Author's Note
The Tides of Silence began with an image that arrived before the story: a drowned city under a quiet sea, where the bells of the towers still rang at high tide, and the people who heard them did not know they were listening.
The book that grew from that image is set in the flooded archives of the Water Gate — a place where memory and water converge, where what has been lost is not gone but only held differently, and where silence, once the soul has learned to read it, becomes the most dangerous sound in the world. I wrote it in the lineage of Le Guin's Earthsea and Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away — water as patient teacher, magic as moral act, the slow grief of growing up against the current.
This world was co-created with Mina Aranicki. The architecture of the drowned cities, the design of the characters, the thematic register — these belong as much to her as to me. The book is more itself because she was here for its making.
The prose was drafted by Claude Opus 4.6 working under our creative direction, against an outline of scenes we held together. Every passage that reaches you here has been read, chosen, or shaped by a human hand. The cover was generated by Google's Nano Banana Pro to direction.
The percentages do not interest me. The decisions were ours.
I want to say one thing about silence.
Silence is not the absence of sound. It is the ground on which sound becomes itself. The book was written for a reader who has, at some point, learned this — perhaps after a loss, perhaps after a long quiet by the sea, perhaps after a season of life in which speaking lost its hold for a while — and who has been waiting for someone to put the lesson into a story.
If you are that reader, the book is for you.
The tide will rise, and the bells will ring, and the people who hear them will know, this time, what they are listening to.
— FrankX, with Mina Aranicki The Tides of Silence 2026-04-25