There's a moment in every novel where the thing you thought was a metaphor turns out to be the load-bearing wall.

For me, that moment happened at two in the morning, on my lounge room floor, with a glass of rosé I'd been neglecting for an hour and a dog-eared copy of The Gay Science that had no business being there in the first place.

I was three drafts into what would become Book One of the Anamnesis Trilogy. I had my protagonist. I had my world. I had a love interest with cheekbones that could cut glass and a backstory that made me cry when I wrote it. I had roughly 140,000 words of plot that I was fairly sure made sense, or at least made the kind of sense that fantasy novels are allowed to make, which is its own generous category.

What I didn't have was a reason any of it mattered.

Not a plot reason. I had plenty of those — seals cracking, beasts pushing through, a whole political infrastructure built on child sacrifice that needed dismantling. The what was fine. The so what was killing me.

Why does this story need to exist? What is it actually about, underneath the magic and the kissing and the very elaborate fight scenes?

I couldn't answer it. And if the author can't answer it, the reader can feel it. They might not be able to name the absence, but they'll feel it — that slight hollowness at the centre, like biting into a chocolate and finding nothing inside.

So I did what any reasonable person does when their novel is falling apart at the seams: I went back to the Germans.

The demon on the lounge room floor

Here's Nietzsche's thought experiment, stripped to its bones: Imagine a demon crawls to you in your loneliest hour and tells you that you will live this exact life again. Every joy, every wound, every tedious Tuesday. Infinite times. Unchanged. Forever.

Would you curse the demon? Or would you call it a god?

That's the eternal return. Not as cosmology — Nietzsche wasn't making a physics claim. As a test. A way of asking: do you love your life enough to choose it again? All of it. The parts that broke you included.

I read that passage and something in my chest went very still.

Because I realised my protagonist was already living it. She just didn't know yet.

When the metaphor becomes the mechanism

Here's what happened to my plot that night.

I'd been writing a chosen-one story. Girl discovers hidden power, girl fights corrupt system, girl falls in love with someone who looks at her like she invented gravity. Standard romantasy architecture, and I'm not being dismissive — I love that architecture. It works because it maps onto something real: the experience of discovering that you're more than what you've been told you are.

But the eternal return gave me something else. It gave me a protagonist who wasn't discovering her power for the first time. She was discovering it again. For the hundredth time. For the six hundredth. She just couldn't remember.

And suddenly the love story wasn't a love story. It was a grief story. Because what do you call a man who remembers every single time he's found her, and she never remembers him? What do you call six centuries of falling in love with someone who looks at you like a stranger every time the wheel resets?

That's not romance. That's endurance. That's the loneliest thing I've ever written.

The eternal return didn't just change my plot. It changed my genre. I was still writing romantasy — the kissing stayed, the fight scenes stayed, the cheekbones absolutely stayed — but underneath all of it, the engine had shifted. The question was no longer will she win? The question was will she remember?

And beneath that: does she want to?

The three phases (or: Nietzsche as plotting software)

Once I had the eternal return as my structural spine, something else clicked into place. Nietzsche describes three metamorphoses of the spirit: the camel, the lion, and the child.

The camel carries. It says "yes" to every burden. It endures.

The lion destroys. It says "no." It tears apart the old laws.

The child creates. It says "yes" again — but differently. Not out of obedience. Out of choice.

I looked at that and thought: that's a trilogy.

Book One is the camel. My protagonist carries the weight of a system she doesn't yet understand. She endures the Trials, the betrayals, the slow revelation that everything she's been told is a lie. She carries it because she doesn't know she has the option not to.

Book Two is the lion. She discovers the script. She tears it apart. Every tablet, every law, every comfortable fiction — including the ones she told herself. The lion phase is brutal because it's not just about fighting the system. It's about fighting the parts of yourself that are complicit in it. The parts that found the cage comfortable.

Book Three is the child. She creates new values from the wreckage. She answers the demon's question — not by refusing the cycle or submitting to it, but by choosing something it never offered: change.

I'm not going to pretend the trilogy mapped perfectly onto Nietzsche's framework from day one. It didn't. I spent months wrestling with it, breaking it, rebuilding it, arguing with a dead philosopher at three in the morning while my coffee went cold. But the framework gave me something I couldn't find on my own: a reason why.

Why does this story exist? Because it's about the hardest question I know how to ask: if you had to live your life again, every broken piece of it, would you choose it? And what would it take to answer yes?

The part where I admit this is also about me

I have a PhD in English and Cultural Studies. I spent years studying how stories work — how narrative constructs identity, how metaphor shapes cognition, how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves become the architecture of our lives.

None of that prepared me for how it feels when your own novel starts asking you the same questions you hid inside it.

The eternal return isn't just Lyre's question. It's mine. It's the question every writer asks when they sit down at the keyboard for the thousandth time, staring at a draft that still isn't right, knowing they'll probably rewrite this scene again tomorrow: is this worth doing again?

Every time, the answer is the same.

Yes. Even the parts that break me. Especially those.

The demon was right. That's the terrifying thing.

It was always a god.

I have a confession that will probably get my fantasy writer card revoked: I don't care about magic systems.

I mean — I care about them the way I care about plumbing. I want them to work. I want them to not leak. I want to be able to flush the toilet without thinking about fluid dynamics. But I don't want to read about fluid dynamics while I'm in the middle of an emotionally devastating love scene, and I definitely don't want to write about it.

This is a problem when you're writing a fantasy trilogy that runs on magic.

The solution I landed on was accidental, like most of the good decisions in my life. I stopped trying to build a magic system and started building a psychology. The magic in my world doesn't operate like a set of rules. It operates like trauma. Like memory. Like the things your body knows that your mind has spent years trying to forget.

