The Mare Who Lives On The Moon
Lacquered wood. Polished brass. Vented steam.
These three things represented the pinnacle of the modern era, an era that shaped and defined Twilight Sparkle’s library. Former library, since it had now been refashioned into an observatory that just so happened to contain a lot of books.
You would be forgiven for not noticing, however, for all of the books that got in the way.
Towering shelves of expensive treated woods stood testament to the vast fortunes their owner had at their disposal. Monstrous printing presses drank ink like an addiction and devoured gluttonous volumes of paper to keep the shelves up with the times. Other tomes were sufficiently aged and wizened to keep the shelves timeless.
The bookshelves created a lot of dust though. Bad news when you had a little dragon assistant around with sinus problems. The owner’s insurance policy didn’t cover “flamethrower sneezes” or “pyrotechnic hiccups”.
Those shelves stacked high and far, curved around each other cyclically. There wasn’t an obvious pattern that they conformed to, however: they were random and haphazard, and interpreting them was an exercise best left to the individual—a rorschach ink blot in mahogany. Some ladders bridged gaps between levels as others stretched farther still to the upper echelons, creating a perverse three-dimensional labyrinth scaled only by the hardiest of explorers, or the shrewdest of librarians.
It was rather a shame about the roof, actually.
Once a stunning dome of baroque stained glass that filtered sunlight down onto any reader below, it was now a jutting series of copper plates, already tarnished to a harsh green, whose electric corruption spilled into the stale dust-filled air of the library below. The dome of the new copper ceiling had been entirely mounted on railings, with a slit added to accommodate her latest invention, providing an unobstructed view of the vastness of the night sky at whatever angle she wished.
Twilight Sparkle had, really, invented two things of monumental significance, as she often did quite unintentionally. The Telescope came first, and now an Observatory in which to house it.
Certainly, ponies had invented crude facsimiles of this device before. But never to this scale, never to this degree of precision. It was like comparing a crude walking stick to a jewelled sceptre by dint of being able to rest your weight on both.
The housing of the thing was as long as eight of its creator pressed nose-to-tail, and as wide at its fattest end as three more Twilights to mark its diameter. It needed to be, to house the lenses and other optics, at least four of which were larger than their maker herself. Each delicate, polished lens was even more expensive than the finely polished silver mirrors between them. The housing had to be two thick, solid inches of brass just to support its own weight.
Which made it an utter nightmare to move.
Its creator, a purple unicorn covered in scorch marks and sticking plasters, with neat midnight bangs cropped at right angles, sat in a red velvet seat at the Telescope’s control hub, staring down its eyepiece. The scorch marks were, at least for now, hidden beneath a set of hardened synthetic-leather overalls she wore with all the decorum of a ball gown, with a white cotton blouse where the overalls ended and she began, for modesty. It was a horrid pain to wash.
The eyepiece provided a distant look into nothing-in-particular, out into the aether. Nothing of interest, yet, at least. It would need to be calibrated for its true target.
Whatever that may be.
She called into the bell of the brass speaking tube beside her, which ran far down a monolithic bookshelf and deeper still through the floor below, like a creeping brass vine ambling its way down a cliff-face to lay its roots.
“How are the boilers, Spike?”
A little rattle raced back up the tube in response, a reply from the bowels of the boiler basement.
“We’re getting two bars of pressure, oh Captain my Captain!”
“Just Twilight will do, as always. Thank you, my faithful assistant. All right, that should be enough…”
Twilight Sparkle, Royal Philosopher-in-Residence, stared at her collection of wheels and levers. Three elongated brass levers, polished to a shine, ended in black, spherical rubber knobs. Pipes of superheated steam, fed up from Spike and the boilers, awaited her guidance with the pull of these levers.
“What should we do with this beautiful brass behemoth, Spike? Where do you think we should aim it?”
“You could look for that mysterious tenth planet?” her faithful draconic assistant offered. “The one that you said is throwing out the orbit of the ninth one, but nopony can seem to find?”
Twilight seriously pondered that for a moment, looking deep into the eyepiece and past it out into the solar system. It would be powerful enough…
“Next time,” she declared, as much for her own benefit as it was for Spike’s. “I wouldn’t know where to aim the Telescope yet.”
“You could… try and see what Roman’s rings are made of?”
“Or I could just predict that they’re obviously rock and ice, like everything else out in the aether. What’s something nopony else could do without an instrument this precise?”
