Through the Thinning
In a world of fading magic, a scholar seeking magical portals finds their quest for the truth running them afoul of warlords, bandits, and politicians. When arcane theory leads to disturbing reality, our scholar must decide what they are willing to do for knowledge—and, ultimately, for love.
Scholar hides behind magical shadowmasks to seek the Thinnings, disturbances central to their theory about the decline of magic. Through the first Thinning, though, Scholar sees another world, and a person who appears through every Thinning thereafter. Thinning by Thinning, Scholar slowly falls in love with this unreachable person that they come to think of as the Reader. Told in a primary narrative that is Scholar’s dissertation (On the Thinning of Magic and the Magic of Thinnings) and a secondary, epistolary, narrative in which Scholar writes to the Reader, Through the Thinning is an unconventional love story about identity, duty, and hope.
Through the Thinning is a love letter to anyone who loves reading. Blending the epistolary love story of This is How You Lose the Time War with just a little of the snark of the Murderbot Diaries, Through the Thinning invites readers into a fantasy world that may be just a Thinning away from their own.
Through the Thinning has been shared with alpha and beta readers, and revisions based on their feedback have made it a stronger story.
Love is a story, told by two people to one another. Disconnected from time, it follows no simple arc, tracing a wave-form of emotional resonance that transcends and is transcended by worlds known and unknowable. It begins and ends with every sunrise and every moonset. For all its confusion and mayhem, it is the only story that matters.
– Willem de Baston, Reflections in the Hour of Mortality: On the Quasi-Temporal and Equi-Tidal Connected Essentiality of Souls