ARCHIVE NOTE
A note before you read.
The Other Dark is the second novella of The Archive — a line of self-contained works set in the world of Edhra. It does not share characters or plot with Tidewater. You can read it with no other context. If you have read other Edhra work, you will find old vocabulary used in unfamiliar ways; if you haven't, nothing here will be a closed door.
SYNOPSIS
Karath’s Lower City has a killer. By the seventh body, Watch officer Tessa Halder has been on the case for two months and is sleeping at her desk.
Her sergeant Errin Vell is the only one in the precinct who hasn’t told her to slow down. She narrows forty-three suspects to twelve. None of the twelve is the man.
Then a Driftborn sailor at the Anchor Stone tavern asks her a question the Watch has no procedure for. What if the killer is a man who does not know what he is doing at night.
The Driftborn voice-keeper Mariska Quill gives the answer a name. The Forelong — a pre-Dissolution category the Anchored academy has held for centuries to be folklore. Predatory. Host-binding. Fed by the Tidewater. One survives. It is in Karath. It is killing through a man who does not know.
The Other Dark closes on a third dawn. The killer alive in his cell. The thing inside him loose in the city. Tessa at her desk with the notebook open to the next blank page.
ABOUT THIS NOVELLA
Length: 19,296 words · 10 chapters · roughly 80 minutes
Setting: Karath, Year 382 — late autumn into early winter
POV: Officer Tessa Halder, Lower City precinct
Reading order: Standalone. Set in the same world as Tidewater but
independent. No Tidewater spoilers.
Content: Cosmic-horror noir. References to off-page serial murder,
including a fifteen-year-old victim. No graphic violence on the page.