“Hit the wrong lever and crush themselves?”
“Not helping, Spike.”
“Sorry.”
He wasn’t.
“Well, there’s a full moon tonight, so there’s going to be plenty of light to see by?” His tone was uncertain. Rightfully so.
Twilight Sparkle massaged her temples with her hooves. “Spike, that will make other things more difficult to see because of light pollution. It’s like going into a theater pit with a bright lantern to see the celluloidtography better.”
“Oh. Wait, that wouldn’t work? Is that why they have it so dark in there? I thought it was just so you couldn’t see what they put on the popcorn to make it taste like that. Or what the ponies in the back row were doing.”
Okay, so, Spike may be wrong, but she couldn’t blame it on a lack of insight.
“It’s going to make it exceedingly more difficult to see anything but the moon tonight, Spike. I guess… no, wait, Spike, you’re a genius!”
“I am?” The pipes between them did a good job to mask his confusion, but not good enough.
“The moon, Spike!” Twilight explained, hoof pressing the catch on the handle closest to her and wrenching it vigorously back towards her. The Telescope ground on its thoroughly greased rails as the steam forced it to comply with simple physics. Twilight’s chair slowly spun with it. “We could map it! The vast oceans! The mountains, the crevices! We could prove that Equus isn’t the only aetherial body with topography!”
“Err… yay?”
“Yay is right!” Twilight giggled excitedly, much in the same way another pony would after staying awake for a few hours too long sustained by at least four cups of coffee too many. “Where should we start?”
Spike hesitated. “Oh, uh, are you asking me for real, or asking just to be polite? Surely, I don’t mind either way, but—”
Twilight rolled her eyes, lamenting the fact that her number-one assistant couldn’t tell just how magnificent the gesture was through the pipes.
“No, my faithful assistant, I want your honest input on this. Where should we start?”
“How about… the left side? Since that’s going to get the darkest, first?”
“Brilliant!” Twilight agreed enthusiastically, pulling the lever furthest from her until the Telescope’s gaze hit the side of the moon just so.
Twilight let out an annoyed grunt. Very unladylike but, well, sometimes so was she. “It’s harder to tell from such an oblique angle. I forgot to remember the moon isn’t flat, it curves like Equus does. I’m looking at this edge almost side-on.”
“Still, though, what do you see? Is it like you expected?”
“It’s like a desert up there. A seemingly endless white desert, with pearl sand.”
“I didn’t think you were the poetic type, Twilight?”
“I’m not being poetic. It really is like somepony took all the pearls that ever were and will be and hurled them into orbit after a thorough round with a mortar and pestle, and it all just stuck together.”
“So, sandstorms, huh?”
Twilight’s head pulled back from the eyepiece long enough for her to shake her head vehemently before realizing that, again, Spike couldn’t see her, and feeling rather silly about it.
“There’s no atmosphere up there in the aether. The air just gets thinner and thinner like… well, you’ve been up in the balloon, Spike, you know. But that means, because there aren’t really mountains, that there mustn’t be any tectonic activity up there either. It’s entirely dead, in every sense of the word.”
How wonderfully morbid. Her map had suddenly become a guide to a geographic necropolis.
“So, it’s probably really cold then, huh?”
“Probably. Certainly nopony could survive up there, not for more than a few seconds.”
“Huh. So, no new libraries for you on the moon, then?”
A dangerous gleam appeared in Twilight’s eye. One that spoke a simple statement that began with inspiration, and ended with the infamous phrase, “or die trying”.
“No, Twilight,” her assistant chided after a long moment of contemplative silence. He knew her too well.
“A mare can dream, Spike.”
“One mare’s dreams are another dragon’s nightmares.”
“Point. But there’s… blue? Spike! I see blue!”
“Is it a sapphire? Is the moon made of gems?”
“No… no, it couldn’t be…” Twilight murmured, gingerly pressing down another lever. The Telescope twisted minutely with it, narrowing down and isolating a fuzzy patch of blue right at the edge of the moon. It was about the size of a pinhead at her current magnification, maybe smaller, but it was as visible against that blanket of whiteness as even a single gold thread would be on blackest felt. She centered the Telescope dead on it.
“It definitely can’t be a gem. If the moon is tectonically dead, there wouldn’t be anything to create them, let alone push them to the surface. I need to get a closer look.”
