us gone, but a whole new world might be born out of that. A tear rolled down my cheek on the inside of my facemask. I felt bittersweet, having just for the first time seen within my mind desert turned forest, what a world outside of an endless ocean and a lidded sky looked like.

I reached out to the revenant with my thoughts. I hadn’t tried this before, but now that it was being transformed, I felt less scared of its anger. I composed my mind around a singular thought.

‘Please help me’.

The revenant’s giant glare, lost in the wonder of its re-unification with its children, turned like the planet that it was and refocussed on me. Its gaze softened and I felt a word arise in my mind.

‘Trust?’

I didn’t know what else I could do, so I nodded.

As the revenant possessed me fully, that memory of the feeling of being gripped rose back up into my body and held me in its infathomable grasp. I was lifted into the air and dangled in the middle of the room. My diving suit melted into nothingness and my mask dissolved, leaving me suspended in mid-air like I had just been born again.

Souls started to flow faster & faster through me. The monitor where I had worked showed the number of souls left in the archive decrease at an increasingly rapid rate. 10 million left... 5 million... 1 million. 0. The screen flickered and went dark, and I collapsed on the floor, released from its grip. The revenant stood resplendent in front of me, visible even with my naked eyes now. And all around it... an aura of light glowed. A fierce, blue light poured through the door, and beyond... I glanced once, and then fell into unconsciousness.

Pentober Day 031 - Crypt

When I awoke, my first thought was disbelief. I couldn’t imagine how I was still alive. Much how this Arc had been a crypt for those trapped souls, I had felt sure it would also be where I would be put to rest. And yet here I was, bruised and worn to a nub, yes, like a pencil that had been sharpened right til the bitter end. But I was still absolutely, tangibly here.

I grasped the stone door of the arc in my hands and pushed myself up onto my knees. The revenant was leaving the room. It was a rich tapestry of constantly flowing aliveness. Impossibly complex, so much so that any attempt to try and study it simply made you cross-eyed. Its abyssal eyes, like deep cracks in the rock, turned towards me. I felt a tug in my heart as it communicated to me with my own feelings. I had to follow it.

The facility was now completely quiet, dark, and still. A crypt in the truest sense, a place where its occupants had passed on. My feet, naked, shuffled out of the room and through the first door onto bare cold rock, slick from having been just recently submerged. I have to shade my eyes with my hand, because the light coming through the next door is so intensely bright. I step out warily, aware that it hadn’t been that long ago that this had been a dense, dark and terrifying ocean. What I saw instead was surreal.

I was stood on a rocky outcropping bigger than any I had come across. Before me was an ocean that stretched to the furthest horizon. This was a new concept for me. The boat had in the past, always been enclosed in a distant bowl of mist that forever obscured the edges of the world. Now there was a dstinct and distant edge to all of it. I wondered what lay beyond. But the thing that both scared and delighted me equally was the place where that horizon line met a new sky. So all encompassing, broad, and pale blue. It was so expansive that I feared looking up at it properly, in case gravity suddenly shifted in reverse and sent me falling into its endlessness. The lid of the world had well and truly been taken off.

Where it had all been thick gray & green fluff in the past, there were now just a few little white clouds floating weightlessly in that blue blanket. In the center of it all was an object I couldn’t look at directly it was so bright. A warm lamp in the sky, bright enough to illuminate as far as the eye could see, and its light felt nourishing on my skin.

I walked to the edge of the rocks where the ocean now lapped up against them. What I saw astounded me. The ocean had always been completely empty of anything but souls. Now there were plants, so colourful and varied in every shape & texture conceivable. And in amongst all of that were creatures that seemed to flow through the water, making my earlier attempts at swimming look utterly foolish. I watched it all for such a long time, as fascinated by the life as I was by the waters clarity and colour. You could literally see into it, and all around it, light rippled and cast rays that peeked into cracks in the rocks below.

After a while I wondered if there were any souls left in here like there had been in the past, or had they all been subsumed by the Revenant. Closing my eyes I reached out with my mind, and what I saw was not just a few souls, but all of them, as far as the mind could conceive.

