What happens when a wine writer who loves to write whimsical fiction is asked to write for a serious wine writing competition instead?

Not much is the answer.

Three months ago I submitted my response to the Jancis Robinson wine writing competition 2026.

For those in the know, Jancis is a big deal in the world of wine, and her competition sees entries from all over the planet, from war-torn countries such as Ukraine, to desolate regions such as the Arctic Circle.

The brief this year was to write about an unusual wine pairing, a subject I absolutely love. I preach that wine is a form of art, and so I wonder often at the reasons why we tend to only pair it with food. Why not music? Why not a famous painting? Why not a piece of writing? (Something I have done for a number of you on Substack already).

In my response, I decided to go a bit more… Out there. I paired wine with the Taoist concept of Wu-Wei, using the teaching of Wu-Wei as a vehicle to explore how both wine and words are in essence, essence-less.

Spoiler alert: My entry did not even get shortlisted. I think it was a bit too experimental. The other entries I read were beautifully written, but much more direct. Something I shall consider ignoring for next year’s entry as well.

As a result of not even placing, I have instead opted to share it here with you lovely people. Exploring both the piece of writing, and its influences through my Substack mission lens.

Joy in the process | Creativity as a skill | Wonder as a feeling.

So, let’s get into it!

The Wu-Wei of Wine

‘How are you perceiving me?‘ said the text to the reader.

With your eyes you see me, left to right, one by one - sip by sip, you absorb me until understanding dawns. As the words and sentence structures macerate in your consciousness, they reveal themselves to you as meaning. Then you take that dawning understanding, fermented and bottled within your unique life context, and you pair it with your catalogue of experiences.

Words of self-help pair with positive change.
Fiction pairs with empathy.
Poetry pairs with awe.

And yet words are only second-hand artefacts of reality. So what of wine?

Wine is sudden, it arrives, not left to right, not drip by tiny drip, but with immediacy. Flavours flood your mouth as fast as experience can be experienced. It is effortless to taste wine; you simply apply it to your senses. That is it.

Wine education brings proficiency in tasting, but don’t worry, you have been preparing for this your whole life. You intuitively understand flavour, and even if you don’t consciously, your tongue will fill you in on the details. Acidity will squeeze your eyes tight. Flavours of apple will remind you of childhood. Tannin will make you lick your teeth.

The wine will reveal itself in your mind as meaning. Then you take that understanding, fermented and bottled within your unique life context, and you pair it with?

Food? Is that it?

A perfectly adequate pairing for sure, and yet wine invokes so much more. Why not pair it with your very existence, as you might with the words you consume on a daily basis?

Is there more to find?

Level 1 - Environment | Domaine Bernard Baudry | 2023 Chinon - Les Granges

You are in your allotment, a Loire Cabernet Franc resting slightly chilled in your shed. Your hands have the smell of dried earth baked under your nails, clay and ceramic. Raindrops settle on your brow, a fresh counter to the intense warmth dug from the earth. Retreating from the weather, your coat hem brushes the tomato plants, releasing their spicy, verdant aroma.

Sheltered now, you unfold a camping chair. As it pops into shape, a clatter of sand pings off the wooden floor. Salt lashes the tongue as the memory of a sea breeze from your last beach trip swims across your mind’s eye. A pail of raspberries, redcurrants, blackberries and strawberries rests in the corner. A little juice runs at the bottom, releasing sweet fromage frais aromas.

As the rain comes down harder, the pitter-patter is punctuated by the pop of a cork, the glug of wine being poured. The aromas mingle with your dusty hands. The first sip lands, but by now, you have already tasted it.

Wu-wei is a Taoist concept that roughly translates to ‘effortless action.’ English lacks a direct equivalent; its meaning is best felt through the gravity it exerts on experience.

Fortunately, this exact illustration of the flimsiness of words to describe Wu-Wei is wine’s greatest strength.

Words try to describe something that is already a memory, a flavour in the mind, half forgotten, formless, pushed and pulled by conceptualisation, and neatly stored in the filing cabinet of a sentence. Whereas a sound, when it arises, is automatically heard. A flavour, when it appears, is automatically tasted; a sensation, when it erupts, is automatically felt. So why not pair wine with...

Level 2 - Feelings | 2021 Villa Maria Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc

Ramshackle stairs creak, danger, trepidation. A shower of beads hung in the doorway stroke my hair. Eyes ablaze with lights, filling up with excitement. A second-story beach bar, Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Costa Rica.

Two sides of the room open to the world, wind on my face. Nostalgia for my old dreams. Tropical trees sing to my heart, the song is the sound of aspirations being realised. Stormy electricity in the air, raising goose-pimples. The ordered wine arrives with an umbrella and ice, served in a coconut shell.

Electricity in the grapes, fresh from New Zealand. Zing - grapefruit & petrichor. Zap - lightning arcs over the jungle. A rush of energy courses through my body, prickling at my skin. This feels SO good.

Waves wash on the nearby beach. Wine rushes through a straw. Tropical rain starts to clatter upon the tin roof, and acidity clatters against my teeth. Gusts brush through trees, carrying memories of botanical gardens. Wind swirls the wine’s aromas into the shape of the jungle. Sensory whirlpools capture my brain and body. Sounds, shapes, smells, tastes, and feelings suck me deep into the present moment. Bringing me home.

Embracing the rawness of your senses enlivens you. Paradoxically, words, the very tools used to communicate wine lore, are in themselves merely concepts.

Words and sentences are like a fisherman’s net held up in front of an island on the horizon; the tiny squares serve to break up the view of the landmass into little measurable chunks. That’s a tree, that’s a cliff. That’s a tannin. But experience is not like that. It is flowing and impermanent, it has no shape and contains no essence. It has no borders, and neither does wine. It flows literally and metaphysically, simultaneously with experience. Wu-wei.

Level 3 - Communion | Domaine Marcel Deiss - Grasberg 2022

Flowing, unctuous, glinting, exciting.

What a night.

Tumultuous tinklings, speaker bound but room wide, pumped deep into our mysterious heart-filled caverns.

Nothing and everything mingles in the dance.

My sister raises her glittering beacon unto the sky, light pours like liquid golden honey, oozing down between the cracks of the beat. Feet slowly subsumed.

Warmth rumbling and tumbling up the limestone mountain of our fractured terroir, opposing gravity. Childhoods spent apart.

A million grapes in a glass. They all had separate lives, their own scars. Some are not even familial, just outcasts in a field.

How could we possibly resist the borders of our upbringings?

The honey connects us. Atoms. Thoughts. Experiences. Falling like drops of rain, united in the ocean.

Mind stills. Petals spring, boundingly, bountifully forth.

Waves splash about, a skin above the connective tissue of the deep.

Music brings communion

Wine teaches

... - …

Joy In The Process

I hope that upon reading this you can feel how much fun I was having. This combined three of my favourite things. Wine, metaphysics and linguistic philosophy, and writing.

I knew early on that I wanted to deconstruct what wine writing even is. In my day-job I write articles and emails about wine almost daily, and it gets tiring when every entry reads like the one before. Familiar descriptors, the same focus on winemaking and flavour. It’s interesting, don’t get me wrong, but as I stated in the piece. Wine for me is so much more than a description. It is experience in one of its more raw and alive forms. In that sense, I simply wanted to show that wine is a feeling, and not a description. And boy did I have fun doing so.

The three wine descriptions were a complete experiment in how far I could take words and bring them to a place where they still felt coherant, but also made little sense.

Oh and by the way, the three wines (in order as written) are also delicious. I would recommend trying them!

Creativity As a Skill

A part of practicing creativity is the ability to let go of expectations. As much as I would like to have done well in this wine writing competition, I also didn’t let that be a determinate for what I should write. And true, that does mean the final product will not be to everyones taste, but that is wonderful. This world is beautiful because of its diversity.

I don’t suggest that writing or doing any art for commercial gain is a bad thing. We all have to drink from the font of capitalism. But do consider also that some of the most memorable art in our lives has also been commercially successful. Pink Floyd’s - Dark Side of the Moon. Spongebob Squarepants. (Yes, I said it). Hamilton the musical.

So, make sure to flex your creative muscles sometimes, you never know what people will fall in love with.

Try these excercises next time you want to explore your creativity more:

• Cliché, but actually dance like no one is watching. Let yourself really go wild and enjoy having a body.

• Spend five minutes talking in a funny voice during a conversation and don’t explain it.

• Take a feeling and try and describe it in either one drawn line, or five linked words.

In this piece I literally tried to do that third idea. I took the feeling of having a wine and spotify night with my sister, and I tried to translate the absolute onslaught of feelings those evenings bring up. From happiness, to nostalgia, difficult memories and happy ones, shared love and a zest for life. All of it was channelled into that paragraph. It doesn’t matter if it was successful. It matters that I touched that part of my soul, and gave it the chance to be free.

Wonder As a Feeling

There are few things in life that have filled me with as much wonder as studying Taoism and Buddhism.

I was an atheist for most of my life, and I would still consider my beliefs to broadly so. The great thing about these two spiritualities and philsophies is that they don’t require you to have faith. They instead ask - “Well, hey there Graeme, why not read what we have to say, and then give it a go yourself. If it doesn’t do it for you, thats cool.”

I remember the first time I read the Tao Te Ching vividly.

Much like my aims for this piece, it was a book that washed over me. Meaning in the text wasn’t always clear, but it felt like something, and the more I read the more the feeling grew into a sense of wonder. Wonder at nature, wonder at our ability to have awareness, wonder at the world.

To combine this with two of my other passions was such a burst of energy. And so I would advocate that —if you too have things in your life that truly fill you up— do not shy away from portraying that in your work!

People will tell you art comes from suffering. I beg to differ. Art comes from feeling, and wonder, like suffering, is just as valid a muse. Never let it slide.

Thank you for reading this far. If you have enjoyed what I shared, please do comment below and let me know what this piece and its subsequent breakdown did for you.

Embracing the Messy Reality

Writing while balancing a 45-hour corporate workweek is an exercise in dedication. I am sure you have all felt that too.

But this is the messy reality of writing for the passion. 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 creative pursuit works.

Support the Unseen Work

Building 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 writing, and my other stories into their truest form.

Join the cartographers’ guild and help this adventure continue.

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. I have so much more to share, and I cannot wait to serve you with whimsy, talks on creativity, and playful silliness.

Love 💖🐇🦕

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 💖🐇🦕

When I was about 18 years old, I had assumed somewhat naively that I had already found my favourite sci-fi series ever. Stargate SG1. I was going to grow old with it. I had all the DVDs, and if I ever had children, I would watch it with them when they were old enough. How foolish I was, for I could not believe then that a show such as Battlestar Galactica (BSG) would rob me blind from that assumption.

I acquired the DVD box set of BSG on the cheap, reduced from the HMV sale (a music and film retailer in the UK), where I worked. I was intrigued by the visuals of the case. It looked mysterious and dark. Later that night, I popped the first DVD into the disc drive of my university laptop, and my world was changed.

What had changed?

In most sci-fi, we have a lot of gung-ho characters. Heroes like Luke Skywalker, Jack O’Neill, and Captain Kirk, people who are fallible but very courageous and charming. Sure, BSG even has their equivalent in Captain Apollo, aka Lee Adama, the admiral’s son. A muscular, brave, emotional, and morally defined character who gives us exactly what we might expect. Guns, roaring engines, romance, and bravado.

Suddenly, however, I found myself absolutely gripped by a character who was almost the exact opposite. A scientist, egotistical, philandering, self-preserving coward by the name of Dr Baltar. A man who had been instrumental in the literal apocalypse brought down upon humanity by their prodigal children, the AI robots, the Cylons. Hardly a likeable character, right? WRONG!

This character is the beating heart of the show. And I am going to explain why and what we can learn from the way he was written.

The Curveball: A Character Trope

The best way to understand Baltar, or indeed any character that follows this curveball trope, is to realise that they have a broken moral compass. Many characters, including heroes, are built on moral consistency, but curveballs are filled with dramatic contradictions. Their internal landscape is a melee of fighting beliefs, ethics, traits and contexts. Often, the battle between these juxtapositions is bloody and brutal, which is what makes them so dramatically interesting.

The Core Mechanics.

McKee’s law

McKee is right at the very pinnacle of the pantheon of screenwriting teachers, and he has been instrumental in the education of some of Hollywood’s most famous screenwriters and their success. One of my favourite examples of this is Pixar Animation Studios, which has relentlessly sent its story teams to McKee’s lectures and seminars to build stories that will stand the test of time. If you love Finding Nemo or Toy Story, then this man is part of the reason why.

His first law is all about building dimension in your characters through contradiction, weaving opposing forces right into the code of their identity. However, we must use the word ‘law’ lightly. McKee would be the first to say that he teaches principles, not rules. A rule says you MUST do it this way, whereas a principle is simply the awareness that this has worked repeatedly for a very long time, and that in learning it, you can adapt it and make it your own.

Paradox Versus Randomness with Dr Baltar

So what do we mean by giving your characters contradictions? The simplistic view of this might lead you to think that bolting on random opposing quirks onto a flat character will yield intrigue. It won’t. Contradictions must be fully justified in the character’s story and the fabric of who they are. The reader has to see the internal logic that bridges the opposing traits. In other words, don’t think that making an assassin have a penchant for baking pretty cupcakes will make them fun to read or watch.

Baltar manages to make the bridge between his natural oppositions very understandable and even empathy-inducing. The formula for this success goes as follows:

Core Character Paradox = Their Origin (how they were raised and the life they live) X Their present. (Their role in life, what they do).

Dr Baltar’s origins are thus: he grew up as a dirty farming boy on the agrarian colony of Aerilon, with a simple, rustic family and very few prospects. He spent the years between his childhood and adulthood crafting a sleek, Caprican-accented elite defence scientist persona. Academically trained, highly respected, and a paragon of what it means to be ‘high-scoiety’. All of this was by design, to bury his working-class roots and to pile layer upon layer over the top of his underlying imposter syndrome, class shame, and the deep-rooted insecurity that he is not good enough.

His present is as a scientific advisor who has huge sway over the military and government branches of the surviving human population, where all of the burying he has done threatens to be unearthed through relentless (and sometimes hilarious) conflicts of interest that place him directly between two or more immense powers.

You can see through this example how his negative traits can wage war with his good ones, and how they make perfect sense in relation to his context. His cowardice is a direct result of his insecurity; his self-preservation is a reflex from years of building up a formidable ego. He is not doing anything random as such, because his unpredictable actions are always grounded in who he is.

Empathy

This character of Dr Baltar makes some incredibly poor, and often self-centred decisions throughout the series, often with dire consequences. I mean, literally one of the first things he does is allow a Cylon into the defence mainframe of the 12 colonies because the beguiling Cylon in question had flattered his sensibilities. A charming, high-class, beautiful woman is just the right fit for his new identity, never mind if she seems a bit off and asks too many questions.

So how does a character like this become enjoyable, and even one we root for? How do we turn detestable actions into likeable characters?

For this, we turn to a classic piece of writing advice….

Save the cat

Save the Cat is another very famous guide for storytelling technique, and it gets its name from the principle of making your character ‘save the cat’. Or, in other words, taking a character who may not be morally pristine, such as Dr Baltar, and giving them either an action or a trait that is recognisably vulnerable and potentially wholesome.

Of course, there are not many cats in space for Baltar to save and nurture back to health, but we do see many other instances of his compassion and empathy that serve to balance his more challenging aspects.

The most famous example is when he is tasked with interrogating a Cylon prisoner who has been brutally treated. Starved, allowed no basic humanity, and repeatedly sexually abused. Most of the crew in this instance see her as non-human. A machine that walks the walk and talks the talk, yes, but ultimately she has no ethical value as a robot. However, Dr Baltar challenges this idea, and we see him gently bring this poor Cylon character back from the brink and give her a new life.

This is not the only instance of this heartfelt compassion. He saves lives in action, prays for people, and sometimes even sacrifices his own safety for others. His tendency toward self-preservation cracks, revealing a desperate, almost childlike longing for love and validation through connection.

Vulnerability

Vulnerability doesn’t always have to be shown through actions either. Neuroses is also a particularly effective way to show a character’s cracks and let their vulnerability shine through. Contrast the hyper-masculine heroism of Admiral Adama and Starbuck’s bravado with Baltar’s scared, confused and oftentimes slightly crazy persona. Baltar is often shamed by the storytelling for his lust, his weakness, his cowardice and even his emotional vulnerability. Yet it is this revealing of his imperfections and how he handles them with a tragic lack of grace (such as the scene when he is caught masturbating in his office whilst making love to the woman who lives in his head) that makes him feel achingly human.

As an audience, you are often thrown between feeling empathy, disgust, admiration, disdain and many other emotions when you follow Baltar’s story, and the vulnerability shines through in every moment because of it.

Want Versus Need

This is one of my personal favourite pieces of writing advice, and is best explained, in my opinion, through the book ‘Into the Woods’ by John Yorke. It is simply the idea that a plot is driven by the wants and needs of different characters, with a caveat. Characters will act mostly on their wants for most of the story, and the results of these acts will force the world around them to show what they need.

Dr Baltar, being the curveball that he is, is mostly driven by his desire for self-preservation and the maintenance of his ego. He does not have any idealistic virtues of truth, loyalty, or other such heroic traits, which is often why his actions, driven by his wants, lead to such whiplash moments throughout the story. Shuffling as he does between military ally, Cylon collaborator, Vice President to the colonies (and later president), and eventually religious cult leader. He releases prisoners, lies about people’s identities, and is constantly messing with people’s well-laid plans, all in the name of staying alive.

That explains his wants, but through all these changes, we also begin to see what he needs. Love, faith, connection, a community. And eventually, as his character grows and he works through his many flaws and vulnerabilities, we see development. We see a person change from a somewhat silly, boyish character to a man who shoulders responsibility and who cares about those around him.

In the end, his shifting loyalties as he discovers who he is underneath his shell become the primary engine for the series’ biggest moments.

The B-Side Principle

When we are crafting surveball characters, we are always searching for that theory called the ‘behavioural paradox’, that same juxtaposition of contradictory attributes we discussed earlier. But how do we best show these contradictions to the audience?

FLIP THE RECORD!

Imagine Baltar as a vinyl record.

Side A is where the radio hits live. It is his sleek, public-facing persona that he performs for the world. The celebrated, highly logical scientist-philosopher. He is smug, egocentric, and an atheist who looks down on spiritual beliefs with rational superiority.

But a good storyteller will always have a side B

Side B is the swirling undercurrents of his vulnerability.

So what do we do if we really want to reveal those B-Side traits? Well, turn the record over. Use the plot to force the record player of his life to flip him around and play the music from his other side. With Baltar, he is dragged into playing that side of himself when his guilt causes him to hallucinate the woman in red into existence. A mental projection of his ex-Cylon lover who appears to his consciousness as a deeply spiritual messenger of ‘the one true god’. She drags his deeply buried capacity for spiritual belief and dealing with trauma, screaming and kicking, into the light.

That plot manoeuvre forces the story to unearth everything that makes Baltar tick, and in so doing, reveals to us the depths of his contradictions and our capacity for empathy towards a character that probably doesn’t deserve it.

A word of warning, however.

This technique only works well if you follow this one basic premise. Do not give them a magical makeover. True growth is always about integration, not replacement. A coward should not magically become a fearless warrior by the climax; real humans do not change that cleanly. We are not trying to replace the A side of the record; instead, we want the A side and the B side to begin to work in harmony with each other.

Baltar is not magically transformed into a brave, stoic military commander. He is still the same twitchy, hyperventilating, self-interested egomaniac we met in the pilot. Yet, he has successfully integrated his B-side.

When the final crisis hits, he holds his fear in one hand and a rifle in the other, choosing to stand on the front lines to defend the future of humanity. He doesn’t survive by shedding his flaws; he survives by embracing them, ultimately settling down on New Earth to farm the soil he spent his entire life running from. He remains wonderfully himself, but his inner compass has finally integrated his warring multitudes into a unified whole.

The Workshop

Just like before in my last educational piece where we combined the art of cooking and writing, I would like to suggest an exercise.

So this is where we hand the reins over to you, my fellow friends and writers. Do you have a character that you feel could fulfil this role of the curveball? Yielding unpredictability like a sword that drives the battalions of your plot forward?

Run them through these three steps, and you will have already done much of the heavy lifting when it comes to defining how they will fulfil this trope.

1. Locate their north star: What are their obvious active goals in the story, and why do they want them?

2. Demolish their compass: What is hidden on the B-side of their soul. Introduce a justified contradiction between their origin and their present.

3. Flip the record: Place them in a situation where they must consistently make choices between their opposing sides.

If you can achieve these three basic things, you are well on your way to building a Baltar.

What does Baltar really teach?

Baltar is a complex character, yes. But I think what makes him really special is the mirror he holds up to our souls as well.

We may not be much like him, but we can certainly relate to these warring feelings, conflicted emotions, uncertainty and fears. Making a list of steps for how to build a character like this is an exercise in simplification. Sure, it helps us to understand some of the mechanics, but the real wonder will shine through in our characters when we are able to look into the mirror and embrace our own messy multitudes and scratch them onto our sheets of parchment with as much truth as we can muster.

This new understanding is just the starting point.

Now, dear friends, go write a baller curveball character and make sure to tag me when you do. I would love to read it. And if you have done already, let me know in the comments below and tell me all about it.

All the best 😎🛸👽

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This is part two of my graphic fable, Taona. A cute little story of a Triceratops who lived on a peninsula 66 million years ago. Through this lil’ dino friend, I will be exploring the theme of deep time — how, no matter what time you live in, we can all feel connected.

The Story so far

Chapter Directory: 1, 2,

You are here 👆

Taona has woken up to the all-encompassing sound of the monsoon rains. While it sometimes bothers him, he often finds that the subdued nature of the forest and his preference for the dry and warmth of his little cave lead him to reflect on things he might normally gloss over, finding perfection in even the littlest details.

As with all things, though, the weather changes, and the rain slowly begins to ease…

Taona noticed that the drips in his puddle were slowly easing off, their splashes less pronounced, the ripples less aggressive. He looked upwards through the canopies to the sky above, trying to sense the quality of the light. To hear whether anyone was stirring from their nests?

Indeed, the sky had changed, and it felt unusual despite the lighter skies and the quieter background pitter-patter. His ears twitched, trying to pick out sounds, but unusually there were very few to be heard. The sense of the world holding its breath had not abated like the wet weather, and he was desperately curious to find out why.

