The Boiling Seas: The Owl in the Labyrinth

The Blackbird and the Ghost is 5 years old. Nightingale’s Sword is almost 3. It’s about time for another Boiling Seas book, don’t you think?

The current version of the cover, by me, and featuring photos by Aaron Burden, Sarah Lee, Neom and Zachary Spears on Unsplash.

It goes without saying, but this post is definitely going to spoil bits of Nightingale’s Sword, so if you haven’t read that book yet, pause and do so right now.

Tal, Max and Lily have sailed across the deadly Boiling Seas. They’ve explored every inch of their mysterious islands. They’ve even flown high through the steamy skies above them. But they’ve never ventured underneath the Seas… until now. Because Max is trapped, leagues beneath the scalding waves in an impossible house of secrets, and she’s not getting out without help. She’ll have to unravel the mystery of the Scrolls and the Seas while Tal and Lily figure out how to rescue her.

It’s only a journey into the most inhospitable environment on the planet: an ocean of boiling water, floored with molten rock and filled with steel-scaled sea serpents. And it’s not like the most powerful man on the Seas is trying to seize their secrets for himself at the same time, and won’t let a little thing like ‘friendship’ stand in his way.

A race against time, against authority, and against the world itself. Tal, Max and Lily couldn’t be happier.

The Owl in the Labyrinth concludes the Boiling Seas trilogy with a trip to the only part of this world we haven’t yet visited: underneath the actual Seas themselves. I’ve been off-handedly mentioning metal monsters and flying fish for 5 years now, and it’s finally time to meet them up close! I don’t want to spoil the whole book, but it’s been a very interesting challenge getting my protagonists down there safely…

Max is of course the Owl – she needed a bird name to go with the rest of my little flock, and it had to be a clever one. As for the Labyrinth… well, you’ll have to wait and see.

There are lots of loose ends to tie up here, and I might even get to most of them. Who made the ancient scrolls that have driven the plot of this whole trilogy? What are they even for? Who lurks in the mysterious Panopticon at the heart of Port Malice? How will Max escape the Boiling Seas themselves – and how can Tal and Lily keep from each other’s throats without her?

All these and more might be answered in The Owl in the Labyrinth. Probably.

I’m sure there are more effective ways to do these reveals – a bit at a time, getting hype on other sites, all that jazz – but I’m bad at marketing, it’s the 5th birthday of book 1, and when am I going to get a more satisfying reveal time than that? It feels like I’ve been sitting on this reveal for too long, anyway.

Is the book ready to be published yet? Nope. Will it be by the end of the year? Probably. I’m very busy with my own wedding and countless other things but I am getting through this edit and it will be done. And what better way to motivate myself than revealing the title and cover and thus putting a very real clock on my own editing process? It’ll be fine. I hope.

I didn’t really expect The Blackbird and the Ghost to do well. I didn’t write it with a sequel actively in mind, for all that I left plenty of things open for one. But that little book I wrote almost 9 years ago has blossomed into something much bigger than I ever imagined. Its characters have lives of their own that I couldn’t leave unexplored, and as for the world… well, I’m finally getting to the really cool bits. Some of these ideas I wrote down almost 9 years ago and am only now getting to explore.

I’m excited. I hope a few of you are too. Let me know.

And if you’re reading this and want to start your journey on the Boiling Seas in time to be able to finish it, then grab The Blackbird and the Ghost for free until the end of today (Sunday the 9th.) It has been described, by multiple people, as a “good book.” I reckon its second sequel will be, too.