So this is what the revenant had needed to be whole. It wasn’t about possessing them all, it just wanted to free them. Because this is the revenant. The world and all of its contents was its body, heart and mind. What I had seen, the thing that had possessed me was just the metaphor made real. A mirage hinting at something much bigger. I smiled at that thought.

That smile, however, was immediately surpassed as I sensed in my minds eye a soul more familiar than all of the rest. CAT!

My eyes snapped open and scanned in the direction I had sensed it. There it was, my boat, anchored and at sea, floating there like nothing had happened. I jumped eagerly in to the cool water and rejoiced at how nice it felt on my skin. Inspired by these ocean creatures I tried to replicate the way they moved with my legs, and swam as fast as I could.

Eventually I pulled myself up over the side of the boat and onto my deck. Cat wasn’t immediately apparent so I hurried about looking for it. I entered the pilots cabin, it felt suspended in time. My stove was still there in the cabin, and my dear pencils in their pot. I ran downstairs. My computer was still there too, and on its screen were the words ‘welcome back’.

Beyond that charming welcome though, on my bed, was cat, stretching as it woke up from a slumber. I ran over and leaped on the bed, cuddling and stroking its soft little body. Its little rumble fired up and went into overdrive. I cried thick tears of happiness as peace and calm washed through my body. I had missed this little creature so much. I had not dared hope it would still be here. As it rubbed up against me, over and over with its head. I felt missed and wanted to, like my life mattered, if only to this little Cat.

Minutes passed in perfect bliss. Suddenly, however, my boat jolted and rocked violently, as if it was about to be turned over. Picking up cat, I stepped outside to see what caused the commotion. The Revenant was there on my bow, looking disproportionately gigantic on my deck. It looked to me, and Cat who was sat in my enshrouding arms. Before it was my sketchbook, and my pencil - the 2B, ‘Bert’. I walked over and the revenant pulled at my body once again, communicating through my feelings. I gently put Cat down, who proceeded to go over and rub up against the Revenant as if it was just another person. Picking up Bert, I began to sketch. I let my mind lead, as I had done countless times before. My pencil scratched across the page, and soon, I looked down at a picture.

There, on the page, was a distant shoreline, a small plant was growing in bare soil and rock. Next to the plant was me, my cat, and… Another person. I gasped audibly at what I saw. The person looked different, with a body that seemed to deviate in a few ways from my own. I sensed a strangeness about them, but also an affection I couldnt begin to describe.

Underneath the picture, in a script that I couldnt read, but within whose meaning was instantly clear, was the words of the Revenant.

“All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. Winter has passed, and Spring is here. You have earnt your name. You are not just ‘the man’ anymore, you are Adam. It is time to sail forth. Help them.”

Welcome back to the Atlas.

This is the second entry in our ongoing series, Raw & Unedited, where we look inside the engine room of the creative process. I have mentioned before that I write two pages of my story, ‘the strings of us’, in my notebook every day, stream of consciousness. This is the result of that.

Last time, we met the old mentor, Jun'ip, as he reflected on his brilliant but troubled student, Cash'ya. Today, we join their conversation as Jun'ip attempts to soothe Cash'ya's distress not with logic, but with a story, a foundational myth from the rabbit archives with a surprisingly dark twist. Let's dive in.

Italicized Text: Passages I'm reflecting on.

Author's Note: My real-time editorial thoughts and plans for the next draft.

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The story continues…

Cash'ya's voice became the entirety of my focus again, and her string continued its slightly discordant hum.

"You are circling the same point my dear," I said gently. "Your frustration, can you pin point it for me please, rather than walking around it?"

She looked at me a bit sharply, as if to reproach the direct question, but my gentle smile softened her eyes and she bowed her head slightly.

"Elias," she muttered, her ears twitching with frustration. She looked about herself as if searching for something, a distraction, or maybe a solution to the magma buildup she could feel surging up inside of her.

"GAH! Frustration doesn't even cover it, it's despair! How am I to compile a unified history - our truth - alongside a man who believes truth is just an aggregate of verifiable facts? He reads and listens to our stories and sees only metaphor and myth! It's just the way humans are. All logic and no feeling!” Cash’ya’s disdain was palpable.

