The Echoes of Yore: A Philosophical-Horror Novella

A philosophical-horror novella exploring what happens when reality and unreality blend into a single experience.

Three veterans, three journeys, three lifetimes of war and death now haunted by the echoes of yore.

What they see cannot be trusted. What they remember is never just a distant memory—for in the space where their minds fracture and their pasts blend into the present, something appears.

Each sees a Shadow. Each confronts it. Each must decide whether what they are experiencing is memory, madness, or something else that has always been watching.

This is their story.

Or, perhaps, it is not.

Psychologically unrelenting, and not for those who need their narrators reliable.

Author’s Intent

Records of The Orders is a weird-lit genre-blender series: military dark fantasy settings, theory-backed political intrigue, philosophical questioning, psychological horror overtones, speculation on a number of fronts, and alchemists which defy what readers expect of cosmic/eldritch horror.

However, while the main books combine all those flavours, what I planned for the novellas is different: leaning into one or two of the blended sub-genres to explore what shorter formats can do that 500-page novels cannot.

The Genesis of Change, the prequel novella, leans towards the philosophical fantasy and the upturned cosmic horror. It takes place in one of the oddest places in my universe, and shows the ruthlessness of the alchemists while being deeply thoughtful.

For The Echoes of Yore, I aimed to blend the psychological horror of the series with its military dark fantasy setting, while letting the philosophy emerge as the plot progresses. As the blurb teases, the narrators are highly untrustworthy and unreliable—not because they want to omit or misdirect, but because their minds blur the threshold between past and present to haunt them, as the title implies, with the echoes of yore. Here is where the psychological angle slips in: sometimes, our minds are the most terrible monster.

With relation to the narrators, I was certainly inspired by one of my personal favourite authors: Philip K. Dick, author of Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, Valis, among others, and known for crafting settings where defining reality and unreality is an almost impossible—if not Herculean—task. Still, PKD’s influence on my work is a topic for another time.