Through generations of observation, trial and error, and many deaths, Laudomians developed a makeshift system for naming Occasus, warning against them, and combating them. Over time, the followers of the Great Song came to understand that though these beings moved through it, and indeed seemed to be a part of it, their presence damaged the Song. Soon, a class of Laudomian faithful rose whose calling was to hunt the Occasus and preserve the sacred flow of the Great Song. They were the Rionnagan, and they referred to the task of demon killing as bluing, for demon blood runs blue.

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The modern study of demons began much later and mostly by accident.

Aamon and Isla were among the first people to see demons after Ithas awakened their souls. They quickly realized their sight now extended past the veils to observe the eddies of the Binding Force and all that flowed in it.

As a bit of a game, Aamon started naming them. Some of the names were silly, others descriptive. Typically, he just went with whatever felt right. Eventually the names stuck, and there was no point in changing them.

As Aamon and Isla traveled, the names and the practice spread. More awakened people began encountering the same creatures, and when they compared observations, similarities emerged. The same demons appeared in different places. They looked the same, behaved the same, and fed the same. If the early awakened had access to Laudomian texts, they would have been surprised by how much that nearly lost faith got right.

Once a demon can be seen, the only chance you have of killing it is to identify it quickly. Aamon once said, “It’s fun naming them. In fact, it’s about the only fun I find when dealing with them.”1 Demon taxonomy is utilitarian, created as a way to describe and identify a demon. Once you have done that, you will know how best to combat it should you encounter one.

What follows is inexhaustive, as the system continues to grow and change. New demons appear, and much about these beings is still poorly understood. This is not a combat guide. The goal of this document is to lay a fundamental foundation for the journeyman, the demon killer, or simply the curious, and hopefully protect you on your way.

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Contextual Knowledge

Entry into the Arkhipelago: Demonic origin is unverifiable. Every demon with the ability to speak has told a different version of its history than the last. Liars all. We know, however, that they arise from the coldest, most isolated pockets of the Grand Column, where the Binding Force’s choir of frequencies collapses into chaos.

From there, demons, it appears, have slowly stolen into the Arkhipelago and the other parts of the Grand Column since the firmaments2 first coalesced from the Binding Force’s rhythms. There is no history of any people that does not contain some account of demonic activity or indication thereof.

Shifted Sight: All demons, regardless of size, grade, or form, are invisible to the naked eye. Their effects may be seen if a demon chooses to wound someone physically or affect the material world in some other way, but the demon itself remains undetectable.

Shifted Sight is the simplest of the Soul Skills, the fundamental abilities that unlock when the soul is awakened. Most people describe learning to use it as a passive occurrence that comes soon after Awakening. Early attempts require concentration and can be difficult to sustain. With practice, however, the shift becomes simple.3

A demon that possesses a body or hides within an object can also be detected through Shifted Sight, though deeper examination is required and is often paired with other magical means of detection.4

Soul Shed and Class Conditions: Your soul is comprised of a core and a shell, and the whole mechanism vibrates constantly: a complex standing wave formed from Mauth.5

Soul Shed occurs when the frequency of the soul’s core fluctuates outside of its natural range for an extended period. Prolonged discord of this kind causes low-grade damage, and in response to the stress the soul begins to slough off small parts of its shell. This shed material is the target component of every demonic diet, made of altered Mauth tuned by whatever negative state the soul is experiencing. When that state is provoked through demonic predation, it is called a class condition.

Once a demon has been killed and the class condition stoppered, the soul will immediately begin to return to normal function and heal.6

Unawakened Insensitivity to Demonic Predation: Because demons cannot be seen by unawakened people, their predation is difficult to perceive, making invisibility a fiend’s most reliable advantage. Victims often chalk their suffering up to simply feeling off, and after prolonged exposure may begin to believe that this is just how life is supposed to feel.

Demons see souls as wells, capable of constantly producing their desired food. In order to make the soul do this, they employ tricks and tactics to provoke a desired class condition.

A Weyht, a kind of stress demon, might cause one’s heart to race and whisper stress inducing messages into the mind. A Flaxcer, a grief demon, may constantly remind someone of a lost love. Stress and grief are not bad in themselves. To experience them is to be human. It is the prolonged and disordered experience of them that pushes the soul beyond its natural state and eventually causes it to shed.

The unawakened who cannot defend themselves with Shifted Sight, spell, or sword are not helpless. In the long history of the Arkhipelago, awakened souls are a relatively new phenomenon, and demons have been fought for millennia.

A community that understands and believes the signs of demonic activity, even without the ability to perceive or fight demons directly, is significantly harder to hunt than one with no knowledge at all. The completely faithless, or groups whose faith has been badly misdirected, such as the Adherents, are among the most vulnerable.

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Demonic Nature

The Knowable Nature of Demons: A demon is a malignancy within the Binding Force, which is itself best understood as a kind of living tissue. Wherever they go they bring ruin with them. The Binding Force seeks itself and in the process all things are formed and hold together. A demon interrupts this seeking and causes the Binding Force to unravel. If one could describe the reality of the universe in moral terms, the Binding Force is good, and the demon, though born of it, is the enemy.

Demons stand obliquely opposite the gods. A god is a vast structure that holds a domain together, and its presence causes order and continuity within the Binding Force. What the two share is permanence of nature. Where even the most unsavory god will seek some semblance of order, a demon will always seek chaos. Either may surprise an observer through method, but when one does, it is only because their nature was not fully understood.

This permanence is the foundation of everything in this work, including its moral position. Demons are evil. Not evil as a man is evil, by choice and circumstance, but evil the way rot is evil, the natural opposite of life.

None of this means demons are mindless. Demons possess intelligence, and the most dangerous can speak, negotiate, and pursue complex objectives. Still, their will is shaped by their nature.

Demon Noise and Environmental Corruption: Though the texts of the Laudomian faith are largely lost, we know they understood the Binding Force as something called the Great Song. We know they believed its greatest structure was but a series of endless notes that formed chords, and eventually melodies, until all of it became a beautiful song from which all things arose and dwelled.

It still confounds the modern Arkhipelagan how accurately they were able to describe the phenomena of reality.

To understand Mauth and the Binding Force more fully, it is recommended one read On the Nature of Mauth and Magic, but suffice to say the world is made of a complex frequency that is not unlike a complicated song. Demon Noise occurs when that complexity is flattened. Many beautiful songs have silence, and so of course silence is not what demons produce. Instead, their presence ruins the harmony that holds the world together by dissolving the varied notes of the Binding Force into a single flat tone.

Those with the ability to shift their sight can see Demon Noise as streaks pulsing through the Binding Force or as other distortions within its patterns. An unawakened person may experience Demon Noise simply as a wrongness. This is often the cause of a place being deemed haunted even when there are no apparitions present.

Eventually, Demon Noise will affect a place so deeply that its effects can be seen with the naked eye. Stone cracks. Wood rots. Life stops. Look around and you will see the order of the world is being unmade.7

Demon Grace: Demons often perform supernatural feats: teleportation, causing harm without physical contact, altering environments, and others besides. Each of these involves manipulation of the Binding Force, and because demons are made of Mauth, some capacity to alter it should be expected.

Direct, willful manipulation of the Binding Force is otherwise the domain of gods, through a process known as Grace, and so the term Demon Grace came into use. The term is misleading. A god rewrites the Binding Force by will. A demon slightly adjusts it constantly. The class condition it provokes, the noise it leaves, the forces it exerts on a world: all of it is one low, unceasing act of manipulation that the demon no more chooses than a man chooses to sweat. Whatever it is, it is not Grace. The word remains in use for lack of a better one.

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General Demon Classification Structure

Type: A demon’s type defines its specific taxonomy, or name. Within that name is an understanding of appearance, class, grade, likely threat, abilities, methods of predation, feeding, and general behavior.

Some of these parameters may differ due to injury, circumstance, environment, or experience, but the underlying creature remains consistent. Once a demon has been correctly identified by type, previous encounters can be treated as reliable evidence for how it feeds, what it can do, and, most importantly, how it can be killed.

