Some stories take a detour. This one earns it.
We leave Hasan for a chapter and follow Henri LeGrande — or rather, Henri deMaudit, the name he took after the wreck of the Falcon God — through the twenty years between a shipwreck and a tavern in Sicily. How a ship captain who survived a disaster that killed everyone he felt responsible for rebuilds himself.
What he builds in those two decades is interesting. What happens when he sits down across from a man in a scarlet burnoose who places a familiar deck of cards on the table and says “I come in peace” — that’s the moment the chapter has been moving toward.
The story of Henri deMaudit is, in some ways, the same story as every person who gets knocked completely off the life they were building and has to construct something entirely new from whatever is still floating around them. The name changes. The brothers appear. A shadow economy rises. The original wound — the people who trusted him and died — never fully closes, but becomes something a person can carry without collapsing. I’ve been that person. I suspect you have too. That’s what makes this chapter stick.
*Notes from Nowhere* touches this same nerve — what do you do when the world you thought you were navigating turns out to have a completely different map? Harold Haggins wakes up in an ICU and everything has reorganized. Henri LeGrande clings to a mast until morning and reinvents himself. The survival instinct and the identity instinct are sometimes pulling in opposite directions and you have to find a way to let them both win.
The full text is free on Royal Road— a reader-first platform where you can follow the story chapter by chapter without the algorithm getting in the way. Follow me there.
The complete novel is on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0CTDP5KFW
This audio is me reading the chapter I wrote. Something about that still feels like the right way to deliver a story about reinvention — in the voice of the person who lived inside it long enough to write it down.
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