“I mean, come on, he patted my head at the meeting, literally and figuratively." Cash'ya squirmed at the thought of it.

Author's Note: Cash'ya's anger here is aimed at Elias, but this is only the surface itch. The real, deeper fear is self-involved. She isn't truly afraid of Elias, but of what he represents: a challenge to the core values that have formed her ego. Her identity and her reputation among her peers are built on a specific worldview, and Elias's fact-based approach threatens to dismantle it.

Editing Plan: To show Jun'ip's observational skill, I'll add a specific physical 'tell' that he notices. As she speaks, he'll observe that her gaze shifts in a very particular, human-like way, looking in one direction when stating her frustration (the truth), but looking in another when trying to justify it (the insecurity). This grounds his intuition in observable details and reinforces her "human-like" internal conflict by displaying a very human tell.

I sensed then that this was only the surface itch. She had a lot more going on underneath. I decided to play along for a bit.

"He has also held up your work for all to see," I countered. "His first book... The Rabbit Awakening. A human trying to understand our origin."

"Exactly!" she retorted. "He studied it, he didn't feel it. He wrote about Que'rup’s awakening as a sociological phenomenon, not the moment the universe first SANG to one of us. He will do the same to the root of our history as well. How can I work with that?"

I decided to ignore the question. My job was to help Cash'ya emotionally, not pragmatically. She would be quite capable of figuring that conundrum out on her own. No, I needed to scratch deeper. I placed a gentle paw on her shoulder, stopping her mid stride.

"Hush now for a moment my dear, breathe. Your string is singing such a frantic song, I can barely hear your words over its noise. Let's for a moment be rabbits again. Thinking will only get us so far, let's listen. Let me tell you a story... but first, settle down and attune to your own heart string."

Cash'ya stopped sully. We both hopped over to a window seat. It would have been a nice spot, adorned with potted plants and a stunning view over the moon below. But Cash’ya could barely notice. I breathed a deep consoling breath which she followed, and then slowly she closed her eyes. I started sensing her string, I felt it tighten its pitch a little as she began to smother it with her awareness. She began to see how fraught and tense it had become during the conversation about Elias.

I started the story.

"Let me tell you the tale of 'Whisper-in-the-grass'," I said softly, my voice taking on a storyteller’s cadence.

Author's Note: This is the introduction of a "story-within-a-story," a classic narrative device. It's a powerful way to teach a lesson or provide crucial backstory without a simple exposition dump.

Editing Plan: My pacing strategy here is to mirror a reader's own process of immersion. At the beginning of Whisper's tale, I'll cut back to Jun'ip and Cash'ya more frequently. To guage this pacing I will literally read the story aloud and find the moment I, the author, feel "hooked." Cash'ya's reactions, a physical relaxing, an ear twitching, a softening of her string's "song"—will mirror that journey from detached listener to immersed participant.

"Whisper was a quiet mother of three, living in northern Europe, back when humans were still transitioning from their hunter gatherer society roots to an agricultural system. Whisper did not know this, of course, her life had been simple and she had never encountered a human in her life. For as long as she could remember, her world, a large meadowland that decorated the edge of a wide river, was her home. She had spent many carefree seasons there among the flowers, frolicking through the tall grass, and playing games over the river with her ‘skill’."

My own heart string began to play along to the rhythm of the story, its slow gentle cadence, roll, and bounce, rippling out into the world along its length. Little sprinkles of merriment tumbled into that warming backdrop of musical vibration, eliciting memories of flower scents and clear blue skies. As my ripples spread, I slowly felt Cash'yas string subtly respond. Like a jazz musician whose ears might have caught a sound on the breeze, a melody calling to it, an invite to join in.

Author's Note: This scene, where Jun'ip's "heart string" plays a song, is a key piece of world-building. The "strings" are not a magical power, but a rabbit's intuitive perception of the universe's interconnectedness, like ripples in a pond. Jun'ip, being a master, can create a powerful, calming "song" with his own string, and as the ripples overlap, Cash'ya's frantic string naturally begins to synchronize with his.