Grade: Grade defines a demon’s fixed order, complexity, and power. The six recognized grades are Minor, Lesser, Common8, Greater, Sovereign, and Name-bearing. Grade is fixed. A Minor demon cannot become a Lesser one.

Higher grade demons typically possess greater size, strength, intelligence, and capacity for influence. A Greater sorrow demon may manipulate more people at once, sustain a deeper feeling of sorrow, and devise plans in order to keep the class condition sustained among the group.

Sovereign and Name-bearing demons sit at the upper edge of this system and do not fit well within the rules that govern the grades below them. Sovereign demons are immensely powerful and often make use of lesser demons to provoke their class conditions within people. They may also satisfy several classes at once. Name-bearing demons are rarer still and so powerful and complex that ordinary classification is not worth it. If you encounter a Name-bearing demon, you will know and you should run.

Class: Class describes the condition a demon provokes in a soul. Grief, deceit, stress, paranoia, etc. In other words, class describes a demon’s diet.9

The method of provocation depends on the type. Two demons of the same class may operate very differently. One may act directly upon the body. Another may manipulate perception, alter the environment, stalk its victim, imitate trusted voices, or engineer real events that produce the desired class condition.

Threat: Threat describes how dangerous a demon type is in its ideal environment. The existing scale is Low, Moderate, High, Severe, and Extreme. Older scales included None as a threat level, but all demons, no matter how inconsequential, are dangerous to someone, and so the tier was folded into Low.

Threat level, though typified, is unfixed and may change depending on the conditions under which a demon is encountered. A low-grade demon can still receive a high threat rating if its methods of provocation are lethal or difficult to interrupt. For example, a lesser despair demon like a Marl may hunt and kill the loved ones of its victim in order to provoke its class condition. A Greater deceit demon, meanwhile, may be rated Low if its methods are narrow and its class condition difficult to provoke.

Threat levels consider all of the following in their determination: rate of feeding, lethality, intelligence, possession, concealment, resistance to injury, scale of influence, and difficulty of containment or exorcism.

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Demon Behavior and Interaction

Embodiment: Some demons possess physical bodies, while others exist in more phantasmic forms10. Whatever form it takes does not determine whether the demon can cause harm. It can.

Demons without physical bodies tend to manipulate the soul directly, acting through perception, emotion, possession, or environmental influence.

Life Stages: Some demons produce offspring while others have never been observed breeding and are always encountered fully matured. We do not know why. As grade is immutable, in the cases of developmental demons it always describes what the demon will be once mature. In earlier larval stages a demon may feed, hunt, and behave differently from their mature counterparts. Larval forms of demons of these kinds are almost always easier to destroy.

Feeding, and Starvation: If you were to observe a demon feeding, you might think it a hungry animal. Resist such thoughts. A starved demon is just as strong as a fed one, and angrier. A Caulth was once observed sealed away from prey for nine months. When it escaped its seal, it was no weaker than before.

Demons feed for pleasure. Whatever soul shed does to bolster their bodily functions is incidental. Feeding produces what, in demons, is called a surplus. When a demon is well fed, its active functions intensify. It can maintain more victims, possess bodies, alter environments, temporarily acquire specialized abilities, or simply become capable of pushing its class condition harder. Surplus is always temporary. A class condition sustained in an individual for too long invariably leads to death and, therefore, the disappearance of the demon’s food source.

Some demons have been observed entering dormancy. This is not a physiological response to hunger. It is behavioral and seems to occur in higher class demons when their class condition is not readily available, or for some other undetermined reason. Dormant demons should be treated as actively hunting and should not be awakened without proper preparation.

Possession and Exorcism: Possession by a demon is possible, rare, and critical. Most demons cannot enter a soul at all, and the few fiends that can do so only with a deeply troubled one. For possession to occur, the victim must be extremely vulnerable, made so by profound damage, severe destabilization, or, in the bleakest cases, invitation.

Most possession is a parasitic relationship. The demon enters the soul and lives within it, feeding on the soul as it sheds. It has little need to control its host, and so the host may continue to speak, move, and make decisions while carrying the demon inside. In these cases, however, a person’s decision making abilities are often compromised beyond recognition. They may do things to themselves or others that produce severe soul shed corresponding to the class condition of the inhabiting demon.

Full bodily control is possible, though it belongs to particular demon types and is comparatively rare.

A possessed soul cannot heal while a demon lives inside it. The creature will constantly aggravate the soul. Nonexorcismic treatment may slow the demon’s progress, but full restoration cannot take place until the demon is removed or destroyed.

Exorcism is a case specific process. It may involve direct soul manipulation, ritual, magic, restraint, controlled psychic or physical injury, or any combination of these methods used in unison. The correct process depends on the demon type, the host’s condition, and the manner in which the demon and soul are tied together. Exorcism always harms the host. The harm caused may be temporary, permanent, or fatal.

A demon may also leave voluntarily, though this is uncommon because an inhabited soul can become so conditioned to possession that it desires the fiend to stay.

If the host dies, the demon may emerge, though it may also choose to remain within the corpse unless pulled out by force. A corpse inhabited by a demon usually remains dead and unmoving. Some demon types, however, deliberately inhabit corpses and animate or speak through the remains as a means of provoking their class condition. These are most commonly distress demons.

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Demon Killing

Injury and Death: A demon dies when its body is destroyed or fatally damaged, but a demon’s body is Mauth, and Mauth can only be affected by force applied directly to the Binding Force. Ordinary steel passes through a demon and touches nothing.

When a demon is killed, the Mauth that comprised it is absorbed into the Binding Force. Demons have no souls, and so there is no chance of one rising from the dead. Another of its type may one day take its place, but it will be a new enemy.

Any awakened person can learn to channel magic through a weapon in a way that allows it to affect the Binding Force. This is a universal Soul Skill, though it is more difficult to master than Shifted Sight and requires considerably more practice to use reliably in combat.

The Bluing11 weapon class remains the most common tool for killing demons. Its metal possesses naturally occurring properties that interact directly with the Binding Force. Weapons forged from this material can harm demons without any active channeling from the wielder. As a result, an unawakened person could injure or kill a demon with a Bluing weapon if they were capable of perceiving and striking its true position.

More experienced hunters may instead use channeled magic through ordinary weapons, other specialized materials, or magic itself to hunt and kill demons.

Injured demons heal over time. Feeding does not always appear to accelerate this process. Extraordinary injuries can leave permanent scars or cause lasting maiming. A sufficiently grievous wound may disable a function, limit movement, interfere with feeding, or create a lasting weakness in the affected demon.

A scarred demon can adapt much like an injured animal. It may change its methods, alter its hunting patterns, or rely more heavily on other abilities in order to feed.

Corpses: A slain demon may leave behind a corpse. The corpse remains invisible to all but those with awakened sight.

A demon corpse will gradually decay as the Binding Force washes it away. The rate of decay varies by demon type.

Some groups harvest components from demon corpses for use in medicine, alchemy, weapons, and other processes. The methods and applications of this practice shall not be recorded here.

A demon’s corrupting nature does not end with its life. What is taken from its body will continue to degrade the world around it and, in some cases, may continue to provoke class conditions.

The use of demonic materials is strongly discouraged by those who produced this document.

Containment and Sealing: Demons can be trapped, bound, or sealed. Every such measure will fail in time.

Sealing works by forcing the Binding Force into a shape it would not naturally assume. The practitioner uses their soul to bend the flow of the Binding Force around a demon’s position, restraining it and limiting its movement and influence.

The Binding Force resists this. It desires to flow as it chooses, and though that flow can be changed for a time, it will always return to its preferred state. A seal holds only as long as that return takes.

A demon’s presence hurries the erosion along, but a seal containing nothing will fail too. Draw one perfectly, maintain it against a dormant demon, set it where the Binding Force is at its most placid, and it will still dissolve.

Compatibility can contribute more to a seal’s longevity than raw power. A seal designed with a demon’s class and nature in mind will outlast generic sealing by a significant margin.

An older tradition of binding predates the seal entirely. The old faiths made inscribed objects, tags and chains and ropes and the like, marked with letters and shapes, and these worked not through the Binding Force’s manipulation but through faith work: genuine belief of protection embedded in the material at the moment of inscription. The faith lives in the making, not the use. Once inscribed, the object carries its power independently, and a skeptic, a child, or a man may wield it as well as the one who made it.

