I’ve spent my hiatus taking it easy and haven’t accomplished as much on the back end as I was hoping. So far I’ve released only a single new recording (A Prayer to the Palace). I have most of the next re-release ready to go, I just need to edit it. I also STILL need to fix the audio levels at the beginning of Everything Must Fall Part 3.

All that said, I think I’m about ready to get started on Season 2. I spent last night reading through the material for Episode 1, the title will probably be something like “The Tale of Dark and the Nightingale,” but we’ll see. It’s going to be a good episode and I’m excited to record it.

Season 1 told the story of Bluebeard and the Kraken, but Season 2 will expand the universe further. It takes us from the outlying farms beyond the capital, to secret underground tunnels and cities, and finally up into the former Imperial seat of power on the moon, an ornate castle with snow swept walls and a dark history, but before all that we get a final scene with Bluebeard–his voice captured by the sphere of glass he bequeathed. It’s one of those scenes I wrote in a great rush, as though it was happening before my eyes. We’ve probably got another week before I record that episode, but I thought I’d give a little teaser here.

“Once I believed the world would be what I would make it.”

The darkness turned to dust and blew away on a chilling wind. Once again, Darien stood in the shadow of a great cliff at the foot of a door that would not open. Bluebeard lay on the ground. Under the dust on his skin, he looked drained of blood. He looked empty. Darien thought again of trying to hold the man’s wound closed and how the blood had found a way through his fingers.

“But that was just the folly of youth.”

The wind howled with Bluebeard’s sigh and the dust picked up. When it had settled again, Darien realized he no longer stood under the cliff on that broken world. He stood on the deck of a starship, metal creaking around him. Stars glittered on the other side of a window. His mouth went dry and he stared slack-jawed into the vastness of space.

“Linda…wake up Linda…” Bluebeard spoke in a tender voice, but an edge of terror tremored underneath like a disharmonic string.

Darien turned to find Bluebeard kneeling beside him, blood weeping from what had once been an eye. The red tears dripped from his face and rolled along the sharp face of a young woman. Her dead eyes stared up at Darien and he had the sudden feeling, sure and terrifying, that they begged something of him. Bluebeard shook her gently, as though trying to wake her, but she would never wake again.

“Yes. The folly of youth.”

So in that early draft the text that became Episode 2 really was the start. It sets the tone for the story and gets some of the threads that run through the story going. I do think it lacks a bit when it comes to forward momentum. This is one of the tensions I’ve had in turning what is essentially a book into a podcast. You can open a book with a few scenes like those in “A Prayer,” because, while they lack direct action, they go quickly when you’re reading through them. On a podcast they become an entire 20 minute episode that has to carry a lot of weight being only the second episode, when the listener is likely still deciding if they’re going to keep listening.

I considered making major changes, but at the end of the day decided that everything in the episode is pretty important. It sets up what Darien’s life has been like and the tension between that life and the life promised in Kathy’s stories. This tension drives the narrative of the book, maybe as much or more than the actual things that take place (Marialla’s kidnapping, the finding of Night, his time on the Kraken). It’s the underlying internal conflict that Darien can’t escape.

Many elements in the episode directly set up things that take place later in the series, maybe none so important as the establishment of the religion surrounding the Palace of Mirrors. It’s one of the most idiosyncratic ideas in the story, the idea that the Palace of Mirrors wasn’t just a place. It was considered a deity and the people of the Empire, and some still—like Kathy and Bluebeard—worshiped it and prayed to it through reflective objects.

Finally, of course, I end it with the set-up for the entire season—Bluebeard and his crew of pirates off in the distant shadows of the beginning of this story. I wanted to give the ending of this episode (and Darien) a jolt. This final scene is intended to be a promise to the audience: yes, the podcast is often contemplative and quiet, but there are dragons lurking under the surface, and they’re hungry.