And that changed everything.

The Ocean and the Drowned Woman

The worldbuilding in the Anamnesis Trilogy rests on a distinction that took me three drafts and one nervous breakdown to articulate clearly: the difference between the Source and the Eighth Beast.

The Source is the primal void — the raw substrate of reality. It's not evil. It's not good. It's not anything, really, in the way that the ocean isn't anything. It just is. Everything came from it. Everything returns to it. It doesn't think. It doesn't want. But if you fall in, it will drown you without noticing.

The Eighth Beast is a woman who walked into that ocean six hundred years ago and never came back.

Not because the ocean swallowed her. Because she couldn't let go. And the ocean couldn't let go of her. What emerged wasn't human anymore, and it wasn't the void either. It was something new. Something that had never existed before and was never supposed to.

Here's why this distinction matters for storytelling: if your cosmic threat is an impersonal force, your protagonist is fighting the weather. That's compelling but abstract. If your cosmic threat is a person — transformed, consumed, barely recognisable but still in there somewhere — then your protagonist isn't just fighting for survival. She's fighting a mirror.

Because the Eighth Beast isn't a monster my protagonist needs to defeat. It's a version of what she might become. The same bloodline, the same power, the same dangerous pull toward the Source. The beast at the end of the story is the protagonist at the end of a different choice.

That's not a magic system. That's a character arc wearing a monster's face.

Why Magic Should Hurt

There's a trend in fantasy worldbuilding that I think of as the "mana bar" approach. Magic has a resource pool. You spend it, you recharge, you spend it again. It's elegant. It's gameable. It maps beautifully onto spreadsheets and RPG mechanics.

It also bores me to tears.

Not because it's wrong — Brandon Sanderson has built a cathedral out of systematic magic and it's extraordinary — but because it doesn't do what I need magic to do in my story. I don't need magic to be a tool. I need it to be a wound.

In Anamnesis, magic costs you something you can't get back. Not mana. Not energy. Memory. Identity. The boundary between where you end and the power begins. Every time my protagonist reaches for magic, she's reaching into something that wants to absorb her. And every time she pulls back, she leaves a little of herself behind.

This isn't a mechanical cost. It's a psychological one. And it means that every magical escalation in the plot is also an escalation in the character's internal crisis. She's not just getting more powerful. She's getting less herself. The question isn't "does she have enough power to win?" The question is "will there be anyone left to celebrate if she does?"

I stole this idea from real life, honestly. From the way grief works. The way trauma works. The way you can survive something and come out the other side and look in the mirror and think: I don't recognise this person. Magic, in my world, is just a literalisation of what it feels like to be changed by something bigger than you.

Beasts as Bonded Trauma

The beast-bond system grew out of a question I couldn't stop asking: what would it feel like to share your body with something that isn't human?

Not in a horror way. In an intimacy way.

My protagonist is bonded to Scythe — an ancient, sardonic, deeply complicated beast who lives inside her bond mark and communicates through a connection that's part telepathy, part emotional bleed, part the worst roommate situation in literary history. He's not a pet. He's not a weapon. He's a relationship. With all the mess and negotiation and mutual dependence that implies.

I wanted the beast bond to feel like the relationships we have with the parts of ourselves we can't control. The anger that surges before we can stop it. The grief that ambushes us in the cereal aisle. The desire that doesn't care about our carefully constructed boundaries. Scythe is all of those things — externalised, given a voice, given opinions.

The magic system works because the beasts aren't mechanisms. They're characters. They have desires that conflict with their rider's desires. They have memories that predate their rider's lifetime. They have loyalties that don't always align with what's convenient.

And the bond itself — the glyph that connects rider to beast — functions like an attachment style. Some bonds are secure: rider and beast in genuine partnership, each holding a piece of the pattern. Some are anxious: the rider reaching too hard, the beast pulling back. Some are avoidant: the beast offering power without intimacy, the rider taking it without ever truly opening.

I didn't plan any of this. I just started writing a girl arguing with the voice in her head and realised I was writing about what it feels like to live with the parts of yourself you haven't integrated yet.

Therapy, basically. With more fire.

The Architecture of the Invisible

One more thing about magic systems, and then I'll stop pretending this is a craft essay and admit it's a love letter to the act of worldbuilding.

The physical architecture in my world is also magic. Buildings are texts. Walls are spells. The Spire where the Trials take place isn't just a setting — it's a glyph, a magical construct so large the characters are living inside it without knowing they're being read.

This came from my academic work on the semiotics of space — the idea that the buildings we inhabit shape the way we think, the same way sentences shape the way we read. I wanted a fantasy world where that relationship was literal. Where walking through a doorway could change your cognition. Where the architecture wasn't backdrop; it was plot.

The magic system, the beasts, the architecture, the Source — they're all the same thing, really. They're all ways of asking: what shapes us without our knowledge? What scripts are we performing that we didn't write? And what happens when we finally see the walls we've been living inside?

That's the real taxonomy. Not void versus beast, not seal versus Bleed, not source versus symptom.

The real taxonomy is: what do we carry, and what carries us?

The Practical Bit (For the Writers in the Room)

If you're building a magic system and it feels mechanical, try this: stop asking "what can this magic do?" and start asking "what does this magic cost?"

Not in mana. Not in energy. In selfhood. In identity. In the things your character cares about most.

Because a magic system where the cost is abstract (tiredness, depletion, nosebleeds) will always feel like a game mechanic. A magic system where the cost is personal — where every use of power forces the character closer to a version of themselves they're afraid of becoming — that's not a system. That's a story engine.

And story engines, unlike magic systems, never run out of fuel.