Drat. Three levers: Horizontal, vertical, and the one she really didn’t want to use so lightly: magnification, in the center.
Magnification would slide the mirrors on their mountings fitted to tracks within the body of the telescope itself. Those mirrors were fragile, delicate things, and the sheer force of the steam she was channelling… wasn’t.
A small nudge, just the smallest of gestures. Timid as a mouse, or perhaps even timid as a mouse who had spotted cheese on something which appeared decidedly spring-loaded, Twilight pushed the middle lever up.
Nothing cracked. Nothing shattered. Just the soft slippery grind of mountings on their lubricated tracks. The Telescope played its part masterfully, and the view of that mysterious patch of blue on the endless white got larger.
Using a nearby dune for scale, she estimated that the blue patch was at least the size of a pony, possibly larger. Not much larger, though. It was moving, too, or at least part of it was. Like it was caught in a breeze.
A breeze obviously nonexistent on the moon, unless everything modern science and philosophy had gone so far to hypothesize was wrong.
Twilight Sparkle eyed that accursed middle lever again.
“You’re going to make me use you again, aren’t you?” she muttered darkly at it, away from the speaking tube where Spike couldn’t misconstrue her statement.
“So, what is it?” Spike sounded giddy now, or at the very least excitably curious, like Twilight had been moments before.
Now… now she just felt sick. Had she unintentionally just destroyed the results of decades of insights with a chance little discovery at the moon’s edge?
Only one way to find out.
Twilight steeled herself as she reached for that brass lever. A bit more confidence, which she felt was entirely undeserved, accompanied the gesture. If she admitted it to herself, she was emboldened by the possibility of proving herself wrong, but as a scientist she refused to acknowledge any bias she might have. Especially bias this potent.
Mirrors slid home and locked into their new positions. Twilight dared look through the eyepiece again.
Something was broken. She had broken something with the levers, that was the only explanation.
“We just dropped below two on the dial, Twilight. You figure out what it is, or am I going to need more coal?”
“I think I broke the mirrors, Spike. We’re obviously catching the reflection of somepony’s apartment with this, somehow. That’s the only possible explanation, besides the obvious.”
There was a tentative silence. Did she sound panicked? Hysterical? When her assistant replied, it was with the tentativity of one who was walking on eggshells, certainly. “Well, what’s the obvious then?”
“Spike, the only other possibility is that the telescope is not broken, and there is a mare on the moon.”
Another long silence. She awaited Spike’s answer with trepidation.
“Well, that can’t be right. What do you think’s broken?”
“I don’t know! I definitely haven’t seen this pony before. I’d have remembered her! So I can’t tell where I’m getting this interference from!”
There was another long pause. It was a rather diplomatic silence this time, one that came from the pregnant pauses that gave birth to carefully worded sentences, sentences laden with the subtext and please don’t bite my head off for saying this. “Why? Why would you have remembered this pony in particular, other than her being on the moon, apparently.”
Twilight tried not to take offense for reasons she didn’t quite understand, and failed. “And just what do you mean by that, mister?”
“Well, I mean, you’ve never really been good with remembering names. Or faces. Or, ah, voices.”
“That’s not true! I’m very good with remembering ponies.”
“Oh yeah? How about this: give me the names of two of your high school teachers.”
Twilight opened her mouth, grinning at the tube rather smugly. Spike cut her off.
“Wait! Let me finish. Give me the names of two of your high school teachers that never gave you a B+ or lower.”
Twilight’s mouth clamped shut, and the pleasant warmth of smugness turned frigid cold. “Grudges should count for something.”
“No. No, they really, really shouldn’t.” The monotone imparted by the brass tube medium layered on Spike’s deadpan snark in a way that really got to Twilight. “Face it. You’re just not the social type.”
“To be fair, I graduated when I was thirteen, Spike. High school was a very long time ago.”
“Same question, but university.”
“I was only there for three years!”
“Uh-huh. So why would you remember this pony, this specific pony?” There was an understandable dubiousness to his voice. Twilight liked to imagine him leaning against the tube, now, skeptical expression on his draconic face, arms folded tight across his chest.
“Well, for one thing, she must be the tallest pony I’ve ever seen, except for the Princess herself.”
“Oh, yeah? What else?”
Twilight’s eye pressed to the Telescope again, watching the faintest of sighs part the lips of the mare on the moon. A curious gesture, if there really was no atmosphere up there.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pony this lonely before.”