All containment delays the need for destruction. But sooner or later every demon must be faced and killed.

Pacts: A pact can be formed with any demon. The terms are negotiated individually. A demon may receive offerings, permission to feed, access to victims, protection, territory, service, or any other agreed-upon benefit. In return, it may provide knowledge, violence, protection, power, or the use of one or more of its abilities.

A pact does not create loyalty, nor does it change the nature of the demon. It imposes conditions upon a creature that will continually search for any weakness in the agreement from the moment it is made.

As a result all demonic pacts are extraordinarily dangerous and unstable. Even a weak demon can exploit ambiguity, corrupt the purpose of an agreement, or wait until its master becomes vulnerable. A leashed demon is no less a fiend. Given enough time, most will shake the restraints and kill the person who believed themselves to be in control.

For those who follow Ithas, such things are forbidden.

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Conclusion

The Laws of Ithas are simple: Perfect your vessel. Kill your demons. Live in the light.

Demons are evil creatures that stalk the world and seek only to destroy. The purpose of taxonomy is survival. It allows those living with open eyes to recognize what confronts them, preserve what they have learned, and identify the correct method of destruction.

For the sake of yours and all souls, all demons must die. If you choose to journey the world you will inevitably meet some, and of these, some will be very powerful indeed. It is recommended you do not hunt, fight, or kill demons alone, but life is rarely so kind as to put you in such positions.

If you are not strong enough to kill it, run away.

Get stronger.

Then return and face it when you are.

No one knows why it was built. Some say it has always been there, a feature of the land. Others say it is a defunct machine of war. Most people believe the Rain Court made it, and so the few people left on the island of Ambage worship it in the way that people worship things they do not understand and cannot approach.

There are countless entrances to the Citadel, but entry is forbidden by the court. If they made it, even they seem wary of their creation.

You walk up the creaky steps of the place you saw the man watching from. You enter the room he was in. It is a humble room: a chair, a bed, and an open window through which you can hear the struggle of the slaves chained and tugging at the great door of Bram’s Adhera. The man you were sure you saw is not here. Beyond that the room is ordinary, save for the fact that it is filled with minuscule stars. Little motes of light, some as small as an ant and some as large as your fist, but never larger than that. They are warm and familiar, and one the size of a river pebble drifts past your face. On instinct, you touch it.

You are in a room. Different, though. This one has great ceilings and a floor made of polished stone inlaid with golden depictions of strange flora and fauna. A candle-sized flame flickers in the center of the room, and that is the only light. You see this all through eyes that are not your own.

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A voice speaks from the shadows.

“Not since the war has a god been executed.” It was a woman’s voice, hushed and measured, but there was concern in it as well. “For you, it is being considered, Ithas.”

At that, your candle-sized flame blossoms into a torch-sized flame and her form comes into view.

She has pitch-black hair that tumbles to nearly her knees, strange purple impassive eyes, ancient, and a face no older than twenty-one. She is naked, but the darkness and her hair seem always to be placed so as to preserve her modesty.

You are opposite her, and from the body of the god you inhabit you lean forward, examining the flame that burns between you.

You do not look away from your flame, but you speak. Less hushed than the goddess, but still quietly and carefully. “I think they will not,” you hear your own voice reply. You feel an uncertainty that is not yours.

“Why will you not tell them what happened? Or at least allow me to—”

“No.” You cut her off. “They cannot know.”

There was a long, dangerous pause.

“Did you know this would happen?” she asked. Her voice remained steady, but rage and threat were woven all throughout the question, and you became tense.

You looked at her. “I did not know what we would find, Ops,” comes your reply. “They cannot know because they may take her from me. From us.”

The threat and rage drained from the room and there was only sorrow then.

“Can I see her?” Ops asked quietly.

Without a word you pulled your open palm through the air and a spear taller than two men stacked came to be in it. It was an odd thing, for it had no tip. Instead it was more a silvery rod sharpened at both ends to the finest point, so that it looked like the god was holding a needle as tall as he.

“She will not speak much,” you hear yourself say, negotiating the spear so that it flashed in the firelight. You wave away your flame and all was dark.

“Euridyce,” Ops whispered into the darkness. At the sound, something between liquid and light began to pour white-blue from the spear. Soon it became an arm, and then another appeared, and another, and more and more they waved about and grasped at each other, and grasped at you who held her, and grasped at the spear they come from, and grasped at Ops’s hand, for she had placed hers within their reach. “Euridyce,” Ops said again, tears in her voice.

So faint you nearly missed it, a voice spoke. “Sister.”

And then the arms began to retreat, and then there was just blue-white liquid light, and then there was darkness, and then there was your flame illuminating the room once more.

“That is all I can get from her,” you venture into the leaden silence.

“Well,” Ops said, her poise regained. “You turned our sister into a weapon. Give her some time.”

“What will you do when the council asks where she is?” she asked, staring at you so intently, the way you know she often would look at you when you were little.

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“I will take the opportunity to tell them of the darkness we saw,” you say urgently. “You saw them, Ops. Nothing we did harmed them. They wore no armor and neither blade nor power caused so much as a scratch. You saw there were as many as the sand. They will come to Paradise, eventually.”

The goddess’s long black hair seemed to drift on some breeze you could not feel, and she observed her sibling with an unreadable expression.

You speak again. “I will tell them she died saving our lives.”

At that Ops replied, “A lie.” The breeze she drifted on became a wind.

“They may try to pull her out of the spear, and I do not know if she will survive,” you hear yourself reply calmly. It is the truth.

“You withhold.” This too was the truth. Ops stepped closer to the flame, and you did not notice until then that she was a little taller than you. You feel it used to bother Ithas when he was younger. He does not mind now. She was beautiful, but she was terrifying. Her eyes were shaped like those of a goat. She spoke and her voice still did not change, but her anger returned. “I do not trust you, little brother.”

You for your part did not seem scared. But you could feel the god’s concern and sadness. “I am sorry, Ops,” was all you reply, and it was the truth and it was not enough. The goddess turned to leave, the darkness beyond the flame engulfing her.

“What will you tell them when they question you, Ops?” you asked.

“I do not know,” Ops said from the darkness.

Annoyed that you cannot see your sister, you allow the torchlight to become a hearth fire and light fills the room, illuminating the great tapestries hanging from the walls that recount the deeds of your elder kin and the long and storied history of the Paradisians, their embroidered gazes you are trying so hard to ignore. In your periphery, columns split like trees grow from stone walls, and the ceiling was nothing but the blue night dusted with a billion stars.

“Sister, please,” you hear yourself plead quietly. The begging came as a surprise to the god. You feel his heart break and the pieces mix with worry. You hear a clanking you had not noticed before. You look at your hands then and realize your wrists and ankles are bound in platinum shackles. Had those always been there? This was a cell.

“They will not ask me what happened because they do not care about our sister, or me, or whatever it was we saw out there,” Ops said coolly. “They fear you and your fire, and are using this as an excuse to be rid of you.” The hearthflame changed and became white hot for a moment. You feel Ithas did not know he could change its color like that, and feel him make a mental note to investigate further. “They will vote to execute you, and though I hate what you have done to our sister, and I hate you—”

“You do not hate me,” you interject.

She ignores you and continues without losing a step. “I cannot bear to lose two siblings. The best I can do is try to prevent such an outcome.”

Your vision becomes engulfed in darkness, and you are yourself again, standing in the humble room above the square. The drums are still going. The door has still not moved. It never will.

Shoreglass Shard Updated: Map of Andria

I write every day. I think about this world I am building constantly. Everything I do is in service of its growth and I have to be honest with you, Starlight, I am so tired. It is all so nonstop and every day it feels like it is not enough. Every day I am sure the needle isn’t moving even one iota. And yet, boohoo, life’s not fair. And yet my show must go on.

Here are my top five methods for working through creative fatigue.