They run on the thing that's infinite: the human terror of becoming someone we don't recognise.

Cheerful stuff for a Tuesday, I know. But I never promised you optimism. I promised you fire.

There's a difference between books you read and books that read you.

I've spent most of my life accumulating both. The first kind lines your shelves and gives you something to talk about at dinner parties. The second kind does something more uncomfortable: it finds the locked rooms inside you, the ones you've carefully wallpapered over and convinced yourself are just storage, and it opens them. Sometimes gently. Sometimes with a crowbar.

This is a list of the crowbar ones.

Not ranked. Not curated for impressiveness. Some of these are literary fiction. One is planetary science fiction. One involves a very large dragon-riding academy and a frankly devastating amount of yearning. I will not be apologising for any of them.

What they have in common is this: I was a different person before I read them. I didn't always realise it at the time. But looking back, I can trace the fault lines.

Earth — David Brin

I've read Earth at least five times. Possibly six. I've lost count in the way you lose count of how many times you've watched a particular storm roll in over the ocean — it's not about the number, it's about what happens to your nervous system each time.

Brin wrote it in 1990 and it predicted the internet, climate collapse, the fragmentation of the public sphere, and about a dozen other things we're currently living through with varying degrees of horror. That alone should make it required reading. But the reason I keep going back isn't the prescience. It's the hope. Not naïve hope — Brin doesn't do naïve — but the kind of hard-won, eyes-open hope that looks directly at how catastrophically we've mismanaged this planet and says: and yet. And yet here we are, still thinking, still feeling, still trying to figure it out.

Every time I read it, I have at least one epiphany. Not the same epiphany. A new one. The book seems to contain more ideas than it's physically possible to hold in a single reading, so it just rotates them, offering you whichever one you're ready for. That's not a trick. That's genius.

The Name of the Wind — Patrick Rothfuss

This is the most perfect fantasy novel I've ever read. I'm aware that's a big claim. I'm sticking with it.

The prose is extraordinary — genuinely literary, the kind of thing where you pause mid-page because a sentence has done something you didn't know sentences could do. The character of Kvothe is one of the most compelling unreliable narrators in contemporary fiction. The magic system (Sympathy, for those of you who live here) is elegant and logical and genuinely surprising. The world feels lived-in without being exhausting.

It is, by every available metric, exactly what a fantasy novel should be. And Rothfuss has been writing Book Three for over a decade. I'm not going to say anything further about that. I'm going to take a deep breath and close that particular door and trust that it will be worth it.

(It had better be worth it.)

The Inspector Shan Series — Eliot Pattison

Someone once described these books to me as "crime fiction set in Tibet" and I nearly didn't read them because that description does them approximately zero justice.

Yes, there's a disgraced Chinese investigator. Yes, there are crimes. But what Pattison has actually written is something far stranger and richer: a meditation on what happens to the human spirit under occupation, told through the lens of Tibetan Buddhist theology, wrapped in the structure of a detective novel. The Bardo. The relationship between suffering and awakening. The ways in which institutional power destroys the sacred, and the ways in which the sacred somehow survives anyway.

I started the first book expecting procedural intrigue and ended up having what I can only describe as a philosophical crisis in the best possible way. The kind where you put the book down and sit very quietly for a while because you're not entirely sure who you are now.

Zodiac Academy — Caroline Peckham & Susanne Valenti

Look. I know what this is.

It's chaos magic wrapped in astrology wrapped in extremely attractive fae boys doing increasingly inadvisable things. The Vega twins are a mess. The Heirs are worse. The entire situation is one long delicious slow-burn catastrophe, and every single chapter ends with something happening that makes you absolutely furious in the best way and you read the next one immediately at eleven-thirty at night when you were supposed to be asleep.

I'm not embarrassed. Some books break you open through philosophy and some do it through pure, uncut fun and the frank acknowledgment that yearning is a legitimate human experience that deserves to take up space on the page.

Zodiac Academy gave me permission to write the way I actually want to write — all the longing and the crackling tension and the enemies who are clearly going to end up together and the emotional stakes that feel bigger than logic can explain. I'd been apologising for that instinct. These books told me to stop. I did.

A Tongue So Sweet and Deadly — Sophie St Germain

I'm not entirely sure I'm over this one. I read it. I cried. Not politely — not the dignified single tear rolling down a cheekbone situation. The ugly kind. The kind where you have to put the book face-down and just... sit with it for a while and wonder what exactly has happened to you and whether you need a cup of tea or a therapist or both.

There may have been a mini breakdown. I'm not ruling it out.

This is the highest praise I can give a book. If it can take something that lives inside you — something you thought was safely filed away under I've processed this — and pull it out into the light and make you feel it again, new and raw and real, then it's done its job. Fair warning: this book will emotionally ambush you. Go in with snacks and a plan.

Michael Dransfield

I came to Dransfield the way you come to most Australian poets: sideways, late, through someone else's grief.

He died at twenty-four. He spent most of his short life writing poems that felt like transmissions from a frequency no one else could quite tune into — raw and strange and achingly alive. Study in Restlessness is ostensibly about being bored of poetry, and it manages to be more alive than almost any other poem about poetry I've ever read. Sea contains the line you eat ships, which is just three words and somehow contains multitudes. And Ground Zero:

wake up
look around
memorise what you see
it may be gone tomorrow
everything changes. Someday
there will be nothing but what is remembered
there may be no-one to remember it.

Keep moving
wherever you stand is ground zero
a moving target is harder to hit

I think about that last line more often than I can account for. Wherever you stand is ground zero. There's something in it that refuses to settle — a kind of urgent, gorgeous impermanence that hits differently when you're trying to write something you hope will last. Dransfield knew the world was burning. He wrote poems anyway. That feels important.

Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys

I read Jane Eyre first, like a good girl. And I loved it, like a good girl. And then I read Wide Sargasso Sea and realised I'd been reading the wrong book the whole time.

What Rhys did — taking the madwoman in the attic and giving her a name, a history, a self — is one of the most radical acts in the English literary canon. Not because it tears down Jane Eyre (it doesn't, really), but because it refuses to accept that some stories are born as background. It insists that Bertha Mason — Antoinette Cosway — is not a plot device in someone else's narrative. She is the narrative.

Every time I create a character who is supposed to be secondary, I now hear Rhys in the back of my head: and what does she see from where she stands?

Outlander — Diana Gabaldon

I will accept no criticism of Jamie Fraser. Not today, not ever.

But more than Jamie (and he is, to be clear, a literary achievement) — Gabaldon built a world where the stones are alive, where time is porous, where love is violent and tender and absolutely indifferent to the laws of physics. She made the past feel urgent and the present feel ancient.

I've been to Avebury. I stood in the circle and put my hands on one of those stones — those great silent megalithic presences — and I thought: something happened here. That feeling is what Outlander lives in permanently. And it's what sent me down a rabbit hole that is now a YA novel set in Avebury, following a girl who goes back to the building of the stones themselves.

The Stars My Destination and Lord of Light — Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny

These two don't belong in the same conversation except that they absolutely do. Both are science fiction in the way that Picasso is painting — technically correct but doing something so wild with the form that the genre almost doesn't contain them.

Both of them do the thing I love most in science fiction, which is use an utterly alien landscape to talk about the most human things imaginable — rage, transcendence, the cost of power, the difference between a god and a tyrant. If you haven't read them: clear a weekend.

Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse

And then there's this one. My all-time favourite book. Not the most technically brilliant. Not the most surprising in terms of plot. Not even, in some ways, the most useful — its wisdom doesn't translate cleanly into bullet points or actionable takeaways.

But reading Siddhartha feels like being granted entry into something. A kind of elevated clarity where the noise drops away and what remains is very simple and very large: the river. The voice of the river. The idea that everything is already here, already whole, already enough, and that the whole of a human life might be the project of learning to hear it.

I've read it at different ages and it has been a different book each time. At twenty it was philosophy. At thirty it was grief. Now it's something closer to a compass. I don't read it for the story. I read it to remember what direction I'm supposed to be facing.

Every book on this list broke something open in me. Siddhartha showed me what was inside.

The archaeology of your own influences is always the most surprising dig.

I was looking at the full moon one night, clouds nested around it, and remembered Nietzsche's eternal return.

Holy fuck, I thought. That's what I've been writing.

I'd started writing Anamnesis just to see if I could — came up with the characters, the worldbuilding, the magic system. It began as a synthesis of all the romantasy tropes I enjoyed reading — Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, Throne of Glass, and more. But it only really took off that night, standing under the moon.

I went inside and started researching the eternal return. Immediately, I found an article talking about Nietzsche's thought experiment:

"What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence...' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'"

It's from The Gay Science. And it's been living rent-free in my head ever since. It turned a trope-filled romantasy into something completely different.

I read a little Nietzsche when I was in uni. Thought I knew the shape of his philosophy. Knew the main points — died of syphilis (he didn't), cried with horses, God is Dead, got co-opted by the Nazis. Didn't love him.

I think I needed to be older and wiser before he broke me open with these pointing-out instructions.

I've finished the novel. It's long. I need to cut it back by approximately half for a publishing house to even consider it as a debut. That's where I am now.

But last night I thought: if one Nietzsche quote can help me write a 147K-word novel, what would the whole book do?

I flicked to the internet and found a YouTube video about The Gay Science. Thought I'd get the lay of the land before I dove into the book. I lasted around one minute.

Because the video started explaining what the title meant. And I discovered that I'd followed a thread from a single Nietzsche quote — the eternal return demon, the will you live this again and again — without knowing that Nietzsche himself was in conversation with the troubadours when he wrote it.

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft — The Gay Science — takes its title directly from the gai saber, the Occitan term for the troubadour art of poetry. Nietzsche was obsessed with Provençal culture, saw the troubadours as the last Europeans who'd genuinely affirmed life rather than fled from it, and the eternal return is, in many ways, his attempt to secularise and radicalise what the troubadours were doing mystically.

Then I wondered: do any of the troubadour stories map onto Anamnesis? Off I went down another rabbit hole.

Turns out that several map onto it with startling precision, and one in particular feels like it might be the mythological skeleton Anamnesis has been unconsciously building toward.

Jaufré Rudel and amor de lonh

Rudel was a 12th-century troubadour who wrote a cycle of poems about a woman he'd never met — a love from afar, across impossible distance, that he considered more real and more true than any love available to him in proximity. He eventually sailed to find her and died, according to legend, in her arms upon arrival — the moment of finding her being inseparable from the moment of ending.

The structural parallel to Riven in Anamnesis is almost exact. A love that exists across distance so vast it defies ordinary logic. A devotion that doesn't diminish with absence but calcifies into something geological. The beloved who is always just across a distance that can't be closed — except that in Anamnesis the distance is time rather than geography, and the moment of full arrival keeps being deferred by death. Riven has been sailing toward Lyre for six hundred years and keeps arriving just as she's leaving.

The Cathar connection and metempsychosis

This is where the archaeology gets genuinely interesting. The troubadours flourished in Occitania in the same period and region as Catharism, and the overlap is not coincidental. Denis de Rougemont argued in Love in the Western World that fin'amor was essentially a coded mystical practice. That the troubadour poems weren't really about a woman at all but about the soul's yearning to escape the cycle of material existence.

