Charting a course on Maritime Obsession and Why The Reply Had to Exist
A Lifelong Voyage, Finally Given a Chart
On the True Cost of a Haunted Sea
I’ve spent 570 hours on The Reply in the last two months alone.
That’s not a complaint. It’s a confession: I’m building a world I’ve been obsessed with since childhood, and the hours disappear because this isn’t work—it’s communion. Maritime horror saved my life. The sea is my spiritual language. And I’m building a horror that sits in the violation of something sacred.
Let me show you what it takes to build a haunted ocean—and why I had no choice but to try.
The Psychological Cost
The Fathom isn’t weather. It’s a presence.
In The Reply, the sea—called the Fathom, or the Oraen depending on who’s speaking—is sentient. Jealous. It doesn’t just kill sailors; it claims them. It whispers. It makes offers. It gets inside your head and stays there.
Captain Somerset survives it not by blocking it out, but by listening. By treating the abyss like a cruel, possessive lover he must constantly negotiate with. This gives him preternatural intuition at sea—and it’s destroying him. Every decision is a bargain. Every victory costs a piece of his soul.
The fog was an oppressive, 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.
His First Lieutenant, Ladon Vance, moved to his side. “She has a grasping mood this morning, Captain,” Vance rumbled, his voice low. “The whispers are finding purchase in the quiet hours.”
Somerset took the offered mug of tea, its heat a welcome, grounding reality. His lips twisted into a wry smile that did not quite reach his eyes. “Then we’ll give the men something louder to listen to,” he said, his voice carrying with a theatrical lightness. He turned his back on the spurned sea. “Mister Vance, beat to quarters. I want a live fire drill, starboard battery. Let’s sing her a song of our own this morning.”
Why this had to be the story:
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. The first book I truly read on my own was In the Heart of the Sea, the harrowing account of the wreck of the whaleship Essex. The horror and majesty of it never left me.
But here’s what I understood later: the ocean is where I feel most spiritual. Where some people find God in mountains or forests, I find myself in the sea. It’s an empty, contemplative space—devoid of sound but roaring with it simultaneously. 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 Moods of the Fathom
The sea has moods. In Nhera, those moods can kill you.
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? When it’s in love with you.
A grasping mood. An envious mood. When the Fathom decides it wants a particular ship, a particular captain, and begins the slow, patient 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.
Why I built it this way:
I want to be the sea. Be in it, around it, be loved by it and love it in return. That yearning—that spiritual pull toward something vast and incomprehensible—is real. The Elder Fathom 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? That’s how passion becomes pathology. The currents turn without warning. What felt like grace becomes possession. And you don’t realize you’re drowning until you’ve already gone under.
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 art has claimed me—utterly, completely, 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 divine 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. Entire cultures have shaped themselves around the question: how do you live when the ocean itself is hostile intelligence?
Somerset is dangerous to the Admiralty not because he’s breaking rules, but because he’s proving their entire survival strategy might be wrong. He listens to the thing they’ve spent centuries teaching people to ignore. And it works. That’s the horror they can’t accept.
Why maritime horror saved me:
After my 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—a cathedral of wood and canvas powered by wind. But it’s also a prison. You’re trapped with the same men for months, sailing over an abyss, under officers who might be incompetent enough to kill you all.
That tension—beauty and horror inseparable—is everything I needed to process about power, survival, and what it costs to be good at something that might destroy you.
The Narrative Cost
A sentient sea changes everything.
This isn’t man vs. nature. It’s man vs. a cruel intelligence that’s been watching humans for millennia and knows exactly how to break them. Every storm might be vindictive. Every calm might be seduction. The sea doesn’t just test you—it wants you.
That changes what intimacy means in this world. When Daud—the wounded cynic who trusts no one—meets Somerset, he’s meeting another man who’s learned to live with something that intimately wants to destroy him. They recognize each other because they’ve both been claimed by forces they can’t escape. Not lovers or enemies yet, but the only two people in the room who understand what it costs to negotiate with obsession.
The Cost and the Communion
I’ve made a crucial decision, repeatedly, at several points in my life: I chose creation over everything else.
I sacrificed stability for art. Friendship for fiction. I’m trading social interaction, conventional fun, personal autonomy—all of it submerged in the single-minded pursuit of becoming the writer I need to be. My every waking moment is utterly consumed by it. 570 hours in two months isn’t an anomaly. It’s Tuesday.
This isn’t suffering. It’s submersion. It’s what happens when you’re spiritually called to something and you answer completely.
The Fathom claims people by offering them what they most desperately 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.
The abyss demands a tithe. But when you’re charting a course into a world that feels this real, this vital—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—it’s not a price.
It’s communion.
Thank you for coming along on the voyage.
Fair winds,
—D.S. Black