The Starless Sea

They take an unspoken vow to no longer tell their own stories in reverence to the ones that came before and to the ones that shall follow

accompanying text that reads almost done!

Chandler’s great but Hammett’s better. He was an actual detective.”

You get to live in a game,” Zachary points out as they return to their conversation, to a topic he knows he’s discussed with Kat before. “For so much longer than a book or a movie or a play. You know how you have real-life time versus story time, how stories leave out the boring bits and condense so much? A long-form RPG has some substance to it, leaves time to wander the desert or have a conversation or hang out in a pub. It might not be the closest thing to real life but pacing-wise it’s closer than a movie or a TV show or a novel

That is legitimately surprising

Sleep is for the weak

(To destroy the book, no matter how distasteful or offensive or badly written, is to fail the test.)

What is a single house, after all, with nothing surrounding it? Without a yard for the dog. Without a complaining neighbor across the street, without a street to have neighbors on at all? Without trees and horses and stores. Without a harbor. A boat. A city across the sea.

That somewhere there are tongueless acolytes in a subterranean library?

A boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.