Prologue: A Word From Someone Who Isn't the Author

Let's sail the universe for a moment, before we do anything else. Not the whole of it — nobody could manage that in a single sitting, least of all me — just enough of it to get our bearings.

If you drift far enough through what's out there, you'll find you can believe in several universes, or only one enormous one, thick with galaxies and stranger things than galaxies. Somewhere in all of it there's a world where science is the hand that moves everything, and somewhere else a world run on magic instead — though I'd be careless to tell you the magical ones have no science hiding underneath them, because they usually do, dressed up so it doesn't get recognized. There are worlds that don't resemble either. A planet of giants. A planet of aliens too strange to have a proper name yet. A planet of elves, if you like that sort of thing, and — I'm told — a planet that is, for reasons no one has adequately explained to me, mostly about teeth. Keep drifting and you'll pass phoenixes on the wing, and dragons larger than the planets they were born on, which sounds delightful right up until you try to imagine the logistics of it. Every one of these places has its own small epic tucked inside it, its witches and its goblins and its perfectly ordinary people going about perfectly ordinary days that don't feel ordinary at all to the person living them. There are plants with no thoughts in them whatsoever, and plants that think quite a lot, thank you, and everything in between those two.

I could spend the rest of this prologue arguing about which of those things deserve to be taken seriously, and I'm not going to, because I am not omnipotent, and it isn't my place to hand down verdicts on things I only watch from the outside. That's your job, if you want it. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on all of it — whether plants think, whether animals feel the way we assume they must, whatever conclusions you draw from whatever I happen to describe. I'm a narrator, not a judge, and there's a difference, however often the two get confused.

All of that — every world, every planet, every dragon too large for its own sky — I'm going to call the Something. It's an odd word to build a whole cosmology around, I know. But that's the shape of it: something material, something tangible, something that simply is. The stories inside it are as varied as you'd expect. Some dramatic. Some about people who never should have been trusted with power. Some about ordinary souls clawing their way toward something better than where they started. I won't bore you cataloguing the genres — you already know more about genres than I do, and I'd only be showing off a vocabulary I borrowed secondhand.

I'm here to tell you about something else. Something I think you might actually want to hear. A kind of afterlife — a physics that doesn't belong to the Something at all. I call it the Nothing.

What is the Nothing, exactly? As a narrator, and as something like a scientist by disposition if not by training, I'd say it's the absence of Something — which means the word itself has no meaning without the thing it's the absence of, and yet, somehow, that absence is still there, still doing something, still shaping the edges of everything it isn't. Toxic, if you want my honest opinion. The two of them, locked together in a relationship neither can leave, because neither can exist cleanly without the other to define itself against. Who am I to judge that relationship, though? Omnipotent, beautiful, all-knowing narrator that I am — no. I'm none of those things. Well. Beautiful, perhaps. I'll allow myself that one, and you're welcome to argue with me about it.

If Something and Nothing want to stay locked in something codependent and a little unhealthy, that's between them. But to keep that arrangement functioning — because it is, in its own strange way, a kind of mutual survival — they built a place. A place that would read, to most of you, like something closer to a nightmare if you sat with the idea too long. A strange place. A place that holds not only humans, but every animal, every alien, every creature and plant that was ever part of somebody else's story, anywhere in the Something. We call it the Between: the place where the souls of everyone who once was continue to exist, belonging, in some loose sense, to the Nothing — except the Nothing, being nothing, had nothing of its own to offer them, and so it asked the Something for help building somewhere to keep them all. I won't walk you through the mechanics of how or why that arrangement works. That's for you and me to discover together as we go — I know, being the author's oldest and most reluctant collaborator, but I'd ruin the whole shape of the thing if I told you everything up front. So. Onward.

The Between is a place unlike anywhere else — difficult, unglamorous, full of souls carrying griefs they can't quite set down. Literally without the warmth they once felt in life; not because there's no sun, but because most of the senses simply aren't there anymore, save for the rare exception a soul might stumble across, which you'll have the pleasure of discovering on your own.

Let me try to give you something firmer to stand on than that, though, because "difficult" and "unglamorous" are the kind of words that describe a feeling without ever showing you a place. So picture it properly, if you're willing.

