Behind-the-Scenes: Writing The Gathering Eclipse

Introduction: How Do You Break a World?

Let me tell you a secret about writing cosmic horror:

The hardest part isn’t making the villain terrifying. It’s making the heroes’ choice terrifying.

The Gathering Eclipse is a book about breaking the world to save it. About choosing calculated genocide over peaceful oblivion. About six leaders making the worst decision possible and living with the consequences.

How do you write that without it feeling melodramatic? Without turning The Six into either obvious heroes or obvious villains?

This is the behind-the-scenes story of writing Book 1. The choices I made. The challenges I faced. The moments where I almost gave up because the darkness felt too heavy.

The Central Challenge: Cosmic Horror with Hope

Here’s the tightrope I had to walk:

Cosmic horror says: The universe is indifferent. Your struggles are meaningless. Entropy wins. Oblivion is mercy.

Hope says: Meaning is possible. Struggle matters. Existence is worth its cost. Choose life anyway.

The Eclipsia Trilogy needed both.

Not as opposites. As complementary truths. The Forgotten One is right about entropy. The Six are right about meaning. Both can be true simultaneously.

That’s philosophically complex. How do you make it emotionally resonant?

Answer: The Watcher’s voice.

Creating The Watcher: Your Friend in the Apocalypse

The Watcher is the trilogy’s narrator. Present-tense observer of all three books. Casual-yet-cosmic voice that makes the end of the world feel intimate instead of distant.

I wanted a narrator who:

Speaks directly to you (“Let me tell you about…”)
Acknowledges the horror honestly (no sugar-coating)
Uses dark humor to cut the bleakness
Makes philosophy accessible (deep ideas, simple language)
Varies sentence structure (short punches, long flows)

The model: Your smartest friend explaining the apocalypse over drinks. Not lecturing. Not dramatizing. Just… telling you what happened with devastating honesty.

The challenge: Making cosmic-scale events feel personal. Making 317,000 deaths feel real, not like a statistic.

The solution: Specific details. Zephyrion’s family names. Tarak’s daughter’s laugh. Nerai’s counting of drowning deaths. Make readers know the people who died, even if they’re never named on page.

The Six: Protagonist Design

I needed six leaders, each representing their race, each distinct enough to be memorable.

Design Constraints:

Must embody racial values (Auran = knowledge, Scalian = strength, etc.)
Must be complex (no perfect heroes or obvious villains)
Must have different voices (prose rhythm reflects personality)
Must make impossible choices and live with guilt

Zephyrion (Air): The reluctant prophet. Wanted to study stars, forced to lead. Chooses world over family. Survivor’s guilt core to character. Voice: scholarly but accessible, builds complexity.

Tarak (Fire): The pragmatic warlord. Born for war, chose peace when it mattered. Blunt, direct, no-nonsense. Carries ash of wife and daughter. Voice: short sentences, gallows humor, action over emotion.

Nerai (Water): The diplomat who failed. Sought harmony, created strategy. Felt every drowning. Chooses adaptation over resistance. Voice: fluid, observant, grief through comparison.

Ronan (Earth): The nurturer forced to poison. Grove Warden who had to corrupt growth to save seeds of life. Patient, gentle, carries weight quietly. Voice: long flowing sentences, nature metaphors earned.

Nyx (Shadow): The truth-keeper who saw too much. Calculated survival odds, chose risk anyway. Analytical, precise, vulnerable underneath. Voice: mathematical, precise, fragments for emphasis.

Shahrzad (Dream): The philosopher comfortable with paradox. Saw multiple futures, chose present anyway. Both/and thinking. Voice: dream-logic, flowing, conditional.

The Structure: 14 Chapters of Escalation

Book 1 needed to:

Introduce six civilizations (world-building)
Show prophecy discovery (inciting incident)
Detail the Eclipse (seven hours of horror)
Present the impossible choice (philosophical core)
Execute the Sundering (world-breaking climax)

Challenge: That’s a LOT to cover. How do you pace it?

Solution: Asymmetric structure.

Chapters 1-4 (Act 1): Setup. Introduction. Prophecy. The march to Nexus. Slower pacing. Establish world before breaking it.

Chapters 5-14 (Act 2): The catastrophe. Hour-by-hour escalation. Faster pacing. Each chapter raises stakes.

