A Taste of Something New

Because I thought it would be fun...

Apr 26, 2024

Latest News From the Desk of Sooz
The Alchemist and the Nightsong
UK Tour Dates — don’t forget!

1. Latest News from the Desk of Sooz

My other dog passed away on Monday. Asimov. He was almost fifteen, and I have written a bit more about him on my other newsletter,

Misfits & Daydreamers

. Since I don’t really have the heart to write about him or Leia all over again, just head over there to see his photo.

Guys, I am just so sad right now. And my house is just so, so empty.

Anyway, I thought it might be a fun change to share something totally different from what I usually send out. So here’s a sneak peak at a WIP (work in progress) of mine called The Alchemist & the Nightsong.

It’s adult high fantasy, probably standalone, about a young woman named Mouse in a world where music is magic.

This is just the prologue, but I think it gives you a good hint at the world and stakes to come.

Also, this an early draft, and literally no one—NO ONE!!!!—has ever read it before outside of myself! No friends, no agent, no nothing. You are the first people ever to lay eyes upon it.12

Okay, happy reading. I’ll be back soon—hopefully with a UK cover for The Whispering Night. 👀

falls and snow photo — Photo by Lydia Torrey on Unsplash

2. The Alchemist & the Nightsong

Old Eater

Old Eater is hungry.

This is not a new phenomenon, given that no one has crossed him in almost four hundred years. They don’t dare in summer, when the glacial melt runs hard and fast out of the mountains—when it’s easy to see his fingers and hear his teeth, clawing up to grind their bones. But no one crosses in winter either, even though he forms such hard ice overtop, glittering and flat and promising easy passage if only some person will walk this way.

They’re all too smart, he has decided. The animals and the people and the singers—they have all shared their stories with each other, so now no one is foolish enough to walk his way. Which leaves Old Eater forever hungry, with only fish to feed him. But their bloods run cold and their bones stick in his teeth.

If he could, Old Eater would sleep until the world’s end when the Great Gleamers will fall from the sky and build the Chant anew. But the one who bound him here won’t let him sleep, so instead Old Eater waits. Through each sunrise and each sunset, he tries to remember what food and warmth and sleep used to feel like.

Until one morning when a visitor arrives at his shore.

They are a small person—smaller than Old Eater remembers people being. So small, in fact, he doesn’t sense the visitor until the moment they put their foot upon his icy shore and their song ripples through him.

Old Eater smiles then. His first smile in almost four hundred years, and the parts of him that have become this river unfold and unfurl, expand and reach and yawn with a waking joy. Small though this visitor may be, they are also delectable simply because they are alive. Because they are warm. Because they are a furnace waiting to churn up flames inside his eternal belly.

Later, when it is all too late for him, he will consider how strange it is that a visitor should come here after such a very, very, anciently very long time. And he will wonder why an individual so small could have a song so big crammed inside them. But Old Eater is hungry and lonely and his fingers and teeth haven’t tasted flesh in such a very, very, anciently very long time. So when the visitor steps onto his ice shore, Old Eater grins and stretches and readies the disquiet in his belly for a feast. First he will let the visitor walk to where the waters run deepest. Then he will crack the ice beneath their feet and haul them down. His currents will shove into their mouth, his silty bottom will rise over their toes. The visitor will burn, they will break, and all the Chant inside them will taste like the world once did, before the Nightsong ruined everything.

The visitor continues forward. Their paces are mincing, afraid. They know what this river is, but they have decided to risk the passage anyway. He can hear all those notes jumbling inside their body, Lir and Tem and Glor in a melody that tastes of nectarines and sunshine. Old Eater siphons down each note, each beat, each harmony. More song, more Chant, whatever he can take, he will hoard to him.

The visitor’s feet pitter-patter over Old Eater’s ice. Were he a normal, natural river with only the pure Chant of the Seven to sing inside him, then it would be safe to cross here. But he isn’t a normal, natural river. He is one of the ancient ones, tricked by a perfect Nightsong just like all the rest of them those hundreds of years ago. Such pretty words, such empty promises, and such a very, very, anciently very long punishment to endure.

The pitter-patter slows. Then it stops entirely, a mere three paces from where Old Eater treads at his deepest. The song in the visitor flickers with something almost brave, almost relieved. They think they will make it across. They think that because Old Eater hasn’t come for them yet, he will not come at all.

Old Eater’s smile widens. The visitor resumes their stride, and now is when Old Eater makes his move. After four hundred dull, quiet years, he cracks his ice and surges all his wintery waters upward. The visitor’s song shifts again, the notes of Tem and Glor now clanging louder in discordant terror…

Except no.

Old Eater realizes it too late, as his ice splits and the visitor falls. As his waters lurch up to encase this person and tug them down, down, below…No. The visitor is not afraid—not even a little—and those notes are no longer Glor or Tem but instead a harmony of Ym and Thess, of Ka and Un, and then every other big note and little one that can ever be slotted between. The entirety of the Great Chant thrums in a song that is all too familiar, even if it has been such a such a very, very, anciently very long time since he heard it last.

Spare me, Old Eater tries to say, with his rapids, with his glaciers, with the silt he punches from his riverbanks. Spare me, and I will be yours again. A servant for all of time.

Yes, the visitor replies in their pure, perfect night song. But I do not need a servant now. I need only the very heart of you. And with that assertion, the Nightsong spreads through Old Eater too fast for him to stop. Too vast for him to understand. It rips into every droplet of Old Eater’s soul, into every corner and every fissure. It fills him to the brim, and it fans flames into his eternal belly.

For several glorious moments, Old Eater feels whole again. He feels full. He feels wild and unleashed, just as he did when the world was new and he chased through the land, dancing with the Great Gleamers.

Then the moment passes, and all the invisible spaces between—the ones where music cannot fit, where there is only absence and disquiet—they unfold and unfurl, expand and reach and yawn with a new hunger. Wider, bigger, faster until that is all there is. Until the final driplet, droplet, dream that was Old Eater has been crushed down to a powder that is too heavy to sink, too feathery to float. That remnant simply hovers there in the water, useless and inert. Until even that is gone, swept away by currents that still live. By waters that still feast.

And for a very, very, anciently very long time, the river is totally quiet. Nothing and no one lives there; nothing and no one saw what happened to Old Eater or how the wild soul of him was stripped away for parts. Only a few brave fish—who are curious about all the commotion—saw what happened, and so only a few brave fish see when the visitor who started it all hauls themself onto the southern bank and stretches in the dawn’s icy sun.

Water sloughs off the visitor. Power and Chant too, along with ripples of darkness that glimmer like a sky where the summer never ends. The visitor cracks their knuckles. Rolls their shoulders. They are larger now. Stronger, too, as they shake off any remaining notes from Old Eater, any remaining water still clinging to their dark clothes.

Their belly is warm as they stride away.

The fish, however, are cold and bony, and they soon forget what they saw—or why they ever swam this way in the first place.