What’s Taking So Long?
Dear Backer,
You deserve a clear answer to a clear question. What is taking us so long?
The honest answer is that we underestimated something about the book we had built.
We designed this novel so that most sentences are doing work. Each paragraph is a tunnel to somewhere else in the story, somewhere else in the lore, somewhere in the two books that follow. The whole thing is a network of mutual dependencies. Puzzles, promises, and revelations all speaking to one another. We built it this way because this is how we love novels to be. To reward rereading.
We went back in for what we thought would be the final tightening pass. Turned out the book wouldn’t be tightened in one place without coming loose somewhere else. We’d cut a sentence and find, eighty pages later, that a scene had stopped being true. We’d clarify something up front, because it had confused an early reader somewhat, and a revelation that once landed with force became a whisper. So we rewrote both ends until they worked together.
In one late chapter, we hear news of a seemingly inconsequential assassination. A stricter edit would have meant we cut it to keep things moving. But it’s a gentle invitation to examine the moral architecture of Neh. We had to ask ourselves. Would it matter profoundly to you, the reader of this first book? Perhaps not yet. (Is this a spoiler? Perhaps not yet.) But stay with us long enough and you will be there when the other side of this tunnel opens.
A good idea is a problem. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The old version still works, technically. But you know it could be truer, richer. So you follow it, and you discover that the better version means rewriting an entire chapter that was finished and working well. We rewrote it. It cost us two weeks. This happened more than once.
We have been balancing these trade-offs over the years of writing this book. We are nearly done. “Nearly” has been true for longer than either of us expected.
There’s something we keep reminding each other, on days that become nights with work still left. Once a novel is printed, it is out there for good. It becomes a fixed object in the world, carrying our ideas, aspirations, frameworks and interiorities in a permanent form. And this is our first novel, yes, but more importantly, it is the first doorway into a universe we have been building for five years.
Neh arrives with its own vocabulary, its own social reflexes, its own systems of governance and philosophies. A book like this can pause to translate itself like a manual, or it can let you learn it the way you learn a new city, by getting lost in it, turning corners, slowly building a felt sense of how streets connect. We wanted the second kind.
Across these three books, we want to take you inside a genuinely alien cognition, a living world that doesn’t think the way we do. That kind of entry requires a shared vocabulary. So we’ve arranged the language to be learned the way we learn any other language. By repetition across contexts, by letting a word pass until the story itself insists you understand it.
A lot of this edit has been about calibrating that. Supplying each new term just enough surrounding texture to reveal a bit, but not so much that we flatten the pleasure of slow discovery. We’ve rewritten passages so that if a term doesn’t land the first time, you can let it remain a proper noun. The story will still hold. Understanding will arrive cumulatively.
You should be able to enter the novel without any priors at all. If a name or concept feels familiar, hold the familiarity lightly. Where we’ve taken inherited nouns, we’ve made them do new work. The only meanings that matter are the ones the book earns on the page.
So we’ve spent the last two months building these bridges into this world. We wondered if they were enough. But then we remembered that you backed this project before it existed as an artifact, based on nothing but a description and perhaps an affinity for adventure.
You are exactly the readers this book has been waiting for. Thank you for waiting for it.
Now the part that you actually need from us.
The e-book will be in your inbox on February 15, 2026.
Physical manufacturing begins in early March. Shipping for all pledges begins in April. We will share more details soon.
We are late. We are sincerely sorry.
In the meantime:
We’ve built our own pledge manager, and it’s now live.
Check it out here: https://store.entermaya.com/
You can manage your pledge, explore add-ons, and enter your shipping address. We’ve added a collection of wallpapers and character miniatures that you can download for free. Small tokens of appreciation while you wait.
Thank you for staying with us through the messy part of making.
With gratitude,
Anand and Zain