You know what I love about obsessive research? It looks like madness until it doesn’t.
Chapter 17 is Hasan at his most scholar-detective. His mother and the Drigu are gone. He has one directive: find the Valley of Baboob. So he does what any person who has built one of the great libraries of the medieval world does — he goes looking in the books.
Three mentions of Baboob, in all of Alamut’s vast collection. Three.
This chapter is about what happens when you follow the thread no matter where it goes — across languages, across centuries, across an ocean, across decades of silence. It’s also, quietly, about the kind of knowing that lives inside a question mark. The Valley exists. The Berbers are real. The trade in gold-for-pickles is real. But no one has gotten in. The gap between “I know it’s there” and “I can walk through the door” is the exact gap this whole story is filling, chapter by chapter.
If you want to read ahead, or just read alongside the audio, the full text is free on Royal Road — a great platform built specifically for readers who want to follow serialized fiction without an algorithm deciding what they see. Go follow the series there.
There’s a version of this obsessive-search-through-history energy that shows up in *Notes from Nowhere* too — that feeling of piecing together a picture from fragments, never quite sure which fragments are the map and which are the noise. Same with what’s being built collaboratively right now over at AverygoodNovel.com , where the community is writing a novel together — the tentative title is *The Castle* — and the Drigu, the character who set all of this in motion, has already made a cameo in their pages. These threads have a way of connecting whether you plan them to or not.
This is me reading my own work. The author. That’s a specific thing and I don’t think it happens enough. You hear the pauses I put there. You hear what I thought was important when I wrote it.
Paid subscribers get the audio. Everyone gets my gratitude for being here.
Full novel on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CTDP5KFW
Free text on Royal Road — follow it there and get new chapters every two days.
Press play. He’s found the library. Now he needs the door.
