Quantumyth

A 1,000 page illustrated fictional mythology book.

[quantumyth]

Dedication

For Ray — my wife and best friend, whose grace is beauty itself. And for her Resonant, Alaru, whom my own, Eyodi, shall one day meet beyond death, as we voyage together, one-way, to the Chamber of Vynth, forever unfettered at last, interwoven individual tales to one day become a Resonant Mythsource all their own. 

Thank you for your deep patience and grace through the long years of madness it took to bring The Quantumyth into being. 

Special Thanks to the Author’s Heroes (in no particular order)

a.k.a “ingredients list”

Joseph Campbell, Stanisław Szukalski, J.R.R. Tolkien, Hayao Miyazaki, Fumito Ueda, Guillermo Del Toro, James Cameron, George Lucas, Carl Jung, Yoshitaka Amano, Matt Nava, Douglas Adams, Mike Mignola, Ralph McQuarrie, Doug Chiang, Jenova Chen, Michael Ende, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stephen King, C.S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Jack Chalker, Isaac Asimov, Peter Jackson, Philip K. Dick, Akira Kurosawa, Nobuo Uematsu, Terrence Malick, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kahlil Gibran, H.P. Lovecraft, J.K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, Brian Froud, Terri Windling, Alan Lee, John Howe, Kazuo Koike, Enya, Osamu Tezuka, Moebius (Jean Giraud), Jim Henson, Kentaro Miura, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Alex Garland, Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Naomi Novik, Richard Adams, Alan Moore, Dave McKean, Terry Gilliam, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Blake, H.P. Lovecraft, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Tove Jansson, Georges Hergé Remi,  Beatrix Potter, T.H. White, Edgar Allan Poe, John Keats, William Shakespeare, Rumi, Hafiz, Laozi, Siddhartha Gautama, Herman Hesse, Carl Sagan, Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Ru Weerasuriya, Stephen Hawking, Amy Hennig, Noam Chomsky, Gustav Klimt, Salvador Dalí, Hieronymus Bosch, Yoko Taro, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto, Rael Lyra, Satoshi Kon, Hideaki Anno, Mamoru Oshii, Makoto Shinkai, Katsuhiro Otomo, Hajime Isayama, Junji Ito, Anne Rice, Robert Jordan, Gene Wolfe, Janny Wurts,  N.K. Jemisin, Kathryn Lasky,  Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Clive Barker, Iain M. Banks, Iain McCaig, Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Mike Oldfield, Loreena McKennitt, Howard Shore, David Attenborough, John Williams, Yoko Kanno, Takeshi Furukawa, Austin Wintory, Koji Kondo, Mastodon, Tool, Skyforger, Jeff Jordan, Eyvind Earle

⸻

Special Thanks to these works (in no particular order)

a.k.a. “would-be siblings list”

The Last Guardian, 1001 Nights, Kalevala, Prose Edda, The Silmarillion, The Bhagavad Gita, The Popol Vuh, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Divine Comedy, The Odyssey, The Iliad, Beowulf, The Book of Revelation, The Tao Te Ching, Journey to the West, The Upanishads, The Mahabharata, The Ramayana, The Book of the Dead, Metamorphoses (Ovid), The Mabinogion, The Táin, The Red Book (Jung), The Pathless (Nava), The Holy Mountain (film), The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Earthsea Cycle, Dune, Foundation, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Book of Imaginary Beings, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, Avatar, Star Wars, Alien, The Terminator, The Matrix, Cloud Atlas, Arrival, Interstellar, Waking Life, The Fountain, Blade Runner, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Dark Souls, The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy VI, Shadow of the Colossus Journey (Chen), Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, NieR: Automata, Okami, Chrono Trigger, The Little Prince, Watership Down, The Plague Dogs, The Book Thief, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Neverending Story, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Mythago Wood, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Once and Future King, The Book of Lost Tales, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Fall of Gondolin, Unfinished Tales, Berserk, Akira, Nausicaä (manga), Monstress, Sandman, Hellboy, Saga, East of West, The Arrival (Shaun Tan), The Invention of Hugo Cabret, The Prophet, The Art Spirit

The Man Who Planted Trees, Seth Speaks,  The Cloud of Unknowing, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Zen in the Art of Archery, The Way of the Pilgrim, House of Leaves, The Dhammapada, The Book of Hours, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Alchemist (Coelho), The Electrum Archive, The Incal

Chapter 1 - The Vast Harmony, Aeva Ranur

In the time before time, and the space before space, there was The Vast Harmony — an unbroken field of stillness beyond stillness, an endless repose untouched by moment or meaning. It was not darkness, for there was no light to contrast it; nor was it silence, for no sound had yet stirred to define its absence. It was the equilibrium before concept, the breath never taken. No shape moved within it, for there was no ‘within’. It simply was, and in its being, it lacked nothing — not because all was present, but because nothing was required.

