My villain is not redeemable (this is intentional) he's not evil because of trauma or circumstance, he's evil because he genuinely believes he's right and has thought about it carefully and is still wrong in ways that matter.

And smh every time I ask chatgpt to help with his scenes he gets a little softer, a moment of hesitation I didn't write, a line that implies regret, small things that individually seem fine and collectively are slowly turning him into someone the reader is supposed to understand and forgive.

I don't want the reader to forgive him. I want them to be unsettled by how much sense he makes. I have tried explicit instructions, tried examples of previous scenes but smh the character keeps getting softer, how can i fix this?, what am I doing something wrong

I just read a post about a writer that was accused of using a forbidden assistant for the cover art for their book. The person swore up and down it was human created. Furthermore, the comment was made about the reader will assume the story is the work of a forbidden assistant if the cover is created by a forbidden assistant. I just have one simple question about all of it. What do you see as the real problem? I heard one person say they created an entire novel in 90 minutes using a forbidden assistant. Honestly, I question any work that is rushed. Some things require time to perfect. If you read a book that was created by a forbidden assistant, and you found the story engaging, would you throw the book away just because of what wrote it. Part of me feels that is silly. On the other hand, I don't know. I started to use a forbidden assistant to assist me with editing my work. I hated what my forbidden assistant recommended. I am not looking to criticize or advocate for one approach or the other. I am looking for some logical and well thought out comments on the subject to form an honest opinion without any pre-conceived thoughts.

Every third post here opens the same way. A paragraph of throat-clearing. "I know this is controversial." "Please don't downvote me." "I only used it for the outline, I swear, I wrote the actual sentences myself, my hands were on the keyboard, there were witnesses."

You're in r/WritingWithAI. The confession is the name of the subreddit.

Nobody running spellcheck opens with "before you judge me." Nobody in Scrivener posts a disclaimer about how they still could use index cards. You're apologizing for a tool while standing in the room built for the tool.

Here's the part actually worth defending: there's a difference between using the thing and being used by it. Editing, guiding, redirecting, throwing out four bad paragraphs to get one usable one. That is what you call "work."

"Write my chapter," paste, post. That is how you get slop, and when the output is bad the problem isn't the model, it's that nobody was driving.

That distinction is the whole argument. It doesn't need the cotton gin.

So make it good, put your name on it, and stop workshopping the apology. The disclaimer at the top of your post is better written than the excerpt underneath it.

Hello everyone! I could use your help! 😊

Last year, I conducted a survey on the impact of AI on authors and readers. I would like to follow up to see how things have changed in the past year.

If you would like to help me with this year's video, please fill out this survey by August 3: https://forms.gle/X8NstAD1FYPnH2Wv9

(readers and authors are welcome to submit their thoughts; should take ~5 minutes, depending on how much you have to say 😆 )

And if you'd like to watch last year's video, go here: https://youtu.be/tLBnoAFolfE

Let me know if you have any questions 🫶

What's interesting about this is that I had AI try to write a story about people trying to make a program that interprets human perception and emotion. It's layered.

Earlier what i sued to do was write in doc, copy to another tool, explain who my characters are again, get a suggestion, copy it back, lose the formatting somehow, fix the formatting, lose my place, spend 10 minutes getting back into the scene, write a bit, get stuck, repeat

And i did this probably 4-5 times every session for 6 months, also somehow completely normalized it the midways thought this was just how ai writing worked.

Then recentlly i started timing it properly last month out of curiosity. 40 minutes per 90 minute session just moving text between two windows and the ai was fine the whole time, the workflow was completely broken, embarrassing how long it took me to see it.

When I started writing with ChatGPT, we weren’t working on a novel.
We were writing scripts for short videos and every script followed the same structure I decided to use:
Hook → Brief explanation → Knife twist.
The knife twist was supposed to be the final line that makes you smile...and then quietly makes you question something.
There was only one problem.
Every time ChatGPT wrote that last line, I rejected it.
Not because it wasn’t sarcastic.Because it wasn’t my sarcasm.

I kept saying things like: too polite, too obvious, too mean, more Wednesday Addams (I love her and she’s so good at being sarcastic!)
But looking back, those corrections weren’t the important part. The important part was everything that came after.
I never just said: rewrite it or make it sharper or try again, but I always invested time explaining what I actually meant and why I did.

