As far as Maya knew, the world was very small. She traversed it several times daily, from the fresh-water lagoon on the north end, through the small copse of paper trees, to the southern sandy shore on the other side of the island and back. From the topmost tower of the House of Doors, where the floating mistblooms grew in lazy crowds around the windows, she could see all of it—the entire tiny island of Nilaya and the vast expanse of the Endless Ocean that marked the boundaries of her world. She had asked her caretaker, Rael, about what lay across the Endless Ocean many times. And many times, Rael had responded: “Nothing, my bright Maya. That’s what makes it endless.” But of course that couldn’t be true. Even if the House of Doors had no other residents than Maya and Rael, it was full of books, and those books were full of fantastic things that Maya could see nowhere on her tiny island: towering cities of men and women, vast deserts haunted by nightmare creatures, plants and insects that Maya could only barely imagine. For the longest time, Maya made maps of the Endless Ocean, filling its empty expanse with the distant lands and strange people she’d read about in the books. She even went so far as to model it out of paper and glue, figuring that the only way for the ocean to have no end was for it to go in a wide circle, each of its edges wrapping to meet its partner on the opposite side. “A torus,” Rael had called it, when she saw. She’d laughed at Maya’s cleverness and taught her the word for it in the Language. Maya spent the rest of the afternoon practicing the word in her neat script, conjuring rings of gold and silver from the marks of black ink on leaves of paper. But still, Rael would not explain where all the other places were. Maya had even begun to believe that perhaps all of it were simply made up--but if that were the case, then where did Rael come from? Where did she come from?
I’m going through my documents and organising much of my writing life this week, which has turned up this very, very early excerpt from the scribbles that would eventually become my debut novel, Deathsong. Odd to see how much has changed from those very first rough drafts -- and how much has actually remained intact!