I went with “tome” because it just has a more mysterious image and cadence to it, and also, I liked the idea of poor students lugging around a massive cursed book as opposed to something more mass market-sized.

Concrete is the most widely used human-made substance; it’s something most people have encountered in some form. And it isn’t biodegradable. I imagined concrete stifling the living, breathing earth beneath.

This was one of those stories where the first sentence, “We called it the monster because we could,” really did come first. I kept turning it in my head, and it sort of acted as a key that opened up the rest of the world to me. The sense of place and setting were also foremost in my mind.

Buddhism teaches that life is a cycle of suffering and rebirth, and the only way to escape it is to achieve enlightenment. I’ve always found that theme interesting, especially in how it plays into creating Buddhist characters in wuxia/xianxia stories.

The ships are not human. Their first language isn’t English or any human language. They are mostly telepathic, so everything in the story are their unfiltered thoughts. A human narrator might differentiate between thoughts and even hold back some information from the reader.

I’d say my main inspiration comes from thinking (maybe too much) about divinity. Not from a particular theological perspective, but more as a general concept. If a creator exists for a world, what are its responsibilities to what it creates?