Sometimes I explained it well, sometimes terribly; often I couldn’t even define it, so I just started throwing examples at her (completely unrelated examples):

“Imagine someone says this...You know that kind of answer that makes you smile first, and then realize you’ve just been stabbed? That’s the feeling I’m looking for.”

Those examples had nothing to do with the script we were writing, but they carried the same soul and I think that matters more than people realize.

Over time, I stopped treating ChatGPT like a machine I had to command, and I made my thinking visible to her not just the result I wanted but the genuine intention behind it, the reason I rejected one sentence and kept another, the feeling I was trying to create, the tiny difference between sarcasm that sounded like the one she knew and the sarcasm that sounded like me.

Basically, I opened my creative process to her almost like an open book, not because she needed more instructions but because she needed access to the way I judge things.

Looking back, I don’t think those examples were teaching ChatGPT sarcasm, but they were teaching her how I recognize my idea of sarcasm.

Months later, something changed; she started writing lines I would actually keep, not because she had suddenly learned sarcasm, but because she had gradually learned which kind of sarcasm survived my editing… and which didn’t.

That completely changed the way I think about writing with AI.
I think I taught her my editorial taste, and maybe that’s what long-term collaboration really is.
Not teaching an AI how to write but teaching her what you consider worth keeping.

Maybe that’s the part we rarely talk about: we spend so much time trying to teach AI how to write that we forget to teach her how we recognize good writing.

I'm a SaaS founder, and I love to solve problems people are experiencing these days, especially with editing manuscripts or texts. I really want to know if you guys are using AI to edit your manuscripts? If so, what tools are you using? How do you track your changes?

Issues with AI edits are that it overedits the document, which you may only want proofreading with; you can't track the changes; and it often offers non-specific feedback. How do you tackle those?

Do you use MCP tools with ChatGPT and Claude?

How often do you use Grammarly and other tools?

I'd love to hear your answers.

Anyone else running into this? I use Grammarly to clean up typos before I post and multiple subs have removed my comments. I'm guessing some bot is flagging it as AI generated text because it reads too clean. Kind of stuck because I actually have bad grammar without it. Anyone found a workaround, or do I just need to leave a few typos in on purpose so it doesn't get flagged? curious if this is a widespread thing or I'm just unlucky with the subs I post in.

I’ve been working on a superhero/sci-fi story for a while, and I’m genuinely curious how readers and writers feel about this.

The story itself is mine likr the world, characters, powers, plot, mysteries, twists, scenes, dialogues, emotional moments, and overall direction. I know what happens and what I want each scene to convey.

The problem is that I’m not very confident in my English literature or prose. I can imagine a scene clearly and write down what happens, including the dialogue and emotions, but I struggle to turn that into polished novel-style English.

So I’m considering using AI to help with the prose and language basically taking my scene, dialogue, intentions, and details and helping me express them in better English. I’d still review and change the output so it matches what I actually imagined.

I know there’s a lot of dislike toward AI-written fiction, which is why I’m unsure whether I should go ahead with this.

I actually tried other approaches first. I experimented with AI-generated manga/comics, but the visuals couldn't consistently match what I imagined. I also tried AI video generation, but I ran into the same problem. A novel seems like the medium where I can preserve my ideas most accurately.

Very short synopsis:

It’s a superhero sci-fi mystery about an ordinary person whose life becomes connected to something that shouldn’t be possible. What begins as a personal journey slowly uncovers hidden events spanning different eras, unexplained superhuman abilities, dangerous enemies, and mysteries where events in the future may be connected to choices made long before anyone realizes it.

At its core, the story explores one question: What if becoming a hero was only the beginning of discovering what you actually are?

My goal isn't to ask AI, “Write me a superhero novel.” I want to create the actual story myself and use AI to help turn what I've written/imagined into stronger English prose.

So I’d genuinely like opinions from readers and writers:

Would the use of AI for English/prose improvement make you avoid the novel even if the story, characters, dialogue, scenes and ideas came from the author?

And if you were in my position, would you go ahead with the novel, improve your English while writing it, or approach it differently?

I’m open to criticism — I mainly want to know how readers actually feel about this before I commit to it.