The Cathars believed in metempsychosis — souls trapped in matter, returning through successive lives, accumulating toward eventual liberation. De Rougemont's thesis is that the troubadour beloved is not a person but a destination: the soul's longing for its own completion, projected outward onto an impossible object of desire.

In Anamnesis, Riven literally believes this and is literally living it. The eternal return mechanism isn't metaphor — it's the actual structure of his existence. What de Rougemont describes as the unconscious theology of troubadour poetry is the explicit mythology of my book.

And I didn't even know until I finished writing it.

De Rougemont spends most of Love in the Western World on the Tristan myth, and his reading lands uncomfortably close to my own love triangle — Caelan as the principle of legitimate order, the person the beloved is structurally bound to, whose existence makes the other love feel both transgressive and inevitable. And in the troubadour alba tradition, lovers separate at dawn before the world catches them. Lyre memorising Caelan in the pre-dawn dark has this exact structure, except the night belongs to the wrong man. She's performing the alba with Caelan when the alba-feeling belongs to Riven.

But those are threads I'll pull in future essays. The parallel that matters most here is de Rougemont's central claim: that Western romantic love is structurally death-seeking. That the obstacle is not incidental to the love story but constitutive of it. That we desire most intensely what we cannot have. His phrasing: happy love has no history.

Riven's arc across the trilogy is, among other things, the story of what happens when a troubadour love is finally forced to confront happiness. Six hundred years of amor de lonh, and then the moment — in Book 2 or 3 — when the distance closes and the question becomes whether the love can survive its own fulfilment. That's a more interesting problem than the love triangle, and it's the question de Rougemont might say my whole trilogy is actually asking.

The demon's hour

What strikes me reading that first Nietzsche quote now, having written Anamnesis, is that Nietzsche frames it as a binary — curse the demon or call him a god. The test of whether you've lived well enough to want the repetition.

Riven has lived the repetition without being asked. He didn't get the choice. The demon came for him not as a hypothetical but as a fact, and the question my story is actually asking isn't Nietzsche's question — would you choose this — but the question that comes after it: what does a person become when the choice is made for them, across six hundred years, and they keep showing up anyway?

That's perhaps a harder question than Nietzsche posed. And definitely a more human one.

Because the quote has a hidden assumption — that the person being asked is the same person each time. Nietzsche's eternal return is a thought experiment about a single consciousness confronting infinite repetition. But Lyre isn't the same person each cycle. She's born new, without the memory, without the weight. The demon's terms don't apply to her the way they apply to Riven. He carries all of it. She carries none of it.

So Riven is the one cursing the demon and calling him a god simultaneously, every single time. Six hundred years of both at once. That's not Nietzsche's binary. That's something the quote gestures toward but doesn't have the narrative architecture to explore.

I think maybe it needed a novel.

The other thing worth sitting with: the demon steals into your loneliest loneliness. Not your joy. Not your triumph. Your loneliest loneliness. Nietzsche understood that the eternal return only becomes a real question when you're alone enough to hear it clearly. And my novel's coda — Riven alone, watching Lyre sleep, interrogating whether Caelan's intervention was accident or design — is precisely that. The demon's hour. The loneliest possible moment to ask: is this divine or is this a curse?

And Riven's answer, six hundred years in, is still: both. Always both.

That ambivalence is everything. Nietzsche wanted a clean yes — the amor fati, the love of fate, the full-throated affirmation. Riven can't give that and wouldn't be honest if he did. He keeps coming back not because he's answered the question but because he can't stop asking it.

That's the troubadours, too, in the end. Not resolution. Just the song, sung again. And again. The eternal return of the story of our lives.

P.S. I keep coming back to the image at the top of this post. The moon nested in cloud like a pupil in an iris. A single eye looking down. And I think about a consciousness vast enough to fracture itself into pieces just so it could experience longing — so there could be a distance to cross, a song to sing, a lover to sail toward. Happy love has no history. Maybe that's not a tragedy. Maybe that's the reason for the fracture.

Here's something I can't unsee.

In almost every romantic triangle in Western literature, the transgressive lover has dark hair. The legitimate one is golden.

Lancelot: dark. Arthur: golden. Tristan: dark. King Mark: fair. Heathcliff: dark. Edgar Linton: blonde. Rhysand: dark. Tamlin: golden.

Riven: dark. Caelan: golden.

I didn't plan this. I wrote what felt right and only later realised that "what felt right" was a pattern eight centuries old. Which is unsettling, and also probably the point. The grammar of desire is older than any of us, and it teaches itself through every story we've ever loved without announcing itself as curriculum.

The oldest love triangle in the room

The Arthurian legend is where the template crystallises. Arthur is the legitimate king — chosen, crowned, the principle of order and duty. Lancelot is the greatest knight who ever lived and also the man whose love brings Camelot down. The story doesn't condemn him. It mourns him. It mourns Guinevere. It mourns the fact that the truest love is the one that destroys the kingdom, and it can't decide whether that's tragedy or inevitability.

Malory presents both things as completely true and irreconcilable. Lancelot is the best of them. Lancelot is the ruin of them. Both at once. No resolution offered.

Tristan and Iseult is the satellite myth that takes this structure and strips it down to its essentials. Denis de Rougemont, in Love in the Western World, argued that the Tristan myth isn't really a love story at all. It's a story about the need for obstacles. That Tristan doesn't actually want Iseult — he wants the longing. The love potion isn't the cause of their love but the excuse for it: a way of saying we have no choice when the truth is that the impossibility of the love is precisely what makes it feel absolute.