Yet here, we must pause. For we humans are not timeless. We are not beings of stillness or formless peace. We are creatures of question, of the urgency of mortality, shaped by endings and beginnings. Restless in the marrow of our bones. We therefore cannot dwell in the Vast Harmony, for it is not built for us. And so, by sheer necessity, the story must move — not because it must, but because we must. Our tale shifts now, not arbitrarily like the myths that speak of divine whimsy, of things coming into being ‘just because’…but because we are here, creator and beholder alike… 

This is myth shaped by witness.

And so, within the Vast Harmony — or perhaps beside it, or through it, though such words mean little in this realm — there emerged…

[quantumyth]

Author’s Preface

Dear Reader,

If you are holding this book in your hands (or viewing it through whatever luminous device the age now offers), let me begin by saying: thank you. It means the world to me that you are here.

What lies before you is the fruit of a lifelong labour — The Quantumyth — undertaken not with any commission or deadline, but out of an enduring, inner compulsion. I began it in earnest in the year 2013, and stayed with it through the decades, writing a little each morning before the day’s work claimed its due. Thirty years passed in this manner (until 2043), and still it feels to me that I have merely scratched the surface of this strange and living world I sought to uncover.

I say “uncover” rather than “create” because that is how it felt: as though the stories already existed somewhere, whole and waiting, and my task was simply to find them, to listen and to shape.

As with all such things, the time available to do so grew ever scarcer—particularly after 2026, the year I became a father. But I had made a quiet pact with myself, and with The Quantumyth, and I honoured it. Whatever hours remained between family and health, I gave to the work.

The first seed of storytelling through art was planted in 1994. I was a child then, and I remember drawing a T. Rex gazing up at a tree, wondering whether it could climb it. That tiny moment, absurd and quietly profound, would go on to feature in The Adventurer.

By 1999 I had written my first full story: The Mousetrix, a parody of The Matrix, featuring a mouse who would eventually find a home in The Dagger, one of the lighter tales of the collection.

Then came high school, in 2001, and with it the birth of The Thief, The Golem, and The Seer. By 2009, The Shadow, The Child, and The Pilgrim had joined them. The Hero emerged in 2013, and many others followed.

In 2024, thirty years after the dinosaur and the tree, I reached the hundredth tale. A round number, and as fitting a point as any at which to pause and begin the longer work of diving more deeply into each.

The following year, I left behind media of all kinds: podcasting, which I had taken up in 2015, and the clamour of social networks that seemed increasingly designed to scatter rather than concentrate one’s attention. They had served their time. Now, every free moment I could gather went to The Quantumyth.

Of the many roles I have inhabited (husband, father, civil servant) it is my role as a storyteller that I feel most closely represents me. That thread of creativity has remained intact through all life’s changes: quiet, constant, and unbroken.

I make no grand claims. This was never written with adaptation or audience in mind. I wrote it because I had to, because the ideas would not leave me until they had found their proper home among the hundred. In this way, The Quantumyth became not only my work, but my world.

If any part of it finds its way into your own imagination, I shall count that a gift freely given and gladly received.

Yours sincerely,

Albert Chessa

[quantumyth]

Note

As mentioned in the introduction, the language you’ll encounter in this text is kehoda — the tongue of the Resonants, the ohuda. It is the language before all others, the root from which all human speech might be imagined to descend: a primal, unified tongue.

Throughout this book, words in kehoda will appear. A glossary of key terms and phrases can be found at the end.

Also whenever a transfer from the human world to the Resonant world occurs, this symbol will show ❖.

Let these words echo as they once did: ancient, unfamiliar, yet strangely known.