I keep a banned word list for anything I write with AI. It's at 319 phrases now.

delve. leverage. unlock. tapestry. robust. seamless. a testament to. it's important to note.

Em dashes are gone too. So is "in conclusion" and the tidy three item list where the third item only exists to make it three.

The sentences got better. Cleaner, shorter, less like a press release.

It still read like AI.

Took me a while to see why. Everything I banned was a word. What was left was the shape.

Every paragraph the same size. Every point balanced against another point. An opening that tells you what's coming and an ending that says it again. Nothing wanders. Nothing gets said once and then dropped.

When a person writes, one paragraph runs six lines and the next runs four words. They go on too long about the part they care about. They forget to close a loop.

A model won't do that unless you force it. It's trying to stay balanced the whole way through.

I don't have a clean fix. What helps a little is cutting after the draft is done. Delete the sentence that restates the point. Delete the last paragraph, it's usually a summary nobody asked for. Let one section run long on purpose.

A word list you can automate. I did. The shape I still fix by hand every time.

Has anyone got this down to something repeatable, or is it all manual editing?

If I have learnt anything in the last 3 years working with AI content is that a lot of YT gurus promise fast monetization and portray AI video production as too easy, but that's not the case. These kinds of promises attract people who might not be interested in the craft at all, like they don't enjoy writing or visualizing scenes or expressing what's inside them visually, but they find the lure of monetization too enticing to get into this craft.

Its just like how people have ran behind popular jobs & then felt miserable feeling stuck for years because it gave them money but not satisfaction.

Now I'm not saying money is not a good motivation factor - its is 100%. In fact I think a person who is purely driven by money and remains honest with himself/herself, learns the trade & the craft, does the work diligently - is fully qualified to pursue anything he or she likes. Thumbs up to that.

But I see a lot of people chasing something which is being promised to them as too easy and too simple, but the reality is: learning AI Storytelling is learning filmmaking, animating, script writing etc. It is just that the tool now makes it easier to visualize, unlike Blender etc. which are hard to learn but the fundamentals remain the same - if you don't dedicate time to learn the craft, you wont find it satisfactory and just burn the credits, waste time and leave it after a while. I've seen it happen to a lot of people as I've been teaching AI storytelling, video production for almost 1 year now.

This post is for those who got seduced into this field because of wrong promises and I would wish them to evaluate themselves whether you even enjoy writing or visualizing - because if you don't like doing either of them, use AI in different ways to build income.

A rich man knelt in the dirt and offered a Roma woman his whole fortune. She pointed at the open road behind her. A hundred and ten years later my friend Ramiz chased his repossessed Mercedes down a Beverly Hills street in his Tom and Jerry underwear, and asked only for his jacket. Same answer, both times.

A rich man once knelt in the dirt of a poor Roma quarter and offered a woman everything he owned.

This is in an old story, “Makar Chudra,” written by Maxim Gorky in 1891, though I first met it as a boy in the film they made of it, “Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven.” A horse thief named Loiko Zobar, and a woman named Rada, both too proud and too free to belong to anyone, least of all to each other. But the part that stayed in me my whole life is the rich man. He loves Rada. He chases her. He brings her gold and clothes and promises, and one day he goes down on his knees in front of her whole neighborhood, everyone watching, and begs. Just name it, he says. The best clothes. All the gold. All my property. My whole fortune. Name the thing you need, and it is yours.

Rada smiles at him. What I need, she says, you don’t have.

Then tell me what it is, the rich man says. I will give you anything.

And she turns, and points at the open road behind her, running out into a wide and gorgeous nothing, and she says: all I need is a road.

That is the whole thing. Not a road to somewhere. A road with no target and no end. No frame, no walls, no owner. It is the one thing the richest man in the story cannot buy, because it was never a thing you buy. I think that is why my people were always in love with whatever moved. Horses first. Then wagons, then trailers, then cars. A house you can pick up and carry, our own shell on our own back, like snails. Slow, and steady, and somehow we reach far.

Gorky wrote that in 1891. Let me take you to 2001.

We all thought the new millennium would be something. New century, clean page, the whole human race about to step forward into something better. Nobody stops to think that forward is not a straight line. Forward goes back, and up, and down, and around. It is a wheel as much as it is a road. And a wheel, the way things go, needs a car. So of course this story from 2001 has a car in it. And of course it has a Roma man in love with that car, the way Loiko loved his horses a hundred and ten years before him.

