Sometimes a story tells you what it wants to be called.

I've been working on a science fiction project for months under the working title "Seed Ship"—a straightforward, descriptive name that captured the basic concept: an alien vessel arriving at Earth, ostensibly carrying the seeds of first contact. It was functional, clear, and completely wrong.

It’s a strange and powerful feeling—returning to the world I built twenty years ago and watching it grow sharper with every word. When I began The World Below, I had no idea what it would become. I only knew the shape of a world I couldn’t forget: a fractured planet named Caldereth, eight Houses locked in ritual war, and an ancient, unfathomable presence that remembers the future.

Read it now. Remember what remembering costs.

I first conceived of this story over twenty years ago. I began writing, full of ambition and curiosity, and made it through two chapters before life, as it often does, caught up with me. The manuscript was shelved, left to gather dust while the world turned and priorities shifted.