a novel in progress · jacob clifton · the midapocalypse
Oldie
a serialized midapocalyptic fantasy
For readers of The Locked Tomb and The Fifth Season —
a fantasy that uses the broken world to crack something real wide open.
Jacob Clifton · 14 years, Television Without Pity · nearly a million readers weekly · novelist & critic
The world didn’t end. It shattered — and that’s not the end. It’s always ending, and being born.
What’s left of the west coast is the Chain — seven islands held together by ancient relics and seven immortal Dreamers who have guided humanity through the wreckage for centuries.
Then, on a quiet morning on the Arizona Coast, the candles go out. All seven Dreamers die at once. They wake up on a pale beach with no names, no powers, no memory that they were ever a family.
Oldie is a story about the weight of forever, the cost of being a hero, and the trauma we inherit from past selves we can no longer remember.it just got tangled.
Welcome to the Midapocalypse
After the Shattering, the reality we knew was replaced by the Chain — a jagged, shimmering expanse where memory has weight and the laws of nature answer to a wilder, older magic.
Oldie is about what remains when the logic of the old world fails: the grit in the gears, the ghosts in the machine — and the seven Dreamers trying to wake it up.
Genre as delivery system for truth. The weird stuff that gets closest to the bone.
They are not heroes.
They are primal forces.
Ancient, powerful, bewilderingly human — who died on a quiet morning and woke up as strangers to themselves and each other.
Holder Stone
The oldest of them and the only one who still knows who she is. A thousand-year-old healer and assassin who has been trying to help for so long she can barely remember what rest feels like. She is their guide. She is exhausted. She loves them anyway.
Meet Holder →Our Lady Maeve
A copper-haired Goddess in a golden dress who rules a crumbling city and genuinely believes in her own divinity. She woke up not knowing her name but still knowing, in her bones, that she is sacred. She is probably right.
Meet Maeve →Queene Death
A terrible angel in a horse-skull mask and 99 silver bells, capable of surgical, white-hot violence and a tenderness so fierce it could break you. Neither boy nor girl. Something older and stranger than either.
Meet Queene Death →The Bard Thomas
A silver-tongued rogue with a red shirt and a song for every occasion, carrying a past he’s desperate to leave behind. His songs are spells. His selfishness is a survival mechanism. His love, when it finally comes, is catastrophic.
Meet Thomas →Sailorboy
Captain of the living ship Actæon, bound to the ocean in ways that make land a kind of agony. He carries a deep, still sadness and a love he can’t quite put into words. The most sincere person in any room he enters — on the Chain, that’s remarkable and dangerous.
Meet Sailorboy →Benjamin of the Beasts
The Prince of Trees, a wild boy who can flicker into a bearcub or a wolf and hears the forest talking back. The youngest of them in spirit. The most honest. The most dangerous — because his emotional state and the health of his forest are the same thing.
Meet Benjamin →The Diamond Dogs
Synchronized figures in chrome fox masks who serve an ideal called Baseline — a state of calm, open, pleasant emptiness. They are a collective. They are one. There are things stirring in the dark of them that even they don’t know yet.
Meet the Dogs →You’ve met them. Now see where it begins.
The Chain is not a place you visit.
It’s a condition you survive.
Seven distinct, dangerous realities. Each one a Land. Each one the only way home.
Santana
Sun-scorched desert. Red veils and poppies. The Dry Witches guard the underground Mysteries.
Redwoods
A primordial forest that swallowed a 20th-century shopping mall. The Entwife watches what grows.
Ællaë
Hot pink fire on a razorblade wire. Concrete and neon. Pray to the app. Favors are currency.
Ventura
Permanent mist. Fairylande in ruins. The mirrors show futures you don’t want.
The Coop
Wealth is law. The Network manages everything through convenience. The Obsolete live below.
Mission
Hazy. Desolate. Clones patrol forever. The Gardens — hideous technology, alive — are waking up.
Arcadia
A perfect society. The Common Link keeps everyone calm. It is the most beautiful prison in the world.
Follow the seven Dreamers as they remember who they are.
New chapters straight to your inbox as Oldie comes to life. From Jacob Clifton — novelist, critic, teacher & person responsible for this midapocalyptic situation.
From the author of The Compleatly Wasted Beauty and the Outriding series.
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