The City at the End of Eternity is a dark fantasy / new weird novel written by Ethan Goodrum, edited by Brad Carlson, and with artwork by Satoshi Kamanaka. It was released on August 1st, 2020 by Cheshire Smile Publishing.
In the long dusk of a dying world, the last remnants of humanity cling to the decaying corpse of the All-God. Light dims, reality rots, and the encroaching void beyond known only as the Dark patiently waits to consume all.For Susurrus Pitch, the night can’t come fast enough.
Susurrus is a vesper, one of the children of the Dark. While the rest of her kind securely wait out the extinction of humanity, the children of light, Susurrus has been cast out to endure the long sunset amongst her enemies. If she’s not careful, the death throes of humanity will bring her down with them.
Trapped in a desperate, decaying world of clockwork automatons and dusk magicians, a land where time itself is broken, Susurrus seeks nothing more than to escape humanity’s remnant kingdoms and into the Dark. No vesper has ever succeeded in doing so, but Susurrus has no other choice if she wishes to survive.
This novel provides examples of:
After the End The All-God, chief deity of the setting, died long before the story begins. What’s left is a world carved from his rotting corpse. Someday, it’ll be entirely gone, and humanity will have nothing. The other beings in the setting very much look forward to this happening, as the Dark that existed before the All-God is their natural home.
Clockwork Creature The Sanguine Estate’s security system consists of alarms, protection spells, and clockwork wolves crafted from hardened darkness.
Dark Fantasy It’s definitely got the ‘dark’ part covered; the world is dead and reality is fading away into an all-consuming infinite void beyond time. However, it’s more aesthetically dark than tonally dark, as it takes place in a setting so far past its own apocalypse as to be barely recognizable.
New Weird Magic and vampires are about the most common fantasy/horror elements you’ll find here. The rest is clockwork automatons made from abstract forces, polite spider people, and a world that was once living, organic matter but is now a macrocosmic corpse.
Spider People The parcae are this, possessing large arachnoid lower bodies with vaguely humanoid upper bodies. Their venom paralyzes prey as their innards slowly liquefy for later consumption, but if they’re not trying to kill you, their hospitality can be quite charming.
Main/Steampunk The setting draws heavily from a Victorian Gothic aesthetic, with technology roughly analogous to the Industrial Revolution, albeit with working automatons and other magi-tek. Cicatrix is full of factory smog, Clockheart is overflowing with gears and pistons, and Fastigium has tram lines running all the way up to the edge of the World-Wall.
Theme Naming Each of the intelligent species of the Crown have a unifying theme to their naming conventions. The vesper are all named after descriptions of sounds, befitting their bat-like echolocation, and the parcae are named after textiles, being silk-spinning spider-folk. Human names are less thematically defined, but the Sanguine family definitely likes the color red.
Wretched Hive The Scarlet Shanties, Susurrus’ home, is a raised slum on the outskirts of what is already a decadent, over-industrialized city of soulless aristocrats and captains of industry. The Shanties themselves are a slum cobbled together from driftwood and ‘skin-rock,’ raised on rickety pillars above the Scarmire, a sea of semi-congealed divine blood.
