28/04/2026
Here is a sample of the first chapter:
THE FIRST NIGHT
From the forests came the Klaus — pale, sinewy predators adapted to the dark, drawn by warmth and blood — and by the time the sun returned, half of the colonists, caught unawares, had been brutally slain; bodies ripped, intestines consumed. Many more had been drained of all life and fluids by invasive vines that overtook the settlement, burrowing through cracks in walls and windows to envelop their prey.
The survivors named that period the First Night of Claws and Teeth and it taught them three truths. First: knowing how to survive by Day means nothing if you do not make it through the Night. Second: fear calls to the Klaus as surely as heat. Third: walls alone do not save—preparation, timing and memory do.
In the aftermath, people carved homes into stone and hull, sealed the gates to the settlement, now called a Cradle, at dusk and learned to count the long hours until dawn. Thus the Cradles began as mere burrows with rules that evolved to guide them through the first hundred Day-Night cycles and that hold their society together still—because when Night falls, and forests bloom with noctilucent vines and bioluminescent fungal nets, the Klaus appear.
These are the descendants of the Teat, a colony ship in search of freedom and a better way of life, who thought they had found it on this planet after decades of flight, only for the ship to crash upon it. They survive in these Cradles: semi-subterranean settlements built from the wreckage of their vessel and local stone. Each Cradle is marked by a relic of an age they no longer fully understand: the Beacons, tall spires that blink red light into the endless sky.
Theirs is a world of long cycles: there are roughly two hundred periods of Day followed by fifty consecutive periods of Night. This full Day-Night cycle is commonly referred to as a year. Winds shift with the cycle; beasts and people do as well. Day brings thaw, growth and migration. Skies in Day are pallid gold or faded blue; in Night they deepen to violet and green and finally red where the spore-clouds gather. The wise time their journeys around High Day; the desperate travel at the edges, when light or dark still remembers its opposite. But all will choose the safety of a Cradle and the stress of confinement over staying outside at Night, if they have a chance to choose.
Each Cradle maintains its own rhythm of toil and defense. By Day, hunters and gatherers harvest and trade; at Night, the walls are sealed and the Watchers take their stations by the vents.
