The Origin of Everything

A few weeks ago, when I told you I had begun The Hollow City, I asked you a question I had never asked anyone before. Hollowmere runs on bound souls. Coal existed. Gas existed. So why would a city choose the dead over the easy fuel sitting right there? I said I had always known the answer and never told you, and I asked whether you wanted the story of it — a short, dark prequel about the choice that doomed everyone who came after.

You answered. More of you than I expected, and more insistently than I was prepared for. So here is my answer back.

Yes. I am writing it. Its name is The Hollow Asylum, and it is the beginning of everything.

I want to be honest about why I hesitated, because the hesitation is part of the craft of it. A prequel is the most dangerous thing a series writer can attempt. You already know how it ends. You know the city stands, you know the machinery runs, you know the bargain was struck — the whole saga is built on the fact that it was. So a prequel cannot survive on suspense. There is no will they. There is only how, and worse, why, and worst of all, why did no one stop it. If I get that wrong, it is just a footnote with a cover. If I get it right, it is the most frightening book I have written, because it is the one where the horror has not yet become normal. It is still a choice a person is making, in a room, with their hands.

That is the book I want to write.

The Hollow Asylum is set well over a decade before The Hollow Clock — in the first experimental years, before the Vanes understood the mathematics of what they were building, before the Church had a single robe or a single doctrine, before any of it had a name that made it sound holy. There is no sixty years of consent yet. There is no congregation nodding along. There is only a handful of people in the early dark of the thing, telling themselves it will be small, it will be temporary, it will be worth it.

The man at the center of it is an engineer named Erasmus Cassin. I have lived with him quietly for a long time. He is not a villain — that is the entire point of him, and the entire danger of writing him. He is a good engineer and, by every measure he would recognize, a good man. He has reasons. The reasons are not lies. The city is dying of its own winters; the obvious fuels are failing or were never enough; people he loves are cold. And then he finds something that works, something that works better than anything has any right to, and the cost of it is a cost he can almost convince himself isn't real, because the ones who pay it cannot be heard yet. Not at first. The hearing comes later, and it comes too late.

I have written a great deal about the moment a person decides to stop hiding. The Hollow Asylum is the dark mirror of that. It is about the moment a person decides not to look — and then builds, very carefully and with great competence, a machine that ensures no one ever has to.

I keep coming back to a sentence I wrote to you in the spring, almost in passing, and have not been able to put down since: it is easier to belong than to look. In the main saga, that is a whole city's failing, sixty years deep. In the prequel it is one man's, on day one, before there is any city to blame it on. There is no institution to hand his conscience to yet. He has to be his own institution. He has to invent the reasons himself and then believe them himself, and the most unbearable thing — the thing that frightens me to sit with at the desk — is how reasonable they sound from the inside. I do not want you to hate Cassin. I want you to understand him, and to be afraid of how easy that was.

Some of you who have read the whole saga will already be doing the arithmetic on the timeline, and you will know there is a second thread waiting in the back half of this book. I will not say more than that. There are doors in this story that are not mine to open here — they belong to The Hollow Clock, and opening them early would cost you the very discoveries that make the first book what it is. So I am holding them shut on purpose. If you have read the saga, you know what I am protecting. If you haven't, all you need to know is that the prequel reaches forward toward the books you already love, and stops exactly where it must.

A word on how this changes the shape of the year, because I owe you honesty about the work. The Hollow City remains the priority. It is the end of Cal's story and it comes first; nothing about The Hollow Asylum slows it down. The prequel is the shorter, sharper thing I write in the margins of the larger one — a novella, not a novel, lean and cold and built to be read in a sitting. I will be offering it as a reader gift rather than a shelf book: the origin story, sent to the people who actually want it, as thanks for being the readers who asked for it in the first place. More on how to get your hands on it closer to the time. If you are on the mailing list, you will be first.

So that is the answer to the question I asked you in the spring. You said yes. I listened. The book exists because you wanted it to, which is the best reason a book can have.

One more question before I go back to the desk, since asking you things has worked out rather well lately.

When you read an origin story — a prequel to a world you already love — what do you actually want from it? Do you want the comfort of recognizing things, the small thrill of oh, that's where that came from? Or do you want to be unsettled, to have the familiar world made stranger and more frightening by learning what it cost to build? I lean hard toward the second. But this is your world too by now, and I want to know how you hold it. Tell me. As always, I read every reply.

Reply here, write to me through the contact page, or find me on the mailing list. I read all of it.

email: eliaskeane@eliaskeane.com

Thank you for asking for this one. It is a strange and lovely thing, to be sent back to the beginning by the people who have come all this way to the end.

Yours,

Elias

P.S. For anyone new: The Hollow Clock and The Hollow Cathedral are both out now and can each be read on their own. The Hollow City is the third and final book of Cal's arc, in progress. The Hollow Asylum is a prequel novella, coming as a reader gift — start with the clock, and let it bring you here.