Editing Plan: While the "music" metaphor is strong here, the larger plan is to explore this system from multiple perspectives throughout the book. Later drafts will include scenes where this phenomenon is debated by characters, explored objectively as a science, and felt subjectively by others. This ensures the world-building feels robust and integrated into the story's core philosophical questions.

“Of course, Whispers world would not remain peaceful forever. Any life, long or short, will experience its own ups and downs, and Whispers was no exception... There came a day when she met humans for the first time…”

The song my string was playing became melancholy... and it began to pluck out the melody of fear, of foreboding.

“Humans at this point were still hunter gatherers... Whispers first awareness of them came in the form of a strange scent on the breeze as her cousin's body was cooked over a flame and consumed. It nearly made her sick with both grief and a physical revulsion that was hard to swallow.” Over the next year, Whisper witnessed first hand the disregard these humans had for the sanctity of their lives. They had something us rabbits had never come across before. They had tools, deadly traps, and weapons.”

Author's Note: This is a deliberate and abrupt tonal shift. It’s the first time the book reveals the dark, predatory history between humans and rabbits, moving the story from pure whimsy into a deeper reflection on the moral complexities of real-world history.

Editing Plan: To heighten this moment in my next edit, I will use a cinematic "zoom in" with prose. The sentences leading up to the reveal will be longer and more flowing (a "macro" view). The moment of the reveal itself will use short, sharp, sensory-focused fragments ("A strange scent. Cooked meat. Grief.") to create a visceral shock. Immediately following, I will cut back to Cash'ya in the frame of the story, describing her physically flinching, mirroring the reader's own jolt of horror. This shared experience validates the reader's reaction and deepens their bond with her.

The song of my string became sorrowful, painful. I could see Cash'ya was gently shivering. Her string now in perfect harmony with mine was feeling the emotions of the story just as I did.

And this is where my stream of consciousness writing ends, for now.

I always find it interesting reading back over my first utterings. I often feel as though I am not a natural writer, but I love storytelling. In the same way that you might not be a natural singer, but you love to write songs.

Still, this is a process, and like all processes, there will be refinement and progress over time.

In this section, I focus on a core trope, the mentor. A mentor's story can be a powerful tool. It isn't just about imparting information; it's about creating a shared emotional experience that can bypass intellectual defenses and speak directly to the heart. It's a way to teach a lesson not by explaining it, but by making someone feel its truth.

What do you think?

How about you? Do you like this style of storytelling? What is a memorable example of a "story-within-a-story" from a book or film that has stuck with you? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Bold Italic: Text I want to query

Bold Type: Notes for future me.

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I am old, so incredibly old.
Today it was Cash’yas turn with our weekly one to one mentoring sessions. Walking with her to our usual space in the bloom observation lounge, our comparative age was striking. I always liked to keep the walks to and from the lounge fairly casual.

Is walking and talking the most I can get out of the scene? Can they be doing something else that tells more story, perhaps about the character, or the environment, or the day to day inner workings of their lives?

However today I was starting to regret it. Her heart string was torrid, vibrating with a striking array of emotional back and forth. She was more doubtful than I had seen her in many years, perhaps since she had joined the academy.

A rising star in the rabbit world, gifted with both a remarkable ability to hold the history of our kind in her memory, but also with an uncanny human-like ability to employ logic, science, and other such traits towards that history. Her studies of Rabbit etymology alone had helped piece together stories of our history, often implied or inferred, but unspoken, and bring them back to life again.

Unfortunately, that nearly human-like problem solving ability also seemed to have manifested in a human-like ego that was subject to all the fraught emotions that come with it. Including the need to defend said ego. Rarely had I ever come across a rabbit so affected by how she felt she was being perceived. As she talked, I devoted one ear to her concerns, and another to a question that had arisen in my ears eye.

Am I being overly harsh? Was I too, as a younger rabbit, afflicted with the same doubts, the same emotions?

I recalled my time as a young rabbit, even before school took me into its embrace, I sensed a difference. Where my peers might spend a large amount of time running around, climbing things, playing street games. The dares they used to set up for each other in regards to using their gravitational pulls in a way that barely toed the line of secrecy when humans were near.