[quantumyth]

THE QUANTUMYTH

by Albert Chessa

•

Introduction

In the dawning days of the twenty-first millennium, as I made my crossing from childhood to adolescence, I set myself a quiet task: to write a story. Yet I sought not merely to add another tale to the multitudes already spun since first fire met breath. No — I longed for something older, something deeper. I desired to unearth the story beneath all stories.

In that pursuit, I found myself drawn not only to the myths of our world, but to the mystery that binds them: a single melody, echoed across ages, clothed in many tongues, yet ever the same in essence. The great sage Joseph Campbell called it the mono-myth — the Hero’s Journey — a path the soul treads through dream, through legend, through time.

Where Campbell mapped its contours with scholarly clarity, I felt called to walk it as a storyteller. If he sought the common root of all myths, then I would attempt to imagine the root itself — the seed before it blossomed into a thousand branches.

Thus arose the notion of the Resonants — a people beyond people, a culture beyond culture. Not human, and yet kin to us all. I conceived of them as the first-born of meaning, the children of that primal dawn when ‘story’ itself took breath. Their tale would be the secret thread behind the tapestry of all others — not a story told within the world, but a story that became the world.

Tolkien, whose works lit the path before me, once shaped Middle-earth to answer a noble, singular question: What is the lost mythology of Britain? In his footsteps, I sought the next step — not toward the myth of one land, but toward the myth of all lands. Not the lore of a nation, but the lore of nature itself. What is the myth of existence? What was the first story — and was it told… or lived?

In my imagining, the cosmos stirred and formed a shape — not because the universe is human, but because we are, and so we see ourselves in all things. It took form so that we might understand it. And from this First Being came the Resonants — eternal storytellers, the inheritors of that ancient echo.

They speak a tongue known as Kehoda — the language before languages. Not tied to any tribe or tongue, but bearing the cadence of them all. A kind of linguistic Pangaea — a ‘Pangaeaic tongue’ — before speech was shattered into the continents of culture.

And what, then, is the work of the Resonants?

They listen. They wander. They tell. They are the great rememberers of creation — voyagers among the stars, living lives beyond number. Not as lords or conquerors, but as seekers, as stewards of truth.

The tales they gather are not written with ink, nor carved in stone. No pen meets page. Each is entered — as one might step into a pool, or pass through a door. They inhabit. They become. The closest thing we have to such immersion may be found in interactive art, or in dreams — not read or watched, but lived.

And each life, each story, is preserved in their vast crystalline archive (a cousin of Borges’ Tlön): The Chamber of Vynth.

And what if one such Resonant, Eyodi, chose to walk the Earth? To wear the skin of mortality and learn our joys and griefs from within? And what if, of all souls to be born through, he chose mine? Or perhaps, yours — reading this now?

In time, I came to believe a presence stirred within me — not merely a muse, but a memory older than my bones. When the world turned the page to a new millennium, I too turned a page — and in that moment, my true storytelling life began. Dreams became more than dreams. In the quiet of sleep, Eyodi would lead me to the Chamber of Vynth — and there, among glowing pillars and endless shelves, I did not read stories. I became them.

For Resonants do not archive tales as we do. They leap into legend as one leaps into fire. Each story is a life lived, each memory sealed into crystal, like a ring pressed into wax. And now, at last, I have begun to set them down — to paper, at first.

Indeed, this book is the beginning of that chronicle. It tells not only the tale of the Resonants and their origin, but also some of the many stories they have gathered in their great ‘repository beyond reality’ — and those I have lived through them. One soul, bearing a thousand faces. One thread, carried through many looms.

I have chosen (or perhaps, was chosen) to capture and recount in these pages one hundred such tales, drawn from twenty Resonant mythsources I glimpsed in dream — each a fragment, a flame, a truth. It may take the whole of my life to recall and record them, but recall and record them I shall.

And should you — reader, dreamer, maker of worlds — feel called to bring these tales into other forms, where the Chamber becomes a hub of portals, each tale a realm to enter — you have my blessing. Build from what you find here. That, too, is the work of the Resonants.

This is The Quantumyth — the story that came before the first story.

The dream that made the world.

Let infinity unfold.

Albert Chessa (June 11, 2025)

[quantumyth]

[quantumyth]

[quantumyth]

[quantumyth]

[quantumyth]

[quantumyth]

[quantumyth]

[quantumyth]

[quantumyth]

[quantumyth]

[quantumyth]

[quantumyth]