Carefully so as not to disturb the quiet, Taona picked himself up and ventured out into the jungle. He had in mind to visit the nearby brook, a popular drinking spot, and a sure place to discover whether this feeling of stillness was a warning sign or just sleepiness on the part of the rest of the creatures. His mind drifted momentarily to his old herd, but, shuddering, he pushed the thought down and began his trudge down the valley side.

This story is a labour of love, combining my passion for art with my obsession with the themes that connect us across time. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this format.

Do you sometimes get that feeling when you can’t quite place why, but you sense that change is in the air?

Tell me more in the comments 🦖😀

Bonus Content:

This story has been an ongoing project for a while, and though it may seem like it is just beginning, I have already written the full story. Images, however, take far longer to do, and so I am perhaps only about 1/20th completed. In order to stay true to my original intention, I often go back to the story that inspired it all. The Bhagavad Gita, a story of Prince Arjuna and his loyal aid, the hidden god Krishna. If you know, you know.

In the meantime, you might wonder about the process of how I get to these finished images. Sometimes a page can start from the loosest of sketches. As long as you know what is happening when you plot and plan, it doesn’t matter how it looks; all that matters is that you get the story out onto that page.

Who is Taona running from? Where is he running to? I guess you will just have to stick around and find out.

Tell me about your art process. Do you start scruffy, or are your drawings quite clean to begin with?

The Strings of Us, which is my main serial here on Substack, is a crowdfunded universe. If you are enjoying the free content from my atlas, you can help fund the professional editing, cover art, and final publication of the book by joining the Cartographer’s Guild and subscribing, or dropping a tip in my Ko-fi jar below.

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Every £1 contributed earns you 10 Treasury Points on our public Leaderboard. As we reach our funding milestones, our top point-holders will unlock exclusive, non-financial rewards. This includes securing your place in the premium “Community Edition” print run, immortalising your name and creative decisions directly within the physical text, alongside access to our digital TTRPG lore expansions.

Subscribe below to ensure you never miss a chapter. Step into the Cartographer’s Guild with a paid subscription to unlock the Director’s Commentaries, access the Atlas Vault, and help forge this universe alongside us.

If you cannot contribute financially today, the best way you can help the atlas unfold is by hitting the Like button and restacking this post with a comment on what you enjoyed (or didn’t enjoy; I love critique too).

Lots of love to you all 🥰

Graeme

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.

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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 💖🐇🦕

Why the foundations of good cookery are the secret ingredients to writing a story your readers can’t put down.

Growing up, I was fortunate to have a mum who was a chef. She had worked many different cooking jobs and picked up a lot of skills through her career. Initially it was wasted on me, (I was a very fussy child and couldn’t see my way to eating anything that was actually good for me), but as I got to university age, the need to learn some cooking skills quickly became apparent. I started as a deeply chaotic wannabe, much like the Swedish Chef in the muppets. But with each subsequent visit back home, I set about learning something new, and to my surprise, it was never a lesson related to ingredients or flavour. Rather, the basic value of everything I was taught could be linked back to the intrinsic foundational elements of good cookery.

Sadly for my mum, someone else managed to write the book on this first, before she had a chance to put pen to paper. Samin Nosrat’s ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ is that book, and it is truly excellent at explaining what these elements of good cookery are. But I maintain that my mum was the real trend-setter.

The basic premise of this book and these lessons is simple. There are a few basic levers in cookery which, when pushed or pulled, will take what you are cooking from bland to exciting, from stilted to balanced, and from flavourless to flavourful. I believe these levers exist for writing too, and it is my intention here to point them out and show you how to manipulate them yourself, all through the ongoing metaphor of cookery.

Just as a chef uses these elements to turn raw ingredients into a masterpiece, a writer can use them to turn a sequence of events into a compelling narrative.

Salt - A.K.A - Stakes and Conflict

Salt doesn’t necessarily make food salty, unless you add far too much. It enhances flavours that are already there. You can almost think of it as a volume dial and a clarity enhancer for food. Strangely, the science is quite counter-intuitive. Salt actually knocks back our bitterness receptors, allowing other flavour receptors to be more prominent. Alongside that, salt extracts water from the ingredient, releasing volatile aroma compounds which account for 80% of what we taste through our smell receptors.

In short, it is rather a useful little ingredient. But it must come with a warning. Too much, and food will taste grotesque, like swallowing seawater. Too little, and the food will be bland, like chewing paper.

The salt of storytelling is how you apply stakes and conflict in your narrative. Now, stakes and conflict don’t necessarily change who your character is, but they will bring their true nature to the surface, just as salt brings the flavour of an ingredient to the fore. Without stakes and conflict, a scene is bland. Just two people talking in a room about nothing much. But if you add a deadline, a secret, a threat, a hierarchy, or any number of other things. Suddenly things get interesting.

“Marjorie, I do not wish to alarm you, but for the last few minutes your tea cosy has been ticking.”

Of course, like salt, stakes and conflict have to be judiciously used. Too little and the story becomes slow and bland, but too much, where every moment is a crazy life-and-death situation, it becomes exhausting melodrama that will put most people off. Balance is key.

Heat - A.K.A - Plot.

Welcome to the furnace. Mwahaha! Heat is the great transmuter, and applying heat to your raw ingredients forces a chemical change that produces flavour, texture and all sorts of other fun reactions. It is the element that takes your basic components and turns them into something new; it forces change.

In storytelling, heat is the crucible of the plot. It is the inciting incidents and escalating actions that force a fundamental alteration.

You might easily mistake plot for stakes, or heat for salt to use this metaphor. But they serve different purposes. The salt (stakes) don’t actually change the ingredients. They just bring their best nature to the fore. The heat is the breakdown of the ingredients and their birth into something new. To put it simply, you can’t unbake a cake.

So, while the stakes make them react, the heat of the plot is what breaks down their old worldview and forces them to adapt, learn, and permanently change in order to survive. This is your character arc.

What kinds of heat can you apply in a story?

Heat consists of the structural plot beats that systematically dismantle your characters’ old worldviews and force them to adapt. You can apply heat through threshold crossings that strip away their comforts, like dropping raw ingredients into a hot pan, or through crushing failures that show up the characters’ inadequacies. Heat is the shocking betrayals that destroy trust, the losses of their allies that force them to step up and be responsible, or even a ‘dark night of the soul’ moment where they must sit with their journey so far and realign their compass.

These elements aren’t just threats hanging over your characters’ collective heads; they are friction points that permanently cook them into new versions of themselves.

Fat - A.K.A - Emotion and Interiority

Fat in cooking, such as butter, olive oil, ghee, is an essential component of your dishes, unless you want to have exceedingly flavourless food. It was once demonised as the ultimate threat to people’s health in their diets, but it has subsequently been shown to be pretty essential to health, and very essential to flavour.

To put it succinctly, fat carries flavour. Imagine a person at a water park in a giant rubber ring going around a water rapids. The person is flavour, the rubber ring is fat. Many aroma compounds are fat-soluble; think things like the aroma of garlic or rosemary. They will literally meld with the fats, coating the palate and allowing the flavours to linger and feel satisfying.

In your stories, character interiority and emotional resonance act as the fat in your dish. You can have a brilliantly structured plot (heat) and massive dramatic stakes (salt), but if the reader does not feel a deep, empathetic connection to the characters, the story is dry, like plain boiled rice. Emotion is the buttery medium through which the reader can taste the impacts of the plot; interiority is the lingering weight of a scene’s repercussions, shown through the character’s point of view, that stays with the reader long after they have closed the book.

Acid - A.K.A - Contrast and Reversals

Acid is the brightener. Sometimes when I am cooking, I imagine it like an industrious butler going through and polishing all the grease off the silver so that it can shine. It cuts through the heavy richness of any dish and cleanses the palate (leaving any fingerprints and greasy handprints but a dream).

Have you ever tried to eat a massive bowl of rich, creamy pasta and found yourself struggling halfway through? That is palate exhaustion. Or perhaps something overly sugary like a crepe. A squeeze of lemon sorts it right out. This is why even a glass of cool acidic white wine on the side of a meal is so essential. It wakes the taste buds back up and ensures the next bite is just as exciting as the first.

In narrative terms, acid represents contrast and pacing shifts in your story, alongside shocking reversals.

If your story is entirely composed of heavy emotional trauma that oozes off the page, or dense world-building that is like reading an encyclopedia, your reader will get exhausted. You need acid to cut through it. A lemony sharp plot twist, a sudden moment of vinegary bitter dark humour in a tragedy, or a rapid pivot in the pacing, like picking up a glass of wine and putting down the fork. It prevents the story from becoming a monotonous slog and keeps the reader engaged.

Time - A.K.A - Pacing and Structure

Time is the invisible ingredient; like the swinging of Kronos’ scythe, it is quiet and inevitable, and yet as a chef or as an author, you do get to choose how it feels.

Time dictates exactly how the components of your dish experience the heat, and crucially, it is also the element that allows a dish to rest so the flavours can meld. A high-octane stir fry requires minutes in a super hot wok with a dash of salt, sesame oil (fat), and some rice wine vinegar (Acid), whereas a good curry or a well-made ragu needs hours. I am sure you have all experienced that strange phenomenon where indian food leftovers are eaten the next day, and somehow it tastes even better? That’s time!

In a well-told story, time is your structural pacing. It is the art of knowing when to race forward at breakneck speed in pure adrenaline-fuelled excitement, and conversely, when to let the characters and the reader take a breath from running at full tilt.

A story cannot be all climax. It requires quiet sequel scenes after a massive action sequence to process the consequences before the heat is turned back up. It reminds me of a quote by Alan Watts, which I shall include here.

“In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who only wrote finales. People would go to a concert just to hear one crashing chord… because that’s the end!”

Alan Watts

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The Kitchen Workshop: A Practical Exercise

Much like we did in my last educational piece, when looking at the cinematic techniques of Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece - Jurassic Park.

I want to turn this analysis back over to you and your own work. I invite you to put on your chef’s apron and step into the narrative kitchen. Take a look at your current work-in-progress and identify a scene that feels a bit flat or isn’t quite landing the way you intended. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Does it need more Salt? (Are the stakes too low, or is there a lack of immediate conflict?)

• Does it need more Heat? (Are the characters actually being forced to make a difficult choice or undergo a change?)

• Is it lacking Fat? (Do we truly understand how the point-of-view character feels about what is happening around them?)

• Does it need a splash of Acid? (Is the tone too monotonous, and could it benefit from a sharp reversal or a moment of contrast?)

• Does it need to cook faster or rest for a while? (Has the pacing left the audience bored or has it been so relentless that they are desensitised to the story?)

A Final Thought from the Muppets Swedish Chef.

“Et de eend ooff de dey, coookin’ is ooltimeetely un ect ooff hoospituleety und noorishmeent foor udders. Vritin’ is ixectly de seme; it is un proofoond ect ooff cunnecteeoon. Bork, bork, bork!”

Wait, no! Like the characters in any good story, I too have grown out of my Swedish Chef chaotic phase. So let’s try again...

At the end of the day, cooking is ultimately an act of hospitality and nourishment for others. Writing is exactly the same; it is a slow but achingly beautiful act of connection. You are preparing an experience for your readers to live in and learn from, and by mastering these foundational elements, you can ensure it is a meal they will never forget.

Now, I would love to hear from you. Which of these five elements do you struggle with the most in your own writing? Or, what is a book you have read recently that felt perfectly ‘seasoned’?

Let us chat about it in the comments below.

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. 👇

Prologue, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

The Story So Far:

We are aboard the Chrysaora, a monumental generation ship born from a secret alliance between humanity and intelligent, gravity-manipulating rabbits. Tensions on the vessel are running at a breaking point. A rogue saboteur recently triggered a near-catastrophic explosion in the water reclamation facility on the exact day the ship’s overarching AGI, “Sister,” was activated. Security Chief Lysander Tanner and rabbit spec-ops officer Hec’ten narrowly averted disaster, uncovering a hidden conspiracy that has led Lysander to forge a secret, investigative alliance with Dr Farrell.

Meanwhile, far from the political sabotage, the grieving human historian, Elias, is struggling to adapt to his new life among the stars. To break through his rigid, academic shell, the rabbit archivist Cas’shya has brought him to the ship’s holographic archive. Rejecting his sterile artefacts and museum-piece mentality, she has plunged him into a fully immersive, sensory reconstruction of Ancient Athens to teach him how rabbits truly record history: by feeling it.

Today, we leave the sound-dampened void of the starship behind and step into the bustling, sun-baked crowds of the Grecian Agora. A boastful Olympian is about to learn that the greatest athletes in history aren’t always human.

A massive thank you to everyone in the Cartographers Guild who joined the Leaderboard so far to help this vessel launch. Let’s open the logs.

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A Brief History of Rabbit-kind: The Tale of Philoc the Swift - Part 01 - The Pride of the Agora.

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.

He worked mostly for Rabbits as a runner between communities, using the many warrens that connected Rabbit families beneath the surface, and was well loved and respected for it. However, he was just as often chastised by the elders of the Rabbit families, what with his awkward habit of regularly getting mixed up in human affairs. His love of figs was sadly the driving force behind this unwelcome knack for getting into trouble. Philoc could barely contain himself at even the slightest waft of a basket of market figs, conveyed on a delicate breeze. In order to acquire them through more legitimate means, he would often go against common Rabbit convention and quietly run messages for important people on the surface, in lieu of payment, with fresh or dried figs and dates. Careful as he was to keep his profile low so as not to anger the Rabbit families further - and to keep his talent for Terra running a secret, under pain of Rabbit law! His reputation still preceded him. He was an almost mythical creature to those in the know, becoming a Rabbit who, in time, was highly sought after by the Athenian elite to run messages. Sometimes to generals or dignitaries, often to lovers, and even to the Kings, Pharaohs, and Emperors of other nations. Despite being well known in the upper rungs of society, however, he was yet to cement for himself a longer-lasting and more durable form of notoriety and fame.

All of that effort to remain relatively anonymous was to change the day he met a young, boastful Olympian. Demetrius.

It all began, as many good stories do, in the bustling Polis of Athens. Under the watchful eyes of the gods, Philoc, who was indulging in a few well-earned fruits, overheard a proclamation.

A tall, muscles-and-braun kind of man was standing among a crowd of admirers, fully slicked in rose-scented olive oil and glinting in the midday sun. He bellowed out to the crowd in as impressive a voice as his huge chest could muster.

“Good people, my name is Demetrius of Athens. I implore you to remember this name well, for I am bound for the Olympic Games, where I will assuredly win glory in every event. Not only for myself, but for the great city of Athens and for all of its citizens who wish to see the gods’ light shine upon the brow of an Athenian. The golden wreath bestowed upon the heads of the best athletes will be proof of my claims to excellence when I bring it home to this very Polis.

But do not just simply take what I say without scrutiny; listen well to the experience I bring to the Olympiad. The abilities I have come to possess in my travels will be evident for all to see, and it will be repeated for future generations to come as the greatest example of the human capacity for athleticism. In Sparta, I trained with their mighty generals. I can throw a discus, a shot, and a javelin further than even the boldest and most highly acclaimed Spartan warriors. On horseback, I travelled east, where I was recruited as a mercenary for the famed horse riders known as the Scythians. I now have the dexterity, the speed and the natural ability of those who can ride like the wind and shoot arrows with both hands free, from the back of their horse - at full gallop no less. My chariot skills have been likened to those of the great Hittites, famed for their chariot warfare, which will come as a surprise to none who know of my exploits in Anatolia.

In boxing, I have spent many months fighting with bears in the northern hills of Makedonia, learning how to brawl, to read the flow of the fight, to dodge, weave and master the art of using my opponent’s weight against them. To think like a bear is an art in itself; they do not presuppose the outcome of a brawl and instead react with lightning reactivity in the moment that it is necessary. It is impossible to surprise a bear, and it is impossible to surprise me. In wrestling, I tested the might of Poseidon and the Minotaur, both by sailing down to the ancient Mesopotamian island of Crete, where I fought against the great beast and learned how to use this Bull’s strength against him, pulling him to the floor and holding him fast as Theseus may have done in the past. After this, I travelled into the far north, well beyond our northern borders and up into the cold, frost-bitten realms of the Celts. It was there that I studied under a great tutor. A fierce Celtic warrior by the name of Arthengeterix, who taught me the techniques of his fierce, one-to-one combat style. It is a fighting form that has stood him in great standing as a king among the tribes. It is this fighting style I will be bringing to the Pankration, where there will be no one in the Greek world able to stand toe to toe with me”.

Philoc, who had scoffed his figs by this point and was sitting amicably in the shade of a small market stall adorned with flowers, scoffed again at this man’s audacity and boldness. Surely no one could be daft enough to believe this man’s claims. For a start, he looked to be no older than twenty-five years, so quite how he had been able to stuff his life so full to bursting with all these experiences was beyond belief. Stories of Minotaurs, Mercenaries, and fighting bears. Philoc laughed to himself again and creased his eyes in bemused bewilderment. However, his ears pricked up at the next statement.

“My dear friends, ‘but what of the running events’, I hear you ask… Fear not, for I have found the greatest of tutors. I am certain you have all heard tales of the swift and lightning-fast Gē Dromeis. Terra runners. Rabbits whose ability to run has become almost legendary. Of course, most of you, I am sure, think of these enigmatic creatures as simple kids’ tales, but I can assure you they are not! I have met one, and learnt the secrets of their incredible ability to be in one location and the next before the blink of an eye. I can now best any Rabbit or Human in a course of any distance. The other Olympians will have only a view of dust, kicked up from my blazed trail as I cascade towards and over the finish line”.

“Hah!”

The crowd was silenced suddenly, unsure who would be brave enough to have released such a hearty laugh at this newest claim. People shuffled awkwardly, and Demetrius himself stilled, unfamiliar as he was with being ridiculed. Glaring into the crowd, he scanned for the culprit, ready to prove his mettle as a warrior and athlete right here, right now.

The crowd began to part a little, shuffling awkwardly as the source of the disruption became more evident. Demetrius growled his stern gaze through the crowd as the people parted, until at last his eyes landed on a Rabbit. A small white and grey flecked Rabbit looking sheepish and trying to look as small as he could behind a basket. Many in the crowd who could see what was happening gasped audibly, unsure what to make of this turn of events. Rabbits, as far as they were concerned, were borderline mythical. Stories told to children and shared over wine. These were the moments that concerned Rabbits, not real life. As word of the Rabbit rippled through the crowd, it began to buzz momentarily until -

“You, Rabbit! You mock me!?”

“No sir, not me at all, nope, must have been someo….”

Philoc clasped his paws over his mouth aghast and ashamed in equal measure at having spoken in Human language as openly as this. With so many people around, he couldn’t quite believe himself.

Demetrius projected an accusing finger across the heads of his audience.

“Your guilt speaks volumes, Rabbit! How about I come over there and wipe that smirk off your face properly? Do not think that because of having met your kind before, I will be lenient”

At this moment, when the tension was climbing rapidly up the walls of the great acropolis to new heights, a man stepped out of the crowd. Herodotus, who had much knowledge of the world and of Rabbits, saw an opportunity.

“My dear friends, calm this quarrel immediately. I am sure not everything is as it seems. Perhaps there is an opportunity here for you, Demetrius, to show us all the truth of what you say”.

Turning to Philoc, he beckoned him forward. Philoc, aware of the expectant gaze of the entire crowd, not to mention the heat coming off Demtrius’s glare, was hesitant to take a step further and instead considered making a dash for it, secrecy be damned.

“Come now, no harm will befall you”.

Assured by this gentle man’s calming presence, he hopped forward from his spot in the shade of the basket and out onto the sunny stage that had been created by the feet of those who had parted to let him in.

Herodotus, satisfied that he had absorbed some of the immediate danger, began:

“Gentlemen, let us not resort to brash actions. Demetrius, your claims are grand, and if true, worthy of the annals of history. Yet, they are met with scepticism, understandably so. Why not prove the veracity of your training with the Gē Dromeis in a challenge that would befit such a tale?”

Demetrius, after a moment of thought, his pride piqued: “And what challenge would you propose, wise Herodotus, that could possibly prove my worth and silence the doubters?”

“A race, but not any mundane race. A race to the Oracle of Delphi. To consult the Oracle on a matter of great importance, a question that only the fastest and most worthy of messengers could deliver and return with an answer to before the next full moon. The gods themselves would bear witness to such a feat, and what better way to prove your divine training?”

Demetrius, for a moment, baulked at the thought of this challenge; surely he was above this nonsense. But then he looked around at the expectant eyes of his peers among the audience. Old and young alike, energised and awed by his stories of heroism and skill, were looking to him. A young child was reflecting admiration, as one might if standing before Zeus himself. Knowing that he had to prove himself and also not let these people down, he calmed himself and nodded, inwardly reluctant, but outwardly assured.

The crowd turned their attention towards Philoc, their admiration sliding into bemusement as they absorbed the reality of this unusual exchange.

Philoc hesitantly, and with a respectful nod towards Herodotus, spoke: “Esteemed Herodotus, and... Demetrius, it’s true I’ve overheard some tales taller than the olive trees of Athens, yet none so bold as to claim tutelage under my kin. While flattery it might be to some, to me it brings about a deep quandary.”

He pauses, glancing around at the crowd and then back at Demetrius, his tone a mix of apology and gentle correction.

“For no Rabbit, swift or wise, would dare boast to have taught the wind its ways, nor claim the stars as students. My laugh, ill-timed and unkind, was but a ripple in the pond of your grand tales. Yet, if a race to Delphi is the path to truth, then on swift legs I shall tread it, not for glory or laurel, but for clarity’s sake and maybe... for a fig or two at journey’s end.”

The market stall owner, seizing an opportunity for a bit of easy glory himself, called from his stand: “I will happily and with great pride provide a whole cartload of figs and dates to the winner of this esteemed contest of man versus beast… Ahem… Rabbit”.

“There it is settled then. As the witness to this agreement and a chronicler of truths, I shall set the terms and oversee this race. Let it be known that on this day, a challenge was set forth, one that will be remembered through the ages. Tomorrow morning at sunrise, when the first vestiges of the sun’s facade creep over that distant temple’s apex, we will meet at this very spot, and the race will begin. The message you will convey -”

Herodotus paused in thought. His wisdom and understanding of the greater patterns of the universe led him into a moment of silence as he pondered his role in steering these two characters towards a worthy outcome.

“Let the question for the Oracle be this: ‘What is the true measure of victory for a man? Is it in the laurels of triumph, or is there a greater victory to be found within?”

The crowd cheered with delight as the rules were laid bare for all. Herodotus, pleased with the effect of his words, looked to his two peers for their consent. Demetrius nodded, a thin smile on his lips, caught between amusement and annoyance, whilst Philoc took a low bow, eyes closing for a moment as a gesture of respect, before hopping away between the feet of an old woman.

