[In Progress] [109,000] [Fantasy] Ī Tal Nē Dörî, a mythic dark fantasy cycle tracing the history of the mortal races of Meiach

The universe of Meiach forgets. Not as metaphor — unanchored things, structures, memories, and even people dissolve out of existence, edited from reality as though they had never been. What survives is only what has been recorded deeply enough that the world itself cannot un-remember it: cut into stone, paid for in attention and in lives.

Ī Tal Nē Dörî is told as a chronicle being carved into copper by Vaelōran, the last scribe of a besieged order, in the intervals between artillery impacts, racing to set down the oldest story his people possess before the vault falls. It is the story of Ëaden, a boy born able to hear the deep tone of the planet, and through it the slow dying of the Song that holds the world together, who is commissioned to forge the one thing that will outlast the coming fire, at the cost of his own life.

At bottom it's a story about memory as a physical law: who gets remembered, who gets erased, and what a person will pay to leave a mark the world can't smooth away.

The honest part: please read before requesting

This is dense, literary, adult epic fantasy, slow-burn. The prose is maximalist; the narrator is a scholar whose register swings between clinical and grief-stricken by design; the book is framed as a translated in-world chronicle, so it front-loads history and builds by accumulation rather than action. If you enjoy Gene Wolfe (The Book of the New Sun) or Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere universe, you may be at home. If you want fast pacing, light prose, or a tight single-POV adventure, this honestly isn't for you — and I'd rather you skip it than slog. I want readers who like density, not who'll endure it.

- Genre / length / status: Adult epic/literary fantasy · ~110k words · complete first draft of book 1, revised.

- Content warnings: Most of the disturbing material here is quiet — clinical, psychological, and centered on bodily decay and erasure rather than action-violence. For some readers that restraint makes the child death and the slow suffocations land harder, not softer. If quiet, sustained bleakness is a no for you, this is a no. No on-page sexual content and no sexual violence.

What I'm hoping for: reader reactions, not copyedits.

I'm not after line-level proofreading yet; I need to know how it reads to a stranger. Specifically:

1. Did you keep reading, and exactly where would you have stopped? Mark the spot you'd have put it down. Single most useful thing you can give me.
2. Immersion breaks: any word, phrase, or moment that yanked you out of the world (especially anything that reads too modern or technical for a secondary-world setting).
3. Pace / density: where it drags, where exposition overtakes scene, where you started skimming.
4. The narrator: does the shifting clinical ↔ grieving register work, or feel like inconsistency?
5. Did you feel it? The opening, and the later chapters around the character Esh, are meant to land emotionally: did they, or did you stay outside?
6. Confusion: where you got lost: names, timeline, who or what.
7. Familiarity: anything that struck you as derivative or "I've read this before."

Logistics.

- Format: .docx / .pdf with tracked changes/comments enabled.

- I'm glad to send the first 2–3 chapters first, and the full manuscript of book 1 only if it clicks — no pressure to finish.

- Timeline: Read at whatever pace suits you, but within a reasonable time please.

- Swap: Happy to beta-read yours in return, tell me genre & length.

- Reach me here on reddit and I'll respond to your DMs.

Thanks for getting to the bottom of a long post about a dense book — honestly, that you did is already a decent compatibility test.

For those of you who want more detail on the content warnings, below is if your explanation (behind spoiler tags)

!Death of children / loss of a child — a toddler in the opening; children among a mass erasure later. This is the heaviest one and the one to put first.!<

!Terminal illness & prolonged dying, rendered in extended clinical detail; death by suffocation specifically (an industrial lung disease; two deaths are dwelt on at length).!<

!Suicide.!<

!Body horror — living tissue calcifying to stone; bodies dissolving out of existence; decomposition; a body metabolically consuming itself.!<

!Mass death / mass-casualty events.!<

!Slavery, forced labour, caste exploitation, child labour, and the deliberate destruction of a people's language and cohesion (cultural erasure).!<

!Execution / capital punishment.!<

!Sustained grief and parental bereavement.!<

!Existential dread / cosmic indifference / nihilistic themes (load-bearing, not incidental).!<

!Graphic industrial injury (a crushing death).!<

!Transactional/arranged marriage (non-graphic; consent is coerced by circumstance).!<

!The violence isn't action/gore-driven; there's no battlefield splatter.!<