Not even in the mirror.
Twilight Sparkle looked at the wheels and levers in front of her. A lever might be too much… the wheels gave her a lot more fine control over the movement. Maybe if she got a closer look…
She did one full revolution of the wheel. That should be enough to… to…
Do absolutely nothing.
A bemused eyebrow shot up on the unicorn’s face. Had she really made the fine tuning so fine?
Another full revolution. Another.
No change.
Twilight’s eyebrow shot down low with its twin into a knotted ball of frustration. A dozen more full revolutions of the wheel resulted in no changes. She was about to grab a wrench—possibly to fix something, possibly to whack the wheel until it chose to work—when Spike’s voice rattled up the tube.
“Alright, the boiler’s back up above two bars of pressure again. See if you can’t get a better look! I’m releasing the catch now!”
Spike had shut off the steam feed to build up more pressure. That’s why turning the little metal wheel hadn’t… wait.
“Spike, no!”
Too late. The steam pushed through its path of least resistance, up through the valve that fifteen full revolutions had opened. Twilight’s hoof danced across the wheel, desperate to undo what she had just done, but she couldn’t outrace the surge of pressure she had just unleashed.
The soft grinding of tracks became a dull roar, more like a freight train on its tracks, as the mirrors focused closer on the anomaly Twilight had targeted.
Her blood froze like ice in her veins as she watched in rapt horror down the long brass tube. It kept zooming in, closer and closer. She had been just off-center, so the Telescope instead caught a patch of ground directly behind the mare on the moon as the mirrors slid dutifully onwards.
Hoofprints left in the lunar surface. Hoofprints left in the moon dust. This wasn’t an anomalous reflection, and her Telescope certainly wasn’t broken. There really, truly was a Mare on the Moon!
There was a shear grinding, like the sound of ripping tinfoil blasted through a megaphone. The Telescope rapidly zoomed out, back past the Mare, back past the mountains, until she was no better off looking through it than she was using her naked eye. Then glittering cobwebs as a resounding, shattering crash rattled out of the long brass housing of the Telescope.
Her Telescope certainly hadn’t been broken. Before.
Below, in the basement, Spike plugged his ears with cotton wads to escape the screams of the mare far above, amplified and echoed down the brass tube beside him.
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Warning: The Following Spoiler is Incredibly Pretentious, and will Mark A Theme the Author Cares Far Too Much About.
Read At Your Own Risk.
There is a term in cinema, the field I ideally come from, called chiaroscuro. It is creating depth using sharp contrasts between the light and dark.
The brighter the light and the darker the dark, the sharper the contrast. That contrast adds remarkable depth to the medium.
In every chapter of this story there is one line that shows and evokes joy and wonder, and one that tears it down completely -- for me, at least, writing it. Obviously, I have an innate bias in this matter, but I find it interesting nonetheless.
For this chapter, we have: "Hoofprints left in the lunar surface. Hoofprints left in the moon dust. This wasn't an anomalous reflection, and her Telescope certainly wasn't broken. There really, truly was a mare on the moon!" for that light.
But then of course we have: ""I don't think I've ever seen a pony this lonely before." Not even in the mirror." as its counterpoint.
And so come to a story, then... of light and tunnels. Gaslight fics are wonderful. Even their very name evokes what they are: Harsh light catching brilliantly, then creating even harsher shadows immediately underneath that brilliance, if one could only look past the surface. It's a dirty light. It's a romantic light. There isn't nearly enough of it, and it's in all the wrong places, but that just makes where it is stand out so much brighter for it, and that's what makes it wonderful.
Delightful and unique. I'll enjoy this one.
5608625 Taking pride in your art is not being pretentious, it is simply taking pride in your art.
Ninth planet, ha, Pluto isn't a planet. Though if there were previous telescopes that could see that far and pic out such a faint object, I am not sure what makes Twilight's so special.
Again, seeing Pluto would make the moon easy cheese.
Seems like Twilight needs to redesign her telescope. Something that delicate without cams to move everything and stops just seems silly.
"We're getting two millibars of pressure, oh Captain my Captain!"
really? were breaking out the steam punk references this early!