Key decision: Don’t rush the Fall. Give each moon’s death weight. Lunara (Ch 5), Pyros (Ch 7), multiple moons falling (Ch 11). Make readers feel each loss.

Writing the Difficult Scenes

Some scenes hurt to write. I’ll be honest about that.

Aetheria Falling (Ch 5): Writing forty-seven thousand people plummeting to their deaths while Zephyrion watches from the Nexus. I had to take breaks. Multiple days. The scene is ~3,000 words and I cried writing it.

The Drowning (Ch 6-7): Nerai feeling fifty-six thousand individual deaths. I researched what drowning feels like. Had nightmares about it. Almost cut the scene because it was too dark. Kept it because that’s the reality.

The Sundering (Ch 14): Breaking the world. 24,875 people dying. Had to write it three times because first two drafts felt either too detached or too melodramatic. Final version took 8 hours straight, no breaks, because stopping would mean losing the emotional throughline.

The Surrendered: Writing characters who choose oblivion. Who hear the Forgotten One’s argument and agree. That’s philosophically terrifying because you have to present their choice as reasonable.

The Philosophical Core: Why Do You Persist?

The Forgotten One asks: “Prove that existence is worth its cost.”

That’s the question the entire book asks. Not rhetorically. Actually asking.

I didn’t want The Six to have a good answer. Because there is no empirically provable answer. All they have is:

“We choose to believe it’s worth it.”

That’s faith. Not religious faith—existential faith. Choosing meaning despite evidence that meaning is temporary and costly.

The challenge: How do you make that feel satisfying without being preachy?

The solution: Don’t explain it. Show it. The Six make the choice. They don’t justify it. They just… do it. And carry the weight.

Let readers decide if they were right.

What I’d Change (Honest Reflection)

Looking back at Book 1 now, knowing Books 2 and 3:

What worked:

The Watcher’s voice (readers love it)
The Six’s distinct personalities
The philosophical weight
The Sundering as climax
Dark humor cutting bleakness

What I’d improve:

Pacing in Chapters 2-3: Slightly slow. Could trim 10% of world-building exposition.
The Emerald Fall (Ch 11): Three moons fall in one chapter. That’s rushed. Should have been two chapters.
More Nerai presence: She disappears for long stretches. Should have more POV sections showing her struggle.
The Forgotten One’s introduction: Happens late (Ch 12). Should have foreshadowed earlier with “wrongness” sensations.

The Reader Experience I Aimed For

I wanted readers to:

Fall in love with the world (so the Fall hurts)
Understand The Six as people (not heroes or villains)
Feel the philosophical weight (not just action)
Question the choice (is the Sundering right?)
Carry grief forward (into Books 2-3)

If you finished Book 1 and thought:

“That was devastating”
“I don’t know if The Six were right”
“I need to know what happens next”

Then I succeeded.

Advice to Writers: Darkness Requires Light

If you’re writing dark fiction—cosmic horror, tragedy, grimdark—remember:

Darkness only works if readers have something to lose.

Show the beauty before you break it. Make readers love the world before you destroy it. Give characters moments of joy before grief.

The Gathering Eclipse is dark. But it’s dark because the world was bright. The loss hurts because we knew what was lost.

That’s the secret: Tragedy requires context.

Conclusion: Why I Wrote This

I wrote The Gathering Eclipse because I wanted to explore a question:

If you knew the world was ending, and you could save a fragment of it by breaking the rest, would you?

Not “should you” (ethics). Would you? (psychology).

The Six said yes. Twenty-five thousand Surrendered said no. Both answers are valid.

I wanted to write a story where both choices make sense and readers have to decide for themselves.

That’s cosmic horror: Not fear of monsters. Fear that there’s no right answer and you have to choose anyway.

Explore The Eclipsia Trilogy

This lore entry is just the beginning. The full story of The Eclipsia Trilogy—three books chronicling the fall of six civilizations, the impossible choice to break the world, and the transformation of heroes into legends—awaits.

The Gathering Eclipse (Book 1), The Shattered Veil (Book 2), and The Breaking of Fate (Book 3) will take you deeper into Eclipsia’s cosmic horror and profound sacrifice.

Stay tuned for release announcements.

The Eclipsia Codex | Building worlds, one entry at a time.