Origins: The First Arrival (working title)

Ancient (pre-European)

Two arrivals — one was welcome, one was a warning.

The first volume of the origin trilogy. Two braided threads across five centuries.

The first thread follows the stranger from the north — the pale man, the one who walked off the Vinland window and drifted south — as he crosses into the Antilles, learns the courtesies of a civilisation that had been waiting longer than his own had existed, and gives his hosts a warning his own people could not give theirs in time.

The second thread follows the behiques across the generations as they take that warning and turn it into work. The making of the Codec. The discipline of hiding truth forward — for a reader the makers will never meet, for a window they will never close, for a crisis they cannot name. The choice to encode the proof so that the next people in the room will be able to read what the first ones were trying to say.

It closes with the last work done before the sails appear on the eastern horizon. The last word cut by a behique who knows what is coming. The wrong date completed. The window aimed. The pale man watching from the ridge.