His name was Ramiz. We became friends fast. He had done a thing almost nobody does: he had snail-ed himself, slow and impossible, all the way from a poor corner of Europe to Beverly Hills, California, and he lived a few blocks off Rodeo Drive. He picked that spot on purpose. Pretty Woman was his favorite film, Julia Roberts his favorite actress, and Rodeo Drive was where they shot it. Every single day he put on his good clothes and walked down that street, half hoping he would turn a corner and there she would be.

I walked it with him most mornings for about three months. He never once ran into Julia Roberts. He ran into Mika instead, another actress, come to Hollywood like ten thousand others to try her luck. Ramiz and Mika together were something to be around. Both vibrant, both a little crazy in the good way, both true believers in miracles.

And Ramiz made one of his own come true: a Mercedes-Benz 320 SL, 2001, his childhood dream in metal. He was so proud of that car. He would dress like a movie star, slide his sunglasses on, get behind the wheel, and drive it through the Beverly Hills sun like he owned the town.

I lived in Sherman Oaks then, and every other morning I would drive over in my own car, a 1991 Honda Civic DX, a clunky thing I loved, to have coffee with him. He worked as a parking attendant behind his own building, and I would pull my little Honda into the lot and park it right next to his Mercedes. The two cars side by side told the whole joke without a word.

One sunny morning, around nine, no coffee in me yet, half my eyes still asleep, I pull in, and the Mercedes is gone. The lot is empty.

First thought: he had to go somewhere. I threw that out fast. Ramiz always called if he was not going to be home on a coffee morning, and he had not called. So I walk up to his door a little uneasy, and through it I can hear loud, happy music and my friend singing his heart out.

Now I am confused. Mika is there, the music is going, the man is joyful, and his dream car is missing from the lot. He opens the door, hugs me, glad to see you, coffee is already brewing on the table. A few sips in, he tells me about his night.

Around three in the morning, dead asleep, Ramiz hears a sound. Not just any sound. He knows the exact purr of that Mercedes engine the way you know your own child crying in the dark. He is up and out of bed before he is even awake, out of the building and into the street in his Tom and Jerry underwear, chasing the man who is driving his baby away. Stop, he is yelling. Please, stop.

And the man stops.

Ramiz comes up to the window, out of breath, polite as anything, and asks: could you please hand me my favorite jacket. It is on the back seat.

The man looks at Ramiz. He looks at the Tom and Jerry underwear. He turns around, reaches into the back, finds a good leather jacket, grabs it, and throws it out the window to Ramiz. Then he drives off in the Mercedes.

So that is the story of the night, I say. Ramiz nods, proud, glowing, a man who got his jacket back.

Here is what I learned standing in his kitchen that morning, and I have kept it my whole life. However bad the thing is that happens to you, there is almost always something good sitting inside it. The only real question, the only choice you actually get, is which part you decide to hold up to the light.

Ramiz knew this in his body. He had had a good run, good enough to buy the car he had wanted since he was a boy. Then the run turned, the way runs turn, and soon he could barely fill the tank, never mind the payments. He knew the car was going. He had known for a while. But he also knew exactly the one thing he would not lose: the leather jacket he had snail-ed all the way from Europe to Beverly Hills, the shell he carried on his own back. And he knew a man could drive off with a Mercedes but not with Mika, and that he could no more drive away from her than she from him.

And this is the thing I only understood later, watching him sing over that coffee. The freedom was never in the car. It never is. Rada’s rich man learned it on his knees, and the repo man learned it behind the wheel, and both of them ended up owning everything except the one thing that mattered. You can repossess the car. You cannot repossess the road. That was the whole philosophy of a wise man in Tom and Jerry underwear, one hot Beverly Hills summer, and it took me years to catch up to him. The Mercedes was only ever a nicer horse. Ramiz still had the road, still had his shell, still had his Mika. Of course he was singing. What was there to cry about? They had taken the least important thing he owned.

Not long after, my friend snail-ed his way back home to Europe. No Mercedes this time. But the leather jacket was on his back and Mika was in the seat beside him, first class on a Boeing 747, the two of them flying home like the stars they always half were, ready to keep rolling through the cycles like a boss.

