Thank you for taking this trip with me all the way down. I hope you enjoyed it, among other things. If you have time I’d love to hear what you felt, thought and experienced on this journey. I aim to improve in writing, and I can’t do it without honest, constructive feedback.

I’d like to thank all of the people who helped me on this project – firstly editors Paddy Boylan and Caitlin Sweet, who both have put their backs and hearts into the work of making something readable out of my amateurish writing. To my dedicated writing companions in Dasha’s Writing Club: Dasha, Inbar, Amit and Matan, who’ve graced me with both directness and gentleness, and most of all excitement – it’s hard to explain how much an amateur writer needs people to be excited about their work. To Delany – I’m sorry.

This story was very much inspired by the works of Peter Watts and Alistair Reynolds who both wrote about people going into the bellies of great beasts and losing themselves without noticing (Blindsight and Diamond Dogs, respectively). Robert Chambers (The King in Yellow, in my opinion the greatest horror story of all times, which some of you may recognize from True Detective) broke new records of dramatic irony, of presenting a character as simultaneously completely insane and perfectly logical, and was the main inspiration for the structure of this story. And finally J.C. McCray, who’s magnum opus Worm not only upped the standard for realism in unreal worlds, but plunged my sense of tragedy into depths that I didn’t expect to explore.

If I could see far, it was only because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.