There is a sky, of a sort, though it doesn't do anything so decisive as rise or set — it simply hangs there, the color of a held breath, gray the way the inside of a shut eye is gray, neither day nor night nor anything with a name. There is ground underfoot, if you can call it that, and it holds your weight the way a memory of ground might hold you, present enough to walk on and never quite present enough to trust completely. No architecture waits for you when you arrive, no city gates, no welcoming committee — only distance, enormous distance, built that way on purpose, so that a soul newly dead has a very long walk ahead of it before it meets anyone at all. Some souls build things, eventually, out of stubbornness or memory or the particular ache of wanting somewhere to call their own — a hearth, a wall, a shape that used to be a face. Most of it starts as nothing more than an outline. A silhouette, pale and featureless, the exact shade of the sky it stands beneath, unable to be touched by any other silhouette standing beside it.

That's the cruelest detail, if you want my opinion, and I'll give it to you whether you want it or not: it is not empty there. It is, in fact, unbearably full — full of every soul who has ever died anywhere in the Something, humans and animals and aliens and the occasional overly opinionated plant, all of them drifting across the same gray distance at the same time. And yet it manages, somehow, to feel like the loneliest place that has ever existed, because being surrounded by thousands of souls who cannot touch you, cannot properly see you, cannot be sure you're even real, is its own particular kind of empty. Whether the Between is beautiful or unsettling depends, I think, entirely on how long you've been standing in it, and what you've managed to build there before the loneliness had the chance to settle in.

That's as far as I'll take you today. The rest — whether time moves the way you'd expect, whether the ground was built or simply grew that way, whether it's ever truly silent — I'll let you find out for yourself, the way everyone in this story had to.

And somewhere in that place, among all those souls who once belonged to Something, there is one that concerns us.

Now that we've spoken about the Between, let's talk about whose story we're actually here to tell. Listen closely, because I already lied to you once in this very prologue, and I did it without a shred of shame. I told you every soul in the Something has a story worth telling, even if it's a small one. That wasn't quite honest. I'm not talking about a stone — a stone, as far as anyone has proven to me, doesn't feel anything yet, though I invite you to argue otherwise if you dare. I'm talking about a plant. A plant whose story I am, very deliberately, not going to tell you here — because that story is the story, the one this whole book exists to hold, and it isn't mine to give away in a prologue. You'll hear it from the mouth of the one who lived it, from inside his own mind, in his own time. Why would I bother doing the telling myself, when he's right there, waiting to do it properly? I am the narrator. Not the author, and not the character. It makes me happy, if I'm honest, discovering things alongside you rather than ahead of you — watching what the author decides to put on the page and hoping, the way you hope, that it turns out to be something good.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Since we're getting to know each other, let me hand you a small confidence, the kind I imagine you'd overhear rather than be formally told. This story hasn't found its way into as many hands as the author might have liked yet, and I think that's part of why I exist at all — a voice invented, somewhere along the way, to stand between you and the page and make the standing there a little less lonely. I won't dwell on it. It isn't really my trouble to carry, and it certainly isn't yours. I only mention it because I'd rather you know me honestly than politely, and honesty, where I come from, tends to include the unflattering parts too.

What I can tell you, with more confidence, is what the person behind all of this actually cares about. Not the trouble. The craft. They've been writing, in one form or another, for years now — though out here, years don't automatically convert into wisdom, however much I wish they did. What they genuinely love is writing characters properly — giving them the story most books never bother giving the people who wander through their margins. It bothers them, I think, on some level deeper than craft, when a character gets introduced and then simply used, with no interior life the reader is ever shown. So they decided to give each of them one, and to let the larger plot arrive slowly, gradually, chapter by patient chapter — though if you've been paying any real attention, you'll already know that's not quite what's happened. The plot hasn't moved slowly at all. It's moved in enormous, occasionally reckless leaps, and tying all those leaping threads back into something that reads as one continuous rope rather than several frayed ones has been the harder half of the work. There is also, underneath all of it, a fairly stubborn refusal to write prose that doesn't move something in its own chest first — prose that doesn't manage to drag you into the particular, specific way all of this looks from inside, and the love poured into each of these people. I understand perfectly if that isn't to your taste. If you've decided to stop reading somewhere around here, no one behind this page will hold it against you.

