(How It Quietly Connects to the Grammar for the Dead Universe)**

As I’ve been building Wolf Wounds — shaping the outline, organizing the acts in Atticus, figuring out emotional arcs — I’ve also been thinking about how this book fits inside the larger universe I’m creating across all my projects.

Some readers already know about my other major series:
Grammar for the Dead — a metafictional, recursive, gothic AI-lit thriller that explores grief, memory, and the unstable relationship between stories and reality.
It’s the book with mirrors that talk back, letters that write themselves, characters who suspect they’re written, and a metaphysical structure called the Veil, which surrounds a cosmic spine called the Axis.

The core premise of that universe is simple:

**Stories have physics.

And imagination is a force.
And the Axis is where those forces converge.**

Grammar for the Dead is the book where I say that out loud.
But the idea exists underneath every project I write.

Including this one.

Today, I want to finally talk about the quiet connection between Wolf Wounds and the wider Fulcrum & Axis universe — not as a crossover, not as a lore dump, but as a shared rule of reality that sits under the floorboards of both stories.

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THE SECRET RULE OF MY FICTIONAL UNIVERSE

All magic — across every book I write — comes from imagination.

Not from spells.
Not from gods.
Not from ancient artifacts.
Not from destiny.

Just imagination.

Human imagination creates new possibilities.
Those possibilities attach to the Axis (the deep spine of the metaphysical world).
The Veil (in Grammar for the Dead) is the membrane that separates imagination from manifestation.

That’s why:

• ghosts behave like memories
• recursion feels like trauma looping
• monsters look like emotional metaphors
• powers emerge only when someone believes hard enough
• stories and realities bleed into each other

The universe runs on imagination.
And imagination writes to the Axis.
That’s the metaphysical law behind everything I do — even when the characters don’t know it.

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HOW THAT APPLIES TO WOLF WOUNDS

(And why I’m telling you this now.)

On the surface, Wolf Wounds is a horror novel about:

• a recovering addict
• a werewolf burdened by guilt
• a trafficker who treats monsters like assets
• a government black-ops cult building supernatural soldiers
• a Cold War monster silo (“The Vault”)

Nobody in this story is talking about Axis theory or the Veil.
Nobody mentions recursion structures or metaphysical architecture.
This is not a crossover book.

But underneath the plot — underneath the blood, the neon, the grief — the same imaginative physics that power Grammar for the Dead are at work.

Specifically:

The Perfect Soldier ritual is actually channeling imagination into the Axis.

Not intentionally.
Not knowingly.
Not philosophically.

But emotionally.

The ritual draws in:

• Dawkes’s ideology
• Dominion’s fear and ambition
• the monsters’ suffering
• Caleb’s obsession
• Mark’s trauma
• Lily’s devotion and grief

That emotional pressure builds a kind of psychic-narrative field.

And a psychic-narrative field is how a new possibility becomes real.

So when the ritual peaks…
when Lily sacrifices herself…
when Mark’s grief erupts…

**A new possibility gets written into the Axis.

A new reality becomes true.
A creature that shouldn’t exist — suddenly does.**

Mark doesn’t mutate.
He doesn’t “level up.”
He doesn’t get infused with magic goo.

He becomes a story that the Axis accepts.

That’s why his transformation feels seismic.
That’s why the Vault collapses as if the narrative breaks.
That’s why the final scenes feel mythic and tragic.

It’s not magic.

It’s imagination hitting critical mass.

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THIS IS A CONNECTION — NOT A CROSSOVER

You don’t need to read Grammar for the Dead to understand Wolf Wounds.
You don’t need the metaphysical background to feel the emotional truth.

This is not Part 2 of a saga.

This is a standalone novel with a shared physics under the hood.

Readers of Grammar will recognize the Axis resonance.
New readers will feel a largeness they can’t name.

Either way, it deepens the story without distracting from it.

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WHY I’M SHARING THIS WITH YOU NOW

Because you’re reading the behind-the-scenes updates.
You’re watching me outline, reorganize, restructure, and refine.
You’re seeing the blueprint version of the book — the part most writers hide.

And since you’re here in the workshop with me, I want you to see the real architectural beam that connects my worlds:

**Imagination is the only real magic.

The Axis is the spine.
Stories shape reality.
And every book I write exists on that continuum.**

Even when the characters have no idea.

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Next Time — Placeholder Chapters & the CYOA Brain

Now that the universe rules are set, the next step is drafting the messy, raw, first-pass placeholder chapters inside Atticus — the scaffolding I’ll later reshape into real prose.

And to do that, I’m going to bring back the part of my childhood that taught me how stories branch, collapse, loop, and reform:
my obsessive way of reading Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Update #6 will explain how that childhood habit evolved into the exact skill I use today to track the branching emotional logic of a book like Wolf Wounds.

Get ready — the real drafting is coming.

— Frank