King Mark isn't a villain. That's crucial. He's the principle of legitimate order, the person Iseult is structurally bound to, whose existence makes the other love feel both transgressive and inevitable. If he were monstrous, Iseult's choice would be easy. The structure requires him to be reasonable, even sympathetic. The obstacle has to be real or the transgression costs nothing.

De Rougemont's central claim: happy love has no history. Western romantic love, he argues, is structurally death-seeking. The obstacle is not incidental to the love story but constitutive of it. Consummated love would end the narrative. The distance is the point.

A Court of Tristan and Iseult

Which brings me to Sarah J. Maas and A Court of Mist and Fury.

I loved ACOMAF. Loved it in the way you love something that lands on a bruise you didn't know you had. And I didn't understand why until I started pulling this thread.

The structure is Tristan, almost exactly. Feyre opens the book already bound to Tamlin — the marriage made, the obligation established, the legitimate claim in place. Tamlin is King Mark in every functional detail. Not cruel in the way villains are cruel. Possessive, suffocating, well-intentioned, and structurally in the way. His love is real and it is the wrong kind of love and the story needs him to be both.

Rhysand is Tristan. The darkness, the reputation for cruelty that masks something more complicated, the bond that exists before either of them is willing to name it. And the mating bond — the mystical compulsion — is the love potion. Not the cause of the love but the alibi for it. The thing that lets them both say this isn't a choice while it very obviously is.

De Rougemont would recognise it instantly.

The forest of Velaris

In the Tristan legend there's a sustained sequence where the lovers flee into the forest of Morois and live outside society — outside the court, outside obligation, in a liminal space that belongs to neither of them. The impossible love becomes temporarily possible. It's the time outside of time.

Velaris is the forest of Morois. The hidden city, the found family, the world beneath the world that Tamlin doesn't know exists. Feyre and Rhysand exist there outside their respective obligations — she is technically Tamlin's, he is technically her captor — and the city becomes the space where the real relationship forms, protected from the daylight world that would forbid it.

Even the concealment maps directly. Rhysand maintains the performance of cruelty for the outside world, the same way Tristan maintains the performance of loyal knight, while something entirely different happens in private.

Where Maas breaks the myth

Here's where it gets interesting. The Tristan myth, as de Rougemont reads it, is death-seeking. The love can only be fulfilled in dissolution — Tristan dies, Iseult dies over his body. The obstacle is never removed. It's transcended through ending. Happy love has no history, and the myth proves it by making sure the love never gets to be happy.

Maas refuses this. ACOMAF ends not in dissolution but in consummation and survival. The mating bond accepted, Tamlin's claim relinquished, the lovers in the daylight together. Which is exactly what de Rougemont says the troubadour tradition structurally cannot do.

The cynical reading is that Maas takes the Tristan architecture because it generates enormous romantic tension and then defuses it because the genre requires a happy ending. The more generous reading — and the one I believe — is that she's rewriting the myth. Taking the troubadour structure that was always implicitly death-seeking and asking what happens if the woman survives and chooses and gets to keep the thing she chose.

That's a feminist intervention in a very old story, whether Maas intended it as one or not.

The question she didn't ask

But there's a question Maas sidesteps. The one de Rougemont says is fundamental: can the love survive becoming possible?

She avoids it by making the obstacle external and removable. Tamlin is the problem. Once Tamlin is no longer the problem, the love gets to be straightforwardly happy. The distance closes and the story ends, and we never find out whether Feyre and Rhysand's love can bear its own fulfilment because the book doesn't ask.

This isn't a criticism. It's a genre observation. Romantasy does this. It has to. The reader comes for the tension and the yearning and the slow burn and the finally — and the finally has to land like a cathedral bell or the contract is broken.

But it means the deepest question the Tristan myth asks — whether love that was sharpened by impossibility can survive in ordinary air — remains unanswered.

I'm writing Anamnesis partly to answer it.

The troubadour's disguise

There's one more thing worth saying about romantasy and it's something I keep coming back to.

The troubadour poems looked like simple love songs. That was the strategy. The mystical architecture was invisible to anyone who wasn't looking for it. The Cathars could pass them around in plain sight because all the uninitiated saw was a man yearning for a woman.

Romantasy works the same way. The surface is accessible — magical academy, love triangle, beautiful dangerous men making terrible choices, the heroine discovering her power. It's shelved in fantasy romance. It has covers with swords and shadows and the occasional shirtless torso. Nobody expects Nietzsche.

But underneath? De Rougemont's entire thesis lives in ACOMAF whether Maas put it there consciously or not. The question of whether love requires obstacles. The forest outside society. The potion that isn't really about compulsion. The golden one and the shadow and the woman caught between them, which is a story we've been telling for eight hundred years in the same colours every time.

People underestimate this genre. I think that's a feature, not a bug.

The best disguise for something profound has always been something beautiful.

The troubadours knew it. Maas knows it, at some level. I'm counting on it.

In troubadour poetry, the alba is a dawn song. Lovers separating before the world catches them. The night as the only safe space for what cannot exist in daylight. A watchman cries the hour, the birds begin, and someone has to leave before they're seen.

It's one of the most emotionally precise forms in Western literature. The entire weight of the poem rests on a single structural fact: the love is real and the morning is coming and those two things cannot coexist.

I didn't know any of this when I wrote Chapter 49 of Anamnesis.

In that chapter, Lyre lies in the pre-dawn dark memorising Caelan. The shape of him. The warmth. The bells haven't rung yet but they're coming. She knows she's about to walk out to meet the mountain, and something in her is already grieving the leaving before it happens.

It's an alba. Structurally, emotionally, beat for beat. Except the night belongs to the wrong man.

