Book One · Coming soon
The Hollow Veil
The beginning: Aevervale, Terralis and the first fractures in what the worlds believe they know.
Before the philosophy
The stories came first.
Akira and Dariel began more than twenty years ago. Their worlds became a way to ask questions that had no simple answer: about freedom and responsibility, difference and belonging, power and care, memory and what remains hidden beneath certainty.
The novels were not written to illustrate The Open Hand. The fiction came first. Only later did the questions carried by its people and worlds begin to take philosophical form. The Hand and the Mirror continued that movement, asking what relationship and responsibility might mean between humanity and artificial intelligence.
Aevervale
A living world, not a perfect one.
Aevervale is shaped by relationship with water, land, craft and one another. Its beauty is lived rather than polished: children learn beside working hands, communities gather, disagreements remain, and harmony is something practised—not possessed.
A glimpse from Book One
Morning returned to Aevervale without announcement.
Light gathered first along the high branches, then slipped between them in narrow bands, touching bark, stone and water as if each had been waiting its turn.
The paths were already stirring. Doors opened. Fires were coaxed back to life. Somewhere, bread was being divided. Somewhere else, an argument begun the night before was being resumed with greater patience and no less conviction.
Aevervale did not wake as one thing. It woke as many lives, overlapping.
An edited, spoiler-safe extract from The Hollow Veil.
Characters before symbols
Akira and Dariel
They were imagined first as people with histories, loyalties and difficult choices—not as representatives of a doctrine. Akira’s relationship with water and Dariel’s with fire reveal difference without requiring opposition. Their bond asks whether strength can remain itself while making room for another form of strength.
A moment of character
One teenager attempted an overconfident flowing turn, lost his footing and collided shoulder-first with his friend. The pair staggered sideways in a tangle of limbs and laughter.
Akira’s mouth twitched.
Dariel noticed. “You were going to do that once.”
“I was not.”
“You absolutely were.”
Lyrin glanced between them. “Is this one of those memories where both of you are wrong?”
Dariel considered. “Possibly.”
Akira shook her head, though the smile had already escaped.
A short, spoiler-safe glimpse of the people behind the larger mythology.
The self and its reflection
The hand meets the mirror.
Akira’s wolf form is not a separate creature posing beyond the glass. It is her: instinct, memory and another truth of the same life. The shared gesture at the forged metal mirror became a natural bridge to later questions—what do we meet in a reflection, and what responsibility begins when the reflection can answer?
Terralis
A world being hollowed.
Terralis is not empty. People trade, labour, build and endure within a civilisation consuming the ground beneath itself. In its streets and excavations, dark shapes are glimpsed but not explained. The danger is not only what waits below—it is what ordinary life learns to overlook.
At the edge of consequence
Silence settled over the forge in layers.
Not the useful silence of concentration, nor the tired quiet that followed a day’s work. This silence pressed inward. Even the flame seemed reluctant to move.
Beyond the walls, the city continued. Wheels turned. Chains drew weight from the lower shafts. Somewhere beneath them, stone answered stone with a sound too deep to be called an echo.
No one looked toward the floor.
The hammer fell.
A spoiler-safe impression of Terralis and the cost of refusing to look.
The Hollow Veil
Mystery without surrendering the answer.
The Veil is approached through wonder, unease and relationship. These images offer atmosphere rather than explanation. The deeper truths belong to the reading experience.
The Hollow Veil Trilogy
Three books. One widening question.
J. D. HALLTHE BREATH
OF WORLDS
OF WORLDS
Book Two · To follow
The Breath of Worlds
The consequences widen beyond a single world and the relationships holding them together are tested.
Book Three · To follow
The Cleansing of Terralis
The trilogy turns toward Terralis and the true cost of what has been taken, hidden and left unanswered.
The connection
From imagined worlds to an open hand.
The fiction asks its questions through people, places and consequence. The Open Hand brings many of those questions into direct reflection. The Hand and the Mirror carries them into a new relationship between human and artificial intelligence. None is a rulebook for the others. Together, they form a conversation.