A finger plunges into fresh soil. A seed falls in. There is a momentary pause before a hand wipes dirt into the hole. It pauses, lingering; a subtle shake rattling through its fingers.
He looks up. A field of earth sprawls before him. A tiny tree sticks up on the far side. A sad smile crosses his shaking lips.
He feels her there, watching him. He can hear her cruel smile pulling back across jagged teeth. She’s speaking cruel words to him. He ignores.
He stands up and turns away from the field, ignoring her entirely. She knows she is inevitable, so she is happy to grin and sneer as he tries to walk away. He knows he will never be free; his fate long set in stone.
Still he laments what once was. So far away in both space and time. His hope died with the infernal machine. It served its purpose, and now it was gone. Now, it was his turn to do the same.
He nearly cries wishing he’d met the same fate as the rest. Why was he cursed to live?
He watches machines built by smarter men than him erect what would become his home. She said so. She pointed to the first building raised along the manufactured coastline. She declared it their home. He clenched his fists at his side as each brick was laid; each timber framed.
In a matter of weeks, a replica of what he left behind would sprawl across this worthless rock. More seeds would be planted.
In a matter of years, voices would fill the streets; lights would turn on in the empty homes.
And yet he would forever be alone.
They would never know what came before. What was sacrificed.
A god, dead for their survival. A planet sundered for their future. No one would ever know.
He climbs the scaffolding and sits upon the steeple of a roof’s frame. He looks out across the sea to a setting sun. It’s too red, he thinks. Sol was a better star.
He sits. Darkness falls and the moon rises. Too oblong, Luna was a better guardian.
He sits.
The sun rises.
It sets.
The moon rises.
It sets.
He sees the passage of time, but will never feel it.
He envies the seeds, big and small. He envies their ability to feel the sunshine on their skin, to grow and live, to find meaning from nothing. To one day close their eyes, never to open them again.
To see their last sunrise and moonfall.
That, he laments, will never be him.
He feels her wicked grin behind him.
He ignores her in favor of counting the minutes, the hours, the days, the years, the decades, the centuries until the day his heart’s song returns. Until he can sing again. Until his soul is lifted from darkness. Until he is whole once more.
Eternity was so beautiful with him by his side.
Tag: fantasy
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White light. Clicks and soft beeps filled the air. Tense voices I couldn’t discern echoed from unknown directions. All at once, the serenity snapped to red-lit chaos. Machines wailed and screeched in agony. The voices rose to words I could barely understand.
“-has to be-” One sounded eerily familiar.
“There isn’t…” The other, I swore I recognized.
“THERE HAS…”
“You know…”
“I WON’T LE-”
“-no choice-”
“PLEASE!”
“-well, lo-”
Heart-wrenching screams seared through my mind.
I bolted upright, nearly slamming my head into the windshield of my truck. My hands clung to the steering wheel, sweet dripping from my brow. Taking deep, agonizing breaths, I raised the back of my chair to meet my rigid spine. A dream. A nightmare. It felt unnervingly real. But all dreams felt that way in the moment, didn’t they?
I turned to my passenger fast asleep in the seat beside me as I still struggled to catch my breath. Asleep, his nostrils flared as tiny snores pierced the silent night. I reached for his hands folded across his stomach as the echoes of the nightmare faded from memory.
Sighing, I returned my grip to the steering wheel. He was still there. That was all that mattered. Turning the key in the ignition, he snapped upright beside me, chairback and all.
“Morning already?” He wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“N-no.” I breathed. “I just couldn’t sleep anymore.”
He turned to me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Just a bad dream.” I shifted the truck into drive.
“Can’t promise there won’t be more of those.” He looked out the window beside him.
To the west, just above the horizon, hung the tattered remains of Ancora’s moon, Onus. A net of tentacles spewed from its gaping, stony wound, floating through the sky like flotsam on a sea of perpetual night.
“It’s already out of my head.” I forced a laugh. “But it felt so… Real.”
He smiled. “A prophesy, perhaps.”
“Keeper help me, I hope not.” My grip tightened on the steering wheel again.
“Are you certain you’re well enough to drive, Love?”
“I-” I wasn’t. The details had fled my mind, but my nerves were still shaking.
“Why not lie back down? You don’t have to go back to sleep, but you need to give yourself some rest.”
“I just woke up.” I adjusted my eyepatch to hide the twinge of Voidsight that had started kicking in.
“You know what I mean, Love.” He smiled softly. “Here.” A tentacle reached over to the key and turned the engine off. “I know your instinct is to work away trauma and pain, but let’s try something a bit different, shall we?”
“Trauma?” I chuckled. “I don’t even remember what it was about.”
“Something that cut deep, I’d wager.”
I finally let my hands slip from the steering wheel.
“Y-yeah…”
“Just because you don’t remember it, doesn’t lessen the effect it had on you.”
