Unreliable Narrator Steals a Stopwatch from his Feral Gremlin Child

Or: Time, POV & the Smug Deceit of the Aphorism.

There is a point in Raptoraem where the unreliable narrator effectively steals a stopwatch from his gremlin daughter and refuses to give it back.

No, that is not literally what happens (if anything, Stryx steals his stuff daily).

It is, however, a fairly accurate description of the novel’s relationship with time.

Raptoraem does not behave chronologically because its characters do not experience themselves chronologically. Memory is political, trauma is architectural, and history itself is something people weaponize, revise, suppress, worship, misremember, and occasionally drag into the room by the throat and yell at for not listening to them and daring to speak out of turn.

Erik Mordiger is one of the worst offenders, largely because I try to make the prose go out of its way to make his recollections seem suspiciously immaculate. He is an unreliable narrator, but not necessarily in the traditional sense of lying to the reader about whether the body is buried under the floorboards; I wanted his unreliability to be more insidious than that.

In fact, as a lot of readers are beginning to note, Mordiger relies on aphorism to curate, compress, and rearrange experience into rhetoric before the blood has even dried. This owes largely to the fact that Mordiger is a man obsessed with command, whether this is self-command or political sovereignty. Territory, negotiations, violence, language, himself… all of it gets folded in so that his narration acquires the underlying sense of a distorted/glitchy documentary feed.

Reality gets edited, chaos becomes preordained/deliberate, and even his memories, throughout the course of nine books, acquire cleaner edges than they probably possessed when the thing happened. Some of the most polished prose in Raptoraem, therefore, is less a straightforward presentation of reality than Mordiger making reality presentable to himself and mythologizing in real time.

That distinction matters because readers are trained to associate confident-sounding prose with authorial truth. If a sentence arrives polished enough, after all, we are inclined to instinctively trust it.

But what if the polish itself is suspicious?

In Raptoraem, I make the choice to include Black Ledger chapters because the prose itself is part of the unreliable narration. This isn't necessarily because every sentence is false, but because every sentence has been… handled.

This felt particularly important in a story where chronology itself is unstable. Raptoraem does not introduce the past politely. Sometimes the past barges in as the story’s prologue. Sometimes a memory arrives in medias res because something in the present has disturbed it and caused it to unspool out of its memory box. Sometimes a character is understood through an event the reader does not yet possess, or a relationship appears complete before the saga circles back and shows where the fracture began.

Time in the Raptoraem saga is less a straight line than evidence scattered across a crime scene.

And my hope is less to ask the reader, “What happened next?” than to have them begin to wonder, “Why tf are we being shown this now?”

And naturally, this means our primary POV character needs to be the man capable of looking directly at emotional catastrophe and mentally filing it under NECESSARY LOGISTICS HUFF HUFF MANLY COMPARTMENTALIZATION HUFF HUFF NEEDS MUST HUFF HUFF.

Meanwhile, Stryx, his feral little counterweight, exists in almost the opposite relationship to time.

Stryx accumulates experience in fragments, objects, associations, naming-then-renaming, and things that should belong to the past but remain startlingly present, if only in her own mind.

When Raptoraem begins, I wanted it to be from Stryx's POV, thus giving readers the impression that it was going to be a world organized through her particular perspective. Then, come Act II, Mordiger effectively hijacks the narrative, and all that is fractured, wounded, sensory, and instinctive becomes “tamed” into war/trauma/revolution as told through a brutal warlord's playbook.

Figuratively speaking, Mordiger steals the stopwatch from his gremlin daughter because he thinks time is something that can be disciplined.

Stryx, meanwhile, knows better.

This matters for the underlying architecture of the larger saga. I wrote Book I with the hope that it won't merely tell readers what happened during a specific political crisis, so much as quietly begin teaching them how this universe handles history, narrative, and truth itself.

Events may not always remain where they were placed. Meaning can travel backward. Later revelations can contaminate earlier scenes, and, as we hopefully get further into the saga, new books may completely rewrite meanings in older ones.

There are gaps in the narrative, and some gaps are the point. Sometimes the absence contains information. Sometimes the reader has received the facts but not yet received the correct interpretation, which may be several books beyond.

It's why I was very terrified of smoothing every rough temporal transition during the editing process, because sanding those edges felt narratively dangerous. I've always felt that confusion and disorientation are not automatically the same thing. Bad confusion can give the reader insufficient information to construct meaning, but productive disorientation gives the reader enough information to know that meaning exists while withholding the final arrangement.

To my mind, the latter creates a contract:

Keep reading.

This will move again.

Given this is a veryyyyy chunky nine-book saga, I hope the contract is legible right from the get-go. If Book I behaved like a perfectly conventional chronological novel and Book IV suddenly began treating time as negotiable, the series would feel as though it had changed its rules.

Instead, the instability is there from the beginning, which hopefully clues readers in early that time in this series is a negotiable tangle, and the clock that keeps it tidy has already gone missing. Metaphors may betray belated meaning. Omissions may betray self-deceptions. Confidence may betray inherent terror, and the things someone insists are irrelevant may become extremely relevant in another installment.

Meanwhile, throughout the saga, Stryx will be hanging upside down from the ceiling as she chitchats with the spiders, reminding them that time has never respected Mordiger nearly as much as Mordiger respects Mordiger.

Also, she will 100% get the stopwatch back eventually.

Likely after breaking it.

<3