There’s a backstory. There’s always a backstory.
Alongside the news that Sub-Verge has been selected as an official title for LudoNarraCon 2025, we announced that Sub-Verge will be releasing alongside it's own prequel novella; Subtle Mind.
If you've not already, you can get an exclusive excerpt from the novella from our newsletter.
Today though, we descend further into that backstory, and give you a glimpse at the beginnings of The Mind...
"Suddenly, the silent surface of the pool was broken. A green, gelatinous bubble surfaced, glowing from the inside. It slid towards the edge and emerged onto eight spiked crab legs, clicking on the cavern floor. They transported the green bubble they were attached to, like a jellycake, wriggling along on scissor-legs.
It was a krake. One or two had ended up in my fishing nets in the past, but always dead, with the jellysac like a tiny limp parachute. In contrast, this one was very much alive. I watched it closely. It was the only life in the cave, if I didn’t count myself—and I wasn’t sure I did.
The movement of the krake was unsettling and comical at once. Its spindly legs barely able to keep up with the weight of the floating jellysac, lurching this way and that. It was lit from within by a pair of small, glowing yellow eye-orbs. I remained motionless, and eventually it approached my landing place. There was something else in the jellysac, and I couldn’t make it out at first, but as it got nearer, I saw that a skrillamander was floating there, inside. The krake’s most recent meal. The jellysac was a head and stomach in one, where the poor little lizard was suspended. A novel thankfulness occurred to me, that most creatures don’t have translucent stomachs."
The skrillamander twitched, and I knew it was still alive, at least partially. Probably the sac held some paralyzing fluid, and the creature was being slowly digested, alive. A tortured way to die.
I suddenly felt a kinship with the skrillamander. I would be made to endure a similar fate, should the Surfacers catch me...
(from the letters of The Mind)
When we agreed that publishing Sub-Verge with Pantaloon was the perfect partnership, Jamin, the man behind the mask, asked what else we had for fans of the storyworld. The art is amazing, but there weren’t enough extras to make an art book (Tiia is just too good). And the eerie underwater soundscape that Thomas created (with thrumming heartbeats and otherworldly krake screeches) is too tied to the world to be called a soundtrack on its own.
But I’m not so disciplined in my art, so I had plenty of words left over from the crafting of the Sub-Verge’s story. I thought I could weave them into a short novella, and shine a light on the larger world of the story.
But what I found was something else entirely. I needed to know more about The Mind. And once I found him, I couldn’t stop following him. It was the same for the miniature krake that appears in his second letter.
I went looking for the beginnings of The Mind. And I found him in the Surfacer’s city, at the eternal waterfall, supposedly for a bit of idle fishing. But when the High Commissioner of the city appears above him, he takes an opportunistic shot. Accused of attempted assassination, he is cast into a subterranean labyrinth, where he uncovers the scaffolding of lies that has kept the city sundered from the sea. He survives with the help of the krake, but the creature has strange appetites of its own. With this unlikely pet, he flees from the city and Officer Cromby, determined in her murderous pursuit. His actions foment an accidental rebellion among those who aid and abet him. Cornered, his hidden motives confront him in the dark. Will he be caught first by his hunters or his long-buried past?
Tiia helped visualize the rogue gentleman, and his unlikely companion. Once I was on his trail, I couldn’t stop. And the novella took a shape I wasn’t expecting. Subtle Mind is a prequel to the narrative in Sub-Verge. You’ll see many familiar faces there, before they donned the facemasks that help them breathe beneath the sea. But above all, you’ll come to know The Mind and the depths he must go to in order to find himself once again.
The prequel will be available to download from Steam on May 1st.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3487020/SubVerge/