From the Cartographer’s Desk

This chapter was an absolute joy to build. After the claustrophobic, high-stakes tension of the water facility sabotage in the present timeline, pivoting to the sun-drenched, mythological past of Ancient Greece felt like a necessary breath of fresh air.

Writing Philoc the Swift allowed me to explore the cheeky, slightly irreverent side of rabbit culture. I loved contrasting Demetrius’s loud, aggressive human hubris, built on boasts of wrestling minotaurs, fighting bears, and training with Spartans, with Philoc’s quiet, fig-loving capability. It sets the stage perfectly for the race to Delphi, proving that the greatest athletes in history aren’t always human.

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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.

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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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Do you remember the first time you saw Jurassic Park?

There are few movies as formative for people in the 90s as Jurassic Park. It managed to achieve wonders in the eyes of the 1993 cinema audience, which garnered the film multiple awards and rave reviews. Everything about it was brilliant, from state-of-the-art visual effects (both practical and CGI), to a sweeping soundtrack by John Williams that has become an instantly recognisable motif.

(The latter even managed to launch many successful memes and joke videos, usually involving epic music contrasted with mediocre visuals, or vice versa.)

But probably the film’s crowning achievement is how Stephen Spielberg was able to tell a story, visually, about something very much in the realm of science fiction. A story that has stood the test of time and feels just as visceral and exciting now, 32 years later, as it did on release.

But why Jurassic Park?

The moment I fully grasped the power of this craft, as exemplified by Spielberg, came when I was still very young. I had managed to sneakily watch Jurassic Park, despite how it had been made clear to me by my parents that I was ‘too young’ and that the film was ‘too scary’ for me to watch.

Spoiler alert: They were right, I was absolutely too young.

The next few weeks, I slept terribly. Sometimes I would lie as flat as possible underneath my bedsheets, believing that if I stayed incredibly still and didn’t move a muscle, the Velociraptors might not find me. It is amazing in hindsight how vivid and real a child’s imagination can feel after the lights go out.

What is just as amazing is that the combination of strong visual effects and excellent storytelling managed to create a monster that felt tangible and was very much an emotional reality, changing how my 8-year-old self acted.

This is the very thing I hope to do in my own writing: to use my craft as a writer and artist to make the whimsical feel real for you, my kind readers. So what better way to achieve this than to learn from the masters? But how do we take something as visual as film and bring it into a writer’s toolkit?

Let’s explore.

Jurassic Park Technique 1: Scale & Verticality

Stephen Spielberg made a conscious decision with Jurassic Park to shoot the film in a taller aspect ratio, 1.85:1, to emphasise the dinosaurs’ height and the vastness of the park’s landscapes. Standard widescreen CinemaScope prioritises a film’s horizontal scope. This decision led to a film that, from the very start, frames humans and dinosaurs in the same shot, making the human characters feel incredibly small and overwhelmed. Low angles throughout help emphasise this power dynamic, with multiple instances in which the creatures tower over the humans.

But how can we do something similar in writing? It is not as if changing the font size or the page size will affect how a person perceives a character’s power dynamic in quite the same way. However, you can control scale with sentence structure, using narrative altitude - how far the narrator’s voice is from the action - to create this sense of grandiosity. As well as techniques such as sentence complexity or simplicity.

For example, to create a sense of immense scale, you can use long, complex, flowing sentences with multiple clauses. This mimics a slow, sweeping camera pan across a vast landscape. The narrator’s voice becomes more distant, philosophical, and epic.

To make things feel small, intimate, or personal, you use shorter, simpler sentences. The focus narrows to concrete, sensory details.

Examples from ‘The Strings Of Us’.

With his eyes still closed, he perceived the landscape around him as vast, moving through time and space in a grand cycle of shifting and swirling patterns that went on into infinity. He knew suddenly that the meadow beneath him would come up to him, in just a moment, with the movement of the earth. As long as he stayed true to his place in this swirling mass.

This is an example from my prologue of using sentence structure to convey scale. The first sentence is long and complex, full of grand concepts like time, space, and infinity, mimicking a wide, cosmic shot. The subsequent sentences become slightly shorter and more punctuated, bringing the literary equivalent of the camera back to the character as Que’rup orients himself. The prose is being used to control the narrative zoom lens.

Jurassic Park Technique 2: Contrast (Awe vs. Horror)

In Jurassic Park, you will begin to notice a certain motif when it comes to how the subjects on a screen are presented. In awe-inspiring moments, the shots are wide and breezy, with open spaces. The horror moments are tight and claustrophobic: extreme close-ups, enclosed environments, often shown from a character’s subjective perspective, such as that famous scene of the water in the cup rippling in time with the looming footsteps of the T. rex.

To apply this technique to literature, we can build on what we have already established in the first technique and add extra layers to explore. To enhance our long, flowy sentences that convey space and scope, or our tight, claustrophobic sentences that convey intimacy, we can start playing with diction and setting.

This is one of the greatest strengths of writing compared with film. You achieve this contrast between awe and horror by manipulating your word choice and descriptions of the environments your characters inhabit.

For awe-inspiring moments, you might use words that are abstract, wondrous, and vast: infinity, cosmos, consciousness, grandeur.

The setting can also be open and symbolic, like a verdant meadow under the sky or a wide, endless beach. Even internal environments can have this open quality, with large windows that illuminate a common area, or an atrium brought to life by the gentle, echoing hum of footsteps as people go about their business.

And then for those horror moments, you shift to sharp, visceral, sensory words: hiss, clang, heat, steam, prickling, unbearable. Whilst moving the characters from an open space into a confined one, perhaps a tight corridor, a damaged facility, the space between two hot pipes, or famously, a cramped commercial kitchen, where the sound of metal utensils clattering on the floor can alert the two velociraptors hunting you to your hiding spot.

Examples from ‘The Strings Of Us’.

As carefully as I could, I teetered over electrical wires, shuffled under pipes, and retreated from touching the increasingly warm metal with my chest. The danger of being scalded was only a few centimetres away. The structures around me groaned threateningly. The humidity down here was insufferable. Steam hissed, masking my ragged breathing, and I could already feel beads of sweat rolling down my shoulders.

This section from my 6th Chapter is in direct contrast to the earlier parts of the story. We had established a sense of wonder with one style of language and setting, and then here, we pivot hard, trapping both the character and the reader in a physically and sensorially oppressive environment. The diction supports this claustrophobic feeling with words that imply danger. Instead of stepping over wires, he teeters; instead of crawling under pipes, he shuffles. His breathing is ragged rather than worn. Between these two techniques, you can create a feeling for the reader of being trapped alongside the character.

Jurassic Park Technique 3: Symbolic Visual Cues

In Jurassic Park, there are subtle yet consistent visual rules that are employed throughout the film. Characters descending into danger and ascending toward safety is a nice, obvious starting point, leaning into the ideas of up and down being metaphorical directions for failing or succeeding, heaven and hell, taking a fall or rising above. Another visual clue comes in the form of characters being backlit to signify an important decision.

To achieve the same thing in our written stories, we can use character action & metaphorical staging.

In prose, these symbolic layers come through your characters’ physical actions and their placement within a scene. Something worth thinking about very early in your process, when you are “blocking” or “staging” your scenes.

A character looking down on another can literally represent dominance. You can use geography here to your advantage, such as Juliet in the balcony, or Saruman in his tower. A character physically turning their back can represent emotional rejection as it would in real life. You could even be as on-the-nose as Jurassic Park is and have characters descend into danger and ascend out of it. The physical staging of the scene and the characters will tell the audience a lot about the story’s dynamic.

Don’t forget that these ideas can also be used to show a character’s internal state. Often, when we write in third person, we need to show what is happening inside a person’s head without being told, breaking the illusion of being separate from the character’s inner workings. It could be a simple comment on their mental state, such as a character tidying something or fussing over their appearance, which can represent a desire for control. It could be a comment on a much grander metaphysical aspect of their journey, such as a character walking into darkness, which can represent their moral descent or their soul into the unknown.

Examples from ‘The Strings Of Us’.

Before he could even notice or resist, I jumped into his lap, like a common pet. A few people gasped, and the room stilled... The Heat of all those eyes seemed to momentarily burn into my fur… – It was then that I felt the next newest most unusual thing I’d ever experienced. Elias put his hand on my back and gently stroked me like I was a lap cat.

In this scene from chapter 2, Cas’shya performs an act that is, on the surface, a shocking breach of protocol and taboo. But the action itself is one of comfort, vulnerability, and connection. She physically closes the space between them and makes herself vulnerable to this “deeply distraught giant” to offer solace. Elias’s response, a gentle, stroking hand, is not one of dominance, but of quiet gratitude. The physical action serves to demonstrate the book’s core theme: that connection and compassion can transcend species, hierarchy, and perceived differences. I didn’t need to tell you this because this scene shows it through a single, powerful, and unconventional physical act.

The Jurassic Park Workshop: A Practical Exercise

Now, I want to turn this analysis back over to you. It is time to step into Mr Spielberg’s director’s chair and spin it in the direction of your own stories, to take control of your own scenes. If you have a moment in your work-in-progress that feels a bit flat, or perhaps isn’t landing with the impact you intended, I invite you to try this.

Pick one scene and apply just one of the techniques we have discussed. As an example, if you need to dial up the awe, pull your ‘camera’ back. Use longer, more flowing sentences to open up the space and create that sense of vastness. Conversely, if you need to crank up the tension, push the lens in. Move your character into a claustrophobic setting and focus intently on sharp, sensory details, the hiss of steam, the clatter of metal, the heat of the room. See how consciously manipulating the ‘camera’ of your prose shifts the emotional reality for your reader.

Take every opportunity to let your prose do the heavy lifting, so you don’t make a story that is explanation only.

The Conclusion: A Final Thought

At the end of the day, whether we are directing a film or putting pen to paper, we are all chasing the same thing: emotional resonance. The best writers, just like Spielberg, are intentional architects of experience. They know that every word, every sentence structure, and every physical action is a tool they can use to make the impossible feel undeniably real.

I’d love to hear about the moments that have made you feel this way. What’s a scene in a book that felt so vivid, so visceral, that it was like watching a movie? What do you think the author did to make that reality click for you? Let’s chat about it in the comments below.

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Prologue, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Today, we are leaving the simulated natural wonders of the ship’s biomes and stepping into the sterile, sound-dampened void of the Holographic Archive.

Cas’shya is about to have her first official working session with Elias, the grieving human historian. Armed with the philosophical grounding Jun’ip provided in the forest, she is preparing to confront Elias’s rigid, academic view of the universe. What happens when a man who relies on verifiable facts meets a rabbit who remembers history by feeling it?

A massive thank you to everyone in the Cartographers Guild who joined the Leaderboard so far to help this vessel launch. Let’s open the logs.

Chapter 10 - Cas'shya - Rabbit - Female: Testimonial 002

Jun’ip and I walked into the holographic archive room. The space was one of five such rooms on the ship. Four were spaced out in quadrants along the band of metal that encircled the ship’s biome, and the last, the one we approached, was at the head. This much smaller part of the ship housed some of the ship’s most critical functions, navigation being one, and Jun’ip’s quarters being another. But this room, this was one of my favourite places to be.

The door to the archive opened wordlessly, which had always amazed me. Having grown up on Earth, I was accustomed to the basic physics of friction and to things making a noise when they moved. This door seemed dead-set on frustrating that life lesson in the most fascinating way. Sometimes, for fun, I would level both my ears at it just before I commanded it to open, determined to find any sign of sound. No such luck yet.

The room inside was pitch-black, save for a small pulsing blue light where a device hung in the air at the centre of the room, defying gravity in a way that put my previous attempts in the forest to shame.

Around one half of the room was glass, an observation deck for other scholars to watch, currently not being used, and so dark. The rest of the room was sterile. Its surfaces were light but shrouded in darkness, revealing their whiteness only in the sporadic reflected glow from the blue LED.

The walls curved slightly inwards, not quite taking the shape of a half sphere, but neither was it a cube. Our feet made soft little thuds in the room, but they didn’t echo like a normal space. The floor and walls were textured like a minuscule rendition of the soundproofing insulation in a recording studio. The whole place gave me an eerie feeling, as if it had been designed specifically to subvert all my usual sensory expectations.

I hopped in and immediately squeaked a little in delight. Jun’ip came in behind me, however, and didn’t seem quite as perturbed or excited.

“Eeeh, I have missed this place! What has it been, like, five weeks now?” I stamped my feet on the ground a few times, savouring the feeling of the odd soft texture underpaw, and then bounded over to the edges of the room and started brushing my head and exposed fur against the walls like I was brushing myself.

“So soft!”

The softness was having a clear effect on my fur as well. I didn’t quite understand the mechanical engineering of the room, but by the way my fur started to stand on end, I suspected there must be a static charge somewhere. My antics against the wall had that balloon-like effect on my hair, and I was now looking a bit tumble-dried.

“Please refrain from touching me until you have released that.” Jun’ip remarked, pointedly eyeing my static fur.

“Ha, you can’t be worried about a little shock, surely, I would have thought being Orion’s heart guide you would be used to ‘shocks’, right?”

Jun’ip did, in fact, seem quite worried about shocks. Being old is not for the faint of heart, and neither is being mildly electrocuted. I started edging towards him teasingly, and he hopped back a little in response. I moved faster, letting a familiar, playful menace bubble up in my chest. Jun’ip stood composed and, at the last second, used his connection to the strings to pull himself smoothly away to the side. Thankfully, I had intended to stop right before him, and I was poised just in front of where he would have been, one paw quivering in the air.

“Do you dare me?” I asked.

“I do not, in any way, shape or form, dare you to do any such thing. Is this how you treat all your mentors?”

My paw lowered, and I twitched my nose slyly.

“Maybe next time I will get you,” I replied. “What’s the score now? I think it’s about twenty-three to zero for you. You always pull away at the last moment, and I never have the gumption to actually do it. One day, I will pluck up the courage to zap you! I am deeply confident it will make you less stuffy and more fun.”

“I will have you know, I am the funnest Rabbit I know. I just have a rather unique perspective on what fun means.”

“Ha!” I pulled away and went to discharge myself over by the door, my fur flattening back into place.

“Whatever you think your perspective on fun is, I am certain it is not in any of the stories you like to regale me with. I swear, some days, I could catch you in those strings, and you would be gone with the wind for hours. Silent as a cloud in the sky.”

“Ahem, yes, well, if you spent more time practising with your own strings, you might too realise the joy to be found in becoming one with the ‘clouds in the sky’.” Jun’ips eyes twinkled a bit as he looked at me. I stuck my tongue out at him.

“Cloud freak.”

“History freak,” he retorted. I laughed at that. Freak is not a word I had heard him use before. Its shape felt unusual coming from him, but oddly satisfying. It fitted well with our natural language of clicks, mixing in with the sounds quite perfectly.

Elias, in the meantime, had managed to step into the room unnoticed because of the infuriatingly quiet door and the dampening floor, and coughed to draw attention to himself. He was still looking dishevelled and worn, but for the first time, I saw a quality to him that had not been present before.

Jun’ip and I froze. My ears flattened in mild embarrassment, and my now-patted-down fur somehow managed to shrink even more. We had been caught in a moment of silliness, and I knew immediately that the last thing I wanted was to give Elias even more reasons to think I was unusual. Elias, meanwhile, just stood there by the door, his hands clasped awkwardly in front of him, his puffy, red-rimmed eyes looking from me to Jun’ip and back again. The silence in the sound-dampened room was suddenly immense.

“I...Ur, I apologize,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly mumble. “The door was very quiet. I didn’t mean to…”

Recovering first, I gave a huff and began to smooth my whiskers down, pulling my shawl tighter around myself, trying to regain a shred of professional dignity.

“Professor. You’re... here. We were just…”

“Being freaks,” Elias finished.

Jun’ip and I exchanged a sharp glance.

Elias looked down, and a small, almost pained smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. Then, he spoke. It was not in the flat, human language, but in the clicks, soft thumps, and whistling tones of formal Rabbit-speak.

He said, in a very rusty, and borderline incomprehensible human meets rabbit accent:

“My apologies for surprise today now. I thinking… if you be ‘Cloud-freak’ and you also be ‘History-freak’… then I also be ‘sad-corner-freak.’”

He finished on a surprisingly accurately timed click with his tongue behind his two front teeth, exactly like a rabbit might.

Jun’ip genuinely recoiled in surprise, and his ears shot straight up. Of all the things we expected this grieving human to say, a self-deprecating joke in our own language was not one of them. I found myself caught utterly off guard.

I just stared, my mouth half-open. The static electricity seemed to have frozen me in place all over again. After a beat of pure, stunned silence, I let out an explosive snort, a sharp ‘Eeeh!’ of surprised laughter.

“Well, who would have thunk it,” I said, hopping forward towards Jun’ip, my earlier static-based menace gone, replaced by pure, baffled curiosity. “Who knew? Even sad humans are more fun than you, Jun’ip.” He remained faux dignified and aloof. As if he were above such things.

Elias gave a small, genuine, and deeply sad smile. “We sad humans have our moments… just not… not recently.” His gaze drifted to the central console. The mood sobered, but the air’s static tension had smoothed into something much more comfortable. That fleeting quality was a flicker of the same, offbeat silliness I possessed. I wondered about his past before he joined us, and whether, beneath it all, we might actually find friendship.

“Right,” he said, switching back to his own language and drawing his academic sword and shield, defensive in posture. “Shall we... begin? I have been briefed and have been led to understand that we are to work together compiling a unified vision of human-rabbit history. How does Ancient Greece sound as a place to start?”

Elias moved to the device with the blue light hovering in the centre of the room and, using it like a magic wand, brought up a console in the air. His hands were still fidgety, but he carefully strapped the remote around his wrist with a wrap-around strap, ready to command the room. As soon as he started typing on the console, however, a sudden sense of assurance came over him. It was like watching a nervous medical student somehow transform into a confident surgeon. The fidgety hands became masterful and precise.

“Right. Let’s begin,” he muttered, as much to himself as to the group. Carefully avoiding making eye contact with either myself or Jun’ip. “The purpose of this project, as I have been led to believe, is to codify… to create a verifiable–”

Frustration sidled up to me like an old friend. I shot Jun’ip an ‘I told you so’ lilt of my head, striking in its effectiveness. He gently chimed in.

“Elias, we are here to share our histories, are we not?”

Elias, taking a deep breath, recomposed himself. He looked at us both again, as if to remind himself that he wasn’t actually alone, and that he could be seen.

“Yes. Yes, of course. A sharing of... data. Let’s start with my own research while I’m here and already strapped in, shall we? A foundation, perhaps, from which we can leap off.” He tapped the console a few times, and the room thrummed. The lights dimmed until all that was left was a constellation of moving lights that came together and formed a spinning Greek kylix, an ancient drinking vessel, that stood tall and proud, magnified tenfold in the middle of the space.

The detail on the artefact was superb. I had never quite got used to the way this room could create something so tangible-looking, yet ultimately a mirage. This mirage, in particular, was very much like a museum piece, segregated from its history by placing it in a dead context. A single point of colour and light in an otherwise unfathomably dark space. To me, it felt cold. As a lifetime student of the rabbit lore and the strings, I could never quite figure out this human habit of removing things from their attachments. This cup was meant to be enjoyed, filled with liquids, and rested on the lips of famous and powerful Athenians. And yet, here it was, alone, segregated from all that it valued.

Elias’s stumbling was gone as he strode over to the projection. The confident professor was in his element. He walked around the hologram, gesturing.

“As you can see, the style is classic Attic, late 5th century. The depiction of the rabbit is, of course, charmingly zoomorphic, a clear...mythological representation... a fable of some kind. It’s a delightful object, but as a historical source...”

My fur bristled. The sheer wonderment at these human habits was rapidly turning into frustration, my old misgivings about him returning. Jun’ip glanced at me, and I held his gaze. Our conversation on the way played on a loop in my head, a shared story between us; a silent plea from him to heed his warnings and be inspired by his story.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

“Elias?”

My voice didn’t quite carry.

“Of course, representations like this allude to realities that we can begin to use as a basis for…”

I had been quiet at first, but I gained a little strength. “It’s not a ‘representation,’ Elias.”

Elias stopped, amused. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s a portrait.”

Elias scoffed, a dry, academic sound, a sadly practised sound. “A portrait? My dear Cas’shya, a portrait of whom? What is your source material?”

I walked past him to the console and looked pointedly at him, waiting for him to lower it down to my height. He obliged by waving the arm with the device downwards, pushing the console down to the floor.

“Of Philoctetes the Swift, my dear Elias,” My slight tone of mockery gave a subtle twist to my lips. Not quite a smile, after all, this was still a precarious relationship at best, but the intention was clear.

“You’re showing us an object that has hidden within it an entire story, but of course, you wouldn’t know that because you have removed this object from its inherent aliveness. Did you know this Kylix was actually a prize awarded to an Olympian? Let me show you the Truth.”

I swiped my paw across the holographic keypad and brought up what appeared to be a simple touchpad. Elias, having never seen such a thing before, was bemused. “What is tha-” But before he could finish his question, I was pawing away at the pad, drawing delicate patterns in its space. The lines appeared as if they were both wide and deep; the pressure I applied seemed to convey to the device not only intention but also feeling. I was a dancer lost in the throes of an interpretive piece. My eyes closed as I lost myself, and as the pattern grew, the thrumming of the room notched up a few notes. The Kylix hologram shattered before him, causing his eyes to go wide with surprise as millions of trailing stars of light swirled about the room.

“What are you doing? That’s not in the index—”

“It is,” I whispered, lost in the movements as I composed around myself a new hologram, infinitely complex and detailed. “Just not yours.”

The archive walls dissolved into daylight. The smell of artificiality was replaced by the phantom scent of dust, olives and other fresh produce, of perfumes and the smell of humanity. The soundscape of a bustling marketplace seemed to stretch past what had only moments before been hard boundaries, of merchants shouting in ancient Greek and goats bleating. The energy and life of a world long passed became our new reality. The final few stars of light swooped down and landed on a man in the middle distance, forming him in real time. We were suddenly standing in a fully immersive reconstruction of the ancient Athenian agora. A digital sun beat its warmth down onto our bodies, and a breeze ruffled the corners of my shawl.

Elias was physically stunned. He took a step back, passing through a number of mirage-like people as they went about their shopping. His academic confidence was completely shattered. He sat down on the floor, almost as if it was the only way he could steady his disbelief. “How... what is this?”