5696603 Seems like Twilight needs to redesign her telescope. Something that delicate without cams to move everything and stops just seems silly.
its fucking steampunk there are no cams you have grease, oil, brass and pressure thats it
Forty years later, Kneels-in-Grass the Bison, curator for the Hayden Planetarium demotes Sparkle's planet to a dwarf-planet, and ponykind collectively loose their fucking minds.
This looks fun! And steamy, in a good way.
(I'm pretty sure you don't mean millibars of pressure, there. One atmosphere is just a little over a bar, or thousand millibars.)
Oh I am loving this.
Awesome concept, and the writing is great too! Looking forward to the rest.
Yeah, I also raised an eyebrow at "millibars". I don't know what pressures a steam powered device (or a pneumatic one for that matter) might be expected to operate at, but I'm pretty sure it would be more than 0.2% above atmospheric pressure.
5608625
This is relevant to my interests, greatly.
5696603 Pluto used to be counted as a planet, it was quite recently that it was demoted to a dwarf planet. My guess is that this is supposed to take place before that happens.
5608625
5696424
Yeah, what they said.
5696718
Since when was Walt Whitman considered "steampunk"?
Very nice descriptions and evocative imagery. I am quite intrigued by what's next.
This is kind of absurd. One bar is ca air pressure at sea height. This means that two millibars are way, way below normal atmospheric pressure. Two millibar are allmost a perfect vacuum. In order to work a steam engine will need pressure of more than one bar.
Just to give you some context, when James Watt modernized steam engines in 1768, his prototype worked with 1.3 bar. At 1800 most engines worked at 3 - 4 bar and in 1900 at 9 - 12 bar (because a higher pressure is more efficient, but the machine is harder to construct.)
I'd recommend you to just strike the "milli" and leave it at two bar. It makes much more sense that way.
5608625
Just asking, but, does this Universe use our Physics?
Do the Princesses control the movement of the sun/moon?
I'm liking this steampunk pony world already! So, I assume that Twilight has just seen Luna/Nightmare Moon for the very first time?
That's one hell of a telescope...
Just finished this first chapter. I must say that so far I enjoy your style of writing. Looking forward to reading the rest of what is available. So far so good.
The way you paint the world with your descriptions of things is one I have no seen before it is both unique and informative without becoming repativeor dull, I found my self enjoying the descriptions of everything just as much as the actule plot of this chapter.
I am looking forward to more and you have earned a like and a favorite for this chapter alone
Do you mean 'reader'?
Telescope™
7081736 YOU AGAIN!!
I like this story already. The steam-punk telescope is a cool concept, although it seems like it would've worked better if it were powered by magic, perhaps even Twilight's telekinesis. However, some fans have speculated that telekinesis can tire out a unicorn if they use it too much; perhaps that's the case in this fanfic.
Lines like that make me feel both jealous and inspired.
Well, this is a lovely
littlestory. To the tracking list with you.Yay steampunk astronomer Twilight!
Chapter 1... good hook. I'm in it for the long haul at this point.
Hit right out of the gate! Hold me hooves boys, I'm goin in for the long haul!
I adore the way you write, this story is amazing so far! And I'm only one chapter in!
I'm liking this already. The characterization of Twilight gave me a very good first impression.
Also, My brain is weirdly giving everybody a British accent. Is that a known side effect of steampunk stories?
Finally starting this over now that it's complete, and man, I'd forgotten how much I love this Twilight, and your writing in general. Onward!
7969864 Doing the same
I Bar = 1 atmosphere pressure. The surface of Mars is 10 millibars (IIRC). 2 millibars is pretty close to a perfect vacuum. You sure you don't mean 2 Bars?
For some reason, Twilight brings to mind Professor Steamhead from the old Ninja High School comics (1st series. with Jeremy)
8080036 Quite a number of pressure reading instruments report their readings as gauge pressure as opposed to absolute pressure.
I got a recommendation to read this story, but I found an error in the tagline:
"They" is plural. It should be "She":
Miss Twilight Sparkle uses the mirrors for magnification. The mirrors gather light and the optics in the eyepiece magnifies. Indeed, this is a trick manufacturers of cheap telescopes use:
One has a cheap telescope with an aperture of only 1 centimeter (about the same as the human eye). The manufacturers market its "¡Thousand-Fold Magnification!" (the smallest lenses in the eyepiece are about 1 millimeter across, so putting enough lenses in the eyepiece for extreme magnification is cheap. The buyer tries to use the telescope, but cannot see anything because the telescope does not gather enough light.
