This started as game lore and escaped
At some point I stopped wanting to write background material for a game world and started wanting to write the world’s oldest book.
The project grew out of an older game idea, but the part that survived was not the mechanics. It was the mythology underneath them: a broken creation, gods whose conflict damaged the world, souls carried by song, and a final silence that is not quite oblivion.
The working idea is something closer to a mythic history than a conventional fantasy novel.
Not a character walking through the lore so the reader has an excuse to hear it. The lore itself is the story.
The Seven
One of the ideas I keep returning to is that the Seven sings for every living soul it helped create.
Each life has a melody.
When that life ends, the melody stops and the soul becomes one of the Silent.
That gradually turned the Great Silence from a poetic phrase into the shape of the afterlife itself.
The Seven may ultimately sacrifice itself so that the small lives can continue after a conflict among the gods leaves creation broken. I like the sadness of that foundation: life persists not because creation succeeded cleanly, but because something chose to keep singing inside the failure.
None of this is fixed simply because I have written it here. The project is still at the stage where ideas earn canon slowly.
What I am trying to write like
The tone I want has sorrow underneath it without becoming hopeless.
There should be bravery, awe, dread, tenderness, and occasional hope, but the baseline should feel closer to a hymn remembered after the people who first sang it are gone.
Tolkien is an obvious influence on the ambition and distance of the prose, but imitation is not useful to me. I am more interested in what gives mythic writing weight: syntax, memory, repetition, naming, restraint, and the sense that events have survived through people who considered them worth preserving.
I also want room for influences from Turkic mythology and the kinds of oral traditions where telling a thing is partly a duty to prevent its disappearance.
Why it is here
This is exactly the kind of project a normal software portfolio would quietly hide in another tab.
Which is one reason I wanted a personal site instead.
I do not experience the technical and literary parts of my life as separate personalities. Both are mostly me becoming obsessed with systems: how a protocol holds meaning across implementations, how a mythology holds meaning across generations, how a world develops rules strong enough that stories begin appearing inside them.
The materials are different.
The urge is suspiciously similar.