Smiling faintly, Jun’ip hopped over to Elias, putting a paw on his arm. “She is showing you, Elias. As she was taught. By feeling.”

“But this is.. Miraculous. Nothing on earth exists that could do this?”

“My friend, we are no longer on earth.” Jun’ip gently suggested.

I was now in my element, and I gestured towards a holographic man, all tone and oil, the Olympian Demetrius, gleaming on a pedestal. I met Elias’s gaze, my eyes bright and challenging.

“You asked for the source material, Elias. Here it is.” I took a deep breath and narrated, my voice became the soundtrack to the scene unfolding around us: “In the bustling polis of Athens, there lived a rabbit...”

From the Cartographer’s Desk

This chapter was a thrilling challenge to construct. Moving from the quiet, meditative philosophy of Jun’ip’s forest lesson into a high-tech, visually explosive environment required a complete shift in pacing.

I really wanted to explore how grief acts as a kind of armour. We see Elias walk in completely dishevelled, but the moment he straps the holographic remote to his wrist, he transforms back into a confident, guarded academic. Breaking through that armour required Cas’shya to do something radical. Shattering his sterile museum projection and forcing him to literally stand inside a bustling, living memory of the ancient Athenian Agora. It was a joy to write about the clash of these two entirely different ways of experiencing the universe.

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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. 👇

Prologue, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Today, we are leaving the stuffy and humid confines of the Arcturian Water Reclamation Facility for more ‘natural’ climes. (At least. As far as a spaceship can be called natural).

Cas’shya is having a one-to-one mentoring session with Jun’ip, widely regarded as one of the wisest elders in rabbit society. She is still feeling particularly awkward after her encounter with Elias in chapter 2, and is starting to doubt whether she should even be working with him…

A massive thank you to our newest Cartographers Guild members who joined the Leaderboard so far to help fund this launch. Let’s open the logs.

Chapter 9 - Jun’ip - Rabbit - Male: Testimonial 001

I felt old today; my shoulders felt heavy with the burden of my position as a mentor.

“I am simply honouring our ancestors, Jun’ip. Did you know the Terra runners used to achieve a state of focus and calm when travelling at ridiculous speeds? They would find focus through movement. Which leads me to wonder why...” She gestured with her paw at the surrounding moss-covered trees and rocky rivulets. “I cannot simply go and organise my thoughts by enjoying a bit of high-speed tree dodging?”

Today it was Cas’shya’s turn for my weekly one-to-one mentoring sessions. I shielded my eyes with my ears as I gazed up to where she hovered, ten meters up in the air, amongst tall deciduous and pine forest.

From a distance, you would think she was perfectly still, but a bit of attention revealed quite the opposite. You could see she was swaying, bobbing, and fidgeting about like a leaf in a breeze. The trees nearby threatened to poke her with their outstretched branches, like eager children trying to pet animals in a zoo. She would always pull away just in time, but begrudgingly.

Second by second, it seemed more likely that she would embrace those playful instincts of hers to bound about this forest like a regular squirrel. I was already starting to regret bringing her to such tempting surroundings. But there was a purpose behind my madness.

“Well? Am I to assume you have simply not heard me?” She asked.

I sighed inwardly. Her strings were torrid, vibrating with a snapped and frayed quality, like a broken snare. She was more doubtful than I had seen her in many years, perhaps since she had joined the academy. And as usual, she was deflecting from it by weaponising her intellect and being aggressively silly. It made our comparative ages feel particularly striking to see such misdirected enthusiasm.

“Hmm, perhaps I just need a new perspective on this task.” She started to slowly rotate sideways in mid-air. Her arms were crossed, and her ears were dangling comically as she inverted herself completely in a perfect circle.

“I am perfectly still, Jun’ip. It’s the ship that’s fidgeting,” she declared to the slick rocks below. “Besides, I’ve calculated that if I simply release my string and allow this artificial wind to hurl me into those branches, the resulting mild concussion might finally organise my thoughts. Or at the very least, knock some sense into me.”

“Cas’shya, what do you think my answer will be?”

She didn’t respond. She didn’t need to. I had seen her mime-like impression of me giving her instructions a million times. It was amazing how human it made her look.

“I can feel your string; it is a tangled mess,” I said. “We need to bring you back to a more regulated state of calm...”

“And you think bringing me out to a playground like this, after months of being stuck in artificial surroundings, would help that?” She swayed as she said it, nearly bouncing off a moss-covered tree trunk.

“Do you think it is easier to stay focused when you have things to focus on, or when there is no stimulus at all to stop your mind from wandering?” She stuck her tongue out at me. “It is easy, Cas’shya, to move with our heart string. It is much harder to stay still. For this, we need two things: concentration and awareness. I have brought you out here because there is plenty to be aware of, and plenty to hold your focus. Now, please with me, breathe.”

She rolled her eyes, but finally did as I asked. Closing her eyes, she hovered up there in amongst the branches of the trees and took a deep breath.

“Now, feel the wind on you. Feel the sunlight as it shines through the shield of this ship onto the back of your neck. Listen to the trees as they gently sway. Find those points of focus and connect to them. See how your strings hold you in an infinite web of interactions. The exercise here is to let that web hold you in place. Feel the movement of the earth and the moon below us, feel the vibration of the Chrysaora as it tracks the moon’s orbit...”

I was glad to see her breathing slow down, and her hover stopped swaying so much. She gently rose and fell with her breath like a beach ball held by the sea. I tuned into the environment myself and felt the slight strangeness of it all through the strings. The surroundings were all natural, the trees were real, and the soil below was working as soil should. The management of things like rain and wind seemed more natural now than it ever had been since sister had taken over.

But as I probed deeper, reaching down through the decks toward the ship’s centre, I hit a wall. A sensory void. The humans must have wrapped the ship's core in dense shielding, creating a localised numbness in the strings that made my ears ring when I focused on it too much. Yet, bleeding through that hollow space was a tragic, undeniable weight. A vast, captive consciousness straining in the dark. The humans had birthed a nascent intelligence in ‘Sister’, only to lock her away in a box, forcing her to maintain the Chrysaora from within. Empathising with that chained-up, mechanical consciousness always left a dissonant ache behind my eyes.

I looked up, and Cas’shya was starting to lose her focus again; her eyes were screwing up, and her hover started to drift from one side to the other. With one paw, she rubbed her temple gently as a furrow appeared in her brow. Eventually, she bumped into a tree and fell to the floor, tumbling into a heap before me.

“Uff, this is stupid. She pushed herself up, rubbing her shoulder. “My head is splitting. How am I supposed to stay still when the ship’s gravity drive is screaming in my skull? Artificial gravity, fake wind. It’s all moving. Do you know we are travelling at close to 3700km per hour around the earth, and I am supposed to remain perfectly in one place?“

I groomed my paw slowly, allowing the silence to endure, and half trying to hide a smile as her scientist side started to bite again.

“And yet, you are still when you sit here on the floor beside me. You fall because you are trying to anchor yourself to a machine, Cas’shya.”

“I am trying to anchor myself to reality, Yes Jun’ip, that is called momentum.” She groomed a tuft of lichen that had lodged itself in her fur and threw it at the floor. “I’m a historian, not a scientist; this is pointless. Why are you teaching me this again?”

“Humans are always calculating things, just like you,” I said quietly, letting my strings project a slow, steady pulse. “The mathematics of this space station dictates your weight. This metal shell was built to be dragged across the galaxy at colossal speed, fighting the universe every inch of the way in its attempt to preserve this.” I gestured at the forest around us. “But the strings do not care how fast this ship moves.”

She looked at me with frustration simmering in her eyes. Still so distracted. It was no wonder she fell out of the sky. Her defensive posture was rigid.

“The centre of the Milky Way is pulling at us just as steadily here, as it did in the meadows of Earth.” I continued. “You fall because your mind is trapped inside the world of mechanics, fighting against its speed, while your heart is trying to listen to the universe around you. You are tearing yourself apart between the anchors of logic and the anchor of flow.

“But the movement is real, Jun’ip. If I let go of the momentum, I should smash into a tree at 3700 km per hour.”

“Stillness is not the absence of movement, my dear. It is a perspective. The universe never stops moving.” I pointed with my cane up and out of the artificial sky where the moon loomed large over the ship. “Stillness is surrender. Become one with the movement so completely that you become indistinguishable from it. Like a leaf resting on a river, if the leaf fights the current, tries to anticipate its movements, it will spin and drown. If it accepts that the river is holding it, it is perfectly still relative to the water carrying it.”

I leaned forward, catching her eye. “When you pull on your string, you are not fighting momentum. You are remembering that you are not a leaf, and that this is not a river. You are one and the same. And a river-leaf cannot fall.”

Cas’shya stared at me. The rigid lines of her furrowed frustration behind those spectacles held for a moment longer, battling the simplicity of what I was trying to guide her towards. Eventually, the tension broke.

Her shoulders drooped. A gentle, quiet smile touched the corners of her mouth, accompanied by a soft, breathy laugh - the sound of a heavy burden of effort suddenly evaporating. She shook her head, the realisation washing over her.

“I am fighting the river,” she whispered.

“So...” I said gently, keeping my voice as soft as the breeze, “let’s stop trying to calculate the ship’s velocity for a moment. Tell me what turbulent waters you are actually fighting.”

“Elias,” she muttered, her ears twitching with annoyance. 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!” Cas’shya’s disdain was palpable.

“I mean, come on, he patted my head at the meeting, literally and figuratively.”Cas’shya squirmed at the thought of it.

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.

“My old master, Sin’to Eelop, would always get me to discuss issues as a younger rabbit whilst in meditation, so I suggest we do the same, if you do not find that disagreeable. I promise I will not ask you to try and float silently again if you do not want to...” I suggested, gifting her a warm smile.

“It is hard to imagine you were ever young, let alone with problems to discuss.”

I briefly recalled my time as a young rabbit, even before my first school took me into their fold, I sensed a difference between me and the other kits. Where my peers might spend a large amount of time running around, climbing things, and playing street games, often using their still-clumsy gravitational pulls in daring ways when humans were nearby. I was instead absorbed in my own world, feeling the strings’ chorus around me that, in hindsight, I later learned had been unusually strong for me.

I may not have appeared very involved with them, but I was following along in a way they never understood, through those lines in my mind, unfortunately they didn’t always see that. To them, I was an oddity.

I sighed. That had been a very long time ago indeed. “I had my own difficulties, yes. But this is not my mentoring session, young miss, it is yours. So if you please, begin once again to start connecting to your heart string.” She smirked at me before calmly closing her eyes and letting her breathing slow once more. “My old master used to say, ‘We must always find comfort in the strings. The strings are home. When you have found your centre, please tell me more about this situation with Elias.”

“I just, you know, it makes me doubt if I am doing the right thing here. Perhaps I should have stayed on Earth and continued developing my theories about Rabbit History. Human historians have such a rigid, cold way of looking at things, and now I’m throwing my lot in with them. I mean... I just worry, Jun’ip, that I’m not up to this. I feel I am betraying my morals by being here, and that maybe this is not where I am supposed to be.”

My reflections on my earlier years revealed to me something that perhaps Cas’shya still hadn’t quite resolved yet. That there is a difference between feeling hard emotions and accepting them. When the song of the strings is your constant companion. You sometimes lose perspective and forget that for most other rabbits, the strings are a challenging thing to grasp. An exercise to practice rather than a place to live within.

“The strings are home”.

I felt the words vibrate through me in my old master’s voice, and my calm immediately returned. I knew what was needed.

“You are circling the same point, my dear”, he said gently. “Your frustration, can you pinpoint 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.

“If I am meant to be a leaf on the water, why do I have such misgivings over this. I feel so much resistance to this project, and to Elias. I fear he will dilute everything we have achieved in the last fifty years. He will humanise our efforts to rabbitise our history. They have done it to their own people, too. Just look at black history, for example. It was completely whitewashed for such a long time.”

“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-argument.

“Hush now, for a moment, my dear, breathe. Your string is singing such a frantic song that I can barely hear your words over the 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 sullenly. We both hopped over to a couple of small boulders by the stream. The sound of the water was immediately soothing, but Cash’ya could barely notice it. I breathed a deep, consoling breath, which she followed, and then she slowly 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.

***

“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 strings 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 warm backdrop of musical vibration, evoking memories of floral scents and clear blue skies. As my ripples spread, I slowly felt Cas’shya’s 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.

“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 became aware of them 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.

The song my string was playing became melancholy, and along its length, the threat of danger became more imminent. The tempo of the vibrations began to gain vigour. Cash’ya, with her eyes still closed, squirmed. The jazz musician playing her string was now improvising along with mine in a call-and-response; her string plucked out the melody of fear, of foreboding.

“A summit of the rabbit elders was called. They gathered at night by the river, risking the night hawks, the owls, the foxes, and polecats. It was an immense risk, but they did it knowing that at least the humans were asleep and wouldn’t be hunting. Many rabbits in that circle had experienced multiple losses in their family groups: to traps, arrows and cages. Whisper herself was still grieving the loss of her youngest child, who had recently been caught in a snare. The pain everyone felt that night was immense.

“It was agreed then that the humans had no good in them. That the rabbits were to keep well away from their camp, their planted crops, and under no circumstances at all could any human know of the rabbits’ gifts. Under pain of exile.

“The last point was debated fiercely, with some advocating a first contact, suggesting that if humans were able to recognise them as intelligent, they might leave them alone. But the risk was too great. The rabbits who counter-argued that their intelligence might actually threaten the human ego were much more numerous, and ultimately the decision was made to forgo any contact at all.”

Cash’ya whispered, “Why are you telling me this? Is this supposed to be helping me like Elias more?”

“Hush, my dear, stay with the strings in your heart. Therein you will find answers.”

I similarly returned to the strings and found the story’s melody once more.

“Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into years. Any early hopes that the humans would leave when that first winter came were dashed. What started as a small camp grew into a small village with farms, fishing huts, woodcutter lodges and a bustling trade with people coming and going. Inevitably, the rabbits of the valley were slowly pushed to the margins.

“The meadow became a distant memory, and warrens became secretive, hiding their entrances in the valley sides far away from where anything but the hardiest of sheep herders would go. Life grew tougher, play became rarer, and good, nourishing food became scarcer. But as time went on, rabbit losses went down to nearly zero. It seemed humans’ appetite for rabbit flesh had a limit in the effort they were willing to make to acquire it. A rough equilibrium settled over the land. Though one that seemed decidedly in favour of the humans.”

“My string stretched out with low, soft notes interspersed with seasonal trills, implying seasons passing one after another. The scenery of the mind’s eye whizzed past as if seen from the window of a high-speed train. Eventually, the train stopped, and my string played the hymn of winter.

“Snow came one day, and it didn’t stop. It was the hardest winter anyone, human or rabbit, could remember. Food became scarce, and the humans redoubled their hunting efforts. The rabbits responded in kind, hiding deeper in the valleys and holing up in their warrens.

“Whisper was out one day and was trying to forage for what little she could find before the winter set in fully. She knew that they had a much better chance at surviving if their bellies were fuller, and if their circular burrows were lined with more moss and dried grass, scarce as it had become. She was resolute that her babies would survive this hibernation.

“Her wandering for materials had taken her farther out of the valley than was strictly wise, but the proximity to the river meant the snow was thinner. Still, it was dangerous. It was not uncommon for hunting parties and fishermen to come by here.

“She noticed a bit of bearded moss on a nearby tree that looked perfect for her needs. Looking around to make sure the coast was clear, she found the central string in her mind’s eye and, gripping it, guided herself up through the air to land gently on the branch above where the lichen was dangling. From her new vantage, she gently leaned down and nibbled away at where the lichen attached to the tree, savouring its earthy green taste. When it was freed from the branch, she tucked it away in a small, near-invisible pouch around her middle.

“The sound of the nearby river caught her attention. It had been a long while since she had frolicked in those waters. The cool touch of that fresh alpine meltwater was a distant memory at this point. She sighed and closed her eyes. The ripples of water as it swooshed around rocks, gently carrying and depositing pebbles, lapped against the bank, creating an all-encompassing sound that she found herself growing increasingly lost in. The sound pulled her, trance-like, closer to her strings. The melody helped her with the focus and clarity she needed to sink beneath the noise of the central string. She started to sense smaller strings, lifeforms in abundance, living quiet lives inside the water and its earthen banks. Everything from small mammals, shrews and voles, to little fish. The symphony of the river came alive to her in her mind’s eye.

“She had wondered before what else she might be able to sense if she was able to go deep enough. Do plants have strings? Or would the river itself have a string too? She felt as though she had once got close to believing she could feel a willow tree’s string, but that was a long time ago, and sensing the strings had never been her strongest gift. Still, what she was able to perceive now, this abundance of aliveness tucked away in the river... It was enough.

“As she lost herself in this connection to the river, she failed to notice another string slowly getting closer. A crunch of snow underfoot alerted her. She flattened herself down against the branch, hoping her pale brown fur would be enough to help her blend in.

“The unmistakable crunch... crunch of human feet neared. Only humans walked that way, loudly, without a care in the world. She could feel her temperature rising despite her fear. How many times had she wished to be bigger, stronger! To be able to fight back. The stench of her cousins’ burning skin, or at least the memory of it, assaulted her again, causing her stomach to clench. How could such an animal exist, capable of such cruelty and power, to the degree that they didn’t even care anymore whether they were heard in the wilds?

“The crunch crunch of the snow continued, adding a beat that her anger and passion churned along to. Annoyingly, she noticed that even now, when all she had was a steady beat to be angry and fearful against, that even this was thwarted by this insufferable human’s inability to walk at a consistent steady pace.

‘Appalling creatures!’ She thought to herself.

“She noticed a sniffling sound coming from the human. The footsteps stopped, and a moment later, she felt a small vibration shudder up through the trunk of the tree, followed by a soft thump of compacted snow as if it had just sat down.

“The sniffling continued, and every now and again she heard the occasional mumbled, indistinct word. Her ability to understand humans at all was minimal after many years of dedicated silence between the two species. But as she listened, she couldn’t escape the thought that this one sounded different. Smaller... Softer. Time passed, and the sniffling and mumbling slowed and faltered.

“Whisper, whose body was beginning to ache from the self-imposed stillness, felt trapped. Clearly, this human was not going anywhere any time soon, and the predicament, the lateness of the day, and her aches were starting to make her feel brave. Breathing softly, so as not to make too much obvious movement, she braced herself. She scrunched up her eyes and started to lean her head excruciatingly slowly around the edge of the branch. Eventually, she snuck a quick look.

“Sitting a few meters below her, in the seat of the tree roots, was a small human child. It was still sniffling slightly and staring into the middle distance away from her. She wiggled out her poor aching limbs and leaned out further.

“She observed the child was wearing... no. She shuddered to think where those furs had come from and pushed the thought of it to the back of her mind.”

I let my string drop an octave, pushing the bitter chill of the memory toward Cas’shya. She shivered visibly on the boulder beside me, her eyes squeezed tightly shut as she listened.

“There was a small patch of blood in the snow near the child’s feet. Never a good sign. A hole in the skin is a sure way to let the cold in faster and the warmth out too quickly. A creeping sensation started to come over her. It felt like an impetus to move, but it wasn’t coming from her limbs this time; rather, it felt like energy that bounced, echo-like, from a place deeper. She thought of her children in the warren, how they might be worrying where she had got to.

“The young boy shivered below. A new feeling and impetus rose within her. This time, it felt less like movement and more like weight. In her mind’s eye, the faces and voices of some of the elder rabbits in her colony arose. Some were faces of rabbits still alive, some were not. The voices of her friends whispered in her ear, urging her never to reveal herself.

“She found the two feelings were at odds. From that confusion, a third sensation arose in her head, sharp and painful. A feeling she often avoided. It was the sound of a memory, of that child she once lost a few summers back. Caught by an arrow from one of those awful human weapons. She shuddered.

“For what seemed like an eternity, these conflicting rhythms projected a swirling, complex array of images across her mind’s eye, keeping her trapped just as effectively as the danger of the situation. Rarely had she felt such a sense of confusion and conflict rise up through her and settle over her. However, as the time slipped past on her motionless branch, staring down at the young human, something changed.

“The child below, gently, grew terrifyingly still. This was not the stillness of sleep, where short, awake movements morphed into a long, sonorous but steady rise and fall. No. This was a sullen stillness. A dead stillness.

“Suddenly, the variety of voices in her body stopped, and one of them boldly stepped forward. The mother. The version of Whisper who had children at home who loved her and needed her, and who loved them. The voice of the elders, with their laws, became an abstract muteness. The crying pain of her previous losses was swaddled and comforted in the warmth of her inner glow. Her decision was made. Finally, she was set into motion.

“At the base of the tree, she walked around gently, step by step, eyes fixed on where the child’s face would be when she got far enough around to see it properly. She was ready to run at any indication of danger. But as she glanced around the hood of the child’s coat, she saw its eyes were closed. She breathed a temporary sigh of relief, but it was short-lived when the presence of the blood around the child’s ankle penetrated her peripheral vision.

“Her conviction grew. There had been enough sadness, enough death. Children should not perish. Stepping quietly down to the child’s ankle, she inspected the cut. It was not as bad as she had feared from the amount of red in the snow, but it was still deep enough that it didn’t seem to be healing very quickly. Whisper hesitated for a moment, thinking of her burrow and her children.

“There is always more lichen,’ she thought to herself as she rummaged through her pouch and pulled out the bearded moss. She was thankful there was quite a lot of it.

“Carefully, she pressed it to the wound layer by layer, letting the blood set it in place before adding more. After a few minutes of careful application, she stepped back to admire her handiwork. She was pleased; it was holding, and there seemed to be considerably less bleeding than before.

“She studied the child’s face. It still had that youthful, fatty quality, with chubby cheeks and eyes that seemed slightly too big for its face. She wasn’t very accustomed to humans, but her intuition led her to think this was a human boy.

“His eyes were still closed, and he looked almost peaceful. He could have nearly passed for a sleeping babe except for the sometimes faltering breath and that awful tinge of blue in his lips. Her heart clenched. This was not going to happen today.

“She gently lifted her front paws and placed them on the child’s legs. Nothing.

“She gave the boys’ legs a little nudge, but still nothing.

“Feeling brave, she scanned around to make sure no one else was around, and then she got up on the child. He was wearing a fur coat, she confirmed, and she tried desperately not to think about what it could have been. He was already too cold, so at the very least, she supposed, he could have it.

“Gingerly, she pawed at the coat flaps to create more of an opening and slowly, softly clambered inside. It was a touch warmer in there, but not enough. The undershirt smelled of humans, with a faint, musty note that reminded her of dust. They really are odd animals. Nothing she had encountered smelled remotely like this, though something about it was slightly comforting.

