A Distance in Pages (WIP)
Growing into adulthood is hard. Tobias spends half his time teaching resistant young minds about language, dialect, and poetry, and half of his time being a whistler at a proscenium theater. He loves both, but also knows they can’t overlap forever. He also fell in love with Nissa, the daughter of a powerful family who wants nothing more out of her life than to be a botanist. Unfortunately, others are among the administration who would see him fail, the world is drying up as rain stops and the oceans rise, and Nissa’s altruism promises to send her to a wartorn country to find the answer to the climate disaster. An epistolary tale, where Tobias’s words are written in black and Nissa’s edits are written in red, it captures the complexity of doing what one must to save the world in the perspective of the one who must be left behind.
An adjunct english professor in a prestigious fantasy university falls in love with a botanist who, through science*, finds the answer to a world-spanning climate disaster. Tobias’s background is the son of a shipping merchant, and he works behind the scenes of a theater when not teaching as an adjunct at Teullerid University, one of the five major universities running the country of Ataraxia. Nissa, a well-born associate professor who is also a botanist, spends her time trying to figure out how to fix the world as it slowly warms, and the rain stops. She ends up leaving, to go to a war-torn country, to find the answer, while Tobias remains behind. His journal makes its way to her, and she adoringly edits his recounting of events on her return trip home.
A world full of rich languages, political intrigue, and a terrible backdrop that forces certain countries to war, and other countries to destitution. Can Nissa return home to her love?