Aperture comes 1st. If one wants different magnification, one can buy av different eyepiece for less than 1% the cost of the telescope. The only way to gather more light is to buy a new telescope iis to make a new telescope with a larger aperture.
Miss Twilight Sparkle would increase magnification by turning a knob on the eyepiece, or if she has maxed out the eyepiece, switching eyepieces for an eyepiece with an higher magnification. She would not mess with the mirrors.
8087183
2 millibars over atmosphere is still just a tiny pressure difference. That still seems wrong to me.
I'm not going to take up a dozen entire pages with all my crazy comments, so if you folks want to see the full blow-by-blow follow-up, you can find it here. (Seriously, I wrote a 30,000 word follow-up. I probably need an intervention or something
).
I’ve actually had this story in my to-read list for months and I’ve been tracking it for just as long, waiting for the day when the tale was complete. I’m weird like that. I hate waiting. I also have trust issues when it comes to stories getting done. I can’t stand falling in love with a story just to see it unfinished. So, when I saw this was finally complete, this went straight to the top of “To Read” list.
Why? Because steampunk ponies! Magic working with technology! Alternate universe! And romance between entire worlds!
I wasn’t ready for just how deep this world got, either. The dialects and tones of the characters sound like they just came out of the Industrial Revolution. But even more fascinating to me was the cultural changes. The concept that Cutie Marks were an intensely private thing and bringing in the idea that ponies actually do wear clothes all the time was a great idea. Seeing the various mechanized pieces of the world come together, down to Equestria essentially becoming Imperial Britain.
We’ve got violence, war, firearms and a draconian rule by what appears to be a madpony on the throne. But that’s not what we’re really here for. We’re here for a complete reimagining of the pilot of MLP:FiM. We’re here to brave new frontiers and push the boundaries of pony fandom!
Okay, fine.
We’re here for a steampunk pony romance between two of the loneliest ponies in all the worlds (yes, plural intentional). We’re really here for that steampunk pony romance. And we get us some serious steampunk pony romance. So let’s get to the steampunk pony romance, shall we?
Steampunk pony romance. ./squee
This. This is what is known as a “Story Hook.” This is also what is known as a really freaking good one.
What really sells this and made this utterly delightful was the “...covered in scorch marks…” I just went ./squee. I don’t even know why. But I simply loved that tiny little bit.
He shouldn’t be. It was awesome.
I can hear this in my head and she sounds so petulant. It’s so cute I could die.
I think if there’s any real issue with this story, is that in later chapters, it loses some of this magnificent wordplay and worldbuilding. The terminology and language of the early chapters are so whimsical and delightful. I got the sense that some parts of the story got rushed and the author didn’t have time to put that layer of polish there, but even still, the magnificence of the world still shines brilliantly.
Anyway, it wouldn’t be steampunk if there wasn’t a little grease and tarnish now, would it?
Oh shut up, I thought it was clever.
But later we find out cutie marks are private. Maybe this should be changed?
Also, are you still planning to edit out millibars?
8092871
You've missed that "they" can also refer to a singular person whose gender is unspecified. When "they" is used in this manner, the verbs are conjugated as plurals, even though the entity being referred to is singular. This is more or less the same thing that happened to "you", which started out plural (we used to have "thou" meaning tu and "you" meaning usted, but it was closer to French vous because it was inherently plural) but now is both plural and singular (that's why "you" takes "are" and not "is".)
...you know, he has a point. But I honestly never thought of what the person behind me may be doing.
...to check, or not to check? That is the question, my dear.
8454333
I was just thinking that too. Now I'm concerned about just how much Spike knows, if he's guessed at THAT for his first reason at why a theater is dark.
Is this telescope on an ordinary alt-az mount, or has she also invented the equatorial mount? Because that would be a third major invention.
I get this story recommend.
Im curriouse how it will be.
I like Spike and Twilight. Interessting start.
The story avatar is amazing.
Poor very expansiv equicment
I've never been much for Steampunk as a genre in any medium, and this story has resultantly been in my read later list for a good couple of years.
I regret leaving it there. This opening chapter is refined, well-polished, and is setting me up for enjoyment assuming the quality stays consistent here on through. This is one of if not the best opening chapters I've ever read.
Hoo Hoo Hoo! You know it’s gonna be a good read when your story starts with writing like this!
Looks like I got the 3000th like
Great start so far.