I’ve spent 570 hours on The Reply in the last two months.
That’s not a complaint, by the way. Far from it.
Instead, I confess that I’m building a world I’ve been obsessed with and the hours disappear because this isn’t work. And that means that I can’t ever be sure anyone will give much of a damn about it. Because like the best things that matter to those that make them, they’re personal first. They’re a piece of something. Of you.
And I’ve never been entirely likeable.
My point here is that this is ok. I’ve given myself permission to write it and possibly even write it poorly.
LLM would advise me to write it like a powerpoint presentation, devoid of all the ESL nonsense, romance-language exophony and strange archaicism that might define my English. I’ve decided to write it in English anyway since I do believe—if there will ever be an audience for it—that English is a nice home for a nautical horror.
Perhaps when the manuscript is done, I’ll translate it myself.
Where Began
So, to the point. Nautical horror is something I’ve been rather obsessed with since I read my very first book in English. Wreck of the Whaleship Essex by Owen Chase, first mate of the very voyage he recounts. Which, while not strictly a horror—or even a work of fiction—is definitely horrific.
I was so immersed in the atmosphere, the salt, the suffering. It’s crusted over my dreams since.
In The Reply, the sea—called many things though mostly the Elder Fathom, or the Oraen depending on who’s speaking—is sentient and jealous. It doesn’t just kill sailors rather it claims them. It whispers, makes offers, gets inside your head and stays there.
Captain Somerset survives it not by blocking it out, but by listening. This gives him preternatural intuition at sea and it’s destroying him.
The fog was a living thing, its tendrils clinging with a damp chill that had nothing of the sun’s mercy in it. It tasted of salt and envy.
I grew up with the ocean as a constant presence. My mother’s love for it was tangible—old glass buoys hung like captured stars, sea shanty CDs were our soundtrack.
What I understood later, or perhaps it was true because of this: the ocean is where I feel most spiritual. Where some people find God (or whatever) in mountains or forests, I find myself in the sea. It’s an empty, contemplative space—devoid of sound but roaring with it also. It’s a perfect analog for a human mind, for a soul. Sailing on the sea is sailing your own consciousness. And in some parts of your mind, as the old maps warned, “here be dragons.”
Somerset’s relationship with the Fathom is that spiritual conversation turned predatory. It’s the sea I want to love—need to love—responding with obsession instead of peace. A horror that sits in the violation of something sacred. The darkness that corrupts love into possession, the way existential dread creeps in when you’re in deep contemplation and suddenly the currents turn sour.
You don’t know when it will happen. Just like you don’t know when something sacred can be violated, something important taken away or mutilated.
The sea has moods.
One of the most important creative decisions I made was giving the Fathom temperament. Some days it’s indifferent—you’re an insect crossing its surface. Some days it’s curious, almost playful, testing you with strange calms or unexpected swells. And some days it’s hungry.
The worst days are when it’s in love with you.
When the Fathom decides it wants a particular ship, a particular captain, and begins the work of claiming them. It offers intuition. Power. The ability to read the water like no one else can. And in return, it demands everything. Your peace. Your crew’s lives. Eventually, your soul.
I want to be the sea. Be in it, around it, be loved by it and love it in return. That yearning is why the Elder Fathom exists. It exists because I needed to explore what happens when that love becomes corruption. When the thing you’re most drawn to, the thing that feels most sacred, turns predatory.
Because that’s how obsession works, isn’t it? What felt like grace becomes possession before too long and you wake up one day drowning not having realised you went under long ago.
The Fathom’s moods are my moods. The sea’s jealousy is every time I’ve sacrificed something real for something I needed to create. The way it claims people is the way my work has claimed me. Utterly and often without room for anything else.
The Cultural Cost
Building a haunted sea means building the societies that survive it.
The Orosian faith teaches that the sea is a test—suffer correctly and you might be worthy. The Arunean Navy developed rigid doctrines specifically to keep sailors from listening too closely to the water. In practise, this is for safety. In essence, it’s become paternal discouragement from using your intuition. It’s certainly not meant maliciously, but sometimes terribly tedious decisions are made by people who really just want to keep you safe.
Somerset is dangerous to the Admiralty not because he’s breaking rules, but because he’s proving their entire survival strategy might be inefficient. Wrong. He listens to the thing they’ve spent centuries teaching people to ignore. And it works. That’s what they can’t accept.
And inversely, they may just be right. Because men like Somerset don’t often live the longest lives. Sure, he’s magnificent now but wait. How long can this be tolerated on a gamble before we risk another priceless vessel going down and hundreds of working sailors with it?
After my military service, I needed stories about characters navigating impossible systems with grace and precision. Hornblower. Aubrey. Men who operated in worlds of rigid hierarchy and constant mortal danger, where competence was the only virtue that mattered.
The frigate under sail is the most beautiful piece of engineering humanity ever made. It’s a cathedral of timber and canvas—gifts from land—powered by wind. But it’s also a prison. You’re trapped with the same men for months, sailing over an abyss that sees you, under officers who might be incompetent enough to kill you all. Or so competent that the sea wants them and kills you all to get them.
That tension—which is beautiful and horrible—is everything I needed to process about power, survival, and what it costs to be good at something that might destroy you.
The Cost for Me
I’ve made a crucial decision, repeatedly, at several points in my life where I chose creation over everything else.
I sacrificed stability for art. My every waking moment is always utterly consumed by it. 570 hours in two months isn’t an anomaly for me.
I wouldn’t even say I’m lonely.
The Fathom claims people by offering them what they most want—power, understanding, connection—and then demanding everything in return. It’s not a metaphor. It’s what I’m living. Art claimed me the same way. And I went willingly, eyes open, knowing the cost.
When you’re building the horror that sits in the violation of your most sacred space, when you’re finally telling the story only you could tell whether anyone else cares or not—it’s not really a price. It’s tuesday.
Fair winds,
—D.S.