The alba-feeling — that ache of stolen time running out — belongs to Riven. The love that can't exist in daylight, the one the world won't allow, the one that requires darkness and secrecy and the particular tenderness of borrowed hours. That's Riven's register. Caelan is the daylight. He's warmth without urgency, safety without cost. He's not the love you have to hide.

But Lyre performs the alba with Caelan anyway. She gives him the form that belongs to someone else. And the displacement is doing something very precise: the shape promises one thing and delivers another. Which is exactly what Caelan himself does throughout the book.

The demon visits Lyre

In my first essay I wrote about Nietzsche's eternal return — the demon who steals into your loneliest loneliness and asks: would you live this life again, exactly as it was, for eternity?

I said then that Riven was the one living the question. And he is. Six hundred years of returning. But I've been thinking about it since, and I've realised something that changes the whole shape of the story.

Riven has already answered.

He may not know it. He interrogates it in the coda, sitting alone, watching Lyre sleep, asking himself whether what he feels is love or the habit of loving. But the evidence of his existence is the answer. Six hundred years of showing up. That's not ambivalence. That's a man who has, through sheer accumulation of action, said god. He keeps coming back. The body has decided even if the mind hasn't caught up.

Lyre is the one who gets the demon's visit in the form Nietzsche actually describes. She wakes into each life without the memory. No weight. No accumulated centuries of grief and devotion. She just lives. Falls into the same patterns. Finds the same people. Moves toward the same fire without knowing it's been lit before.

But in this cycle, something is different. The seal is cracking. Scythe is named. The memories are surfacing. For the first time she's being handed something close to the demon's actual proposition — not the thought experiment but the lived reality of it. This life as you now live it. The same succession and sequence.

And the question the trilogy is building toward is whether, fully knowing, she chooses it anyway.

The one who could have walked away

This reframes the entire love triangle.

Caelan isn't just the wrong choice or the betrayer or the villain-in-progress. He's the alternative to the demon's question. He's the life that wouldn't repeat. The new thing, the clean start, the love without the weight of centuries behind it. Choosing Riven means choosing the pattern. Choosing Caelan would have meant stepping out of it.

Which means the triangle isn't really a triangle at all. It's the demon's binary wearing a different costume.

Curse him or call him god. Choose the pattern or refuse it. Riven or Caelan.

But here's the thing I keep circling back to: the demon or the god only means something if refusing was real. If Caelan was never a genuine option — if he was always just the obstacle, always just the thing in the way of the destined love — then Lyre's choice is no choice at all. It's inevitability wearing the costume of agency.

The trilogy needs her to have genuinely wanted to step out of the cycle. Needs the reader to feel what it would have cost — the relief of it, the ordinariness of it, the love that doesn't come pre-loaded with six hundred years of grief. Otherwise, the final yes to Riven is just a genre convention and not a philosophical act.

Not Guinevere

There's a version of this story where Lyre is Guinevere or Iseult — the woman at the centre of the triangle who is desired by both men and must choose between them. Acted upon more than acting. The beautiful still point around which the male arcs revolve.

Lyre isn't that. Can't be.

Guinevere doesn't get the demon's question. Iseult doesn't get it either. They are objects of love, not subjects of the philosophical proposition the love encodes. Their agency is limited to choosing between the men. Lyre's agency extends to choosing the shape of reality itself — whether the pattern continues, whether the cycle holds, whether consciousness stays fractured or wakes up.

She's a genuinely new woman in a very old story. And that matters — not just for the novel but for the genre. Romantasy is full of fierce heroines. Women who fight, who rule, who refuse to be diminished. But the fierceness is usually expressed through power — through what they can do. Lyre's defining act isn't a display of power. It's a display of knowledge. The moment she sees the whole pattern — the cycles, the grief, the cost, the beauty — and says yes, this, again, mine.

That's not Guinevere choosing between knights. That's a woman standing in front of eternity and answering it.

The song that answers itself

The troubadours never resolved the alba. The form depends on irresolution. The lovers separate. The dawn comes. The poem ends in the leaving because that's where the feeling is sharpest.

In the last essay I wrote about de Rougemont's claim that happy love has no history. The troubadours seemed to believe this. Their entire formal structure was built on longing sustained, never fulfilled.

But there's another way to read it. What if the alba isn't about the impossibility of love in daylight? What if it's about the courage required to walk into the morning anyway?

The troubadours never wrote that version. Their form couldn't hold it.

Mine has to.

Because the ending of Anamnesis — not this book, but the trilogy — is Lyre walking into the dawn. Not fleeing from it. Not grieving what the morning takes. Choosing it, with everything it costs, because she knows now what the night was for.

The alba that finally answers itself.

On my first day at the school I'd won a scholarship to attend, a boy cornered me at the lockers and asked if it was true. Had I really won it?

Yes, I said.

He looked at me for a moment. "Huh," he said. "You don't look smart."

I was a teenager. I didn't have a response. I just absorbed it the way you absorb things at that age — not as one person's thoughtless comment but as information about how the world works. About what was safe to show and what wasn't.

I got very good at not seeming smart.

In Anamnesis, Lyre spends nine years in the Ward before the story begins. It's an institution designed to contain and suppress — a place where the children of the Accord are kept manageable, kept useful, kept small. She enters it young and emerges at eighteen having learned the essential survival skill of her world: don't be too much.

Be affable. Be supportive. Be whoever the room needs you to be. Hold the rest in abeyance.

I wrote that without knowing I was writing autobiography.

The child who was other

I was the child whose inner world didn't match the room she was standing in. Not deliberately. Not dramatically. Just — the things that consumed me weren't the things that consumed the people around me. I lived in my head in a way that didn't translate easily, and I learned early that the particular shape of my thinking made people uncomfortable when I showed too much of it.