Go for a Walk

Should it be green or yellow? Should the story have witches or dragons, and if so, when do they appear? How tall is the main character? What color is his skin? And if he goes to point A first, how does he get to point B? And on and on it goes, a knot of thoughts and questions becoming more tangled by the moment. When this happens, I go for a walk. Studies have shown that walking physiologically helps clear the mind, but I think it is just magic. The trees, the air, and the ground beneath my feet unravel those knots one by one and whisper the answers to the questions that formed them. I have one rule to make it even more effective. No phones. I bring mine for safety but it stays on do not disturb. And if things are really dire, no music either. Just me and the earth for a little while.

Do Something Else

There is almost certainly something else I should be doing. As hard as it is to tear my eyes away from anything relating to the Arkhipelago, sometimes I am more of a hindrance than a help to my own plans. When I have worked at the same task for hours on end I begin to make silly mistakes, become disenchanted, or worse, get lazy. That is when I know it is time to switch gears. The dishes need doing. Bills need paying. The gym is waiting. Friends exist. I will admit I am terrible at this and tend to attempt to multitask when I should be focusing on the doing of the something else, which defeats the purpose entirely, but when executed correctly I return not only fresh but genuinely excited to get back to work.

Do a Bad Job

Not enough credit is given to the act of just doing it badly. Go quick, go through the motions, just get it out. Then make it good later. I take this approach when I get stuck between the idea and the platonic execution of it. Perfection is the enemy and I strive every day to be less precious about the work I make. As I have grown as an artist and designer I have come to understand that creativity requires reps. Just like lifting, the more often you do it the more reps you can complete and the heavier you can go. From inception to publish is what I consider a rep. Just making the thing and letting it sit does not count. I put things into the world now perhaps less flawlessly than I would have in the past. The fact of the matter is no one is watching and no one cares, and the only way to get them to watch and to get them to care is to become exceptionally good, and the only way to become exceptionally good is to practice.

Make a Choice

I promise you, it is not that deep. Watching people agonize over the choices they make is nearly physically painful. Before a work goes out, nearly all decisions are reversible. Every choice is a larger part of a whole. It is just not that important, Starlight. You are experimenting, trying things out. If it was the wrong choice, Control Z, or turn that pencil around and erase it. So much is lost to indecision and so much is gained by forward momentum. As a disclaimer, I would like to add that this is not always how I operate as a designer. There are times when a decision is important and I have the time and bandwidth to make it properly. But when I feel a decision is starting to weigh me down, that is when I say to myself: make a move, Starlight. And keep it pushing.

Do Nothing

Go to sleep. Watch a show. Sit in the dark. Do nothing. Be still. My favorite scene in Avatar: The Last Airbender is when Aang rescues King Bumi after the Fire Nation takes over the city of Omashu. King Bumi, however, does not want rescuing. He wants to do nothing and wait. I could and should write a whole newsletter on how this idea has profoundly impacted me, but for now it suffices to say that just because I yearn to make a move, sometimes I do not have anything to give. And the best thing I can do for myself and for the work is to wait for the right moment.

I know there are other ways to get through it all, but these are the go-to moves I have learned to employ over the years. Ultimately, the thing that keeps me going is something I once wrote: what Mair whispered to Aamon. “It does not matter how slow you go, as long as you do not stop.” In whatever you pursue, don’t stop, Starlight. Let me know how you push through your fatigue in the comments below.

I did not realize how much anime I have watched until I look back and see that I have been watching it since I was a kid. Although I would not say I am an anime expert, I would say that when it comes to the medium, I know, as the kids say, “ball.” I love anime and cartoons so much, more so than live action things. It is beyond the restraints of reality that we are allowed to explore the telic truths of life, for there is no complexity that is not consciously introduced in animation, and thus it becomes an ideal place for experimentations in the human condition.

In no particular order, I have created a list of five anime that I feel most influence the work I do here at Arkstudios.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

This is probably one of my favorite stories ever told. If there is a bell curve where the left represents the most logical stories and the right the least, Fullmetal Alchemist lives somewhere far to the left. Even amongst all the magic and combat, from the first episode this show begins to weave a story into a tapestry that has not a single loose end by the finale. The magic system in FMA Brotherhood is one of the most rigorously adhered to I have encountered, and the show is stronger for it. Every character is explored and, for better or worse, understood in the end. FMA Brotherhood progresses along a fairly standard western story structure, which is why I always recommend it as an entry point for people looking to get into anime. Amongst its strangeness, there is a familiarity to it.

The iconography of FMA brotherhood is singular in my mind. There are so many symbols that represent different aspects and ideas throughout the show. So strong are they that people now get them tattooed onto themselves. I think about this often when I am working on the Arkhipelago I am constantly working on building a world of symbols that pull people into the world of the Arkhipelago and looking for ways to tie ideologies of characters and groups to imagery they create.

Samurai Champloo

Similarly to FMA Brotherhood, I feel Samurai Champloo is a perfectly executed story. It is relentless in its pursuit of an ending and somehow, in its twenty six episodes, does not neglect to pace itself, make you laugh, and gross or freak you out a little bit. It is the shortest watch on this list and all the stronger for its brevity. Its protagonists seem diametrically opposed in the way they approach the world. The show does one of my favorite things, which is to subvert a familiar trope. The single mindedness of Fuu, which serves as the relentless drive of the story, is constantly subverted by side quests, detours, and growth triggered by her traveling companions. On our bell curve this one lands at the leftmost side, most intelligible. When I think of cleanliness of aesthetics and the way minimalism can be used to demonstrate a character’s strength, I think of Samurai Champloo.

Jujutsu Kaisen

On the bell curve of sensible storytelling this one lives in the mid right, confusing but parsable with the help of Reddit. I have watched it through to its current place three times and there are still parts that make me go huh? But the story is wonderful in all of its twists and confounding turns. The powers range from wildly inventive to just plain whacky, and its characters the same. It is, every episode, a visual masterpiece. A feast for the eyes. It demands to be rewatched and you will oblige gladly. The battle between Sukuna and Mahoraga is one of the greatest displays of fantasy combat I have seen. It feels like a culmination of everything Japanese animators have learned across their years of creating these shows. All the great battles in this show are incredible, but they are so much better within the context of the show.

JJK intensely explores the rules it has set up for itself and celebrates the exceptions it finds. JJK is what caused me to be so thorough in my creation of the Arkhipelago magic system. I knew that if I hoped to create a story that was as intensely complex and sprawling I needed to set up a sound foundation.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

I saw one clip of this show on Reels and ran to investigate further. Upon watching it I was confused, because the clip I had seen was action packed and epic and the pilot is, well, not. But I persisted and by episode two I was hooked. Frieren, and Fern to some extent, are among my favorite depictions of female protagonists in animated media. Pey Talks Anime on YouTube does a great job at breaking down this show. For an intensive study on it I recommend his channel.

What caught me most about Frieren, even early on, is that sometimes the show's namesake chooses to do the beautiful thing over the efficient one. She takes detours that serve little purpose beyond the fact that they are the scenic way. A spell cast for wonder rather than utility or defense is often animated with the most attention and care. You could stop, look at something lovely, and move on having done nothing more than look at it. It is how I try to live my life, and until Frieren it was not showing up in my writing. There are passages in the Arkhipelago that exist for no other reason than that they are beautiful to me, and I think Frieren is at least partly responsible for my willingness to leave them there. On our bell curve this one is right in the middle.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

I do not really know what to say about this show. On our bell curve of sensible storytelling this one is so far to the right that it does not even appear on the scale. It is strange, nonlinear, dark, and off putting. It does not seem to care that it has an audience. The fact that it makes any sense to the viewer at all seems to be something of an accident. And yet, without a doubt, it is my favorite anime, which may give you some insight into my personality.

The show is beautiful and vast. So quiet at times and so loud at others. Its complexities mirror those of a human being. Its intersections are where I most find my affinity for it. Ultra future high tech merging and colliding with ancient forces is so central to the show’s thesis. I tried in the beginning to do something similar with Arkstudios’ apparel, where the clothes were clean and almost futuristic but spoke to an ancient magical world. I never recommend anyone watch this show. Those that are meant to watch it will do so inevitably, and those who are meant to love it will, because God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.

There are so many shows that define what I love in a story, and anime makes up a large part of that. Having loved this medium and consumed it for so long gives me what I think is a genuine creative edge. It is a deep well, and though it is more popular than ever it remains underexplored.

