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We’ll Meet Again on the River Someday

This is the story of how I accidentally spent two years building a 1,586 year reincarnation saga after trying to learn one forgotten woman's name:

Introducing:

Lost River, a series

“You shall be reborn into that flow until the day your Old Gods triumph, but the price is absolute: every choice, and every child born of your union shall be claimed by the element you defiled, the water, to ensure no High King shall rise.” Lost River: Eógan mac Néill, 433 AD

As a reader, you’ll be dragged into my world first in the late 15th century, after you’ll sink into the deep and come to in 2013. By then: you’ll be just as confused, traumatized, and in love as the people you’re following.

Then, I’ll take you back to the 400s so you can see where it all began.

What’s it about?

If we want to get super snappy:

When Sovereignty and her Guardian reunite, the world of power and politics destroys them. Cage the wild daughter, gain more power.

If we want to get otherworldly:

What happens when divine myth gets dragged through real history?

And if we want to get clinical:

A grounded, multi era historical drama spanning 1,586 years. A bloodline civil war. A reincarnation loop. One girl whose choices determine whether an ancient curse survives.

But like…

Imagine if Marianne and Connell from Normal People were cursed, and Marianne couldn’t stop webbing every moment of life together and physically couldn’t shut up.

We aren’t writing high fantasy over here.

We’re writing about ducks.

And that’ll make sense to you one day.

i’m writing a very serious series about a reincarnation loop / bloodline civil war that follows one girls soul over three incarnations spanning 1,586 years.

also me:

trying to make mock covers for my WIPs

the stories follow the same souls through three lives:

400s Boyne Valley 1400s Wester Ross 2010s Glasgow

all from the POV of one girl stuck in a loop.

do they feel connected? like, can you tell it could be the same universe?

I hummed as I missed.

I tossed another stone, and grinned to myself as I heard a crunch. Until I realized the sound of the rock was just the crunch of dress shoes in a patch of frozen snow.

“Quiet the walk in the dead of winter, thinking of getting in?”

The voice rang in my ears as the shoes squelched in the grass behind me again. I had heard whoever it was, but I still jumped.

I swallowed and noted every possible escape route. I was alone in nature, far enough away from the house that no one would hear me over the music.

I turned - slowly - facing a very tall, very shaggy-haired man.

Fear should have flooded me, and I did swallow that frog in my throat. But a strange recognition came instead. It was the same guy that told Niall to fuck off last week at the club.

I felt less frantic.

He was wearing a dark black suit with a ridiculous green winter jacket over it. Yet he still had the air of the son of a wealthy man.

I raised my eyebrows. “Considering it, are you?”

His hands stuffed into the pockets of that absolutely ridiculous green jacket, as if it just dawned on him that he’d walked up to a girl all alone in the dark and said a very strange thing as a greeting. Like he was trying to shrink himself for the sake of my trembling hand.

Other than that, he looked amused by my response. Or maybe just thankful I didn’t back away terrified.

“I’d rather make it to midnight.”

i am sick i have no voice

i was given a box of free vintage scarves meant for sewing but i put them on my head instead

i was meant to wear them i became a pirate’s widow i became my own sickbed saint

my weekend trip to western south carolina:

I was feelin’ at home in appalachia, took hella kids dramamine on the way down, and kept slugging this watermelon water.  Here is something I wrote on the way down, and added to on the way back home:

i wanted to take a photo for you so you can see what i see. i’m staring at it, and it is beautiful. it reminds me of being young, when the mountains looked like stalks of broccoli growing tall. and with my soul i still see the broccoli. but on my phone it becomes a dirty ditch with a tree that will be chopped down for new power lines. but the kids are still listening to MGMT, with the windows down during the first week of summer break, so maybe we are really just fated to pretend. or maybe nothing changed at all. i'm in the prime of my life.

anywho, it was a much needed refresher. i celebrated my cousins graduation. i got to be the cool older cousin without kids. somehow fit in and let myself feel nineteen all weekend. i think my soul wants to live in the woods in one of the carolina's and become an old crone.

(aren't me and my cousin in the geek squad shirt fricken clones?? black sheeps for life)

my ancestors were in a cult? kinda?

A mini deep dive on the utopian, transcendentalist, & Fourierist communal living experiments in the 1800s & why they should have just practiced animism instead of being... kinda dumb? The idea was there, they just lacked common sense.

They were so busy waiting for the ocean to turn into lemonade that they forgot how to talk to the dirt. They tried to build a New Way out of theories, when the Old Ways (Animism) were already right under their feet, laughing at them.

