Chapter 0: The Primeval
No one can say when it all began. Maybe it was always there. We’re made up of so many pieces that it shouldn’t surprise anyone if, somewhere down in the mix, there’s a shred of elemental darkness. Everyone can look into their own heart and find traces of that original dark. What it actually is — whether it’s the residue of foolishness or the leftovers of something ancient and secret — who knows.
In 1667, the coast of North America and part of the mainland were all but wiped out by a monstrous storm that tore through every settlement’s infrastructure. Afterward, a strange fog rolled in off the sea. It wrapped around the whole continent and cut it off completely from the Old World. Every ship that sailed into the fog came right back out again, not far from where it had gone in — except the crew would come back changed. They’d fall into sleeps they couldn’t wake from, die in unexplained explosions, or simply vanish. Ten years on, people had gotten used to the fog and stopped sending ships into it at all. The storm of 1667 left its mark on the settlers for a long time after, but it was around then that people started appearing up and down the coast who carried strange knowledge. They built advanced tools to make life easier, wielding know-how that was centuries ahead of its time. People called them the Founders.
The Founders laid the foundation stone for Westhaven as the capital, along with four more cities strung along the North American coast. Quality of life shot up so fast that the population passed two hundred thousand within a generation — and then refugees started arriving from the north and south, from what used to be Spanish and French colonies, bringing word of strange occurrences: monsters, walking corpses, cities clawing their way up out of the ground. The Founders chose not to get involved, not wanting to spread themselves thin. Instead they focused on defense — thick walls, solid infrastructure, powerful weapons.
My great-grandfather, Isaac Grow, was one of them — one of the most mysterious Founders of all. Even his own colleagues called him otherworldly, strange. He made his name inventing punch-cards that let a person communicate across enormous distances with anyone who owned a matching device called a punch-phone. Fame brought my family a measure of influence, along with a network of relay stations for the punch-cards strung along the whole coastline. In those days, you couldn’t overstate how much a working line of communication was worth — which is why, even after my grandfather Sean’s long string of eccentric antics, the family business stayed afloat. Partly because of those relay stations. Partly because no one but him knew how to make the punch-cards in the first place.
More Founders kept appearing, even a century later, each one a master of some field of knowledge. But by then the whole coast had transformed almost beyond recognition: brick and concrete stood where wooden shacks used to be, trains had come into everyday use, and local merchants sold clothing woven partly from plastic and synthetic thread. Toilets and basic sanitation appeared, along with schools, superior weapons, and airships. But the Founders’ old problems hadn’t gone anywhere. In the north, waves of refugees brought outcasts along with them — the dregs of settlers and frontiersmen who’d given themselves over to chaos and easy plunder. From the west, the united tribes tested the new territories’ defenses again and again. And from the south — silence. Even the scouts sent that way with punch-phones never made it back. Worst of all, it seemed like even the animals were on the natives’ side, as if the forests themselves were determined to wipe people out and scrub their settlements off the face of the earth, the way you’d burn out a plague.
People needed feeding, and while the ocean gave up its catch generously, nobody could guarantee the fish would keep coming forever. So the settlers clawed farmland out of the forest bit by bit, then defended it, first with a fortified outpost that grew into a small village within a couple of years, and into a town within a decade. That kind of creeping expansion had its upsides, but the more people poured in, the more problems came with them. To conserve manpower and keep friction down — both within the system and across the country — the priests and clergy of the Marisian Church stepped in as the connective tissue holding it all together. There was always talk that every major city had its own inquisition tucked away somewhere, though I’ve never put much stock in that myself.
You can see Marisianism most clearly in its worshippers and its holidays, when people gather in the square and greet the shepherds with their arms raised, thumbs touching to form a pair of wings. You see that same greeting, that same procession, at every festival honoring the Founders. In those moments the square turns into a living spectacle, and the greeting itself becomes a cloud of butterflies. It always used to captivate me.
Every child knows the story: when Saint Maria loses her son Yeshua — hunted down on Herod’s orders, betrayed by the magi’s tips — she refuses to give herself over to grief. Instead, she chooses vengeance. But it turned out grief wasn’t hers alone to carry. It bound her to others, gave her a path forward, and Maria began her long war against the evil of the New Testament — Herod first, and after him, Rome’s other puppets. At first no one wants to listen to her. But she works miracles, and people start to believe. Eventually it gets to the point where they try to kill her, and she’s driven into a ravine with no way out. She says goodbye to her disciples and leaps into the abyss — but she doesn’t die. Seconds later she ascends into the sky, wings of pure light unfurling behind her. Everyone who witnesses it — even the mercenaries and killers who’d been hunting her — is so shaken that they fall to their knees, unable to lift their eyes to the sky for days afterward, while her disciples shield their faces with their hands, straining to look at Maria without being blinded by the light. That’s where the gesture comes from — the raised arms, the wings of thumbs — a sign that even in an uneven fight, you can rise above it. You can choose how you die. You can become the light that shows others the way.
I feel a certain sympathy for the Marisians myself, a kind of kinship. But even so — as kind and thoughtful as they truly are — serving something greater isn’t my path. Maybe, like my grandfather used to say, that’s just because I’m young and haven’t seen enough of the world yet.
I miss him. More than I can say.