Tell me, Starlight, what are you watching? Share it in the comments below.

Countless artists have created images that changed me. From an early age, I was fascinated by fine art and by those with the ability to capture the parts of being human that words simply are not suited for. I have assembled a list of five artists who have been fundamental to the way I approach creating.

Charles White

I was first introduced to Charles White when I was twenty. I had subscribed to MoMA on YouTube for its How to See series, which I highly recommend if you are just getting into art. They were announcing a retrospective of White’s work, and I found the teaser video compelling.

I had never heard of Charles White before then, but I was soon consumed by his world and his aesthetic. His work felt like a new way of seeing the color of the skin I lived in. His figures were powerful and mystical. White called them images of dignity. That is exactly what they are.

Donald Judd

What can be said about Donald Judd that has not already been said, except that I saw a Judd exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum when I was twelve or thirteen. I had no idea whose work it was, and I was certainly too young to care, but those objects and their arrangements seared themselves into my mind. I thought about that strange art all the time.

It was not until seven years later that I encountered Judd consciously, and longer still before I realized that the art I had seen as a preteen was made by the artist I was growing to love. Strange, perfect shapes arrayed so delicately in colors that surprise. It was in Judd that I found my love for the monolithic, the singular, and the humble box.

Agnes Martin

I have watched this Tate video on Martin more than one hundred times, and I will watch it one hundred more. My appreciation for her work began as my understanding of art was deepening and maturing.

Judd taught me about the power of the singular: minimal, perfect moments placed within a field. Martin turns her attention to the field itself, until there is no single moment within the totality of the work. The field, repetition, and monotony are deeply important to me and to the work I make, particularly when familiar shapes or objects appear in such abundance that the mind flattens them into a new image. Like stars packed so densely that they begin to look like sand on a beach.

And then she calls it beauty. Then she calls it nothing, because the beauty, she says, is in your mind.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

I encountered Bouguereau the way you encounter a dream you cannot hold onto. Scrolling through the internet, I would come across Les Oreades and be completely arrested. I would look up the artist, swear I would remember his name, and promptly forget it. This happened more than once. More than twice.

So many images I had loved, saved, and marveled at eventually turned out to be his. He had been accumulating within me for years before I knew who he was. Of all the artists I love and reference, Bouguereau is the one whose work appears most directly and frequently in my own.

Encountering his paintings was strange. The placidness of his faces and the dead serious surrealism of his subject matter felt deeply familiar. His work already held so much of the look and feeling I was seeking to create.

In a way, his work feels almost like proto-AI. His skill and command of academic technique were so complete that he could paint fantastical scenes with the accuracy of someone recording what stood before him. His paintings drift through my mind daily.

Andy Warhol

If you are at all tuned into art, at some point Andy Warhol simply arrives. I do not remember when I first became aware of him, but I do remember seeing Double Elvis at the Seattle Art Museum and being completely arrested.

I am not sure whether it was the scale of the image against the silver canvas, the duplication of Elvis pointing a gun directly at the viewer, or the way the black screen print faded at the edges, but something in that painting has never left me. There is a little bit of Double Elvis in everything I do.

Potentially my GOAT. Potentially the GOAT.

If you make art and wish to sell it, study Warhol. That distinction matters. If you are curious about the state of art today, study Warhol. He was the prototype for a certain kind of modern man. The commodification and industrialization of art had never been expressed quite this way before him, and now it is all we know.

Whenever I am at a loss for the next step in a design, I return to a motto: When in doubt, double up.

I cannot believe that not a single Abstract Expressionist made the list, but they are too special. I think I would have to write an entire issue of Arknotes about them.

This list is a grab bag of favorites. I chose these five because they show a good range of where I draw my inspiration, but there are infinitely more.

Tell me, Starlight, who are your favorite artists? Share them in the comments below.

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The sandy cobblestone lurched beneath me as a hand found my shoulder and pulled me back. The grip was unyielding, and the music I had left behind in the square blared again in my skull.

“Not your battle, Ulliam.” A man spoke in an amused unfamiliar voice.

He stepped in front of me. He smelled sweetly of wine and sex. He had tan skin and his hair was slicked back and wet. He towered over me, much taller than Aamon, perhaps as tall as Ithas. Whatever cold the demon radiated was no match for the warmth that came off him, hot and close, the heat of many bodies pressed together. The moonlight gilded his face in dewy silver. His deep-set eyes hid from most of the light, but I could see his golden irises, and every so often a spark of some other color flickered to life in his pupils before vanishing again. His eyes were drunk but not empty, and words came from his lips without slur.

“One of my brother’s companions, yes?” he asked rhetorically. “Strange that you stand in my city and raise up a knife in my alleyway. I find it unlikely my brother did not tell you of my law against combat in Kil, and yet here you are.”

The alley was silent save for the faint sound of the lovers I had passed earlier and the wet feeding of the demon and her prey.

Dionysus.

My hand tightened around my knife.

“Oh.” Dionysus sighed and waved at the knife as if it smelled badly. “Away with that thing. Weapons are most unwelcome here.”

He leaned over and gossiped into my ear, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the scene behind him. “He does this most every night. She has been feeding on him since he was twelve years old.”

I looked beyond his shoulder at the man whose soul was soiled and tattered.

“You care for him?” he asked, his face close to mine, his breath smelling of mint and other spices.

“He will die,” I whispered, meeting his eyes with my own.

“He,” Dionysus returned to his full height so that there were two head heights between us, “has been opening his soul to her his whole life.”

I made to step around the god but he blocked my path with a massive hand on my chest. Again the earth tilted beneath my feet and the music pounded into my skull.

“If you kill that demon, another will find him vulnerable. This one has known him since before manhood. She is interested in maintaining her food source. She will keep him alive, if just barely. If another takes her place it will likely not care whether he lives or dies.”

The god’s dispassion angered me, and it must have shown because Dionysus laughed then. A wild rhythmic laugh echoed in the alleyway. I felt the press of the partying crowds of the Fountain Quarter. Somewhere behind me the couple I had passed earlier made a sound that indicated they had found what they were looking for.

“You have a big pair on you, boy. I see why Ithas likes you.”

He sauntered past me into the shadow, his steps echoing against the sandy street and alley walls.

“Come, let’s leave her to finish.”

I hesitated.

“Come,” he said with slight impatience, walking backwards, his half-moonlit mouth smiling hospitably before being swallowed completely by shadow. Against my back I could feel the demon’s cold beginning to prevail in the alleyway once more. I spared the man and the demon one last glance before stowing my weapon and following the god into the night.

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We walked back through the plaza with the weeping elk fountain. Its tears still burbling in the quiet.

"How is Isla doing," Dionysus asked with genuine interest, breaking the silence.

“Well,” I replied, smiling at the thought of her bad dancing.

“Wonderful to hear. She is always such a joy, even if mildly scary.” He chuckled.

The elk watched us turn down a different road than the one I had come from earlier.

“And what of Aamon?” the god asked. “Still a pain in the arse?”

“Yes,” I said absently.

“Ah well, some things never change. Did you know when we first met he pulled his sword on me and challenged me to a duel because I would not disclose a piece of information to him?” I watched the god’s hands gesturing as he spoke. “He soon regretted that decision.”

The streets we wound through became crowded and I could hear we were nearing the great square. Nearly everyone who passed Dionysus greeted him.

“Dio!” they shouted, drunkenly waving.

The god smiled and waved back. A couple of times we were stopped by people who asked questions that meant nothing to me. Without fail he introduced me and they kissed me hello before we moved on. The square was more of a maelstrom than when I had left it. The ground was coated in trampled flower petals, people danced in a frenzy, and I saw more than one body lying on the ground, pushed beyond its limit one way or another. The smell was something heinous, putrid revelry. On instinct I shifted my sight. Demons snaked through the crowd, the shadowed kind I had encountered all evening but larger ones too, more corporeal quadrupeds with human faces and slick blood-red fur, and high above the crowd strange ones with air-filled bladders and tentacles that descended into the crowd latching onto people.

“Are you having fun?” Dionysus asked.

“No,” I replied, disconcerted by what I was seeing.