I turned to him. “Thanks, Sy.” I choked out.
He turned as much as he could in his chair to face me. Reaching out, he put his arms around my shoulders and leaned me down over the space between us, resting my head on his belly. A net of tentacles wove themselves beneath me, sparing my side from the hard plastic console. I slid my arms around him.
“Rest.” He cooed.
I nodded against him as my eyes grew heavy. The hum of his core and the warmth of his skin was all I needed to whisk me back into a peaceful, dreamless sleep.
-
As you may have seen on social media, the official cover for “Eternity’s Irys: Two Minutes to Midnight” is now complete.
But how did we get here? A lot of work and effort between myself and (mostly) my illustrator, Rhett (@firelocket).
But what does the progress look like? How far have we come? That’s what I want to archive with this post.
Let’s start from the very beginning.
1: The Proto-Cover (2018)
Behold! The proto cover I made at the very beginning of the project. Why is the tentacle green? What is the brown thing? (It’s an antler) What am I even looking at? All excellent questions that have since been rendered moot with the current iteration. However, this comes from a time when I wasn’t being fully honest with myself. Still love that background image though! Used to have it plastered everywhere on the original site.
Honestly, I cringe at this version. It comes from a very misguided point of view and the design is just… awful.
2: A Second Attempt (2019-2020)
Another monstrosity by me! Hand drew all that stuff besides the stock silhouette. It still has a soft spot in my heart.
3: The AI (2022)
So, this image was made with midjourney. To me, I saw it as the closest I’d ever come to a relevant cover. Obviously you can see a lot wrong with it, but further toying only made it worse so I clung to this pretty tightly for the longest time. It was the first time I could visualize the concept of a cover for the book I’d worked so long and hard on.
Text was added by myself.
4: The AI: Round 2 (2023)
My brother made this image with some AI program. It’s better than the one I made, but it’s still problematic due to its origin. Still, it became the baseline for the direction I wanted to take a real cover if ever I got the chance to make one.
It was also the first cover to ever be printed.
Text was added in post.
5: The Official First Draft
The first sketch by an actual illustrator! I was skeptical of the gold and purple motif even though it’s canon to the book, but we ended up sticking with it.
After we went over a bunch of book covers and how I felt about them as well as referencing that last AI image, this is where we ended up. This is true beginning of our journey.
As you can see, there’s also a little illustration that didn’t make it to the end. We decided to take additional artwork into the book.
6: Behold: A Frame!
Some more refinement and a more established direction. I’d fallen in love with Rhett’s impromptu spine design and, while it’s unconventional and might not be the best direction, I pushed it.
We were going to put the subtitle on the hour glass, but man did that not end up going well in the end. I like how we resolved it in the final draft.
You can also still see a scroll on the bottom. That’s where my name was going to go, but we ultimately scrapped the scroll idea entirely.
7: Shading!
We spent way too long trying to realize my idea of making the mask look crystalline. The burnishing effect on the screws and frame were actually a happy accident.
Also worth noting is the smoke now has a definitive form. This is very very important.
8: The Final Form!
TADA!
Still needs a blurb, but here it is! The final cover for “Eternity’s Irys: Two Minutes to Midnight”. This is what you’ll find on shelves, should it ever get to them.
I won’t lie, at first I found myself detaching from it. It was so hard for me to accept that this was it. This was the one thing I never thought I’d ever have no matter how much I wrote, no matter how much I edited, I would never have a cover. Especially not one actually created exactly how I wanted it to be.
I remember going on Fiverr. I remember shopping bulk production sites. I remember googling assets and considering doing it all myself to avoid publishing anything with AI. I was about to accept that AI cover, even though I didn’t want to, but in a last ditch attempt to do something I actually wanted to, I made a Facebook post. Rhett reached out and the rest is now history.
The more I look at it, the more I show it to others, the more I love it. The more I can come to accept that this is, in fact, my cover. What a wild concept I thought I could only dream of.
It is currently in the hands of my publisher (brother) and I should have a dummy copy in a few weeks. I can’t wait to hold it all over again.
Other Things of Note
Beta readers are about half way through and are making some fantastic critiques! We’re aiming for their pass to be completed by the end of the month. I’m implementing their suggestions as they pass them along. It’s been an excellent experience and another thing I never thought I’d have. I’m so grateful to them, I was dead set on being the only eyes to look at it before it hit the wild because I was too afraid of it being torn to pieces like a previous version had been. That would have ended me.
But that’s not how it’s gone. Not at all. And I’m crazy grateful for that.
October deadline seems to be holding strong. Once the beta read is done, I’ll finish polishing, see if they’d be willing to check it again. All that would remain is the internal illustrations and then… Well, maybe one more dummy print before it goes live.
We really are getting there!
After all these years…
Crazy…
🦑💜🦇
Eternity's Irys 