If you'd like to see more, you can download my zine on Gumroad! hush now creature: a small, ongoing problem. you can download it here ~

a june tarot spread:

theres a more eloquent reading in my zine (kind of), but the second to last pic down there is literally my stream of conscious thoughts as i pulled the cards lmao. (idk how to read for the world, i'm just having fun. and i look great as the hanged man)

if ya wanna see more this is from the second volume of my zine. hush now creature: a small, ongoing problem. you can download it here ~

an article about audhd and how i have created the delusion that i just have second sight.

I am me in my perfected form a poem or song or something about sappy, pathetic little me.

the prompt was: “You are standing in line. You are pretending you are not counting how many people are ahead of you. You are counting.”

_________________________________________

She is four people ahead and five people back.

If she slides out of the line and leaves, it is possible the barista will put her in the same category as their impatient customers, and that won’t do.

But on the flip side, if she slides out of the line, it could make the person behind her day better.

It was a toss-up.

If she stood in line, the person behind her wouldn’t even think of it. But the barista might notice her running off and she’d rather stay on the list of pleasant customers.

She stayed put.

She is now three people ahead and seven back.

Maybe the barista wouldn’t be angry. Maybe she’d view it as a blessing. One less customer. It was busy on this rainy morning, after all.

Conversation ran through her ear. Not her own. She was eavesdropping on the phone call the person behind her was having. They were being quite rude to whoever was on the other end.

That solidified it.

She was going to stay in line.

The person behind her didn’t deserve the random blessing of being one step closer to a steaming cup of coffee. They were probably already on the list of impatient customers in the barista’s mind.

A sharp bell rang.

Shit.

She thought she kept her phone on silent. She didn’t like the idea of her noise disrupting anything.

A text from her boss.

She was late.

Another reason she probably should have stepped out of line. But now she had a duty to the barista and a vengeance against the rude person on the phone behind her.

Got stuck grabbing coffee, be there soon. Do you want something?

Her fingertips tapped against her cracked phone.

There. That would make that situation go away.

Bribery.

Easy as that.

She is now two people ahead and six people back. Someone must have had the gall to leave the line like she couldn’t.

The person behind her barked something else into the phone.

She wondered then if the person on the receiving end deserved the bite. Maybe she shouldn’t have assumed the unassuming woman behind her was cruel.

One person ahead, and six people back.

Almost there.

She could taste the salted caramel macchiato she would soon be sipping. A small mercy for the long day she knew she would have.

Her phone dinged again.

She quickly flicked it over to silent.

I’ll take a cappuccino. Thanks.

She let out a breath.

Her boss wasn’t angry. He had accepted the offering.

Another small mercy.

Maybe today wouldn’t be so bad.

She was finally at the counter.

The barista had a scowl on her face, and she felt a pang of anger because she had spent the past five minutes defending her honor in her head.

“A caramel macchiato and a cappuccino, please.”

The barista didn’t respond. She only motioned for her card.

from my current work in progress, Lost River:

I had been small once, with all that wild and green.

But she disappeared one night, as blood pooled along the edges of the crags.

Replaced by a small bundle of light, she was shrouded in moss, and yet the light still peeked through.

Green as the shadow of the bootsteps that trailed behind me.

Green in colour, as all was.

Her light.

Lingering above the mist of the water that had surrounded me all of my days. Throwing tiny, wet pebbles at my window every morning, until the moon dipped into her home and then again.

Yet I had feared her, this whole time. She was right there.

Right through those man-made walls we stacked with our tired hands, as if trying to keep her out.

Perhaps I had known a mother's grief long before today.

The good man. He had not feared her,

He just stood behind my left shoulder as he always had.

Since we were light ourselves.

We already knew what it had meant to bleed together, flowing through rivers in this life and the last.

He was pulling me out of the reeds. He still saw that small girl I had lost again only hours before.

I told him no, it was not me anymore. I pointed to the wisp of light over the loch. "I am not her," I told him, "she is right there."

As he looked over towards my pointed finger, she was gone.

He whispered to me not to worry, because he never saw anything but green when he looked at me.

Nothing but green and the wild.

When he was gone, he did not become a small green light like she did.

He became the way the word green fell from his lips the last night I saw him. In the frogs, in the land, in my head and my gut.

I thought the oath would wash down the river along with his body. But he kept it, even in death.

This time, I did not fear the new sounds, nor the light.

He whispered that he could not leave, not when parts of his soul swelled in my arms and in my belly. He told me that his soul was already carved into my own long before we created the new pieces.

When the other man took him, three was all I had left.

Just three.

But the other man found himself a god. He was only its vessel, mocking the earth, expecting me to kneel, picking us away little by little.

Our sweetest three.

With them, I could touch the green with my own two hands. They were me, and they were him, and I loved them.

Then came the croaking warnings. I could not run. I could only listen.

The false god sent two men this time, one for me, and one for him.

One final debt.

And now, there is only one. And I am the only danger to him now.

Yet, the other man did make one mistake. He gave us all back to the water.