“He was not worth saving, child,” the god replied wearily.

A drunk man stumbled into me. I steadied him and pushed him back to his friends, who were laughing wildly.

“I am not a child.” So far, I did not like this particular god.

The crowd parted along the path Dionysus walked, making the procession through the square feel as simple as walking anywhere else. As he passed, people cheered and hollered his name.

“Dio! Dio!”

He raised his hand and the crowd if possible erupted into even more of a lather.

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We made our way to the part of the square where the Adhera was. It loomed oppressively. Long ago great twisting forms had been imposed into its stone with chisel and mallet, and the symbols of the Rain Court and its religion were all throughout. I studied the carvings even as we proceeded inside through the enormous open doors and the Adhera consumed us. Much the same as outside a cacophonous party filled the temple. The celebration was a roar as it bounced off the stone walls and dome of the old place of worship. Pinkish stone columns rose to catch a grand dome overhead, its silver ceiling covered in patterns that seemed to move the longer I looked at them, intricate and restless, like an angry storm cloud.

A train of people pushed between us. The last woman turned and mouthed an apology.

“This way.” Dionysus guided.

We made our way to a staircase that wound up through one of the spires. A guard in all black stood in front of it and moved aside without a word when we approached. Before heading up, Dionysus stopped and patted the guard on his breastplate.

We began to climb. The staircase was open so that we could see the party below diminishing as we rose.

“An old Adhera,” Dionysus said. The din of the crowd faded as we wound our way up. “I thought it was quite a nice building for hosting celebrations, so I kept it standing when I took the island.”

The stories of Zemrude were famous. During the war of paradise the forces of the divine and man had marched on the island and disappeared without a trace. The rumors about what happened were numerous and each more wild than the last. Looking at Dionysus now I suspected he had a role in it. It would have been wise of me to be more cautious.

We wound up beyond the open portion of the stair into the gloomy dark of the spire. Gaps in the wall let moonlight in to illuminate our way.

“There are many demons in your crowd harming those people you love,” I said.

Dionysus stopped on his step and turned to look down at me. His mouth smirked but his drunken eyes, exploding with color, did not.

“With the exception of my dear brother, gods do not love humans, child.”

The smell of wine and sex wafted off the god as we passed another opening in the spire wall. I could see the crowds below for a moment, dense as sand from my place, before the staircase turned and it was gone from view.

“Strong demons like the one you almost fought bubble up from the sea to the south.” He lazily traced the inner wall of the spire. “The fact that the Rain Court built an Adhera so far inland means that during their time, even they were wary of them.”

We turned and turned up the tower.

“They feed on stressed souls.” The party below was just a sound now, a faint rhythmic thrum pounding through the stone. “My presence pushes people. Maddens them. Stresses their souls in a way demons find irresistible.”

I stopped climbing.

He looked back at me.

“You madden the whole city?” I clarified.

“The whole island,” he corrected.

“The Zemics, do they know?” I asked.

“The people of Zemrude would not care even if they did know,” Dionysus replied.

“Have you asked them?” I challenged.

“I think you would be disappointed by the answer your fellow humans here would give,” he informed me, as if delivering bad news. “They do not care about much beyond merriment. They are not stuck. They can leave whenever they want. Nothing beyond their own lack of belief in their worth and willpower keeps them searching for the same things night after night. I am simply amplifying their proclivities by being here.”

We reached an archway at the top of the spire.

“Afraid of heights?” he asked.

I made a noise at the silly question.

“Good,” he said.

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We walked through. There was space atop the spire for me and the god alone. We were high above the city and all of Kil expanded outward below us. It was silent up here save for a gentle summer wind. In the darkness below a million fires glimmered forming a second sky. It felt like a weight had lifted from my temples being away from the crowds. I shifted my sight and I could see the city’s stressed souls, vaporous clouds of milky white spread through every street and alleyway of the Fountain Quarter and some beyond.

“Beautiful, is it not?” the god said.

Kil was endless. It rolled along the hills of Zemrude and spread out to the sea and the horizons beyond.

“Not particularly, no,” I said.

The god laughed and it was caught in the wind and swept away. “You have seen too little of my city to know better, child.”

“I do not think I like what I have seen.” I was not sure why but I did not want to give the god an answer that pleased him.

“You seemed to be enjoying yourself with Jaimes earlier. He was quite disappointed when you left him,” Dionysus said detachedly, then added with a poke, “Are Laudomian priests allowed to do those things?”

I was embarrassed.

“I do not know if I can even be called a priest anymore,” I said absently, wiping imaginary blood from my hands onto my tunic.

“The healer’s hands are often bloodiest.” He waved my thought away.

“How did you know of Jaimes?” I asked, escaping the subject.

The god smiled. “There is nothing that happens within Kil that I do not know about.”

He leaned down so his head was level with mine and pointed over a wide stone railing. “For example,” a bright purple firework leapt into the sky where he pointed. “Over that way a Saran woman is screaming at her husband. She caught him sleeping with a woman he met only tonight.” Dionysus chuckled. “Or so she believes. The man could not bring himself to betray his wife even in his drunken state, but she is too angry to listen.” The god’s finger moved. “Over there,” another firework, “in a house on the hill, death has just taken a child for no reason at all. A shame. I will send flowers and condolences in the morning.”

“I thought you gods did not love humans,” I retorted.

His eyes shifted to mine, but his head barely moved. He ignored me and continued.

His finger swung far to the east. “Over that way, in an apartment building, the man who lives on the first floor has just been robbed at knifepoint. And a couple upstairs has just consummated a hasty marriage that no one approves of.”

As we looked out at the expanse of Kil a glimmer caught my eye. As I turned my attention to it a tendril of white light silently blossomed from the ground, a league or so tall, spinning slowly, smaller globs of light dancing around its base. Then it was gone, sinking back into the city without a trace.

Ithas.

“We spoke earlier, my brother and I,” Dionysus said into the calm. “I keep track of the strongest demons in the city. He asks where they are, and then kills them.”

Another tendril bloomed farther in the distance. I could feel Dionysus watching me.

“The city is a trap?” I realized.

Dionysus shrugged. “Efforts of the war and such.”

“I thought combat was forbidden.”

“The war general may do whatever he sees fit,” he replied with a mocking salute. “Ithas is the only god who can kill demons.”

He watched as more tendrils blossomed about his city. “I left paradise for him,” he said quietly, after a long pause, “and I would do so again.”

The summer breeze kept on. He was looking into the stars.

“You are right to follow him,” Dionysus said, turning to me.

Another tendril bloomed close by catching both of our attentions.

“Oh, good.” Dionysus clapped once in satisfaction. “It looks like your Star Seer killed our icy demon friend.”

“But what about the man?” I tensed. “Without the demon feeding on him, will he not simply die?”

“Ithas has awakened his soul. Maybe he will put up more of a fight now that he can see the demons that hunt him.”

I relaxed.

“You are very earnest,” the god observed, shaking his head. “Terrible affliction.”

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“Where are my friends?” I asked, thinking of them. It had been a long time.

Dionysus raised an eyebrow.

“Does my company bore you, boy?”

He laughed before I could answer and clapped me on the back, once more leaning over the rail and pointing.

“Isla is over there.”

A pink firework flared into the night sky and exploded.

“It seems she has run into an old friend. Aamon is over that way.”

A red firework leapt into the sky nearer the mountains behind the Fountain Quarter.

“It seems the dog has found himself a few female companions,” he chuckled.

“How is it that you know all of this?” I asked.

He put his hand on my shoulder and the music was there again, quieter this time but still intense.

“I know everything about anything that falls within my music,” he said.

“Why did you come to me in the alleyway?” I asked.

“You were about to be demon food,” he said plainly. The knowledge as obvious as the day.

“I could have killed it,” I protested.

“Not with drink in you,” he snapped. “Not alone.”

There was concern in the rebuke.

He observed me for a moment.

“I can see everything in Zemrude except for you. I can only perceive you through the void you create in my vision. To be so close to my grace and not reduced to a manic puddle is…unusual.” He paused. “I see why Ithas likes you.”

“I thought Ithas liked me because of my enormous testicles,” I replied.

At that, the god laughed heartily, and I did too.