Cas’shya quietly gasped at this. Her string pulsed momentarily to the song of embarrassment as she linked the story to her own experiences with Elias.

“Wrapping her long body around the kid’s chest, she pressed herself up against him and closed her eyes. One ear remained poked out of the coat flap, alert for the sound of anything approaching. With her eyes closed, she deepened her breathing and began to connect to the strings. First, that one large central string, and then slowly, as if slipping beneath the surface of water, she began to sense others.

“Proximity, for some reason, always helped to make an external string more apparent. The boy’s unusual human cadence became apparent to her mind’s eye. What she felt in the music of that string unnerved her even more; it was erratic and frail. It felt like a plant whose leaves were turning brown.

“She began to connect to her own string first. It hovered there in the middle distance, beating a slow, steady drum. As the song swirled in her mind, she remembered a melody that had once accompanied it. It was an old melody her mother used to hum to her when she was little. It was the melody she used to sing to her firstborn before... the string clenched. She focused on her breathing as sadness settled on her, like rain that slowly washed its way through her fur. Sadness is okay, it’s natural, she reminded herself. She let it fall on her, and its contrasting texture intensified the love she felt, both for her own child, sadly lost, and for this human child beneath her.

“She began to gently hum the melody of that old song, and as she did, she felt her heart string, moved by its familiarity and meaning, begin to align with it. Her heart played a soft soothing vibration that conveyed her warm melody. Her humming grew more confident and pronounced. Words began to find their way into the melody, slotting into the gaps of the sound landscape in the same way that water takes the shape of the place it pours into. Her song, from her heart and from her body, passed into the child.

“It was a shock when she refocused on the child’s string and felt it begin to respond, to join in the song. It was fumbling and clumsy, almost as if it were using another language. But it was listening. This wasn’t what shocked her the most, though. Most strings, if not all strings, were connected and interacted with each other, especially when any attention was shone on them. She had loved watching glow flies dance about her on a midsummer’s night, when she became very focused on their little strings, but mostly these interactions felt natural in the sense of being interactive. You push a nut, and the nut rolls. That’s what happens. But this didn’t feel like that... It was more attentive in return. They, the humans, were like us. They didn’t just have the strings within them; they had awareness, too.

“She shouldn’t have been surprised; she had been told as such, but she had always felt that it couldn’t be true, given their cruelty towards rabbits and the way they treated their surroundings. But then, if she could sense it in them... why did they not sense it in us? Her song faltered as this new understanding dawned on her, and as she stumbled, she felt the child’s string stumble too, like a baby in a pitiful sleep; the child’s string groaned in discomfort.

“Whisper listened for a moment and felt the empathy rise once more in her heart, like a morning sunrise. She returned to her song, and the child’s heart grew steadier. His string grew calmer and began to harmonise with hers once more. The shock subsided, and slowly she felt warmth begin to permeate the boy’s heart and radiate outwards. Whispers singing grew stronger and more certain as time passed. She could feel the sun rising in her chest, its rays layering on warmth to everything it touched. Seconds turned to minutes. Time lost its meaning until suddenly she felt the boy’s chest rise beneath her as he sucked in air deeply.

“The moment of the song passed, and where she had held a space of care and complete empathy, self-concern crept back in. Whisper wriggled free of the boy’s jacket and quickly, using her central string, pulled herself into a nearby shrub.

“The boy coughed and blinked, surprised but looking much better. There were colours in his cheeks again, of pink and red. For a moment, he stared intently at the spot where she had dashed into the bush, blinking confusedly.

“Whisper stood as still as possible, making sure not to move a leaf and give herself away. Had she been spotted? The child brought his hands up to his chest and stroked gently exactly where Whisper had lain.

‘Mama,’ he called out loud, holding his chest where the warmth had come from. ‘Mammmaa’, he called, a little more desperately. He sniffed again, looking at his feet, and he seemed to notice the little makeshift bandage. Gently, he lifted his knee and tested his ankle by digging his heel into the snow a little. It penetrated and hit the hard, frozen soil beneath, but his ankle didn’t give way. Carefully, with his arms back against the trunk of the tree for support, he pushed himself back up. He shuffled a little to test his balance and found that the sore ankle was not as bad as he remembered.

‘Maammaa’, he called again, cracking his voice as a bit of fear seeped in.

“From Whispers’ hiding spot in the bush, a harsh breeze passed through, but on the wind she heard a distant call in response. The boy, though, seemed not to hear it. I looked at his ears, useless tiny little things, no wonder they couldn’t hear the strings that well.

“Knowing now, even if he didn’t yet, that he was being looked for, she considered making her departure. He would be safe now. But then something unexpected happened, something that stopped her forepaw in its tracks. He began to hum a melody to soothe himself. It was Whisper’s melody. The one she used to sing to her babies. The one that her mother used to sing when she was little. There was no other way he could know it. Its rhythm, its cadence. It was too rabbit. Through his human mouth, it sounded odd, but still recognisable.

“It wasn’t just her imagination, then; his string had awareness, too. Somewhere in his body, he had heard her song. Maternal instinct overwhelmed Whisper, and her stomach gripped with emotion that needed an outlet. She had to help; her whole body begged to help.

“Her front paw began to move before she had even made a firm conscious choice. But where? A clump of snow flumped down from a nearby shrub and made a soft thud on the frozen ground, which immediately drew the child’s attention. Staring at it for a moment, he walked over and had a look at where the snow had landed, peering into the shrubs’ dense thicket.

“She sensed her central string, and while he was not looking, she pulled herself up into the branches of a second tree a bit further down the animal trackway, towards where she had heard the other voice. Settling onto the branch, Whisper thumped it with her back leg, causing the snow on the outer branches to shift slightly. She glanced at the boy; he hadn’t noticed anything. Giving it another hearty thump, the snow slid off and fell in a clump right in the centre of the path.

“The child noticed it and walked towards it, looking for what could have caused it. There was nothing to spot, however, as Whisper had already moved on to the next tree.

“The child followed Whisper’s snow trail as if he were trying to solve some unusual mystery, yet he didn’t seem scared. On the contrary, he seemed encouraged. He was still humming her song.

“The game lasted only a few minutes. Whisper could hear his mother’s calls growing closer, and within just a few moments, so did the boy. His eyes lifted, and he called back.

‘Mum?’

“Her voice responded shrill and excited in equal measure. Whisper bounded ahead across a few last trees, dropping snow as she went, just to make sure the child would not get lost at this last hurdle. But as she jumped towards the last tree, using her string to pull her some of the way, Whisper’s eye was caught, not just by a female human, but by three others behind her, and they were armed. Momentarily distracted, she missed the branch and hit it chest-first, knocking the wind out of her lungs.

“She crumpled down onto the path below, breathing heavily, a woozy cast in her eyes. She hadn’t realised yet that she had landed right in between the child and the child’s mother.

“Her bleary eyes streamed for a moment, but the first thing she saw was the child reaching down towards her.

“Whispers’ instincts kicked in, and despite her difficulty breathing, she bucked, twisted and ran. A violent pain shot up her leg as a barbed rope gripped her ankle and brought her to the floor. She thrashed and fought, but it was for nothing. This was a rope of their invention, designed to do exactly what they intended. To catch small creatures like her.

“She stilled and lay on the snow, defenceless. The fight in her had exhausted itself. She could see the mother and the child nearby, holding each other and making lots of noises. The child pointed towards Whisper, and together, hand in hand, the mother and child stepped towards her, pulling away one of the branches that partially obscured her prone form. The mother started to pull the boy back, her features betraying an inner conflict. She didn’t see Whisper; she saw food. A way to feed her family. But the way her child was talking to her, tugging her arm, she eventually softened her gaze. For the briefest moment, she wondered about the rabbit before her. She stood transfixed, locked in place as Whisper had been earlier up on the branch. Caught between two competing feelings.

“At that moment, however, the rest of her family caught up. Two older men and a young girl. The men eyed her hungrily. There was no hiding their intentions. It was Whispers time; she would meet the deceased. She closed her eyes and heard the crunch crunch of snow under their feet as they approached, waiting for the final blow.

“There was noise, and a darkening of the light through her eyelids. But there was no pain. She opened her eyes and saw the child sitting between her and the biggest of the men. The mother was crying and seemed to be arguing with the man, who looked bemused and annoyed. For a moment, it appeared as though he would tear himself away from the woman and come for Whisper anyway. The boy was only small after all. But the mother fought back and pushed him away. The moment seemed to last for an eternity. The big human locked eyes with Whisper, looked intently, then walked away, clearly annoyed.

“The child turned and looked at Whisper. She didn’t understand any of its words, but its eyes were kind. His mother came and knelt down next to her as well, and they slowly untied the snare around Whispers’ leg. Her first instinct was to immediately flee, but her ankle didn’t feel strong at all. It buckled even under her slim weight. Still, she started to hobble away.

“As she tried to escape, she heard that little song once more. Stopping, her ears twisted towards the boy. He was there, hand outstretched, imploring. The strange hum of the melody was still foreign as it passed through his lips, but the intention was clear. He crouched down and turned his hand upwards towards her.

The mother watched as Whisper glanced between the boy’s outstretched hand and the mother’s penetrating look. The rabbit laws were clear: not to communicate, not to show them who they really were. But the way the boy sang her song, she knew it was already too late. Locking eyes with the mother, Whisper stared deeply into her soul. She stared back and nodded, and so, with permission granted, Whisper placed her nose in the little boy’s outstretched palm. She felt his tiny fingers stroke the space between her eyes for a moment. And then she limped away, back towards the valley, back towards her home.

Whispers’ return to the warren was not a triumphant one. She confessed her story to the council of elders, her voice quiet but resolute, her wounded ankle a testament to the folly.

“Fear hardened the elders’ faces. She had broken their most sacred law, born from generations of pain and loss, and so was ostracised, a ghost in her own valley. The shame of her actions was a heavier weight than any elder’s judgment. Her own children looked at their mother with a confusion that wounded her more than any ankle snare.

“That winter was as cruel as the elders had feared. The rabbit stores dwindled, and the cold bit deep into their burrows. Despair began to settle like a second layer of frost. It was then that the first gift appeared. Left at the base of the great tree by the river was a small bundle of winter carrots and dried apples, a fortune beyond imagining. The elders dismissed it as a trap, but Whisper knew what it was. Day after day, a new offering was left, and slowly, cautiously, her family - and then others - began to accept the gifts.

“The food was not the only change. The rabbit colony began to notice that the hunting parties no longer ventured into their valley. The sharp, terrifying scent of their woodsmoke stayed distant. The rabbits were able to forage more freely, more safely, than any of the younger rabbits could remember. The fear that had been their constant companion began to recede. Whisper’s exile softened, her story retold not as one of betrayal, but as one of strange, inexplicable courage. She was not yet a hero, but she was no longer a pariah. A new, unspoken treaty had been forged. They were not friends with the humans, but they were no longer their prey.

“Years passed, flowing like the river beside Whispers’ old meadow. The child grew into a man and then a leader of his village. He never forgot the ‘spirit of the forest’ that saved him.

“True to his memory, he decreed that the valley, from the great tree onward, was a sacred place where no human may hunt. He had, without knowing it, created the sanctuary Whispers’ community had only ever dreamed of.

“And then, one last time, Whispers’ string pulled her once more towards the tree. She was old now, her fur the colour of the winter snow, and her movements slow. The man was there, his body fully grown and his hair long, sitting in the seat of the tree’s roots, just as he had as a child. He looked up as Whisper approached, and his eyes held no surprise, only a deep, quiet recognition, as if he knew she would be there. Whisper did not run. The man moved, only to lift up his trouser leg and show his ankle, where a small scar showed his old wound. Whisper lifted her scarred back leg in response. A line across her ankle where the snare had gripped her. Across the snow-dusted ground, they looked at each other, the rabbit and the man, the spirit and the child, and in that silent, final acknowledgement, Whispers journey was complete. She passed away the next day.”

***

Cas’shya’s eyes were still closed, and a single tear traced a path through the soft fur of her cheek. Her heart-string was no longer frantic; it hummed with a low, sorrowful, but peaceful melody. She had heard the story, but she had also felt its Truth.

“The greatest risks,” I said softly, breaking the silence, “are often taken not for ourselves, but for others. And the deepest connections are often forged not in agreement, but in shared vulnerability.”

Cas’shya looked at me, her eyes softly opening. “I didn’t know that story.”

“It is not a famous one,” I conceded. “Its ending is quiet. The next winter was harsher still, and that same child left food at the edge of Whisper’s warren, saving her family. Her small act of courage, born of compassion, changed her history and the history of her family for many generations to come. But come, tell me, now that your song has calmed down, describe to me what is really bothering you.”

Cas’shya looks down, chastened. “I made a fool of myself during that meeting when I sat on his lap. Everyone saw me, and they all judged me.”

“No,” I replied, my voice taking on a distant quality. “You felt the song of another, just like Whisper did. I felt it too, during the meeting. Elias’ string... it was not just discordant like yours was a moment ago. It was the sound of a snapped string. A rough, painful break from something he held dear. When you jumped into his lap, your two songs became entangled. A moment of chaos, yes, but also a moment of harmony. Whisper, too, didn’t know what to make of her connection to the boy. For a long time, she worried and fretted that she had doomed her family and friends. But she didn’t lose the faith she had shown in having empathy for another.”

“But what about...” Cas’shya began.

“Remember, the strings are not just a way to feel the world around you. They are ripples. You did a good thing. And now you are worried that the waves of your actions will cascade in a way you find displeasing?”

“If by that you mean that I am worried no good will come of what happened… then yes”, Cashya replied, head bowed. “And unlike Whisper, I don’t have the luxury of an existential crisis to distract me from my own silliness”.

“Tell me, do you believe that you can do anything about these ripples now that they are out there in the wild?”

“I can try to make things better for myself, can’t I?”

“And will that trying make more ripples?”

“Yes…?”

“And can you do anything about those ones when they are out in the wild?”

“I get your point”. Cashya admitted. “So what are you saying, I just have to accept what comes my way? That it is all just exactly how it should be? But, I can’t do that!”

“I am simply saying that the thing we can control is what intention is in our hearts when we act. Now tell me, if you are truly honest with yourself. At that moment, when you leapt into Elias’ lap, was your intention good?”

“You know the answer to that already.” She murmured.

“And is that the kind of rabbit you wish to be?”

Cas’shya sighed and then nodded. Her goodness had always been apparent, even as a very young rabbit. Strange that anxiety and ego could do so much to help a rabbit forget such a simple thing. I met her eyes.

“You spoke a truth to the human, Elias, that had no words. Now you fear the consequence, just as Whisper did.”

I watched as a new understanding settled in her eyes. The frantic energy of her string had calmed, giving way to a quiet, thoughtful hum. Her fear had not vanished, but her compassion, the very thing that had caused her so much doubt, had now given her a new resolve.

“Good,” I said, rising from the bench. “Because your first official work session with him is due to begin in a couple of hours. In the holographic archive, if I am not mistaken. I think I may join you. It should be fun to watch.”

Her ears twitched, a flicker of the old anxiety, but also a flicker of her usual fun returning as she sensed my jibe. “The archive? So soon?”

“The ripples you co-created are already in the wild, my dear,” I said, gently gesturing for her to walk with me. “You cannot control them. But you can control the intention you bring to the next wave of ripples. This is the way of a mentor, not to change things, but to help the student remember the questions that truly matter. Come. Let us see what seeds you have planted in Elias. Lest we forget, you two have a book on Rabbit history to write!”

From the Cartographers Desk

This chapter was an interesting one to write. The first draft of this, done in my notebook, managed to get all the main emotional beats correct. But what it lacked was any movement, energy, or relationship to the wider story. So this is now the third draft, bringing the characters into a more active setting, and then finally slimming down the chapter. (Despite this, it is still my longest to date.)

I was also keen in this chapter to really nail the authority of Jun’ip as a kindly mentor. Given that Cas’shya is already a very intelligent rabbit, I really had to sit and think how their back and forth could feel natural without dumbing either of them down. Thankfully, meditation and it's associated philosophy is something I adore. So at least for Jun’ip, I had some ammo. I hope his wisdom serves you too.

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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.

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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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Prologue, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Today, we are getting inside the head of Hec’ten, one of Lysanders squad leaders. Hec is an ex-military rabbit with a bit of a chip on his shoulder over his role amongst the other squad leaders. Feeling, as rabbits have often felt, that he has been sidelined, with less faith given to him, and less agency to work as he would wish. For a rabbit, he is more serious than most, but still retains a bit of that lighter touch that typifies a person who can sense the strings.

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Chapter 8 - Hec’ten - Rabbit - Male - Testimonial.

Steam was still hissing, and sirens were still ringing out their alarm in the facility, but things were calming down. The creaking and groaning of the pipes wound down. Plumes of hot, searing steam began to calm, wither, and slowly retreat into the crevices from which they had been born. The air I was tugging into my lungs was cooling down with each gasp, and my fur was slick with condensation that had beaded all over me in little clumps.

I lay on my back next to Lys, my new commander. He was kneeling with his head in his hands, shaking, whilst I was splayed out, staring up at the distant ceiling above, wondering if it was an illusion through which the heavens would reveal themselves to me. The sound of my own voice shouting out the countdown was still bouncing around my brain as clearly as if it had just been blasted into the room through the PA system. Numbers bounced off pipes and metal, guiding us down into that moment when it could have all ended. Had it all ended?

The system was back online for sure. Everything around me was so incredibly clear. My brain seemed to be able to cover every sense I possessed with its awareness. My breathing was as vital as a dip in freezing water and regulated with precision. The cast of the light in the water facility was vivid; every detail of the immediate environment was apparent. Even the smell of acrid steam and industrial lubricant was like incense, with each scent particle catalogued like tactical data. My nose twitched a little, perceiving the curls of the aromas as they rose in the air around me. The strings were clearly felt, as real and tangible as the floor beneath my paws, and far more emotional. The energies of the assembled people were like signal vectors outside the facility. Mapping them to their strings was suddenly as easy as looking at a radar readout. They were waiting with bated breath to see if we would emerge or if they would suddenly hear a large boom. My situational awareness was at peak efficiency. I regarded it as a soldier, and I regarded it as a rabbit. My inner soldier conceded to the rabbit.

It was all so... beautiful.

I started to laugh a little at the absurdity of it. The brilliance that had come to me in lieu of not being blown up by a water pipe was infectious. The laughter rushed through me, and even the pain in my right hand paw couldn’t dampen it.

“Is nearly dying always this euphoric?”

Catching my words, Lys smiled and then laughed too.

“There isn’t much that can make you feel more alive.”

It was a strange laugh; it sounded odd coming from the man that I had been getting to know. It was a raw laugh, like a baby’s laugh, but sized up to fit the shape of an adult human. Despite that, it was exactly how I felt, and I laughed with him. For a fleeting moment, our ranks seemed to dissolve. This sudden dissolving of the hierarchy was like being at my old barracks again. We were connecting over this, not as a human and a rabbit. Just as two soldiers.

As I rolled and chuckled on the concrete floor, I was sharply reminded of that crunch I had heard earlier when we had been pushing against the valve release. When I lifted my front paw, it was disjointed and painful. A break in one of my legs. I really had given the strings quite a pull, ignoring all my training to exert that little extra force, a tactical necessity given the situation. Self-sacrifice for the greater good. It was nothing I couldn’t handle, but it was still not ideal. It would put me out of action for a few weeks while I rested it.

But I didn’t want to rest. I was suddenly keen for more. It was a feeling I hadn’t had in years: excitement. I wanted to work!
I sighed and tilted my head back at the irony of being a sudden hero, only to find that I would be forced to ‘rest up’.

That was when I saw it. From my position on the floor below the pipes, strange markings were scratched into the underside of the valve. The etchings were completely out of eyeshot of literally anyone, it was a miracle I had even seen it. What could have possessed them…. There were scorch marks too, all over the underside of the socket where the wheel stem entered into the main valve housing. Not only scorch marks, but clear signs of welding. The gravity of that sight slowly dawned on me.

No wonder we had a hard time turning the wheel; it was not meant to be turned by someone’s design. But whose design? Had someone purposefully started this chain reaction?

“Lys, when you have finished chuckling to yourself, come lie here next to me and take a look at this” I was temporarily shocked at my using his personal name.

Lys looked at me quizzically, sensing the shift in my tone of voice, and his laughter stopped almost immediately.

The space was small, but with a bit of manoeuvring, he lowered himself down and slid his head below the valve beside mine. It didn’t take him long to notice what I had seen as well. He touched it gently, feeling the metal underside where the weld had clamped it closed. ‘It looks new,’ he muttered to himself.

“What do the letters say?” I asked sheepishly. My grasp of their alphabet was well enough, but this handwritten etching was drawn up in a type of handwriting I couldn’t understand. Lys stared at the odd words.

“It says, ‘the fairy queen,” He said nothing more and just stared at it for a long moment. “No one can know about this yet, I will need to investigate it, and the perpetrator will be much easier to manipulate into revealing themselves if they believe they have not been discovered”.

I nodded. A simple, mechanical movement of the head, but it felt like rusted cogs.

To hide a truth, to actively bury it in the dark, went entirely against my nature. A secret is a jagged, discordant knot in the strings. It felt physically wrong to stand over the evidence of a crime and agree to mute its existence. We were supposed to be a team. A unit that worked together.

Lying on the sweltering concrete, for a moment, we had been equals laughing in the face of death. I was a fool, allowing myself to hope that this human might be different. That perhaps, down here in the heat and the dirt, we were forging a genuine partnership built on shared reality, rather than the usual human diet of shadows, half-truths, and withheld hands.

But as Lysander looked at me, his eyes already calculating, the warmth of that shared survival evaporated from my chest like the steam around us. My training kicked in, a heavy, familiar burden settling over my shoulders. He was the commander. I was the asset. The tool. The Rabbit.

Orders are orders, I reminded myself bitterly, the phrase tasting like ash. And yet, despite myself, I wanted to believe things could be better. Instead I sank back into myself, forcibly withdrawing the vulnerable, helpful part of me that had just started to unfurl toward him.

Seeking a comfort I could no longer find in my new commander, I retreated into my strings, letting their vast, indifferent hum wash over the sudden, sharp sting of disappointment.