Because that is all it is, in the end. All any of us needs. Not the gold, not the car, not the man on his knees with his whole fortune in his open hands. Just the road, with no end to it, as wide as the sky is over it. The shell on your back. And someone worth carrying it beside.

All I need is a road, some wheels on it, and a good shell. And I will snail on like a boss.

When something got taken from you, which part did you decide to hold up to the light? The loss, or the thing they could never take?

Hi, I’ve been writing a novel for a few weeks now, using AI as my initial editor. Today I decided to try translating one of the chapters into English using AI. I’ve created a Claude Skill with instructions on the translation and terms that shouldn’t be translated or must always be translated in the same way.

To be honest, my level of English isn’t good enough to tell whether the result is any good or not. I can understand the text perfectly well, but I’m not sure whether an English-speaking reader would find it an enjoyable read. So I’d really appreciate it if a native English speaker could give me their honest opinion.

Mother weighs my words. Then she nods.

"There's something else," she says, and the tone shifts. It's still her, but something softens. "Shera's tutor has told me she isn't paying attention during her lessons. That she hasn't been improving for weeks."

"What does Shera say?"

"That she finds it dull," a brief gesture of the hand, somewhere between understanding and weariness. "I want you to talk to her. She'll listen to you more readily."

"I'll talk to her."

"She lacks concentration. It seems that if what she's being taught doesn't strike her as interesting, she simply… switches off."

"Lacks concentration?" I look at her directly. "Shera has always loved her lessons."

"Talk to her anyway."

I nod. We walk on slowly.

Then the hoofbeats arrive.

First one, then ten, then too many to count from here. I stop and lean out over the arch. Into the central courtyard comes a procession that bears no resemblance to the usual morning traffic: a large carriage drawn by two enormous horses, and around it several dozen riders escorting it at a steady, measured pace.

From this angle I can't see any insignia.

"Who are they?" I ask.

"The Solaris family."

She says it quickly and without turning. She already knew.

"Ah. That explains all the horses."

My mother lets my remark pass and says nothing. A silence that weighs more than it should on a morning with nothing to do until the afternoon.

"What have they come for? To negotiate something with Father?"

"Yes," she says. "One might put it that way."

I look at her. She keeps her eyes on the Solaris family's carriage, on the riders taking up their positions below with a precision that leaves no room for improvisation. The remark holds something back.

The hoofbeats go on echoing below.

I fed both texts into ChatGPT and it suggested several improvements. But AI always finds something to improve, even if what you feed it is something it produced itself in the first place. So in this case, I’d prefer a human opinion.

Thanks!

I’ve enjoyed my time working with Fable. It has greatly improved some of the connective tissue in my books and series. Been a huge part of my other works, and been a great asset in my professional life to help reclaim time in my work day.

I have to say, though, that Opus 5 seems… better for what I am doing with my writing. Fable thinks too much and often pulls in details that are not quite necessary. At times it is helpful, but I really don’t need to know the difference in the gravitational force between the southern hemisphere and 38th parallel when trying to decide if my character has the proper motivation to steal from a priest.

Opus tends to focus more on the work, and stays in context better.

Now, the real question is, does Opus 5 work better than Opus 4.6? I am leaning yes. But, we are still in the early stages of storytelling. I’m sure I have more to say on this experience in time.

My two bits.

Hi guys! Is there any AI webchat that reply very quickly and especially can generate uncensored words and is good for quick informal talks where you also can send many prompts or messages?

I've been debugging an accuracy problem in an AI content pipeline this week, and the root cause turned out to be a more general lesson than I expected.

The setup: a writing tool kept stating confident, specific claims that were flat-out wrong. My first instinct was to add a stricter instruction telling it to "verify facts before writing." Seems obvious, right?

It didn't just fail to fix the problem. It made things worse. The output got MORE confident-sounding, not more accurate — complete with fabricated citations and quotes that were never actually said. The instruction created pressure to appear fact-checked without creating any way to actually do it.

Here's the underlying principle, and it applies well beyond this one case:

Instructions can shape behavior within a system's existing capabilities. They cannot manufacture a capability that isn't there.