“Are you having fun yet, child?” he asked impatiently.

It occurred to me that I was.

Another tendril of light lifted into the sky, quickly followed by another far out in the distance. It was very late. In another hour or two the sun would come.

He looked at me with his golden eyes, color bursting in their pupils. Those eyes had beheld a great many triumphs and still more tragedies. They say he is the god of madness and of wine. But I was sure he was a war god. He smiled ever so.

“Ithas told me you would not have fun here, so I took it upon myself to see to it that you do.”

If you are subscribed from Instagram, welcome to the Arkhipelago! If you’ve been here for a while, hi Starlight, I hope you are well. This is Arknotes, my weekly newsletter about the things that orbit the world of the Arkhipelago like celestial bodies and tug on its tides and provide light for its plants to grow. For the first issue we are going to talk about my favorite books.

The books that made me are numerous. To know me during my early youth was to know the top of my head, for my nose was perpetually buried in a book. In the interest of brevity and maintaining a healthy source of future content I have picked five.

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Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang

I discovered it through the film Arrival. It is a series of short stories and novellas that subverted my understanding of reality, be it faith, the self, or love. If you think humanity in all of its rapid advancement is of any consequence in the grander schemes of the universe I urge you to read the first story in the book titled “The Tower of Babylon” and think of Ecclesiastes 1:2: “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

Circe - Madeline Miller

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has just been released and though I cannot confirm it I have a hunch Madeline Miller’s Circe was on the moodboard. To read it is to swim through ghostly, drifting, longing prose. As a boy brought up in the tradition of Percy Jackson it had not occurred to me that Greek mythology could be reimagined in such hushed, forlorn tones. In many Greek retellings the gods are characterized by their meddlesome nature. Annoying, selfish, and destructive forces that often hinder the lives of humans in one way or another. Circe asks you to feel for a god, or at least a person with divine blood, and by the end of the book you feel for her. I look a lot for Circe-like moments in the Arkhipelago. Before you ask, yes I have read the Song of Achilles as well and I like Circe more. But both are great.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion

If only I could write like Joan Didion. This is a series of stories and essays, my favorite form of book, that to me represents a prototypical version of the character driven stories and studies on the human condition that comprise a large part of the media today. What she writes specifically of California and Southern California so accurately describes what it feels to live here that barely a single of her words written sixty years ago rings dated or untrue. No one can write like Didion. Her sentences are confoundingly lovely and her observations are as sharp as glass underfoot. To read Goodbye to All That is to feel less alone as a human being.

Stardust - Neil Gaiman

A newer read for me so there may be some recency bias here. This is a story so strange and so concise. I have found in my own writing that it is exceedingly difficult to do this well. Stardust feels like an epic saga has mystically been confined to 250 or so pages. Every word precipitates, every loose end tied up, and every new detail so oblique to my expectation that I would hungrily read more to understand, and yet in the end I was deeply satisfied with all I knew about Faerie. Also, the witches in this story are perfectly macabre the way I believe all witches should be.

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino

I saw what would become my copy of Invisible Cities on a shelf in the Last Bookstore in DTLA, tattered and marked twelve dollars. I swear to you it called my name and I was sure I had known that book my whole life. I bought it without opening it, knowing nothing of what it contained. When I read it, it is no exaggeration to say that my life was changed. I had no idea words could do that, or that stories could feel the way Calvino’s do. In a paragraph or two you know something about life, the universe, and everything that you had not before, but you are unsure of exactly what it is you’ve learned. The richness of the cities is almost saccharine in their way. I could only read so many entries at a time before becoming overwhelmed and needing a break. But I always return and I have read it many times. In moments of joy and moments of grief I am swept up in the far flung foreign reaches of Calvino’s, and perhaps all of our, hearts.

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You amble down the pathway cut into the hillside. A deceptively slow, long task, the black sea never changing in your periphery as you descend. You enter the city. There are no people. Not in the bars, nor the shops. The tables are set. Cups half full. Fires still burning low in their grates. But you hear a great cacophony echoing through the empty streets, a rhythmic chorus of suffering carried on the wet air. You cautiously make your way toward it.

You arrive in the square and behold the source of the noise. The great structure at the center of Bram is an Adhera. It reaches high above the rest of the town, a dark and elaborate thing made from a wood so old it has gone nearly black, carved and bent into odd twisting forms that become eaves and columns and snake upward to frame a great arched door. The wood has a grain to it like alcohol in water, and every surface has been worked, no plank left plain, no beam left uncarved, so that the whole structure seems to writhe. The door itself is ornate and depicts the story of the Rain Court. You are familiar with them all. Adherence was the only faith most knew.

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The door is shut. A few bodies at its base seem to have died there, banging on the door. Tied to its handle are hundreds of chains, and at the end of each chain a slave is shackled at the waist. Armed guards are stationed all around them. Priests move among them with whips, shouting to pull in rhythm with the drums that beat from somewhere on the low steps of the Adhera. The drums do not stop. The slaves are bleeding where the steel shackles cut into their flesh. The bodies of those who have fallen are not cleared. The dead are trampled by those who soon will be. The door shows no sign of movement. It has not moved. It will not move. There is no crowd to watch. Only a man in a nearby building looks down from his attic window, his face unreadable, his hands flat on the sill.

You cross the square, past the pulling people, the mud and the blood and the drums. You look into the mass of struggle and find the eyes of a little girl among them, vacant, dark-rimmed with grit, her small hands raw on the chain. This is wrong.

You go to the house where you saw the man and go inside.

Type: Craftable

The feathers of certain great beasts remain impossibly light long after they are shed. Weave them into certain garb to lighten your step and greatly reduce damage from falls.

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The wheat bends under the breeze and the sky bears down on your shoulders. You sit in the quiet for a while and take in the scars that cross the field. This part of the island is drier than the rest, kept lean by lightning and frequent wildfire. A few siphonofawn graze in the distance, unbothered.

You feel the rumble before you see it. A hulking shadow barreling through the tall wheat, coming for you. Hungry. You run for the saplings you passed between to come here. Your feet do not fail you and you are certain you will outpace it.

You do not see what hits you.

The force is absolute and animal. You are on your back in the grass and a scaly maw fills your field of view. The monster leans close. Yellow eyes buried behind a mask of black cartilage and bone. It opens its jaw and the roar that comes out of it flattens the wheat in every direction.

It is interrupted by the outward force you release from your core.

The Rennerfelling goes skyward. It turns in the air, helpless in the grip of gravity, and you are already on planted feet. You raise your hand. Bolts of static conjured from nothing arc upward and find the creature as it falls, one after another, each one true. When the body hits the earth it is a charred husk. The wheat around it smolders.

The siphonofawn do not look up. You return to the forest.

Recovered: Beastly Plumage

You have worn it only moments and already you can feel it. A low hum beneath your skin where the bracelet rests. The base frequency of your soul, steadied and raised, the way a lovely ditty lifts the spirit of a room.

Raise your hand. Weave even the most basic spell. In every way you will find it easier to cast, the soul flowing where you direct it with less resistance, less cost, less loss.

It is a small gift from a goddess who need not have given anything. It is no small thing.

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Be careful when you pet them. The stingers laced into their coats will find you before you find them. The sting is unpleasant but not dangerous, a brief white heat that fades within the hour.

Their meat is extremely dense in nutrients. It is not particularly good eating. It is, however, reliable.

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As you pass the gate, you notice three things: your pain has eased to nothing, you are in a field of wheat grass, and you are face to face with a bovine that seems to have mated with a jellyfish. It chews its cud and regards you with the typical mild interest of a cow.

You look down. The arrow still protrudes from your abdomen and blood still flows. You feel your shoulder; the wound there remains. But there is no pain. You stand despite yourself and look about. Somehow you know you are still on Andria. The light is the same. In the near distance a boulder rises from the wheat grass and a woman is perched on it. Like the cow, she watches you with only mild interest. You leave the cow and approach her.

Blood runs down your inner thigh, hot and sticky. The smell of your own iron fills your lungs. You near her and she looks down at you from her high place.

“Surely you have something in your pack to heal yourself.”

Her voice is three in one. She is right; you have cinder salt in your bag, and without the pain the solution is obvious.

