Preface

These two books come out of a Dead Suns campaign that a group of friends and I played together, starting in 2019. I played Taeon Kopalo first, a xenodruid who had spent sixteen years locked away and came out of it very still. Later I played Som Zigu, a kasathan solarian. The first book is Taeon's and the second is Som's.

Neither book was written as we played. All I had at the end was my own session notes, written fast at the table: lists, names, half-sentences, the things I thought I'd need the next time. The stories were rebuilt from those notes long afterward. To keep them honest, I gave each book a narrator from inside the world, someone who has only the records to work from. For Taeon, that's a novitiate of his druid order. For Som, it's a young solarian of a lineage that still recites his name. Neither of them can know more than the notes do, and neither can I.

So when a book goes quiet, when a part ends with nothing recorded between one place and the next, or a fight is never finished, that isn't a device. It's a real gap. Some nights I didn't write much. Some nights I didn't write anything. I chose to leave those silences where they fall rather than fill them in from memory, which is less reliable than the notes and much more flattering.

Both books end the same way, on a man whose end the record doesn't hold. Taeon's notes stop in the middle of a fight in an arena. Som's journal stops on a sentence he never finished. I haven't written either ending. I don't know them, and nobody does.

What the notes can't show is how the story was actually made, which was together, around a table, over years. It belongs as much to the friends I played with as to me: Chase, who played Bren; Barry, who played Qwitch; Mat, who played Hugh; and Mike, who played Grek. Most of the best moments in these pages were theirs before they were mine. Thank you all.

And thank you to Kev, our GM, who tied everything together from one session to the next. He kept every thread in hand, remembered what we'd forgotten, and made a sprawling campaign feel like one story. His passion for it was infectious. It's the reason any of us cared enough to keep notes, and the reason these books exist.

If you're reading this, you're getting the story the way the narrators do: from the records, with the gaps left in. I hope it's enough to show you what it was like to be there.