The Dawnlands

Could this be a novel?

My big juicy goal of 2026 is to complete a novel manuscript and submit it to 72 agents. There’s one problem. I don’t know what to write. Or more, there’s too much I want to write.

So I thought, why not use Substack as a testing ground for the story seeds in my back pocket? Over the next few months, I’ll post beginnings of stories that open up new worlds (deep down, I’m in it for the worldbuilding).

Let me know if you’re intrigued enough to want a novel out of one of these stories. Fair warning, this one is sci-fi.

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The Dawnlands

Sasha summited the final crag on the ridge, hungering for the view on the other side. The next mountain range was calling. Warm, page-turning energy flipped up through her body, coaxing her arms to pull her higher. Her mind was clear, immersed in bounding across the continent—leading the rangers in search of their wandering community’s new home for the season.

The planet, Yim, rotated extraodrinarly slow, and close to their sun. Days were bright with scorching fire, and the nights were cold as the hardest ice. Her people lived in the dawnlands, settling in the twilight and moving on in the morning sun. Life was always reawakening within this sliver of dusk, growing fast and tall for its chance to burn.

A message buzzed on the inside of her wrist as her gloved hand found purchase on the stone to hoist her upwards. It was her partner. She knew it from the prick and texture of the ping. Unread messages from Calendula stuck to Sasha’s wrist like thistles in bloom. Where are you? Jaron misses you? How much longer? The anticipated words took the wind out of her climb, dragging at her desire for the top of the ridge.

The settling sensation flipped down her body, as cold as the rocks in these twilight lands. She fought it with her arms, straining to pull herself over the crag.

She crested and stood in the blue darkness, perched on the spine between two valleys. From where she’d come, the light of her rangers flickered as they climbed. Below them in the flats was the distant glow of their village’s lumbering caravan. On the other side, a new valley faded into the frozen night.

The settling intensified within her. Her ancestors were assholes. They’d tinkered with their instincts to survive on this fickle planet without having the courage to fully sever themselves from the programming of Earth. The settling made her keenly aware of her bones, scraping against her muscles like rough concrete. She turned to the faint hint of sunshine fire beyond the distance. Light tricked her engineered endocrine system to restart the questing reflex. Photons tickled her nose, and her bones remembered the heat of her soft body cloistered in her parka.

Her wrist pricked again with Calendula.

“You getting calls, too?” Yarislav, the first of her team, had summited behind her.

“Give us a moment.” Sasha massaged her wrist. “We’ve been out in the tundra all season, and we got them what they can’t shut up about, and all we hear is, where are you, I’m lonely, I want you, come home, baby.”

“They got the settles, and they’re coming on hard. Ow wee! You don’t want to come between me and Chandra when she’s got the settles.”

“But give us a moment to enjoy this fucking moment.”

“Captain.” Yarislav’s mouth was all that showed beneath his fur hood and face mask. “Mind if I give you a piece of unsolicited advice?”

“I do.”

“You know I’m gonna say it anyway.”

“You know I’m still in charge.”

“Not for long.”

“Don’t get fresh with me.”

Sasha called again on that fire in the distance, looking into a promise of incineration as her reason for being.

“Peaches. Chandra just reminded me of peaches. Don’t you at least enjoy grilled peaches in the dawntime? When the orchards are ample, and the grass is tall. Ow wee! You have to admit those are the halcyon days, as the sun lord says.”

Peach juice dripped through the rivulets of her brain. In those BBQs of high summer, she finally relaxed. The settling finally sank, as the questing reflex reawakened in the slow sunrise. She enjoyed those days, making love to Calendula on a mat among the blueberry fields, teaching Jaron how to spot paths up a cliff, letting the bluedark of the twilightlands whisper to her while she slept on the memory foam—dreaming of her fingers on pixelated boulders.

“We still have to find a path to get the convoy into the next valley,” she said.

“Won’t take long.” Yarislav pointed at a distant pass through the mountain ridge.

Sasha’s pathfinder eyes saw a river in the low light. It was frozen solid, as hard as stone, and cold enough to take the weight of their rolling vehicles. There was always a way through when she wished there wasn’t.

“Want me to light it up?” Yarislav removed his pack.