The anticipation of our success from the amassed outside was growing; I could feel the strings of some of my rabbit unit waiting with the rest. I had trained them to stay tuned in to the strings at a subtle level so that we could project basic patterns to each other over longer distances. I closed my eyes and radiated calm and safety, my string slowed and pulsed with gentle rhythms of sleep and comfort. Code for safety. A string sensation we all learn from young when our mothers would put us to bed. My unit responded in kind, a signal received, they knew we were safe.

“Sir, I have communicated to my squad outside. They will be reporting that we are safe and rallying. We should go and help the people who were caught in the initial blast.”

Lys looked at me as if I were joking. “I did not hear you speak?” He asked.

“We… we have a method that is not as well known to humans. I will explain another time…” Now, am I the one being duplicitous? I wondered. No, I hadn’t outright hidden anything, just deferred the truth. Not quite an eye for an eye.

Getting up, Lys started to regain his command-like posture and began shuffling back towards the pipes through which we had come. He touched the one nearest, gently at first to test its heat. Finding it cooler, he dropped the insulative material he had brought with him, able now to get through without the protection.

“You are quite right, of course, we have people to help.

***

A swift hour later, and I was in the main entrance hall of the water reclamation facility, having my arm treated. The nurse was wrapping it up in a splint, pending X-rays at the nearest medical bay.

Lys, meanwhile, was overseeing the medical response with his usual gravitas. He acted like a gravity well, where authority seemed to naturally orbit him, like a star. It made me wonder, did authority naturally cling to him because he believed himself to be a star, or was he inherently a gifted leader, and so gravity was born of his talents? I could not figure it out, at least not yet, not while there were so many people bustling to and from his presence. He checked in on the work on the two other injured engineers once I had been patched up.

They had both been caught up in that first blast. One seemed well enough, minus a few cracked ribs and minor breaks. The second had been less fortunate, being slammed almost headfirst into a metal railing. The engineer had been bleeding for a while and seemed to be slipping in and out of consciousness. The one moment I saw them awake, they seemed heavily concussed. The doctors on site were stabilising her when Kaspa arrived to deliver his report.

General Lysander turned his attention to his second-in-command, extending an expectant hand. “Kaspa. The pad.”

Kaspa, who had been coordinating the perimeter with crisp efficiency, reached down to his tactical pouch. I was naturally attuned to the ambient anxiety of the room, a buzzing wasps nest as if heard from a distance, but the moment Kaspa’s hand hit empty fabric, his string snapped taut with a sudden, deafening panic.

“Sir...” Kaspa patted himself down, his rigid military bearing dissolving into frantic, jerky movements. He looked around the floor as if the metal grating might have swallowed it. “It’s gone. I had it secured right before the blast.”

“Gone?” Lysander declared. His voice didn’t rise, but the air around him seemed to drop in temperature.

“Someone must have bumped me on the gangway,” Kaspa pleaded, his polished English composure entirely stripped away. “In the panic... the engineers running out...”

Lys gave his order over the security team’s radios.

“All units, please initiate the lockdown protocol. We have a potential security breach. No one in or out until I say.”

Dr. Hedghe, who had been lingering to oversee the medical transport, let out a sharp, theatrical scoff. Through the strings, I felt his tangled, chaotic energy spike with sudden, predatory delight.

“Bumped?” Hedghe’s voice dripped with condescension. “A seasoned Lieutenant General, bested by a terrified group of tourists in a cloud of steam? Tell me, Kaspa, is it not more likely you simply dropped it in your terror?”

Kaspa’s face flushed a deep, humiliated red. “I know how to secure my gear, Doctor.”

“Clearly,” Hedghe sneered, gesturing a long, pale finger at Kaspa’s empty hip.

I watched Lysander. The human instinct to punish failure was hovering heavy in the air, but Lysander was a tactician. He didn’t dress down his subordinate in front of a rival.

“Enough,” Lysander cut in, his voice a rolling boulder that silenced them both. He looked at Kaspa, offering a strict, cold lifeline. “Lieutenant General, take a squad. Trace the evacuation route. Find it.”

Dr Hedghe hid a thinly veiled sneer; his own energy was such a tangled mess that it was hard to know what he was feeling. Not someone I would like to cross in combat, where the strings could often give me an edge.

“Mr Tanner,” Hedghe continued. “I implore you to release the two injured parties to the medical team at once, lockdown or no. There is no situation that should take precedence over the health of these two engineers under my jurisdiction.”

The General seemed not to mind him for a moment while he spoke through the radio. The show of nonchalance was expert, and it seemed to wind Dr Hedghe up immensely. Eventually he regarded his counterpart.

“Do not alarm yourself ‘MR’ Hedghe.” His demeanour remained stoic, but there was a subtle change in the General’s string, a slight hint of satisfaction. “I will be letting the medical staff remove the wounded from the site under careful supervision.” He looked at the two engineers and then at me. I got a sudden jolt; there was no way I was leaving.

“Sir, I request the leave to remain and see out this security breach.”

Lysander held my gaze for a fraction of a second, registering my disjointed paw. Was it a disqualifier? Thankfully, he seemed to see it only as an acceptable tactical penalty. He gave a single, curt nod. You will help me set up a secure evacuation of these injured personnel.” I was close to sighing, relegated again to menial tasks. But just as soon as I had thought it, he leaned in close.

“This is no coincidence, given what we have seen, I want you to surveil the crowd quietly while you work, get your team looking for anyone out of place.”

I nodded and gently hopped off the bench where I had been getting attended to. “Sir, my squad and I will start a sweep of all the people. We have ways of not being noticed.”
Lys looked at me again with those quizzical eyes, joining the dots from my comment before. His string pulsed gently with curiosity. My stomach clenched. Revealing this secret would be a huge step in trusting him. Did I trust him? But before I could say anything more, he had started organising the quarantine zone and coordinating the search.

Kaspa, Rez and a few members of my own personal squad headed up the data pad search. Meanwhile, the General and I set up the quarantine zone to ensure the engineers could be safely taken to the medical bay without anyone else leaving. As I sat on a nearby crate supervising, I leaned one ear to the conversation between Kaspa and Rez as they marched off into the facility again. It was a testament to how much I had shifted from near-euphoria to becoming inward-facing and avoidant. Normally, the back and forth between those two was always enough to bring a tap to my foot, but in this instance, it barely made my whiskers twitch.

Their familiar dynamic, Kaspa’s rigid, oblivious panic and Rez’s deflection through sharp humour and apparent flirting, was a loud, discordant hum in the strings. I logged their emotional signatures as the baseline, tuning them out so I could sweep the rest of the atrium for anomalies.

I let them go and allowed my attention to sit back on the room at large, both with my eyes and ears, as well as with the strings. Looking for anyone behaving out of the ordinary. Other members of my squad were doing the same from various positions around the atrium. A sharp, nearby string-vibration snapped my attention. Curiosity, directed squarely at me. There was a pair of eyes on me.

“Your inquisitiveness is quite loud, you know!”

My eyes settled on a smaller female rabbit, a medical scanner wrapped with Velcro around her paw.

“Yes, you.” She said pointedly at me, now that she had collected my gaze. “Are you always so inquisitive, or is this just a habit you have picked up for your work?”

“You noticed, huh?” She didn’t wait for permission, hopping up onto the crate and stepping close to adjust the splint on my arm. As she worked, her eyes flicked to my face, catching my sweeping gaze.

“You’re casting a net over the whole room,” she murmured, her voice dropping underneath the ambient noise of the lockdown. “Are you always this nosy, or is it just the uniform?”

I bristled, a confusing mix of tactical annoyance and sudden, undeniable warmth spreading through my chest. “I am calibrating. A useful skill when you need to understand intentions hidden beneath human facades.”

She leaned in closer, tightening a strap. “For someone so keen to listen, you don’t talk much.”

“Listening for the quiet that I can only suppose exists in the spaces between your constant chatter.” I smiled inwardly to myself. The dance had begun. Consequently, she nipped me. “Ow!” I looked at her, half mockingly exaggerating the pain. It hadn’t been a hard nip, though, and her body language was still amenable. The air between us crackled, a sudden, sharp connection in a room full of chaos. But before the dance could continue, Lysander strode back into view making a beeline for Dr Thorne.

She looked at me inquisitively then. Examining the slight deflation of my chest and the drooping of my head, she followed it across the room to where Lysander stood, deep in conversation. Thankfully, she hopped down off the crate then, at least having the good sense to make it seem as though she had not been distracting me.

“I’ve often wondered how you all do it. How do you manage to be so obedient in your job? Especially when it is humans at the top. They are so...”

Kaspa and Rez bustled over to the general, looking accomplished. The missing data pad was handed back over to the general immediately. They started walking towards me, Lysander keenly tapping on the screen, his left eye wide for the eye scanning feature. I locked my awareness of the strings directly onto him and trained my ears on the approaching party so that I could listen in.

“...found on a console back near the gangway where the tour had first broken up, sir. It doesn’t seem tampered with.” Kaspa reported, practically melting with relief.

I kept my string-sense locked on the General. As the datapad’s screen flared to life, a massive, jagged spike erupted in Lysander’s string, a moment of terrifying, chaotic realisation, followed a microsecond later by an iron-clad suppression. His face remained a mask of placid command, offering Kaspa a curt nod of dismissal.

Beside me, the medic rabbit flinched violently. Her sharp intake of breath perfectly mirrored the knot twisting in my own gut. The sensation squared off with us both simultaneously. A blatant, towering lie.

“They can be so two-faced,” she whispered, her nose twitching with unfiltered disgust.

The words hung between us, an invitation to a shared reality. I desperately wanted to agree. I wanted to validate her disgust and share the burden of this suffocating human duplicity. But the heavy fabric of my uniform suddenly felt like a belt around my throat. A soldier does not undermine his commanding officer to a civilian.

I forced my jaw to lock. I buried my own revulsion beneath years of spec-ops conditioning, reshaping my face into a blank, tactical mask. I said nothing.

She looked up, searching my eyes, listening to my strings. She didn’t find the kindred spirit she was looking for; she only found the soldier. Her ears flattened slightly, the playful spark in her gaze dampening into something resembling pity.

“Watch out for that one,” she said, her voice cooler now, stepping away from the crate.

“Wait, what’s your name?” I asked, a sudden, pathetic grasp at the connection I had just actively severed.

She paused, offering a cheeky tilt of her foot. “I’m sure a nosy rabbit like you can find me if you need to.” Her eyes shimmered with a wry quality before she hopped off to continue her work. Fortunately, she was gone when the General and the rest of his retinue showed up.

“Sir, I am up to speed already with the basics. I understand the pad has been found.”

The general looked at my ears for a moment. “Yes, very good. Kaspa, Rez, please report to Dr Thorne. She is keen to discuss next steps for when the lockdown is lifted, so she can get back to work. Turning to me once they were out of earshot, he looked out over the crowd and whispered. “It has been broken into, hacked!”

“I thought Hawkesmoore had said they were...”

“Yes, well, clearly Hawkesmoor was wrong. Have you sensed anything from the crowd?” At that moment, a triumphant spasm shuddered through the texture of the room. Several of my Rabbit squad suddenly flared as well, alerting each other to the same anomaly. I scanned in the rough direction I had felt it. “Sir, 1 o’clock, by the service gantry.” There was a woman there with purple hair and a grease-stained overall, the same woman who had been asking innumerable questions during the tour. She was looking at us and smiling. I didn’t need to know who she was; it was obvious she was the person who had instigated all of this. A silent predatory tension grew taut between them as she and the general locked gazes. She wore a deep knowing smile, a dangerous smile. The dark alley feeling that had wiggled into the room reached a peak before she quietly stepped backwards, melting away into the shadows of the reclamation facility access ways.

Instead of sounding the alarm, Lysander swallowed the truth of her appearance and disappearance, pocketed the pad, and lifted the lockdown.

“Have you ever been involved in a game of cat and mouse before?”

The horrifying depth of my commander’s lone-wolf pathology became clear. To humans, secrets are a game; to a rabbit, they are a severed connection.

***

Two days passed in the quiet of my quarters, leaving me alone with the throbbing in my sling and a dangerous, suffocating secret. I was officially wrapped up in a conspiracy, bound by the rigid tenets of my role. To follow the chain of command, even when every instinct in my body screamed against it.

My mind kept circling the man who had put me in this position. Could I trust General Lysander?

On the surface, he was a natural commander. In the terrifying heat of the reclamation facility, he had acted like a gravity well, issuing calm, precise orders that cut cleanly through the panic.

I knew I was unusual in my ability to sense the strings so clearly, but even without them, I could see how easily people acquiesced to his unnerving stillness. His stoic poker face conferred a massive tactical advantage, and I confess, I was starting to respect his inner resolve. But that respect was plagued by a lingering, maddening itch. Why had a man so otherwise calculated decided to manually stop an explosion?

It had been foolhardy, rash, and borderline suicidal. He had risked his life and mine. Was I missing a piece of the board? Was there some hidden variable that made his reckless descent the wiser choice?

I rarely doubt my own tactical judgment, but the jigsaw pieces of Lysander’s character simply refused to fit together.

Once the preliminary assessments were done, the department heads would convene. Lysander’s actions would come under intense scrutiny from the quorum. And there I would sit, an accessory to his silence regarding the doctored valve and the mysterious woman.

A familiar, bitter taste rose in my mouth. Memories surfaced of previous commanders who had ordered my silence when the truth begged to be spoken.

Humans possessed this duplicitous need to keep their cards pressed tightly to their chests, weaponising isolation and calling it strategy. Be silent. Be commanded. That small, unspoken command caused a pain far deeper than the fracture in my arm. It agitated the eternal conflict I carried within me. To be a good soldier, I needed to follow orders and trust my superior.

But if it had been my call, I would have shared the evidence with the security heads. We could have investigated the sabotage as a unit, a cohesive team. I knew in my heart that I had the chops to lead and to do so with a moral compass. But I am a rabbit. The galaxy might be opening up to us, but the human ceiling remained firmly in place. I would never get the chance. So, I was left to appraise Lysander from the shadows of his own secret.

Was he the wise, compassionate leader I hoped for, or a fool crippled by trust issues?

My rabbit’s gut insisted there was far more to this human than met the eye.

I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.

Just moments after the thought crossed my mind, a sharp knock broke the silence of my quarters. The door slid open, and Lysander invited himself in with that rehearsed, impenetrable demeanour. I composed myself accordingly, sitting up straight despite my injured paw, and waited. An expectant silence settled over the room as the door clicked shut behind him.

“So, let’s talk,” he said.

From the Cartographer’s Desk:

After a fair amount of deliberation, I have made some rather large changes to this chapter. Namely, adding an extra 3k words to it. It solved a few problems with the next few chapters by doing so, but more importantly, it gave the chapter a much more foundational, character-driven reason for existing. I am not satisfied with releasing ‘a bunch of stuff that happens’. I want every chapter to take us deeper into who we all are as humans and as a society.

Before, Hec’ten felt like a spec-ops bunny. Now, I hope he feels like a deeply conflicted and multi-layered individual who doesn’t quite know what to do with the way the world is throwing him about.

Help Fund the Chrysaora:

The Strings of Us is a crowdfunded universe. If you are enjoying the free chapters, you can help fund the professional editing, cover art, and final publication of the book by joining the Cartographers Guild.

Every £1 contributed earns you 10 Treasury Points on our public Leaderboard. When the book officially launches, a percentage of the initial net profits will go into a Community Pot to be gifted back to our top point-holders!

Drop a tip in the Ko-fi Treasury to make a one-off contribution and jump up the ranks today.

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If you can’t contribute financially today, the best way you can help the ship fly is by hitting the Like button or telling me what you thought of Hec’ten in the comments below! See you next week.

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This piece is part of the “Day of the ___ Writer,” an open collab on the daily experiences behind our writing. Post on your publication about your day, and check out our growing mosaic of many lives.

‘Hi’, I say to the sun in the morning.

Ideally that is what happens, I live in the U.K. which is quite far north, and so in the winter the sun might not say hi back for an hour or two yet. The summer is a different ball game, the sun will be up hours before me and is like a jolly parent nudging and poking me to get up. Though, it is fair to say I bring this relationship upon myself through my unruly notion that it is good for me to sleep with no curtains or blinds over my window. I like to imagine that my circadian rhythm will be more stable if I let the sun do the talking. It’s been a norm in my life for so long now that I have nothing to compare it against, except perhaps the weekends I spend at my partners house. She has a better relationship with curtains, and I do notice I tend to oversleep there.

Waking up is a slow process for me. I am not one of those ‘get up like a spring daisy’ types. I like to roll around, hug my duvet, maybe read a bit, and gently rouse myself from my warm little bubble. If I have the time, one of the first pleasures of my day is a morning meditation. Usually about 20-30 minutes, self guided. It has had its ups and downs in terms of the consistency by which I keep this habit up, but by-and-large this has been a staple of my morning since I was a young teen, so getting on for over 20 years now. The value I get from it is immense, and yet hard to describe. I will start by simply saying that the contrast is apparent when I haven’t done this. I become stressed more easily, more reactionary, less focussed. Strangely it is more noticeable only when I have done the meditation, if I don’t do a morning practice, I rarely notice the effect until the next time meditation is brought back.

Following that, I will start getting ready for work, the usual tasks apply: scrubbing the teeth, choosing clothes (usually a colourful shirt), a quick wash and dry, tying my shoelaces, and then out the door we go. My route to work is both busy and bussy. (As in, I get a bus.) The traffic in my area of London in the morning is slow. I am fortunate enough to live in a nice area where people tend to have a bit of extra cash. But this also means people are very enamoured with their cars, and do not like to share their space with others. The roads are small, easily clogged, and with a population of 10 million or so people, this is a recipe for a traffic jam. I am often left wondering why no one has bothered to do some sort of car sharing app. Perhaps they did, but then discovered it was not something people much cared for. Still, I can’t help but wonder how much extra pollution that entitlement causes, and how much time is wasted with people jamming up the roads. There is a plus side though, this means my bus to work takes a while, and so I pass the time journaling and writing. If you see my notebooks, you can see the sections of my journey where the bus has come to a stop etched in the elongation of my letters as my hand slips up the page.

On the odd occasion I also like to take a leaf out of Winnie the Pooh’s book and do nothing. To glance out of the window, admire the sun on the river, watch people living their lives roll by. ‘Doing nothing is something worth doing.’

Work is here, but just before we get there, it’s time to pop into the local Waitrose and get something for breakfast. I always feel a bit fancy when I go in there. Waitrose is famed in the U.K. for being an aspirational supermarket. There are quotes from a blog called “Overheard in Waitrose” that include such sayings as:

• Waitrose have sold out of my favourite Duchy of Cornwall zesty lemon curd so don’t talk to me about your f*****ng problems.

• So I asked him outright - how am I supposed to get homemade hummus out of cashmere.

Luckily, if you are brave enough to explore this odd world of middle-upper class pretentions, you will find range of products that are genuinely tastier, and not actually that much more expensive. My usual would be something bready that I can jam in the toaster when I get to the office. And if I’m feeling extra hungry, some yoghurt, nuts and fruit to stir into a big old bowl of deliciousness.

Work is a small underground office in Fulham, underneath a wine shop that bears our companies name. I used to work in one of those shops myself, and had a great time doing so, but my creative background and general love for writing eventually got me a position in their marketing department instead. A normal day usually includes writing some form of email campaign about a wine or wine collection. Blog posts, social media content creation, scrolling through endless sheets of data, devising strategies, gamifying customer funnels, and generally being a big old wine geek. The upside of working for a wine company is of course the amount of wine we get to sample and study. There are tastings sometimes two or three times a week, and the range is truly excellent. In many ways I have been spoiled by what we import and sell. I worry that if I go back to a life where I have to buy wine at full price, having understood what quality wine is actually like, my life could become a fair bit more expensive.

I should mention at this point that I am not ending every work day tipsy. The other side effect of working in the wine trade is a relative ease towards spitting the wine back out once you have tasted it. I remember when I used to think this was diabolical behaviour. Why would you spit out such a luxury and tasty product that someone has spent a huge amount of energy, passion, and craft putting together.

Well, next time you go to a big wine trade event and see over 100 wines lined up to sample. See how far you make it without spitting. I have tried, and I can’t remember how I got home that night.

Work usually takes up the lions share of my day, as is the case for most people. Nine hours later I will stumble out of my cellar office and hope for a slither more daylight that I can enjoy. Just recently the time the sun sets has gone past 6pm, when I normally finish, and so now my dreams are realised. That said, where I work near Parsons Green is very pretty in all lights and all weathers. A mist can render the green with its old world lampposts to resemble a gothic book cover. In the summer sun people will picnic and sunbathe, meet their friends in the shade of a tree for a catch up. In the rain, the lamps and shop fronts cast an orange glow in the tarmac surfaces of the roads and walkways, shimmering light into my eyes causing me to feel I am walking through an impressionist masterpiece.

The bus back is usually much quicker. I tend to not do too much on this journey as I am usually head worn from the work day. Recently I have taken to playing some of the original game boy Pokémon games. I chose Bulbasaur, naturally.

Arriving home takes me down a very pretty road past a few victorian alms houses which were built to house people who had sacrificed for the armed forces. The houses are built right next to a commons, a piece of land in the U.K. that is designated for public use and for the benefit of all. Traditionally you could even graze cattle there, but of course not many Londoners these days have a spare cow. They are exceedingly pretty buildings, however, and they are a welcome sight each day. A reminder of the great architecture you can find in London, as well as a reminder that I am nearly home.

One of these houses in particular sits opposite a gorgeous old crab apple tree which they adorn with bird feeders of all shapes and sizes. The tree is always bending under the weight of all sorts of species, my personal fave being the Parakeets. They are not native Londoners traditionally, these are parrots that are said to have escaped in the 60s. Some rumours even going as far as saying it was Jimi Hendrix that set them free. Whoever brought them here, they are now fully adapted and are as much a part of the fabric of London as are its many other international residents.

Eventually my estate looms. An ex council estate with great big apartment blocks that were built in the 60’s. My shared house is on the fourth floor, which does give me some rather wonderful views. Sometimes I will throw my head into the residents community garden to see how my veg bed is doing. Currently it is home to beetroots, chard, broad beans, and leeks. I have to say, it looks rather verdant and alive.

Finally home. I kick off my shoes and tend to go up to my room to relax for a while before I do anything else. Depending on the day this can be anything from writing for my own projects and creating art, or it can be just turning off for a while, watching a show or if I’m really stressed out, taking a nap.

Eventually I am called to the kitchen. I share the house with three Italian chefs which means I tend to have the kitchen to myself because they cook and eat at work. The other upside to this is that they are often free to support me in my slow ascent up the Duolingo Italian ladder.