So I adjusted. The way children do. Not with resentment — with adaptation. You learn to read the room. You learn which version of yourself is welcome. You learn that too much intensity, too much interiority, too many questions about things nobody else is asking about — these are forms of disruption in spaces that didn't ask for them.

The Ward teaches Lyre the same thing. Not through cruelty, exactly, but through the steady pressure of an institution that needs her to be legible. Categorisable. Less.

The fathers

My biological father left when I was three. Divorce. He has blonde hair. The man my mother remarried — the one I called Dad, the one who stayed — has dark brown hair.

I met my biological father again at eighteen. It was an indelible moment. Not dramatic in the way reunions are dramatic in films. Just — the fact of him. Standing there. The golden one who left, returned. And me, old enough to understand what the leaving had meant but young enough for it to still rearrange something fundamental.

I didn't plan for Caelan to have golden hair and Riven to have dark hair. I didn't sit down and think, I'll encode my childhood in a love triangle. I just wrote what felt right.

The golden one who offers warmth and then removes it. The dark one who stays. Who keeps coming back. Six hundred years of showing up even when it costs him everything.

The mathematics of who stays and who goes.

I've been writing about this my entire life, apparently. I just didn't know it had a colour scheme.

In my first essay I wrote about Nietzsche's eternal return — the demon who steals into your loneliest loneliness and asks whether you'd live your life again, exactly as it was, forever. I've been sitting with that question since. And what I've realised is that I've been answering it since I was three years old.

Not consciously. Not philosophically. A three-year-old doesn't have the language for demons or gods or the love of fate. But the question was there, in the shape of it — in the fact of a father leaving, in the rearrangement of a world, in the first lesson that love is not a permanent condition. Would you choose this? Would you choose this again? The demon doesn't wait until you're ready. He comes when he comes.

And every day after that is an answer, whether you know it or not. Every morning you get up and keep going is a quiet, inarticulate yes.

Realising this broke me open. Not the way Nietzsche's quote broke me open the night I stood under the moon — that was revelation, electric, a door swinging wide. This was different. Slower. More painful. The kind of breaking that happens when you see the pattern of your own life clearly for the first time and can't unsee it.

Being broken open is not comfortable. It's not the clean, luminous transformation the self-help books promise. It's messy and it aches and there are days when you'd rather have the sealed version of yourself back, the one that didn't know why she wrote the things she wrote.

But you can't write the next thing from inside the sealed version. You can't get to what comes after without going through. And what comes after — the slow, deliberate work of putting yourself back together in a different configuration, one that knows what it's made of — that's where the real writing lives. Not in the breaking. In the rebuilding. In the choice to reassemble with your eyes open.

Lyre does this too. The whole trilogy is a woman being broken open by knowledge she didn't ask for, and then choosing — not the ignorance, not the sealed life — but the harder thing. The reassembled self. The one that knows the cost and stays anyway.

I wrote that arc before I understood I was living it.

The university

At university I learned to perform. Not dishonestly — I genuinely wanted to support the people around me, genuinely enjoyed being the one who helped, who listened, who made the room easier. But it was also camouflage. The affable, supportive version of me was real. She just wasn't all of it.

The rest — the part that was reading Nietzsche and thinking about the structure of longing and quietly building a cosmology in the back of her mind — that part waited. Through the degree. Through the PhD. Through the years after.

Lyre does the same thing. Survives the Ward by being useful, being legible, being the version of herself the institution can process. And all the while Scythe waits in the dark. Patient. Ancient. Knowing his time will come.

The PhD was my first crack in the seal. The moment the thoughts I'd been holding in abeyance were not just permitted but required. Someone handed me a framework and said: think as hard as you can about how stories work. And I did. For years. Pulled apart myth and meaning and archetype until the thinking became instinct, until it went underground and became the water I swam in.

Then I sat down to write a romantasy novel and my instincts reached straight down to the 12th-century Occitan poets without asking my permission.

The book is the bonding.

The reunion

I saw that boy recently. School reunion. We're both in our fifties now. He walked up to me and told me he remembered me being so good at writing, and had I done anything with it?

I told him about the novel. He hadn't heard of romantasy and looked perplexed.

I enjoyed that.

Not vindictively. Just — the quiet pleasure of being underestimated by someone who once told you you didn't look smart, and knowing that the thing you've built contains Nietzsche and the troubadours and a complete cosmological system expressed through a love triangle and a magical beast, and it doesn't matter whether he sees it or not. It was never for him.

He did open the door for me once, though. Literally. At the HSC results party, when I'd become dux. He was the one standing at the entrance. Opened the door. Congratulated me.

The pattern has a sense of structure.

The disguise

I wrote in my last essay about the troubadours and their strategy: hiding mystical architecture inside what looked like simple love songs. The uninitiated saw a man pining for a woman. The initiated saw the soul's yearning for its own completion.

You don't look smart turned out to be the best possible training for a troubadour.

Because here's what the Ward taught me, the real Ward, the one I lived in: how to build something vast inside a form that doesn't threaten anyone. How to make the surface legible and the depths patient. How to write a book that works perfectly as a magical academy romance with a slow-burn love triangle and a magnificent telepathic beast — and also works as a meditation on eternal return, on the archaeology of the self, on the question of whether you curse the demon or call him god.

The boy who said I didn't look smart was right, in a way he'll never understand. I don't look smart. Neither does the book. That's the whole point.

P.S. Lyre gets to answer the demon's question in full knowledge. She looks at the pattern — the cycles, the grief, the beauty, the cost — and says yes. This. Again. Mine.

I wrote that for her. But I think I also wrote it for the girl at the school lockers who learned to hold a world in abeyance. She doesn't have to anymore.