Books · Fantasy

A personalized fantasy novel, written for you.

Fantasy needs a world that holds together. Before writing, StoryStepper plans the world, its rules and what they cost, then the arc and every chapter. The manuscript is checked so the magic works the same way on the last page as on the first.

Below is a real fantasy written with StoryStepper: the brief it started from, and the book that came back.

The brief

Shape: Somewhere else entirely
Ending: Both at once
Feel: grand in scale, intimate in cost, mythic without grandiosity
Language: English
Who and what it is about: Three river-kingdoms survive on water released by an order of keepers who take a year of life from each keeper per release. The youngest keeper discovers the ledger has been falsified for two centuries and the true price is being paid by the downstream villages, not the order. Ending the deception stops the water; continuing it makes her the next signature on the lie.

The book that came back

The Price of Silt

At the High Weir, every drop sent to the fertile Delta is said to cost a warden a year of life. When Siora Fenn finds impossible records on the eve of her own sacrifice, she must uncover who is truly paying the price—and where the water goes.

Delivered in 14 minutes
17,537 words
15 chapters

Contents

The Measure of Water
The Ash in the Ledger
A Debt in Bone
The Ashes of Master Orin
The Unspent Years
The Copper Roots
The Scribe’s Shadow
The Silt Toll
The Cipher in the Flue
The Arithmetic of Slaughter
The Bedrock Chamber
The Pale Border
The False Martyr
The Shattered Siphon
Epilogue

From chapter one

The brass micrometer smelled of old mutton fat and salt. Siora Fenn wiped its jaws with a scrap of dry hemp, laid the metal against the threaded sluice-rod, and waited until the river underneath the staging deck stopped its hard, shuddering heave against the lower apron.

The alpine chasm narrowed here until the sky was only a ribbon of grey slate between two limestone faces. Three hundred paces across, the High Weir held back the melt-water of the north, wedged like an unpolished tooth between the cliffs. At dawn the masonry looked grey-blue, soaked through with cold mist that never rose high enough to meet the morning sun.

"Two notches north of the center pin," Arch-Warden Malthus Gray said. He did not touch the brass. His hands, long-fingered and white-cuffed, rested behind the small of his wool habit. He was sixty-three, and his skin had the dry, papery cleanness of men who lived entirely above the tree line on grain boiled in mountain cisterns. "If you set it three notches, the intake gate will rattle in its housing before the basin fills. We do not rattle."

"Two notches, Arch-Warden," Siora said.

Her knuckles were grey with dry chalk from the leveling string. She set the micrometer teeth against the bronze collar, took the wooden-handled key from her apron loop, and gave the screw a third of a turn until the brass dog settled into its seat. A fine vibration came through the tool, up the marrow of her forearm, settling into her collarbone like an ache that had lived there since her novitiate year.

She had spent three years learning that ache. When the mountain reservoirs gathered five million tons of winter run-off behind the white ashlar blocks, the entire canyon hummed. It was not a sound one could hear with ears; it sat in the teeth and the soles of the boots. The books in the High Registry called it the Covenant’s Breath, the weight of the Three Rivers waiting for the pen to loose them.

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