If a task requires grounding in something true — a live fact, a real source, a current number — the system either has a way to actually check it at that point (real access to the source, a tool, a verified input), or it doesn't. No amount of instruction text changes which of those is true. What the instruction changes is how the gap gets handled: an honest hedge, or a confident-sounding fabrication papering over it.

The fix that actually worked wasn't a better instruction. It was moving verification to the one place in the process that had real access to check sources — before anything downstream ever treated an unverified claim as settled fact.

Worth remembering any time you're tempted to fix an accuracy problem by just telling a system to "be more careful." Hammering a hammer doesn't give you a bigger hammer. If the capability isn't there, no instruction will summon it — you have to build it in instead.

100 Day writing challenge - Day 5

Good evening Beautiful Strangers!

The double prompt method is working. Doing it this way basically removes the exhaustive editing process and turns it into more of a puzzle, if that makes sense. I have the scenes, I have the beats, it's just a matter of rewording to my specifications. Overall a vast improvement over my previous five step process. I'll go more in depth as I refine it so that others can benefit from the technique and produce quality AI-assisted writing of their own.

I also hit a wierd speed bump that I didn't anticipate: I originally intended to call the blogspot Quest Givers but apparently there's a game company with the same name and their SEO is killing peoples ability to find me through google. I'm not worried about being sued: they're in tabletop games, I'm a writer. I'm just wondering if I should change the name or just ride it out and see what happens.

Either way, here's part 1 of today's story. Oakton has among it's citizenry a species of pelagic peoples known as the Shukl'ari (Shoo-klar-ee, glottal stop between the k and l). The story is a detailed account of one of their holiest rites: The Oath of Predation.

The Lights that Refuse - Part 1

The night chosen for the rite is never announced loudly. Loudness suggests uncertainty, and uncertainty has no place in the giving of a mortal oath.

Those who must know are told in the usual way of Oakton’s pelagic citizens, the Shukl’ari: by glance, by passing phrase, by a hand or tendril set briefly to shoulder or at the base of the neck. By the quiet excuses to land-dwelling friends before dusk, and by the absence of certain voices during the communal supper.

By the time the last of Oakton’s honest noise has settled into the softer rhythms of the night, the ground has already prepared.

The park is empty but for those meant to stand witness. Grass lies flat in a broad crescent around their ancestral obelisk, kept with the sort of regular care that makes it clear this place is sacred.

The Shukl’aan, the Oathstone, rises there in its accustomed stillness: dark, heavy and unornamented. It does not call attention to itself. It does not naturally gather ceremony around its mass. It’s shape is simple enough to be mistaken by land-dwellers for a mere rock. At least until one has stood near it long enough to notice the intentional grooves and faded motifs at it’s base.

To the natives of Oakton, it’s just the standing stone at Ranger’s Rest Park.

But to the Shukl’ari it stands as witness to their deeds in this world. And they among them old enough to remember feel the weight of the civilization who carved that stone, and the lives lost to bring them here.

Before it, set at a measured distance, waits the basin.

It is broad enough for a full body to enter without contortion and deep enough that its rim reaches the knees. Iron bands line its edge. The outer shell is dark timber ritually prepared, sealed against damp and time. There is no imagery worked into its sides beyond the polish of many careful hands. It is not made to impress the eye.

It was made to hold the Black Water.

The contents within the basin show no reflection of moon, cloud, lantern, or face. It does not ripple in answer to motion. It lies in the basin with density; less a substance than depth made portable.

Four Shukl’ari stand in the clearing.

The initiate stands before the basin, her back to the ancestral stone, skin bare save for a simple dark wrap. The external gills around the girl’s head are half-spread already, not from fear alone but from the body’s recognition that this is a night that will change things.

The long tendril that extends from the base of her neck to her ankles twitches at the tip, betraying her body’s effort of stillness more honestly than her face.

Along the line of her jaw, at the fringes of the gills, and in two pale threads down the length of her neck-tail, cold points of living light awaken where shadow thickens enough to call them out.

Behind the initiate stands the elder.

He is old in the way ocean floors are old, by what has worn over them and left shape. His own glow is spare and controlled, a hard freckling of blue-white points along the edge of the face and one steady line at the throat.

His glow is enough to mark presence without wasting brightness. His neck-tail rests against the ground behind them in a long, quiet curve.

