Much of Marshsong is world-building—not just of geography or history, but of feeling. The landscape of Barrenwood is stitched together less from stone and soil than from emotion: sadness, fear, excitement, bewilderment. It is a world born not of logic, but of the vivid, unsettling clarity of dreams. 

Please, don’t grip too tightly to sense or structure here. Let go. Float. Let the current carry you. 

These characters, these energies, these strange contours of place—they arrived to me not through plot outlines but through the uneasy language of my dreams. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean the literal dreams I’ve had at night, the ones that haunt the skin long after waking. I’ve tried to stay true to their energy as much as to the imaginary soil they stand on. This cave, this boat, this mad uncle that has apparently been gone, they all are arrived to me in sleep. 

This chapter is meant to cast a mood, to prepare the body, not just the mind, for the journey. As Octavia Butler once wrote: “I wanted to write a novel that would make people feel what it was like to be a stranger in a strange land. Mood can shape the experience more than facts ever could.” 

So if you find yourself adrift, that’s okay. The compass here is feeling, not direction. –Nato Thompson