From the Author

Eclipseborn started as a D&D character. It became something else—a meditation on everything I care about most.

The loneliest I've ever felt wasn't when I was alone. It was when I was surrounded by people I couldn't reach. That feeling became Eclipseborn. Not the plot—the plot came from a D&D character I got too attached to, twins who shared one body, one lunar one solar. But the heart of it. The thing that made me keep writing long after the campaign fell through.

As I got to know them, I started thinking about what it would actually be like—to share everything with someone and never occupy the same moment. That was Yuki and Yera's reality. And the more I wrote, the more their experience became a parallel for something larger: connection itself. What does it mean to be that close to someone and still not be able to truly meet them?

The inverse is also true. The happiest I've ever felt wasn't when I got what I wanted—it was when I felt genuinely connected to the people who mattered most. Truly known by someone, and knowing them in return. That kind of connection can't be rushed or bought or stumbled into. It has to be chosen and worked for. Words aren't enough. You have to show it—through consistency, through presence, through acting in ways that embody what you claim to believe. Connection isn't a feeling. It's a practice.

This theme appears throughout Eclipseborn in different forms, but the version that stays with me is the simplest one—presented as a lesson for children in the Book of Harmony, which somehow makes its truth more profound. It's an idea I think most adults don't truly appreciate, especially in a world where connection has become so limited.

I wrote Eclipseborn because I needed a story that took healing seriously without being naive about fracture. We live in a world that keeps finding new ways to divide—by politics, by identity, by algorithm. Where difference is treated as threat. Where it's easier to stay in your corner than reach across to someone who sees things differently. Things fall apart. That's not fantasy. That's the news.

Eclipseborn tells that story across four thousand years. A sacrifice that made connection possible. A golden age that proved it could work. A severing that tore it apart. And keepers—teachers, servants, archivists—who carried truth through a millennium of silence because they believed the world would eventually need to remember what it chose to forget. Unity isn't inherited. It's chosen. And what is chosen can be forgotten. And what is forgotten can be remembered.

I never told anyone I was writing this. I never intended to share it. It was something I did entirely for myself, in the quiet hours I carved out, returning to it night after night, following wherever it led. That privacy gave me permission to write the story I wanted to write—to explore my deepest values and principles. I was supposed to be writing backstory. Instead, I ended up writing a world.

Eclipseborn is a labor of love—years of writing, rewriting, and discovering what the story wanted to be. I hope it helps you feel less alone and more connected. I hope it helps you understand what matters most to you. I hope it helps you sit with the complexities of life that don't have simple answers. And most of all, I hope it offers you something you carry inside long after you finish.

— Scott Matthews