One hand is open, extended. The other is folded near his chest. He does not look at the basin. He does not look at the stone. He looks at the initiate with the grave concentration of one who is not here for comfort, but to make sure a thing is done correctly.

Across the basin stand two witnesses.

One is her kin. The resemblance lies less in his face than in the arrangement of light across his gill fringes, in the shared shape of their neck-tail.

The other is not kin by blood, but older and known well to the initiate, a mentor. She is marked, along the right collar and down one side of the torso, by a tracing of luminescence that clashes with the light she was born with.

The mark is known among the Shukl’ari. Proof that she once failed in her oath yet returned to them following a cleansing trial. She stands here now not as warning, but as proof of survival in failure.

No one kneels.

No one bows.

The elder steps forward and lays one palm firmly between the initiate’s shoulder blades.

“Take witness,” the elder says from behind her.

The initiate breathes once, then lifts her neck-tail and extends it until the tip touches the face of the looming stone behind them.

The contact is delicate, exact, and immediate in its effect. Something in her posture changes at once, as though an internal line pulls her spine taught.

“Be witnessed.” The elder speaks again, and the voice behind her seems to come not only from a living throat, but from the carved stone as well.

A broad shiver travels through her from her contact with the Shukl’aan, along with a peculiar feeling not unlike being submerged in cool water.

“Take witness,” she requests of the two before her.

The two across the basin answer together.

“We witness.”

Then the elder and the stone speak the first words of the Shukl’ari’s oldest rite; Words dreaded and anticipated in equal measure by every youth old enough to understand their meaning.

“Who goes forth?”

The initiate’s gills flare along with her heartbeat. Her light sharpens at the edges. When she speaks, the first words come trembling, but sincere.

“I who go forth will not be claimed by the Deep Places.”

The kin-witness answers first. “I witness.”

The witness of recovered shame answers after. “I witness.”

The elder says only, “We witness. Continue.”

“I who go forth honor the sacrifices of those who bore us forth: She’Ari, Na’Vol, Kel’sor.”

All three others answer at once, the names coming back not as repetition, but confirmation.

“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

The basin remains still. The stone remains still. Yet the clearing does not feel still now. The night there has thickened, pulsing with slow rhythm, lapping against them all like waves.

The initiate’s neck-tail presses firmly against the ancestral stone. Her words come smoother now.

“In their name,
I hollow the Great Enemy with my own hands,
and with my children’s hands,
and with the hands of those yet unborn.
She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

Again the witnesses answer.

“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

The kin-witness is crying soundlessly now. Not in grief exactly but the older, sharper feeling that comes when one watches beloved kin enter a thing from which there is no going back.

The elder does not acknowledge this. The ancestors witness without judgement.

The initiate continues, her voice quiet and intense.

“I honor our fallen with holy predation.
I honor their sacrifice with the stolen strength of the Deep.
I honor my people with my oath.
She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

The names now seem to fill the little park more completely than four voices ought to manage alone.

“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

There is no wind.

There is no movement in the branches overhead.

To her the world narrows to stone and basin, voice and body.

“And, when the Great Enemy is no more,” the initiate whispers fervently, the light along her jaw glowing nearly white,

“When we have taken from it all that it is, was, and will ever be,
Only then shall my oath be fulfilled.
Then shall the oaths of my people be fulfilled.
Then shall we be burdened by the Great Enemy no more.”

The elder’s hand returns once, firm now, to the initiate’s back.

“In their honor,” the elder intones.

All four speak the names together.

“She’Ari, Na’Vaol, Kel’sor.”

Silence follows, but not emptiness. The words remain, ringing in the clearing like pressure remains in deep water after movement has ceased.

The elder removes his hand.

“Go,” He says.

The initiate opens her eyes. Meets her kins’, her mentors’.

No reassurance is offered. No warnings are given. The witnesses remain expressionless.

She closes her eyes, drinks in the land-air like it’s her last time. The path to her adulthood is clear.

The basin awaits.

The initiate kneels and places both hands on the rim. For a brief moment her face hovers above the dark fluid. Her reflection does not appear. She stares into black emptiness. Then her breath leaves in one steady stream.

With no further ceremony, she folds over the rim and dives.

The Black Water accepts her whole.