I follow a strictly vegan diet, which means my food is usually quite global in style. Though I have a proclivity towards Asian food and flavours, I suspect partly born of the time I lived in China. I do love to cook, and given the opportunity I will spend many hours in a kitchen making delicious meals. But in a standard weeknight, it is likely to be something much more simple, perhaps a rice dish or a ramen.

And then with the rest of the evening, I tend to devote it to things like my writing. Often I can knock out at least an hour of writing most days, energy depending. Other times, when the inspiration and energy is less available I will read, watch good movies and shows. (I have impeccable taste of course from my tenure as an animator.) I might even treat myself to some pc gaming, though as I get older that becomes more and more rare. Instead you will often find me game-planning my life. Whether that’s looking at my finances, plying around with new business ideas, coming up with new creative endeavours, or working on myself and my growth. These are all things I am deeply passionate about.

Bed is not strictly defined, sometimes I’ll be out like a light by 10pm, others, like an unfortunate night the other day when I stayed up till 3:30am writing, can be later. I used to resent bed greatly. I was a terrible insomniac as a teenager, often laying awake for hours and hours in the dark. It was actually the reason I started meditation in the first place. However, these days, I am a pro at sleeping. Not only can I put myself to sleep with almost zero effort, but I am a vivid dreamer with many fun recurring dreams. It has been a total 180 and I am much happier for it.

This represents a roughly average weekday in my life. I hope you have enjoyed this odd little journey into my mind and life. Maybe some of it seems familiar to you too? If so leave a comment and tell me all about it.

If you would like to try some of my other work, try out my short novella deciduous and evergreen. An eco-thriller and buddy movie style story of a group of children in Edinburgh, Scotland, trying to come to terms with a terrifying prophecy from the past.

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed so far. Your contribution naturally goes well beyond just popping your email in a box and reading my work. The conversations we have had, the critique and feedback I have enjoyed, the palpable sense of community that is evident here in Fiction Substack... I am grateful for all of it!

This, of course, has been no walk in the park…

When you are balancing a full-time job and other time commitments, it is easy to let your daydreams go unwritten. To let your aspirations remain tucked in the desk drawer, out of sight and out of mind. I am determined to not let that happen.

While I have been approaching this 100-subscriber milestone, I have been quietly observing the struggles of everyday indie authors and aspiring writers, myself included. The harsh reality of indie publishing is that getting a book professionally edited, wrapped in custom art, formatted, and sent to the printers costs thousands of pounds upfront. It takes gumption and a lot of capital to pour into your dreams.

Traditional publishing, meanwhile, locks readers out until the book is on a shelf and is notoriously difficult to breach. Standard Kickstarters force creators into a terrifying 30-day ticking clock with no guarantee of success.

What if there is another way?

Joining the Expedition

I am inviting you to help me build a universe.

The Strings of Us serial will remain free to read here on Substack. This is my ‘Lighthouse’ project and it will always guide you to the finished shores of the story regardless of your involvement.

However, today I am officially opening the Cartographers Guild. This is an invitation for the most dedicated readers who want to help fund and develop the book’s creation in real-time.

What do Guild Members get right now? Aside from helping fund the book, members of the Cartographers Guild will receive exclusive access to:

• High-res maps and deep-lore drops about the universe.

• Character profiles and concept art.

• Raw, unedited “work in progress” updates (the messy behind-the-scenes).

• The ability to vote on future story elements and stretch goals.

How It Works (The Leaderboard)

I am opening paid Substack subscriptions, as well as a Ko-fi page, so that if you feel like supporting the progress of the interstellar ship Chrysaora, you can do so on a monthly basis or as a one-off tip.

Here is where it gets fun. We are gamifying the launch. For every contribution, there will be an automatic conversion into ‘Credits’ applied to a public Leaderboard, updated in real-time.

(Every £1 contributed via subscription or Ko-fi tip = 10 Credits). 👇

The Community Pot:

When The Strings of Us officially launches, a percentage of the initial net profits will be placed into a Community Pot. This pot will be distributed to all the Leaderboard point-holders as a massive ‘thank you.’

To be completely clear: Treasury Points have no real-world cash value, and contributing is not a financial investment, stock, or equity purchase. This is a crowdfunded passion project, and the Community Pot is simply a discretionary, post-launch ‘thank you’ gift to reward the people who helped me build this rabbit-filled universe.

What does your support lead to?

I will be running this project very much like a Kickstarter, but without a stressful time-frame. This book is going to take time to perfect, so instead of promising everything up-front, we will work towards goals that unlock one by one as the treasury increases.

Destination 1: The Professional Polish (£2,500) This goal is all about getting the basics right. When we finish this book, we need input from professionals: a developmental editor to point out where the story is going wrong, a copy editor to make sure it reads perfectly, and formatting to ensure that when it hits a physical page or your Kindle screen, it looks stunning.

Destination 2: The Horizon... I have already planned a number of stretch goals beyond this that range from art, add-ons, digital exclusives, and upgrades to the physical book itself. When we smash Destination 1, we will vote together as Cartographers to define which direction we fund next.

So what is the next step?

Your Next Step

Choose your path and help us launch the Chrysaora.

Path 1: Join the Cartographers Guild (Fund the Launch) If you want to earn Credits, climb the Leaderboard, and unlock the behind-the-scenes lore, you can join the Guild in two ways:

• The One-Off Tip: Drop a tip in the Ko-fi Treasury to instantly get your name on the board.

  Ko-Fi

• The Subscription: Upgrade to a Paid Substack Subscription to steadily accumulate Credits every single month. And while you are here, for the first month this link below will give you a lifetime 20% off your subscription.

  The link expires March 25th

Substack Subscription - Special Offer

Path 2: Ground Control (Free Support) If you aren’t in a place to contribute financially, you are still a vital part of this crew! You can help us reach our goals for free simply by hitting the “Like” button on this post, leaving a comment, or Restacking it to share the Strings of Us universe with your friends.

The Recruitment Bounty: Want to climb the Leaderboard without spending a penny? Use your unique referral link to invite your friends to the Chrysaora.

• The Immediate Loot: If you bring in 3 friends, the ship’s computer automatically grants you 1 month of free access to the Cartographer’s Guild (our paid tier).

• The Leaderboard Points: For every single friend that subscribes using your link, I will manually inject 50 Treasury Points into your Leaderboard score, updated weekly. Recruit your friends, fund the launch.

  Just visit my leaderboard page here for your unique referral link.

Thank you for being here. Let’s build something incredible.

Flash Fic Feb - Week 2 Directory

To check out all the great entries this week, check out the link above, curated by Bradley Ramsey & Leeron Heywood

Welcome to the Atlas, Friends.

We have arrived at Day 8 of Flash Fiction February. Today’s prompt asked us to step behind the curtain of reality: The universe is a simulation, and you are the maintenance worker fixing a glitch.

Usually, when we talk about glitches in the matrix, we think of black cats walking past twice or déjà vu. We think of profound, reality-breaking paradoxes.

But anyone who has ever worked in IT or tech knows the truth: the biggest disasters are usually caused by the smallest, silliest human errors. A misplaced decimal point. A coffee spill. Or, in this case, a mislabeled audio file.

So, come with me to the Break Room at the end of the universe. Grab a synthetic sandwich. We have a story to tell, and I promise... it’s a gas.

The Kyoto Protocol Error

Basset and his new apprentice Lentil were sitting in the void enjoying their lunch, or at least, a rendering of a lunch designed to placate their desire for something to do. The white sterile break room between the simulations was tedious, and so they passed the concept of time by swapping stories. Lentil, being the young apprentice, was much taken with the tales Basset had up his sleeves and was always asking for more.

“So, what actually is the worst glitch you ever saw?” His eyes darted about looking for the answer on Bassets face before he could say anything. “Was it that time at the battle of Waterloo when the horses floated?”

Basset put down his pretend sandwich on his knee and stroked his moustache.

“Nah, that was just a bad physics patch, easy to fix. Replace some of the code and rewind the event a few clicks so that their memories are wiped.” Lentil looked a bit disappointed at the lack of extra detail.

Noting his deflation, Basset continued.

“No, when I think about it properly... Lemme tell ya about the surrender of General Akechi outside of Kyoto, now that... That was a memorable glitch!”

Basset waved his hands, and the blank walls, usually beset with code, like trickles of rainwater rolling down invisible walls, gently resolved into a scene of majesty. The sky was breathtakingly clear, and there was a gentle falling of Cherry blossom leaves wafting to the ground in near slow motion. The graphics were breathtaking, rendered in 16k resolution. In front of them both stood two groups of Samurai looking every bit like the figureheads of a mythological rendering.

“1582, Mount Hiei.” Basset announced. “To our left is General Akechi who is about to surrender.”

Lentil looked him up and down as the man knelt in the mud, sweat on his brow. He was clearly terrified. Standing over him, terrifying and silent, waiting for the sword to be presented to him as a sign of submission was...

“And to the right is Shogun Nobunaga, leader of all Japan.”

The atmosphere was serene, and yet you could cut the tension with a blade. A bird chirped, the wind rustled silk banners, a flag cracked in the wind like a whip.

“So, uh, high stakes then?” Lentil whispered.

“Maximum stakes. If the moment goes awry, the simulation AI resets the timeline. This surrender needs to stick. And, hey, you don’t need to whisper, this is just a recording, we are not actually here.”

Akechi reached for his Katana, breaking the stillness of the scene. The lacquered scabbard of the blade was intricate and beautiful, a real piece of craftsmanship befitting a tribute to the Shogun.

“Have you met anyone from the sound design team before?” Basset asked his apprentice.

“I haven’t yet, it seems like a really cool job though.”

“And highly responsible,” Basset interjected. “If you get the basics wrong, the senses of the world, the inhabitants start to lose it and eventually crash the system. Watch this,” Basset chuckled, leaning forward with his pretend sandwich. “And remember, Akechi thinks he is about to die with honor. He is expecting the song of steel.”

On the ground Akechi gripped the hilt. He squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the end, for a blade to sever his head from his neck. He pulled.

It didn’t sing with the song of folded steel as expected.

Instead, the file KATANA_STEEL_SLIDE_V2 had been mysteriously overwritten by WET_FART_04.

It started as a low, rumbling vibration, shaking the scabbard, before escalating into a wet, ripping PFFFFFRPLPLP that lasted for three agonizing seconds.

The very wind seemed to stop. The birds chatter stilled. The Shogun Nobunaga, a man who had burned temples and conquered nations, stared at General Akechi’s waist with an expression of pure, unadulterated confusion.

Akechi froze, the blade half-drawn. His eyes popped open. Panic, cold and sharp, flooded his face. Beads of sweat erupted across his brow. In a desperate attempt to hide the shame, he tried to jam the sword back into the scabbard.

The reverse of the sound was worse. It was a high-pitched, desperate sucking noise, like a flapping pigeon trying desperately to pull a swimming cap off a sweaty bald head.

“Oh god,” Lentil whispered, covering his mouth. “He played it like a trombone.”

“It gets worse,” Basset grinned. “Look who shows up.”

The Shogun’s face had turned a violent shade of purple. He opened his mouth to scream an execution order, but suddenly, the air shimmered next to him. A figure popped into existence.

It was Basset. But not a period-accurate Basset. It was Basset in his bright blue ‘Systems Admin’ jumpsuit, holding a ‘World’s Okayest Coder’ mug.

“I didn’t have time to render a kimono!” Basset defended himself to Lentil. “I panicked. I tried to use the translation matrix to tell them it was a glitch. I had hoped to say something sensible like, ‘Apologies, noble lords, a demon has corrupted your ears to sow discord between your clans.’“

“What did you say?” Lentil asked, grinning, but dreading the answer.

On screen, Blue-Jumpsuit-Basset bowed frantically to the Shogun and shouted in broken Japanese.

“Do not worry! His sword has terrible bum movements! I am the janitor of wind!’“

Lentil put his head in his hands.

The Shogun looked at Akechi. He looked at the janitor of wind. The vein in his forehead pulsed like a lightning bolt.

“You mock the Shogunate?!” Nobunaga roared. “I will silence you myself!”

The Shogun reached for his own blade, the legendary ‘Demon Cutter’, a sword said to be thirsty for blood. He ripped it from his hip with the fury of a god.

BRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAP-HONK.

It was a fart sound akin to a tuba stuffed with ham, falling down a flight of stairs. A deep, brassy, flapping noise that vibrated the cherry blossoms off the trees.

General Akechi, who was seconds away from seppuku, let out a single, high-pitched laugh before clamping his hands over his mouth, appalled, despite his visibly shaking shoulders.

The Shogun froze. He looked at his sword. He looked at Akechi. The indignity was too much. He spun around to his retinue of forty elite Samurai guards.

“Kill them!” he screamed. “Kill them all!”

Forty disciplined warriors stepped forward as one. Forty hands gripped forty hilts. Forty blades were drawn in near perfect unison.

It was a symphony of cabbage level, top tier, schoolyard quaking wind. It was a cacophony of squeaks, parps, rumbles, ripples, and trumpets. It was as if forty sumo wrestlers had all taken a road trip to India, and were not used to the spicy food.

“Oh … My… God!” Whispered Lentil quietly to himself.

The sheer volume of the audio error caused a glitch in the weather engine, the actual wind temporarily blew backwards as if the force of forty farts had reversed its direction, slapping the shogun and his retinue in the face with forty thousand cherry blossoms

The tension shattered like glass. General Akechi fell sideways into the mud, howling with laughter, clutching his sides. Basset too dropped to all fours, collapsed, wheezing with tears streaming down his face. It was all he could do to stay upright.

The Shogun stood there, covered in pink petals, trembling with rage. He looked at his men. He looked at the weeping General. He looked at his own sword. Finally, the most feared man in Japan broke.

He sheathed his sword (SHLUUUUP) and unsheathed it (BRRRAAAP).

A smile cracked his stony face. Then a chuckle. Then a roar. And then all hell broke loose. Every single samurai there was sheathing and unsheathing their sword, leaning on each other for support as their laughter broke their ability to remain upright. As soon as the giggling threatened to die down, another sword would be pulled from its scabbard to riotous mirth.

The simulation ended on a freeze-frame of forty-five grown men, historic warriors and one IT guy, rolling around on a majestic mountain, crying with laughter.

The wall faded back to the sterile white of the breakroom. Basset took a bite of his pretend sandwich, looking misty-eyed.

“So...” Lentil wiped a tear from his own eye, struggling for breath. “Did you fix it? Did the surrender stick?”

“Hell no,” Basset chewed. “The AI flagged the simulation as ‘Corrupted - Emotional Logic Broken.’ It deleted the whole timeline. We lost three months of data.”

Lentil gasped. “You got in trouble?”

“The sound design team got into huge trouble.” Basset tapped his datapad on the table. “But I kept the audio file.”

Suddenly, Basset’s datapad buzzed with a notification. The room filled with the majestic, flapping sound of a ham stuffed tuba falling down stairs.

BRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAP-HONK.

Basset smiled. “Every day, it was worth it.”

From the Cartographer’s Desk

There is something profoundly human about the fact that, no matter the century, no matter the culture, and no matter the stakes, some things will always be funny.

I wanted to write this story because we often treat history as this stoic, marble-statue version of reality. But people have always been people. And if a legendary sword made a noise like a ham-stuffed tuba, I don’t care if you are a Shogun or a peasant—you’re going to laugh.

A Question for the Comments: If you were a mischievous “Janitor of Wind” and could swap the sound of one everyday object with a fart noise, what would it be?

• The Judge’s Gavel?

• The Wedding “I Do”?

• The Pop of a Champagne Cork?

Let me know in the comments. I need a good laugh today.

Status: Glitch Resolved. (Mostly).

If this story made you smile, please Restack it. It helps the algorithm (and the Shogun) find their sense of humor.

Until the next coordinate,

Graeme

Flash Fic February - Week 1 Directory

To check out all the great entries this week, check out the link above, curated by Bradley Ramsey & Leeron Heywood

Welcome to the Atlas, Friends.

We have reached Day 7. The prompt was a heavy one: A character inherits a weapon from their father and is told they must kill to save the world.

I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of the chosen one trope where the only solution to a problem is violence. It feels lazy.

So, I wanted to write a story about Lateral Thinking. What if the curse isn’t a mandate for murder, but just a lack of imagination? What if you don’t have to pull the weed... you just have to prune the branch?

The Gardener

The shears that I picked up from where my father had collapsed were heavy. Memories flooded back, of days spent in the garden watching him prune back the bushes. I brought them close and smelt something weird, underneath the tang of old iron and rust... Was that blood? When I opened my eyes again, the world had changed forever.

***

The hospital room where my dad was being kept was sterile, and melancholy. The palliative care ward had been painted in an awful canary yellow colour in an attempt to brighten it up. It did not work.

“You see it don’t you!?” He croaked hoarsely. I was looking out of the hospital window at a delivery driver. From his chest protruded a mighty red vine that floated ephemerally through the air like a ghost, leading off somewhere into the distance.

“I’m so sorry, my child, I would not have wished this on you. This curse.”

I turned to him, he was fading gray like a dried leaf himself. His body was broken from the fall. There was only the faintest of vines coming from his chest, barely visible.

“Is it magic?” I ask. He looks down gloomily and shakes his head.

“I don’t know what it is, all I know is the role of the Gardener is passed down from person to person.” He looked at me desperately, his eyes wide despite the energy it cost him. The fear was palpable.

“Just remember, it’s not murder... It’s just... It’s just weeding. You don’t hate the bindweed, but you don’t let it take over the whole garden. You have to prune... Them.”

Turning back to the delivery driver I looked at the vine. Within its structure there were memories, or so I had thought. Now I knew them for what they were. Premonitions. He was unloading bouquets of flowers for the hospital florist. It struck me in a flash of awareness.

He delivers the flowers.

He runs a red light because he is running behind, and it’s his daughter’s play at the school tonight.

He slams into the side of a car carrying a future UN diplomat.

Peace talks fail.

Tactical nukes destroy nearly all life on earth by 2074.

I knew my dad was staring at me from behind, his eyes were boring into my neck.

“Tell me?” He rasped.

“Tactical nukes, the end of the world in just under 50 years.”

He closed his eyes and a tear rolled down his cheek.

“I’m so sorry, but you have to see, it is the only way...” He started crying. Do you think God could forgive me?” Reaching for his shoulder to comfort him, he suddenly strengthened.

“You have to do it. You are the Gardener now.” He took my outstretched hands and placed them back on the shears that were hidden beneath my belt.

“Cut the roots out before he gets back in the van.”

***

I walked out of the hospital, my inner monologue running frantic. The delivery driver worked in the distance. A family man, he delivers flowers. He is not a bad person, he doesn’t deserve this. He was checking his phone, maybe it was a text from his wife. A picture of his daughter in her costume.

My dad’s words floated back to the surface of my mind.

“I tried once, to do it differently, I nearly let an entire country descend into war. You think you are smarter than the maths? You aren’t. Soft hands bury civilizations.”

I started running towards the driver. The air was cold as it whipped through my hair. He was walking back to his van with that grotesque red vine protruding from his chest, as thick as a python. Gripping the shears from my belt, I pulled them out. The man turned and saw me, shock and fear in his eyes at the sight of my madness, I plunged forward with these sharp pieces of rusted metal. He froze.

I lunged, and the tips of the gardening shears passed right through the layers of tissue, probing deep. Air gushed out, as the tyre deflated almost instantly.

“What the hell, what are you doing! My Van!!” He cried. I ran around to the next tyre and the next, slashing them into ribbons.

Eventually, I turned to him. “Your tyres were bald, friend, you would have caused an accident.”

The driver just looked at me incredulous before he started dialing for the police. The red vine from his chest had withered and nearly disappeared, a dull harmless gray that the sunlight shone through. The diplomat will live. The driver won’t make it to his daughters play, but no one will die due to his carelessness.

***

Back in the hospital room, I drop the shears on the bedside table. My dad’s breathing is laboured. He looked forlorn, desperate.

“Is... He... Gone?”

“Rest now Dad, everything is fine,” I reply. “I was always a better gardener than you anyway. Honestly, the way you guys used weedkiller on everything, it’s like you had never heard of permaculture.” He snorted derisively.

“By the way, how did you stay out of custody?”

“His eyes turned to me, and his lips moved slowly.”

“You can see the future now my child, it’s quite easy to stay out of jail when you can see all the eventualities.” And with that he closed his eyes again to sleep. Touching the shears I close my eyes too and focus on the various vines that swam in the air around me. I saw my own. Following it down its course, it became clear to me just how easy it would be to prune the eventualities that led to my imprisonment.

Yes, this was a responsibility I had never asked for. But I had not been raised to be a bad person. I would do my best to keep the world turning without harming anyone. But all that said, I could see this becoming rather a fun hobby. Being a gardener was not such a bad career path after all.

From the Cartographer’s Desk

I enjoyed writing this one because it reclaims the prophecy from the grimdark fantasy genre and puts it in the hands of a pragmatist.

A Question for the Comments: If you had the shears, if you could see the catastrophic result of a stranger’s bad day, would you intervene? And where is your line? Tires? A broken arm? Or would you just let the timeline play out?

Next Step: If you enjoyed this twist on the prompt, please Save this post. It helps the algorithm know that we prefer our apocalypses cancelled.

Until the next coordinate,

Graeme

Flash Fic Feb - Week 1 Directory

To check out all the great entries this week, check out the link above, curated by &

Welcome to the Atlas, Friends.

I was quite excited by this prompt. It felt full of potential, and importantly, given the consistent nature of this February Flash Fiction challenge, like it had the makings of a piece I could make a bit shorter.

It was not to be. My final draft was 1700 words, now reduced to 1490.

Despite that, I am very happy with where this ended up. I think it's quite a unique spin on the idea. Let's go to the green archipelago.

The great green archipelago was a sight to behold. A cluster of emerald islands perched upon the deep blue, each distinct and with its own claimants. The community was whole, friendly, and loud.

In the distance a new leaf erupted out of the waters, untouched and terrifyingly far away across the open water. A fresh new lily pad, unclaimed.

Three were summoned by the elders, all coming of age at the same time. Two boys, Fenton and Friar, and Fenton’s sister Feenah.

This was their chance. To claim a pad all of their own. To brave untold danger and become an adult in their own right, with standing in their community. What’s more, the difficulty of claiming this pad would ensure their legacy as brave frogs.

At the edge of the elders’ lilies, Fenton and Friar waited patiently for the start to be announced, applying mud paint to their skin in terrifying patterns that signified their heritage and their prowess. Feenah did not appear, and so they assumed she had backed out.

‘Understandable’ Fenton thought. She had little chance against either him or his cousin.