This is the first mention of rabbits using their gravitational skills for play. In a first draft, it's fine to just state it like this, but in the edit, I need to make this tangible. What does a "daring" use of this ability look like? Does it involve leaping impossible distances? Pranking humans? I need to brainstorm a specific micro-scene to show this in action rather than just telling the reader about it.

I was instead absorbed in my own world, feeling the chorus of the strings around me. I may not have appeared very involved with other rabbits my age, but I was following along in a way they never understood.

Did this bother me? Perception is a funny thing. I perceived myself as connected. They perceived me as aloof. I suppose I didn't really understand why at that age. I didn't know that I was all that different. I didn't really mind either, but then, I had the strings. I was absorbed in a way of seeing the world that was relatively unique to me. I just didn't know it yet.

My mind jumped forward to when I was selected out of my school and taken under the tutelage of my old master, Sinto eel’lop. On one hand I was suddenly having a lot of attention paid towards me. I was being celebrated, and my skill was being made clear to me through both my tutelage, and the way I was being received by other Rabbits. I was understanding my uniqueness more. I was not feeling doubt per sé. Doubt would have implied a sense of contrast between what I was and what I thought I should be.

Jun’ip insists twice that he didn't feel "doubt." This is a key part of his character voice—this serene, almost detached acceptance. Is he a completely reliable narrator of his own youth, or is this a story he tells himself now that he is old? This is a question I need to hold onto. His inability to relate to Cash'ya's very human doubt stems from this core difference. I must make sure his actions throughout the story align with this unique worldview.

I didn't have such a notion of a self I wanted to compare myself too. The strings had shown me from a young age that the person I am, is intricately connected to everything else. How can you be something you are not, when the thing that you are is intrinsic to everything else? No, I didn't doubt. I just accepted. At least, I accepted what the world was making me into.

But I did feel other pain. I was taken away from my family and the few friends I had. I held onto that resentment for a while. Part of me knew that it was folly to resent the way things were changing around me. I had very little power to change it back, and even if I could have, the world around me would have taken them away again later. Still, I can't deny, I felt loss and sadness for it. And I did hold onto those emotions for a while. But I always found comfort in the strings... The strings are home. I suddenly came back to the long corridor, to cash'ya still revealing her fraught doubts and emotions.

The entire reflection happens during a single walk down a corridor. This "walk and talk" structure is good for a stream-of-consciousness draft. The question for the edit is one of pacing. Does this long internal flashback feel static? I could experiment with breaking it up more, interjecting short snippets of Cash'ya's present-day dialogue to heighten the contrast between her anxious energy and his calm memories

Digging into her emotions like a true scholar. Finding ideas, comparing & contrasting them. When the song of the strings is your companion. You sometimes lose perspective and forget that for most rabbits, they are still a challenge to grasp, and an exercise to practice. Cash'ya for all her skill as a Rabbit lore holder, was not that gifted in connecting to and feeling the song of the strings as I was.

This line establishes the central conflict of the mentor-protégé relationship. Cash'ya is brilliant in a logical, human-like way, but lacks the intuitive, mystical connection the narrator, Jun’ip has. This isn't just a difference in skill; it's a difference in how they experience reality. This theme—logic vs. intuition, knowledge vs. wisdom—is going to be a major engine for the story. Every interaction between them should, in some way, explore this tension.

That comment from my old master came back to me. "The strings are home".

The strings are home" is a powerful, recurring line. But what does that feel like? To make this central concept land, I need to build a 'sensory library' for it. Is it a literal sound, like a deep cello note? A physical vibration in the bones? A visual shimmering in the air? In future scenes, I need to layer in these specific sensory details so the reader can feel the comfort of the strings, not just be told about it.

I felt them vibrate through me in my old masters voice and my calm immediately returned. I knew what was needed.

And that's where the two pages ended for that day. A raw collection of memories and feelings, setting the stage for the real conversation between mentor and student. This process of discovery is what I love most about a first draft—it's messy, surprising, and full of potential.

There have been so many times when I have been following this two pages a day process that has surprised me. There is something rather magical about stream of consciousness writing. It allows the subconscious to solve problems in your story you didn't even know were there. And to colour in scenes that had previously just been structured foundations.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What's your favorite part about a raw first draft—the potential, the freedom, the happy accidents?