Notes on The Octave of Time

The Octave of Time is book #99 in the AI Lore books series, by Lost Books, Canadian AI publisher.

The text was is all human-generated, and was written chronologically as a sequel to The Lost Direction. However, due to circumstances, the book was unfinished, with only maybe a third or half of the full tale being told here, of the settling of the island of Ovarion, after the collapse of Quatria back into the Hypogeum.

This book features a returning cast that includes Tob Gobble, among many others. It also references quite a lot the House of Life (though the volume titled that was only written much later).

All the images are done in Midjourney. This was interesting for example with depicting recurring characters like Tob Gobble, who takes on many new and surprising faces within this volume. And MJ had a completely terrible time trying to depict the half horse/half rabbit creatures known as goleks. (There is one of these books that has some awesome pics of goleks, but I can’t remember offhand which one it is anymore!)

Here’s the preview of the interior art:

One thing I love about doing images in this style is that because of the “dvd screengrab” style I use on many of them, I’m left with the impression of there being a movie/movies here that “must have” existed, and the memories of which are nearly at the tip of my tongue… and that’s an incredible feeling; plus this feeling of being able to like “open rooms into my subconscious” and let others peer inside.

By the way, here is the original reference to the concept of the Octaves of Time, as described originally in the Lost Direction.

When Benda upset this natural way of things by mortally wounding Jan Re, he incurred both a blood debt to support Jan Re’s family, but also a ritual debt, for having changed the pitch of the tones which make up the Octave of Time. The cycles performed in Quatrian Society under the priests of the Hypergeic Temple Mount had as their intended function the harmonization of these Octaves in the present moment with the mythic and historical root tones (which were one in the same in this society).

This was not, to those people, idle speculation, or merely a symbolic conception of time as cyclical. This was, in a society still wedded to the Hypogeic powers, a concrete experience of how the present could impact the past. Thus atonement was also attunement, a continual re-tuning of the very stuff of existence.