It was going to be a game

Pantheon has a website as of today, with the first seven chapters free to read in the browser. Since that is the first most people will have heard of it, here is what it is and where it came from.

It is a romantic conspiracy thriller set in Hong Kong. Vivienne Ho is a socialite and a financier, principal of a firm that buys businesses other people would strip and keeps them alive instead. She has spent five years building that life so completely that it became real to her, and she has always known it must eventually break. Damien Tang, a self-made financier, wants to marry her. His family's due diligence and a very old institution's reawakened interest arrive in the same season, aimed at the same woman. What follows is a hunt, a courtship and the audit of a life, in a season where being known is more dangerous than being found.

The part I did not expect is that it was going to be a game.

I started this on 15 July as branching interactive fiction, the same shape as Perpetūra. Eighteen character sheets, nineteen locked portraits, a route mapped through choices. Five days later I shelved the branching entirely and started again as a novel. The reason was not that branching is hard. It was that the thing this story is actually about, a woman who cannot afford to be seen, needs a reader who cannot look away and cannot choose an easier path through her. A branch is a mercy. This book should not offer one.

What survived the change was the planning. Before a single line of prose existed there was a story bible, a beat sheet mapping every one of the sixty-three chapters, and a full cast of character sheets: something like sixty-five thousand words of work about a book that had not yet been written. The first chapter was drafted on 25 July, and by then I knew what every chapter after it had to do.

There is one thing on the new site I am quietly pleased with. Alongside the novel there is an archive of records about the world, and it refuses to read ahead of you. It shows what you have reached and nothing further, not even as a blank space or a locked entry with a tempting title, because a count of what is being withheld is itself a spoiler. Most of the engineering on that site went into that single idea.

The book is in its last chapters now. It publishes as an ebook on 2 October 2026.