But enough about the person holding the pen. Whoever they are, they aren't the one whose story you came here to read, and I've kept you from the gray plains longer than I meant to already.

As the narrator, I am — for what it's worth — boarding this particular ship for the first time with this prologue, and I'll admit, personally, that I prefer prose that's been properly, carefully written over prose that hasn't. One more thing worth mentioning while we're being honest with each other: this isn't a story fond of feelings that arrive out of nowhere — "love at first sight" and its many exhausted cousins — without ever showing you where those feelings actually came from. It tends to look at everything from a deeper, slower angle instead. And though drama is not exactly the fashion here, the book somehow keeps finding its way to dramatic moments anyway — just not the kind we've all grown a little numb to. A healthier kind, if such a thing exists. That's my read on it, at least.

We've already written this much, and we haven't even properly begun the story yet. It's tempting, honestly, to resign from this post entirely, right here, in the middle of my own prologue. But this is the work I exist for, sadly and exclusively, so I suppose I'll see it through. If you'd like to see more of me in future chapters — and I do think you should, given how badly my appearances have been rationed so far, two chapters and this prologue and not a page more — leave a comment, give it whatever the equivalent of a nod is on whatever platform brought you here. Consider this my official, entirely undignified campaign: Help the Narrator. One plus-one in the replies, if you'd be so kind.

Now. The characters — because they are the thread this whole story is strung along. There's no apocalypse waiting around the corner, not yet, though I won't promise you one never arrives. For now, the people you're about to meet simply carry what they carry: their griefs, their worries, the small joys that got them through whatever came before, and we'll spend most of our time exploring what they lived through here, in the Between, rather than what little time they had back in the Something.

The Between is a fond place for me personally, as it happens, because when this story eventually ends, I suspect that's where I'll end up too. It's my world. It's where I belong, once the telling is finished. Let's hope, all the same, that it stays alive a good long while yet, and that whoever is keeping it alive remains the sort of person worth trusting with it — which, given how actively engaged they still are in all of this, I'd wager means I'll be lingering in a few readers' minds for some time to come, assuming this story ever finds its way to you at all.

As for the characters themselves — I won't spoil what I've already half-spoiled here and in the blurb. It would be redundant of me, and frankly, it's a better story if you're the one who gets to discover it, rather than having me hand it to you pre-chewed. I hope, sincerely, that you decide to give it that chance.

A small note on the chapters ahead, since you'll notice a shift in texture as you move through them: the first six carry a very different feel from the ones that follow, up through the fourteenth, and the interludes after that carry a different feel again — though don't let the word "interlude" fool you into skimming past them; they read, for all practical purposes, like ordinary chapters, and matter just as much. Then, more recently, come the twenty-first and the twenty-second — my personal favorites, for reasons that have nothing to do with modesty. That's where this particular voice of mine first appeared on the page, before it ever showed up here, in what you're reading right now, which was, structurally speaking, always meant to come first. Life is occasionally out of order that way, even for a narrator. The earlier chapters are dense, and they linger a long while inside the same emotional register — wonderful, if that happens to be exactly your cup of tea, but a genuine risk for anyone trying to hold a reader's attention across the long haul, because people tire, even of things they love, if you never give them anywhere else to stand.

Let's set that aside for now.

A word on power, and strength, and however this world decides to measure either of those things: nothing. There's nothing I'm going to tell you here. It's an original enough idea that I think you'll enjoy finding your own way into it far more than you'd enjoy me spoiling the shape of it in advance. I am not, I promise you, simply tired of talking — I know exactly how that sounds, and I stand by it anyway. This part of the story was built to be felt before it's explained, the kind of thing meant to pull something closer to "oh, that's genuinely something" out of you than any tidy paragraph of exposition ever could.

As for the wider architecture of the Between — its rules, its geography, everything still left to learn about how it actually holds itself together — I'll leave that entirely in your hands to go digging for. Some doors are more fun to open yourself.

So perhaps it is time I stopped talking about the story, and allowed it to begin.

Thank you, sincerely, for listening to the narrator, who has, once again, kept someone up considerably later into the night than they'd planned.

#HelpTheNarrator

What follows is the story of a soul who traveled to the Between, carrying a debt he doesn't yet know how to name — a debt owed to a world that gave up on him long before he ever had the chance to give up on it first.