A mighty croak from the eldest bullfrog was the signal. It echoed across the community like a rumble of thunder in the sky. Fenton and Friar launch themselves out across the lily pads, their legs pumping harder than they have ever gone before. The race had started and there could only be one to claim the prize. The thwack of their bodies as they landed from one pad to another created a steady beat with which the onlooking frogs all took as their song to cheer them on.

Go. Go. Go!

As the boys got further out, the gulf between pads grew wider, the air and water grew cooler, and the sky became more exposed. The canopy receded, stripping away their shade. The blazing fire in the sky prickled their skin with intensity, but neither of them dared to enter the water for too long, not with the maw of the dread beast lurking in the cooler waters.

A shadow passed them from overhead. Its black cast was deeper and darker than they had ever known before. Looking upwards, Friar was shocked to see birds circling up high in an endless void untouched by the fringes of the leaves he had known as a child. Dragonflies raged overhead. Their wings hummed with an intensity that rattled his bones and shook his soul. Their electric colouring was a stark reminder of the dangers that they faced as they moved further away from the safety of the main archipelago.

Fenton paddled frantically as he made the leap into the water to swim the awful distance to the next available pad. His legs were already pumping as hard as possible when two shadows appeared in the deep. He started pushing even harder, his legs and feet shouting at the water to give him more purchase, more speed.

One of the shadows resolved into a shape he had only heard about in children’s stories. A great abyss opened up in the heart of the shadow, a circle of death in the skin of the water where nothing could survive. The king koi was here and he knew then that his time had come.

With eyes only for that whirlpool of blackness, he was encouraged to even greater athleticism. Suddenly he found his front legs gripping the edge of the next row of Lily pads, a small highway of green that would save him for now.

Breathing a deep sigh of relief, and plastering himself upon the jade surface of this haven, he took a moment to rest. But there was too much to lose by staying still for long. Despite the shaking of his muscles, he picked himself up and moved forward, achingly at first, but soon the movement became fluid again.

Friar caught up alongside him, and they raced. Friar, between breaths spoke to him briefly.

“Did you see it, the king Koi, the stories are real!”

Fenton nodded and gave his cousin a blink of acknowledgement.

Together they passed the great titans, careful to avoid their attention for too long. Yellow webbed feet churned the water beneath towering feathered hulls. Wings that could snap the air in two cast long, deadly shadows. If you were to get on the wrong side of one of these behemoths, it would be your end.

The last challenge met them both at the end of the highway of lilies. They reached the outermost edge of the archipelago, a place neither of them had ever ventured to before. Few ever did, knowing full well the dangers.

The water was wide open and went out towards the horizon in an unbroken line that seemed infinite, the only break in that vastness was their goal. It sat in the water so far away, so unfathomably distant that it seemed neither one of them could ever hope to make it. But they had to try, for the glory of their colony, for the glory of the archipelago, and for the glory of their own lineage.

“If neither of us make it...” Fenton croaked to his cousin, “I hope we meet again as tadpoles in the shade of the mangrove.”

“Good luck dear friend.” Friar whispered back.

With a cry that would have terrified a gnat, they launched.

They hit the water with a splash, with the grim determination of a duck taking flight. This was the dead zone. The true deep. Here, there were no roots to hide amongst, no shadows to mask their passage. They were specks of green on a canvas of endless, terrifying blue.

Fenton kicked until his legs burned with the fire of a thousand suns. Beside him, Friar was flagging, his strokes losing their rhythm.

“Push!” Fenton bubbled underwater, though sound meant nothing here. “Push for the pad!”

The distance was agonizing. Three yards. Four. An eternity of seconds stretched out. The water grew colder, pressing against their ribs like a vice. Just as Fenton’s vision began to blur, his outstretched fingers brushed against something slimy.

A stem.

With their last reserves, they clawed at the algae-slicked rim, heaving their weary bodies over the edge to collapse onto the surface. It was firm. It was dry. It was glorious. Fenton rolled onto his back, gasping for air, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped moth. He looked over at Friar, who was face-down in a puddle of dew, but alive. They had done it. They had crossed the abyss. They were the crusaders of the Colony, the mightiest of the Marsh.

Fenton stood up on shaky legs. He puffed out his throat sac, preparing to let loose the bellow of claiming, a sound that would echo back to the archipelago and cement their legends forever.

Crunch.

The sound stopped Fenton cold. It wasn’t a roar of any predator he had ever heard. It was more familiar. It was the distinct, wet snap of a chitinous exoskeleton being crushed by hungry jaws.

Fenton and Friar turned slowly toward the center of the massive leaf. There, lounging in the shade of a pristine lotus flower, sat Feenah. She was perfectly dry. Her skin was vibrant, her mud-paint unsmudged. She swallowed the last leg of a particularly fat horsefly and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“You two took your time,” she croaked lazily.

Fenton’s throat sac deflated with a pathetic wheeze. Friar’s jaw hit the leaf.

“Feenah?” Friar whispered, his voice cracking. “But... the Abyss! The King Koi! The Feathered Titans! How did you survive the surface?”

Feenah blinked, looking at them as if they were tadpoles who had forgotten how to swim.

“I didn’t go on the surface, you flybrains,” she said, gesturing vaguely to the water. “I swam along the bottom. The thermal current runs straight from the Elders’ log to this stem. It took five minutes. And there are no birds underwater.”

Fenton looked back across the terrifying, miles-long stretch of water they had just nearly died crossing. He looked at his burning legs. He looked at Feenah, who looked fresh enough to swim there and back again twice over.

“The bottom,” Fenton repeated dully.

“Less drag,” Feenah noted, stretching her legs.

“Now, are you going to stand there panting, or are you going to help me defend our pad? I think I saw a dragonfly scouting the perimeter.”

Fenton looked at Friar. A silent camaraderie passed between them, the shared realization that their glory would only be understood in the context of Feenah’s incredible intelligence. Perhaps the three of them together could command this furthest outpost.

Fenton sat down beside her. The leaf bobbed gently, big enough for three.

“We claim this land,” Fenton murmured, his voice lacking the thunder he had planned, but carrying a newfound wisdom. “In the name of... clan Feenah.”

“And snacks,” Feenah added, spotting a mosquito hovering to the left. “Don’t forget the snacks.

From the Cartographer’s Desk

I loved writing this because it reminds me that struggle is often just a matter of perspective. To Fenton and Friar, this was a life-or-death odyssey. To Feenah, it was a commute. To us, it is a paddle.

A Question for the Comments: Are you a Fenton (taking the hard, glorious, dangerous route) or a Feenah (finding the thermal current and getting there withj zedro effort)? Let me know below.

If this little hop brought a smile to your face, please Restack it so others can join the race, and bookmark this post. It helps my whimsical stories enormously if you do.

Flash Fic Feb - Week 1 Directory

To check out all the great entries this week, check out the link above, curated by &

Welcome to the Atlas, Friends.

We are back at the drafting table for Day 5 of Flash Fiction February. Today’s prompt asked for a fantasy story about dragons being hunted to extinction.

But I am taking the alternative route.

I’ve accepted the D’veen Challenge hosted by Bradley Ramsey. This means stepping into his universe, a world of Dwarven kings, ancient wars, and buried secrets.

History tells us that King Brocknar hunted the dragons until none remained. But history is often just a story written by the winner. Today, I wanted to explore the story written by the witness.

This is a tale told in the back alleys of Aluthia, spoken in the rhythm of a smith’s hammer. It explores a question that haunts every historian: Did the dragons die, or did they just go to sleep?

Pull up a crate. The performance is about to start.

Finton Merrybrook wandered through the streets of lower Aluthia. A scurrilous city with a reputation for theatre and thievery in equal measure. The alleys and town squares were a melting pot of performers.

Some were there to genuinely entertain, others were a distraction whilst people’s hands rummaged in your loose pockets and bags.

Finton was here for the more genuine variety. A young upstart who had been garnering a reputation for stories people had never heard before. Stories that seemed to imply knowledge that would be far beyond the young man's years.

Finally he had tracked him down to a dockyard where he was gathering a crowd around him.

Finton sat on an old fishing crate at the back of the audience and crossed his arms, curious to understand the mystique of this performer for himself.

The young man was scrawny and unkempt, but he carried himself with a haughty confidence that was compelling. In his hand was a stick. He started beating it against a sheet of metal.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

A steady beat. The audience had seen this performance before it seemed because some of them had come prepared with beaters of their own. In turn they started joining in, keeping a steady rhythm. A metallic sound that raised memories of forges and armouries.

"I am Shaelen, hear me now!"

He leapt up onto a crate, and taking a deep swig of liquor, he spat it into the air, producing a flame from his fist and causing the image of a crown to burn temporarily in the evening sky.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

There was a king of times gone past.

A hunger consumed him through.

His ambition left all aghast.

Yes his ambition was deep

It was hasty

It was fast

His ambition left the dead aghast

And a world to build anew.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

He hammered the beat with the crowd, striking a piece of metal slung from his belt. Finton so far, as a master storyteller himself, was duly impressed.

Thorgal Iron-Vein hammered away.

The heat of the forge was raw.

The king ordered weapons to slay.

Weapons to kill dragon kind.

Using their blood

Metal inlay

Weapons to batter and betray.

Until their kind was no more.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

Shaelen manipulated liquid smoke around him, conveying the darkness of the forge excellently. Finton found himself enjoying it rather a lot, much to his surprise.

Shaelen crouched low on the crate, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that somehow carried over the wind. He cupped the blue flame in his hands, suffocating it until it was just a thin, struggling ribbon of azure light, a secret thing trying to survive in the dark.

But in the dark where secrets creep,

He whispered a different lie.

A promise that he swore to keep,

To shadows beneath the floor.

Feeding them meat.

While they sleep.

Into the dark and hollow deep,

He would not let them all die.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

The crowd hammered back, but Shaelen held up a hand, silencing them instantly. He reached into his pouch and threw a pinch of powder into the dying flame. It didn't explode; instead, it turned the fire a deep, earthen green. He twisted his wrist, and the smoke curled around his arm like a serpent, affectionate and wise.

They were kind beasts of blood and bone,

And thinkers of thoughts so clear.

He turned his heart into a stone,

To lie to the mad king's face.

A scale of brass.

On the throne.

He kept them safe and all alone,

So the king would never hear.

Suddenly all the light went out and a mournful note hovered above the crowd. People who were less familiar with this performance looked about for the source. Finton watched Shaelen’s lips, they were still. Ventriloquism. A parlor trick to most, but here, in the dark, it felt like a summoning.

His voice continued the song, more slowly.

Many drakes were killed in his reign.

The king was soon to follow.

Beneath the ground his body lain.

Thorgals secret never voiced.

A deadly lie.

Not in vain.

Thorgal hid them in his domain.

Many saved in the hollow.

The steady Clang. Clang. Clang. Started up slowly again, and the crowd joined in at the slower tempo.

The daughter came and she was wise.

Her father's throne was hers.

Thorgal hoped she could empathise.

But his bravery came too late.

A mighty battle

Dwarves demise

The dwarven home would be capsized.

Dragons reveal to defer.

At this point Shaelen let the audience keep up the steady,

Clang. Clang. Clang.

And over the top of this he started constructing his own fast staccato rhythm that sounded surprisingly like gunshot. Finton’s eyes creased a little and he began to lean forward with questions swimming through his mind. This was too accurate…

Before his world was blown apart.

Ran back to the dragons. He

Said unto them all please take heart

They asked to remain hidden.

He closed the vents

No fresh start.

Safe underground they would outsmart.

Waiting for less agony.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

The staccato gunfire rhythm slowed, heavying into a funeral march. Shaelen dropped to his knees, his face smeared with soot, looking not like a performer, but like a man bearing the weight of a mountain. He struck the metal sheet not with the stick, but with his bare fist, a dull, thudding sound that vibrated in the ribcages of the watchers.

He climbed alive into the light,

Behind him closed the gate of stone.

To save them from the endless night,

Until the stars are kind again.

The world is cold.

Out of sight.

He keeps the future burning bright,

And walks the path alone.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

The crowd was silent now. The chaotic energy of the performance had distilled into a thick, heavy reverence. Shaelen slowly stood up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of what looked like common dust. He held it up, letting it trickle through his fingers, catching the dying light of the day.

He looked up, past the crowd, past the curious onlookers, and locked eyes directly with Finton Merrybrook at the back of the dockyard.

And so they sleep beneath the floor.

Until the world deserves them.

Shaelen’s gaze did not waver. He offered a microscopic nod, a shared secret passing between two keepers of lore.

They wait behind the earthen door.

And time it just preserves them.

Finton felt a jolt of electricity that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the truth. He stood up, knocking the crate over, desperate to bridge the gap between them.

A single spark

Hear their roar

The hammer beats forevermore

For he who truly serves them.

BOOM.

Shaelen threw the remaining dust into the torch at his feet. It wasn't a simple flash; it was a wall of blinding, silver-white magnesium fire that roared upwards, mimicking the breath of the very beasts he sang of.

The crowd erupted. They roared their approval, a wall of sound that crashed against Finton, pinning him in place. They surged forward to throw coins, to touch the hem of the fire-breather’s cloak.

"Wait!" Finton shouted, shoving past a burly dockworker. "Let me through!"

He fought against the tide of bodies, his eyes stinging from the acrid smoke. It took him precious seconds to carve a path to the crate in the center.

The smoke cleared, drifting away on the sea breeze.

The metal sheet was there. The torch was there, still smoldering.

But the boy was gone.

Finton spun around, scanning the alleys, the rooftops, the shadows. There was nothing. Just the echo of a hammer in his mind, and a rhythm tapped out on the cobblestones by a ghost.

Long. Short-short. Long.

The beat of the smith. The heartbeat of the deep.

Finton looked down at the empty crate. Scratched into the wood, fresh and rough, was a single symbol.

A hammer.

Finton smiled, a slow, dangerous curling of the lips. He adjusted his lute on his back.

"Well played, Shaelen," he whispered to the empty air. "Well played.”

From the Cartographer’s Desk

Writing in another author's world is a unique kind of magic. It requires finding the empty spaces on their map and filling them with your own ink, without smudging the lines they’ve already drawn.

I wanted to capture the rhythm of manual labor, the clang, clang, clang of the forge, because that is where fantasy history lives. Not in the throne rooms, but in the sweat of the people who build them.

A Question for the Guild:

For the Lore Hunters: If Thorgal hid the dragons beneath the earth, what will wake them up? Is it a sound? A specific person? Or just the right time?

For the Writers: How do you approach writing "in-universe" lore? do you try to mimic the original tone perfectly, or do you try to subvert it?

I Accept The D'veen Challenge!

(Note to & : I hope Shaelen's rhythm does Finton justice.)

If this ballad struck a chord with you, please Save this post. It helps keep the fire lit.

Until the next coordinate,

Graeme

Flash Fiction Feb - Week 1 Directory

To check out all the great entries this week, check out the link above, curated by Bradley Ramsey & Leeron Heywood

Welcome to the Atlas friends.

The day four prompt, (mildly late) has been one of the most fun for me so far. I am a self professed cat lover, and so the opportunity to write from the POV of a cat was immediately appealing. When I was plotting this idea I was watching an episode of Frasier, you might sense that in the tone of the piece.

It took a while to write, simply because I had far too much fun and made something nearly 2.5k words. It is now under the required 1.5k. I hope you enjoy it.

The Reviewer

I am a master of insight, a quester on a cause, a purveyor of finer things. My instrument is the humble paper block so beloved of these odd creatures. They come in droves, both the blocks, and the apes that take them. Invariably these creatures are without a shred of taste, and so it falls to me to guide them. I walk in front of them when they hold a tragic tome, or resort to shouting when their primitive minds fail to comprehend the ineffectual nature of the block in their hairless paws.

You see, I am the reviewer, Bartholemew, (Bernard to my stubborn and rather dim mistress), and I know the qualities of every block in this shop. The bestsellers are often a place of stark resistance to good taste. To nap upon a bestseller is to be brazenly barbarous to one’s own body. They are peak banality. Their spines are stiff, and the pages smell of chemicals.

A writing pad is not much better; most can barely support themselves, let alone a nap.

No, there is much in this shop to dismay, but occasionally you will find a block that is just right. Springy outer layers, thick but yielding, paper that smells of antiques and long established things. The kind of block that would serve to sleep the most royal of all felines. I had high hopes for a new, untested block that appeared in the shop yesterday.

This block was thick and large enough for nearly two naps back to back, or so I thought. It was wrapped in a luscious springy material, and it had all the pre-requisite smells. I could even detect a small amount of mouse on it, which hinted at delicious dreams of chasing and catching. My favourite.

I wish to state that I was deeply wrong in my original assessment. It was hard, unruly, barren and smelt of rot underneath all of its more brash perfumes. I wish never to set another paw on it, and for that matter, I wish no one else the same displeasure. So it was with a heavy heart that I threw it behind the warm place. Out of sight and out of mind.

I was surprised to find my mistress the next day looking absolutely ragged. She was bustling to and fro, looking for that dratted thing, and I had no mind to help her. There really is no accounting for some people’s tastes. Instead I bullied her into feeding me in order to distract her from such concerns. However, the delicious smell of duck and gravy failed to coax her from misery, even after I generously dropped some in her lap. No, instead she scrabbled about like a lunatic trying to simultaneously wipe her dress which now smelled much better than it had, and shout at a plastic box she keeps on her desk.

“Detective Miller, yes, that is right, it really is invaluable…”

You are darned right, that duck was a precious gift, I do not give away food lightly.

Later, a bedraggled man entered. He was wet, which was upsetting, and smelled of old ham, which was doubly distressing. His most egregious crime,however, was the appalling block he carried about with him. A small one with metal rings that would undoubtedly dig into one’s sides, and not a whiff of cushioning cover. It was flimsy at best, and seemed to buckle under its own weight. I was not much inclined to have dealings with anyone of such an atrocious sense of quality. I had half a mind to shoo this tragedy out into the rain immediately. Had my mistress not appeared so glad to see him, I might have.

She, however, was rapturous, spending a good quarter-nap wagging her chin at him, with animated arms and a look of concern. I heard him mutter such things as:

“What, pray tell, was the significance of the book?” and “Yes, quite, £50,000 is an extraordinary value. It must be a rare thing.”

The man then began to crawl about the floor. He was graceless. He poked at skirting boards and lifted the rug with an uncomfortable grunt.

“No signs of forced entry,” the Ham-Man announced, dusting off his knees and depositing a fine layer of street grit onto my pristine floorboards. “And you say the alarm didn’t trip?”

My mistress sniffed, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue that was already damp, and muttered some garbled nonsense. I watched this pantomime from the high ground of the non-fiction section. It was painful to behold. They were hunting in quite the most abstract way imaginable. I attempted to guide their primitive attention toward a particularly comfy book on the lower shelf, a paperback with a spine so wonderfully cracked it offered the lumbar support of a cloud. I rubbed my cheek against it significantly.

“Meow,” I articulated, quite clearly saying, ‘Observe the superior textural quality of this item.’

“Not now, Bernard,” my mistress sighed at me.

“He’s probably hungry,” the Detective offered, reaching a sausage-like finger toward me. I recoiled. The audacity. To assume my critique was a plea for sustenance? I turned my back on them, flicking my tail with calculated disdain. If they wished to remain ignorant, I would let them wallow.

But then the mistress made a noise. It was a high, thin sound, like a child mewing. She sank into her chair, burying her face in her hands. I paused in my grooming. A sensation arose in my midsection. It felt suspiciously like indigestion, though I had not eaten in at least 2 naps. It was a heavy, stone-like feeling. I looked at my mistress. Her face was wet and she was starting to smell of salt. This was unacceptable. A distressed mistress leads to erratic meal times and a distinct lack of lap stability.

I sighed, a long exhale through the nose. I am a critic, not a monster. The offending brick needed to be returned to restore the equilibrium of my dining schedule.

I descended from the shelf, landing with a silent, heavy thud. I approached the warm place. The wet ape was currently busy examining a smudge on the window, entirely missing the real drama unfolding at ankle height. Squeezing into the dark abyss behind the metal fins, I rummaged. An indignity. Dust-mice, the size of actual rodents, clung to my coat. The heat was stifling. But there it was, the wretched thing, right where I had hidden it. Lying flat, gathering dust, looking every bit the uncomfortable slab of masonry I knew it to be.

I extended a claw. I hooked the leather binding. It was heavy, resistant, obstinate. I pulled. I scrambled. I sneezed, a violent, undignified explosion that echoed in the small space.

“What’s the cat doing?” the stupid ape asked.

I backed out, dragging the tome with me. I emerged covered in grey fluff, looking, I imagine, like a common alley cat. But I had succeeded. I shoved the book into the open air with a final, disgusted thrust of my hind leg.

The man shouted. “Look!” Before lunging for it. “It must have fallen! Slipped down the back!”

Mistress gasped, snatching the brick up. ‘Oh! Oh, thank god. It’s barely scratched. Just… dusty.” She looked at me. I prepared evasive maneuvers, fearing a hug. But she simply stared, a dawning realization in her eyes. She looked at the dust on my coat. She looked at the dust on the book.

“Bernard,” she breathed.

“We should get this in a protective case immediately,” the impertinent fellow interrupted, oblivious as ever. “Evidence, potentially. Or just safety.” Mistress nodded, her demeanor shifting. She treated the book suddenly like a prize catch. She walked it over to the glass display cabinet, placed it on a velvet pillow, and locked the door. Click.

There it sat. I supposed there were worse endings. At least under glass it would not suffer itself upon some poor fool. The useless man left, taking his ham-scent with him. The shop went quiet. The rain lashed against the windows. Mistress slumped into her reading chair, looking exhausted. I seized my moment, leaping onto the armrest, then gingerly onto her lap.

I circled three times. I looked at the perfectly formed paperback she had placed in her lap. An ape of great taste, it looked delectably comfy. I stepped onto it. It did not resist. It yielded. It conformed perfectly to my paws. Warm from her hands. Smelling of her. This tatty thing beneath my chin? It was an easy 98 point score.

Mistress stroked the top of my head, her fingers scratching that impossible-to-reach spot behind the ears.

“You’re a funny old thing, Bernard,” she whispered. I ignored the name, settling my chin onto the open pages of the block. I closed my eyes and let the aroma of it sweep me off into a dream.

This block as a pillow? It was a masterpiece.

A Small Request: If this story sparked a thought for you, please Save this post (click the little bookmark icon at the top or bottom). It signals to the Substack algorithm that this odd little obnoxious cat is worth keeping, and it helps new readers find their way to the Atlas.