Sooted Star: The Adventures of Kiri and Zeijien

Sep 3

Is Live!

I talked to a kind stranger about putting my novel out there before the first draft is fully finished. I was hesitant about it, as I have a history of restarting this novel in particular over and over again, and I don’t like making people read something so futile. They brought to my attention the fact that writing need not be a journey alone. A reader early in the drafts may very well become the second opinion that helps keep you on track and ask those narrative-relevant questions you wouldn’t normally ask yourself until it’s too late.

That being said, I have posted the chapters I’ve written so far onto my World Anvil and Royal Road platforms. I invite you to read them and do your worst!

While respectful comments and critiques are encouraged, I appreciate any support you may give by reading or just giving a thumbs up.

So, here’s a snippet so far.

Dimension 0 — The Pronoun, Zei. Or, The “Liminality Bowl”

Author’s note: I use an experimental neo-pronoun system in this chapter.
* zei = pronounced like “zay”
* en = pronounced as “en”
* huir = pronounced like “hear”
In the year’s spring 3077, a giant web of black tendrils with millions of blinking eyes covered the sky above the grassy sea plains, yet no one saw it. Not a single of the tens of millions of residents in the Realm noticed.
Meanwhile, Zeijien had forgotten that it had ever been a zei.
It had forgotten these plains. It knew they had a name, but like everything else, it had slipped away. Just calling it the “Realm” would have to suffice.
The view Zeijien gazed upon from above meant nothing to it. Not the giant, grassy esplanade, nor the sea that would cover it when the tide was high. Not the seven giant islands emerging from portals, nor the tiny ones dotting the plains. Certainly not the tiny residents who looked like dots moving between and within the islands. It was like staring into a miniature diorama through an ugly, vaguely star-shaped glass bowl. Except Zeijien wasn’t merely looking in from the outside. It was inside the very wall of this bowl, trapped here in this liminal space; that much was clear.
Despite that, Zeijien was quite comfortable here. And so it fondly called its new home the “Liminality Bowl.” It felt like it was living between two unbreakable panes of cosmic jelly where it could float around as seamlessly as a fish in an aquarium. It wondered why it felt so eager to cover more of the bowl with its eyes. Its main body was rather small: just a set of nebulous black rings, each with small eyes, encircling a black hole with a single large eye at its center. The rings splayed off into wing-like tendrils, but they stretched far beyond its body. They became the giant tendrilic web that covered the entire bowl. Zeijien was a part of this giant web, to its chagrin.
New days brought on new eyes. A tendril would grow incrementally, and so another set of several eyes would form. Mysteriously, there was one spot on the Bowl that its tendrils gravitated towards in particular. Layers upon layers had accumulated over the years. It had no control over this, so it thought, and so it had learned to ignore it.
Like an unsolicited guardian, Zeijien watched over the Realm, only able to see from either a high vantage point or one far away from the islands at the bottom edges.
However, it was at the bottom edges where the Bowl met the grassy ground that Zeijien found it most fascinating. There, it could see the occasional resident who had strayed to the edge of the Realm. Something about these beings was familiar, but this only manifested as a mere curiosity. Its eyes would follow their movements. Kids of different species might punch the bowl’s wall for fun. Secretive gangs of shapeshifters might camp out by the edge to be as far away from the islands as possible. When the tide was in, boaters might fish around here. Zeijien’s eyes could be right in front of them, and they wouldn’t even notice.
Watching the beings wasn’t just fascinating. It was almost… enviable. But it would finally understand why on one fateful night.