Origins: The Fork (working title — drafting)

Discovery (1492/93 forward)

Contact. The fork. The Guardians and the Hunters take shape.

The second volume of the origin trilogy. Currently in draft.

Two braided threads. The first follows the 1493 Salt River clash from the Kalinago side — not as the colonial chronicles told it, as a random skirmish that the European arrival happened upon, but as the work it actually was: a sightline defence by a generation of keepers who had been preparing for this morning since their grandparents were children. Hayuya, son of Guarionex, releases the arrow at the count of the tall stranger’s seventh pace, and he does not miss.

The second thread follows the Spanish Defector — a Casa de Contratación pilot who reads a Codec fragment, understands what he has been complicit in helping to bury, and turns Guardian. He is betrayed by a colleague who founds the Hunters. The making of the split that the modern team is still inside.

And in a single Mesoamerican glyph cut into the upper edge of the Salt River slab — planted, openly, on the page of Book One Chapter 22 — the chain’s first extension to a third culture gets the origin story its silent appearance in the modern volume promised.