The Spire Cycle

The Grammar for the Dead Cycle

Where Unto a Golden Dawn Began—and What It Became

The earliest version of this project—Unto a Golden Dawn—began as a dark historical fantasy:
Edgar Allan Poe and Aleister Crowley as boys in the same school; a dossier of letters, reports, and occult fragments; a secret history stitched together from documents that were never meant to be found.

Poe was written as the soul of haunted innocence. Crowley, the feral force next to him.
Between them: Lenore—first a muse, then an obsession, and finally the crack in the mirror where reality began to split.

That version was atmospheric, gothic, and strange.
But it was only the doorway.

Where the Project Is Now

The book that began as Unto a Golden Dawn has evolved into something larger—a recursive, metafictional universe exploring memory, authorship, grief, and the instability of narrative itself.

Caldwell, Clara/Lenore, Tesla, and the Archive did not exist in the first version.
Neither did the Spire.
Neither did the idea that the story is not just read but observed from inside.

What was once a gothic schoolboy tale has transformed into a multi-book cycle about:

Recursion — stories aware of themselves and breaking their own frames
Grief as language — and language as an unreliable map
Mirrors that write back
Archivists trapped inside the narrative
Characters who become aware of their author
A cosmic Spire connecting every book, every memory, every mistake

The Poe–Crowley storyline still exists—but now as one thread inside a greater structure, refracted across mirrors, archives, companion protocols, and breached timelines. Lenore has become Clara. The boyhood haunting has become a system-wide recursion event. And the “dossier” frame has expanded into a classified metaphysical archive.

This is no longer just a novel.
It is a cycle, a cosmology, and a living document that keeps rewriting itself as new pieces fall into place.

What Remains From the Beginning

The heart.

The ache for connection.
The fascination with the way stories shape us—and the way we break them.
The realization that memory is a kind of ghost, and that every ghost wants to be heard.

The new books still carry the spirit of that first question:

What if the boundary between myth, grief, and reality was thinner than we ever imagined?
What if the story remembers you?

What Has Changed

Everything else.

The tone is richer.
The recursion is deeper.
The world is stranger.
The documents are now part of a living Archive.
The characters have grown into archetypes and counter-selves.
And the reader is no longer a passive observer—they’re another node in the system.

Welcome to the Spire Cycle

Whether the final book is called Grammar for the Dead, Past Is Participle, The Mourner’s Lexicon, or The God-Made Mirror, the project is united by one idea:

Stories are alive.
They shift.
They haunt.
And they remember you, even when you forget them.

What began as Unto a Golden Dawn has become the axis of a universe.

And you’re standing at the door.