“No. Let’s let them fumble around a little longer in the dark.”

“Come on. This is the fun part.” Yarislav unboxed a drone to drop bioluminescent slurry along their desired path. “I’m gonna do it.”

Her authority was slipping. Only a few hours ago, he would’ve followed her into a half-frozen lake. When she’d glimpsed the prize of the new settlement ground, it triggered a cascade of new thoughts and feelings, rearranging the nature of their bonds. This is not the place. We must push further, deeper, for a longer season, so the fruit grows plump and juicy.

She couldn’t smother her success. The other rangers felt it too. She’d fulfilled her season’s purpose. It was time to fade from command and into the background, milling einkorn and amaranth into flour, smothered in that dusty settling smell of things piling up, sitting in place for too long. It was unlike out here, where the wildlands were always in renewal. That silent frost would be disrupted by screeching equipment and screaming children. As Calendula managed the planting and harvest, Sasha would lie around on the couch, drinking through last season’s mugwort gin, covering up the crush of settling that leadened her bones and atrophied her muscles. It hurt. No one ever talked about how much it hurt. She swore she got it worse. Those who quested well were rewarded with depression, maybe to keep them from wandering off, to keep them useful.

Yarislav activated the drone. “It’s happening.”

Calendula’s ping came strong this time. Cut it out. She wished she could cut it out, but they’d hardwired the connection into her body.

“Why do you fight it?” Yarislav turned to her, steam coming off his frost-covered beard.

“I don’t. You can’t fight something that always wins.”

“It’s not that bad. I kind of like how it feels. I get all loose and soft inside. Sometimes, I’ll catch myself crying, not at sad stuff. But the beauty of simple stuff. Once I balled at a family of voles tunneling out their hollow in the snow melt.”

“I’m not sentimental. How can you be when everything is always dying? The only way to live is to move.”

“They gave us the settles because of people like you. You’d get us all killed.”

“Remember who you’re talking to.”

“We found our pretty valley.” Yarislav punched the map with his glove to set a course for the drone. “You’re a lame duck, commander.”

“Call me what you want. But give us a moment to enjoy where we’re at.”

Small drops of frost melted off his beard and refroze on the screen. He flinched, showing her his urges screaming inside. Did his muscles ache to turn the page to the next season, where hers became stiff on bones that were shards of ice?

“Please.” She reached over and stroked his arm. “I just want this moment with you.”

He looked up from the kit. She searched for his warmth buried under layers, the kind they shared as sack-mates keeping themselves alive with their body heat, snow piling around them. They understood each other, out here in the hypercold. They didn’t need peaches or beds or sunrises. A double-insulated sleep sack and two bodies would do. In these moments, Sasha didn’t long for Calendula in late-summer or yearn for the next valley. Just stillness, a settling of her own.

Another message scratched against her tendons.

Yarislav recoiled from her, as if he’d received one, too. He tapped the console to dispatch the drone. Its rotarblades whirred to life.

Sasha raised her foot, cracking the ice of her frozen joints. She stomped the drone against the rock.

“Have you lost your mind?!”

“I told you to give us a moment.” Her leg loosened and her bones thawed.

The scream on his lips died. He cracked a smile across the frost.

When the other rangers crested the ridge, the two of them were laughing.

“Enjoy the view,” said Sasha. “And let’s find a hollow to bed down for another night.”

Photo credit: Elias Kipfer

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Notes on inspiration

This story was partly inspired by an anecdote in The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow) about Indigenous communities where leadership roles and individual identity shift with the season.

I’ve also been binging Yakutia YouTube, which explores daily life in the coldest city on Earth.

The sleep-sack mate idea came from the way Vikings would cuddle up with a buddy to keep warm on passages across the North Sea.

The planet of Yim was inspired by the slow rotation of Venus. For the last decade, I’ve been tinkering on and off with a space opera series set in a future where many of the planets and moons of our solar system have been terraformed. I’m fascinated with how we humans adapt our cultures to survive in diverse environments, as well as how we domesticate environments to meet our needs. I haven’t decided if this chapter is set within that same story universe, on a version of Venus in the far future, or if it’s a completely new world.

Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see the world of Yim (name pending) developed further :)