You apply the cinder salt. It fizzes in your wounds but does not burn. The wounds seal, and you can feel the salt working at mending the deeper tears in your flesh. You look up at her then. She is striking. Pin-straight black hair of extraordinary length drifts about her in the breeze. Strange blue eyes.

“You follow a particular path. You seek Ithas.”

Suddenly you know she comes from the same place as Ithas.

“He passed through here, and now monsters multiply, and a great beast has woken in the south.”

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A tongue finds your wrist. The cow has wandered to you and licks at your drying blood. You do not mind, and scratch behind its ear. The goddess smiles, faintly amused.

“I blocked the path with an archer to prevent the faithful from going further and becoming hurt. How did you kill her? You have no bow.”

Her three voices press into your skull in a way not altogether dissatisfying.

You show her your soul then. White blazing flames rise and fall as you draw your spirit back once more.

“Ah, so he has shown you your soul, and you have taught yourself how to wield it.”

She pauses for a long time.

“More chaos.”

You say nothing.

“I have no desire to fix what occurs in the south of Andria. But if that is the path you seek, it is not my place to stop you. I am here merely to observe.”

You turn to leave.

“Isla.”

You did not tell the goddess your name.

“Here.”

Strands of her hair drift toward you and land in your palm, braiding themselves and wrapping around your wrist. A bracelet, woven from a goddess.

“This will help your soul flow.”

She descends from her boulder and walks away into the field. She calls over her shoulder.

“We will meet again soon.”

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You hobble through the forest. Along a deer run. Over a boulder. Around a tree. You reach the littlest pool, surrounded by moss and by clover. Across the placid pond two saplings grow like twins from the fertile earth, and though the canopy of ancient cedar suspends the forest floor in shades of shade, an unadulterated daylight seems to shine between the two young trees. Light from a different place. Your blood drips into the still pond as you watch the phenomenon.

“Come.”

Gingerly you make your way around the pool and pass between the saplings.

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You go south.

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Eventually Yvaine falls away, but the road on the lake shore does not seem to notice and marches on ever further. The road too eventually forgets itself, and you are in the deep forests of Andria. The old men here have grown since before the kings whose names even the stones have forgotten. They congregate so closely that they grow into one another, contorting into ever stranger arrangements as you push deeper.

You will have to camp in the forest. You have walked for half a day, and though the sun is high, the canopy is thick and the mist is thicker. Moss hangs from branches like cobwebs wet with dew.

Thwick. A large arrow appears between your feet, sent to you by something in the shadows.

The old men watch on.

Thwick. Thwick. A bolt protrudes from your shoulder and your abdomen. You are on your knees. You use your soul skill to make your eyes see in the dark, scanning quickly, and you see a hooded ranger some hundred yards away nocking another arrow. Your blood is in the loam. It finds the roots of the old men and they drink.

You pull the arrow from your shoulder. Blood gushes and you feel something rip. From your palm you send it whizzing in the direction of the archer. It sprouts from his neck.

You breathe deeply. Your vision begins to dim. Maybe here is a good place to rest.

“I have seen weaker survive worse. Rise and find me.”

It was a woman’s voice. There was something about the words, they did not make you stronger, but they did ease the pain. The voice came from your left, and though you stumble, you proceed that way.

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You follow the girl through the fog toward the lake. It is like trailing a ghost. The road grows steep as the lake nears, and the structures rising along the slope are clad with cedar planks greyed by the island’s air. Just ahead, the girl turns and ducks into one such structure. Inside, if you can consider it that, there is no roof. The building has decayed and hollowed. The inside is little more than bare earth and four old walls. A small cedar tree grows from the ground, and next to it a woman with long black hair sits on a small rug, shuffling a deck of cards on a cedar chest. The girl sits next to her, watching intently.

“Sit.”

You approach with caution. You sit in front of her and watch as she deftly weaves the cards in and out of the deck, ensuring chaos in their order. You are not sure, but you feel the cedar tree is watching you, and you swear you see a face in its trunk.

“I am Nikke.” Her hands slow ever so slightly, then speed again. “You have something. You may give it back to her.” You produce the silver bracelet and hand it to the girl, who shyly takes it from your palm and slips it over her little hand. She bows slightly in thanks.

“Thank you for returning Nelli’s gift. I would like to read your fortune as a thank you.” This, you realize, is not really a choice, as she begins to shuffle the cards in earnest. You watch the hypnotic movement for a time unknown, and then she slides the deck across the chest. You pull a card and place it face up.

A monster holds two people in its claws.

You pull another.

A sunrise, inverted.

Another.

A woman wearing a crown, with pink fluid pouring from her mouth.

You hesitate, but the woman only watches intently, her black hair fallen around her eyes so you cannot see them.

You draw.

A congregation of bones.

Once more you pull and set it face down.

A horned thing with a blade buried in its skull.

As you set it down, the cards and the deck catch fire. Hot white flames turn the paper to ash.

She looks at you then, through the veil of her hair, with strange blue eyes.

“Your soul is purchased.” With the tone of one reading aloud from a well-kept ledger. “Your fate is spoken for. Your fortune cannot be told.”

A breeze from nowhere blows the ash from the chest, and when she opens it the woman produces another deck of cards and begins to shuffle, paying you no mind.

You stand, and Nelli tugs on your robe. “Thank you for bringing me my bracelet.” She was unperturbed by what she had witnessed. “You are the second to return it to me. A man passed through this place on his way to the forests south of the lake some moons ago and brought it back to me. It keeps falling off, but Nikke says I will grow into it soon.”

The sun always rises, and the solstice always returns. Today the veil is thin. I can reach out and swear my fingers brush my home. I miss it, you know, the Arkhipelago. The crisp air, the rich earth. The quietness. That place, in all of its immensity, pleaded with you to be still. Vistas and wonders shamelessly touted, devised only, it seemed, to arrest you. Begging silently, stay quiet.

I think those countless islands have been through a great many things. Lakes worth of blood spilled on their rocks, their forests burned in the name of kings long dead, the seas poisoned by humanity’s pride and impossibly short sight. By the time I came along, it had been hurt many times over. But instead of punishing its inhabitants, as you would think it ought, for that’s what we humans would do, it only gave more of itself.

More bounty.

More wonder.

More beauty.

Always more beauty.

Still though, she was met with more pain. I watched a great and terrible, angry angry war that branded its mark on the Arkhipelago’s scarred-over flesh. Through fields made from feathers, under clouds formed from crystal. Armies marched across the great continent. Navies tread the open seas. The world paid no attention to the beauty it desperately offered, and the Arkhipelago became but a stage once more for the squabbles of humans and gods. Pawns.

The sun is high in the sky today. She is proud of the work it took to grow so tall. Winter nights ate at her light, and the spring dampened her warmth, but she persisted, for her place in the long melodies of the Great Song has long been decided. She knew to be patient. Now she gives us her all. Today I bask in her heat, and I wonder if her sunshine leaks into the Arkhipelago. I wonder if she whispers promises of greatness to that still, hurt world. I wonder if she prods, with her rays, convincing the firmament to give more beauty in the face of its ruin. Why is she so confident? I wonder if your sun knows how the song ends. Maybe she knows a great many things. Maybe she sees me roaming under her skies, learning to love this strange place. Maybe she knows her light seeps through the Great Column and leaks into my home.

I miss it, you know. Those far-flung lands. My friends, my family, my dragon. I wonder if I will ever go back. Such things are not up to me. I will tell you this: summer is here, and soon she will be invincible. This is demon-killing season. Enemies once great in winter’s shadow are minor hazards now.

Happy solstice, Starlight. I pray that every demon who hunts you meets a swift and violent end. Though you have been hurt so, I urge you to give more of yourself. For the surest way to have nothing is to give nothing. We have so much more to go. All of it waiting for us. But remember this, Starlight. You are not alone. I will be here whenever you’re in need.

-Ulliam

A small, crudely smithed ring of ordinary metal, set with a riverstone and bearing a name scratched on the inside.

It is wholly and undoubtedly without value, but you remember what it was to be a child, and what it was to lose something precious to you. Inspecting it furthers your resolve to find the bracelet's owner.