Lord of Water

A Letter to a New Friend

There is a reason
we crossed paths.

Dear friend,

I'm Mike King — the author of Lord of Water, and the person who pointed you to this page.

If you're reading this, it means we've met somehow. Maybe in person, maybe through a card, maybe through a message I sent you. Whatever brought you here, I want you to know — I don't send people to this page lightly. I send them when something in our conversation made me think: this person might like the book.

And the book, in my experience, has a way of finding the people it was meant for.

I spent years writing Lord of Water. I didn't write it because I thought it would sell. I wrote it because the story arrived in my head one day and wouldn't leave — and the longer I lived with it, the more I understood that it wasn't really my story to keep.

It was a story I had to pass on.

So that's what I'm doing now. Passing it on. To you.

And here is what I will tell you, in confidence, before the rest of the page tries to convince you of anything:

You are mostly water. So is everything that lives. The oceans you have stood beside your whole life, the rivers, the rain on your window, the cup in your hand — and the body you are reading these words with — are all the same substance, moving through the same ancient pattern. Most of us go our whole lives without ever quite feeling that.

Lord of Water is, in the quietest possible way, a story about remembering it.

I won't promise you the book will change your life. That would be too easy a thing to say, and you would be right not to trust it.

But I will tell you this: in the very first chapter, a grandfather completes one life and gently begins the next — and you go with him, all the way, from the bonfires with his grandkids to a warm new mother's arms on the other side of the galaxy. By the end of those pages, something in you has been quietly invited to see the questions you carry — about life, about endings, about what you really are — in a different light.

That's Chapter 1. And the journey is only beginning.

A planet covered in living ocean.
A voice that has been watching
since before time had a name.

Lord of Water takes place on a world unlike anything I've ever read about — but one that, the deeper I went into the writing, felt strangely familiar to me. Like I was remembering it rather than inventing it.

It is a water world. Not just a planet with oceans — but a living, breathing, conscious intelligence wrapped in sea. Three moons pull its tides. Ancient things move in its depths. And above it all, unseen, watching with patience that spans millennia — the Lord of Water himself.

He is not a god. He is not a monster. He is something far stranger and, in my opinion, far more beautiful than either.

He is the guardian of this world's soul.

And he is the narrator of the trilogy — telling his story directly to you, in a voice that I tried, over many drafts, to make worthy of him.

That's a passage from Chapter 1 itself — the chapter that will be in your inbox tomorrow if you join us today. From the very first chapter, I wanted you to know: this book is going to be different.

It doesn't rush. It doesn't pound you with plot for the sake of plot. It draws you in slowly — the way the ocean draws you in — until you look back at the shore and realise you've drifted further than you meant to. And you don't mind.

I've lived near water
my entire life.

I'm based on the New South Wales coast in Australia. I'm a developer, a builder of things, and — for as long as I can remember — a person who has been quietly obsessed with water. The sound of it. The presence of it. The way it carries memory.

This trilogy is the work I'm most proud of. It's the thing I've been writing my whole life without knowing I was writing it.

I'm releasing it through my own publishing imprint, Turquoise Era Publishing, because I wanted it to reach readers directly — without a gatekeeper deciding whether or not you should hear it. I trust you to decide that for yourself.

If we've spoken — even briefly — I already think you're the kind of person who would understand this book. That's why I sent you here.

Here's what's waiting for you inside Book I:

✦   A narrator unlike any in modern fiction — wise, warm, darkly funny, and cosmically old. He tells his story directly to you, as if you're the one person he has finally chosen to trust it with.

✦   A cast of companions I came to love over the years of writing — Gary, the grizzled seafaring guide who knows more than he lets on. Mila, whose presence is light against the dark. Max and Pei, the deck hands who are never quite where you expect them to be.

✦   The Hi-Sun — a vessel that becomes, by the end of Book I, almost a character in her own right.

✦   A threat that doesn't come from the outside. It rises, slowly and terrifyingly, from within — from the resonance of choices made long ago that are now beginning to echo.

✦   A world so fully realised that, by Chapter 10, my early readers told me they could taste the salt air on their lips.

✦   A quiet thread of something deeper running beneath the adventure — about water, about the body, about what it means to be a small living thing on a planet that is mostly ocean. Nothing preached. Nothing forced. Just felt — like the wordless moment in the very first chapter when a grandfather and his granddaughter look into each other's eyes and both quietly say, "I see you."

✦   A subtle, accumulating sense — across the seventeen chapters of Book I — that the line between you and the world around you is thinner, kinder, and more alive than you had been taught to believe.

✦   And at the end — a revelation I spent five years building toward. One that I believe will sit with you for the rest of your life.

For the reader who senses
there is more.

We are living in an age of noise. Of distraction. Of ten thousand voices pulling at us in ten thousand directions, none of them saying much worth hearing.

I wrote Lord of Water for the readers who have always quietly suspected there is something more. More to themselves. More to life. More to the relationship between the body they walk around in and the world it moves through.

The book doesn't lecture about any of this. It would be a worse book if it did. It tells you a story — a properly thrilling, surprising, emotionally vivid story — and lets the deeper recognition come on its own, the way the best truths do. Quietly. From the side. Almost by accident.

Even in Chapter 1, you will meet a narrator at the peaceful end of an 86-year life. A grandfather. A man who has loved his work and his people. A man who, when his time comes, simply lifts — and you are with him as he looks back at the planet he helped to save, cups it gently in his spiritual hands, and feels the warm draw of the next life beginning on the other side of the galaxy.

You finish that first chapter and something has quietly shifted. The fear of an ending you may have carried since childhood is gently, almost playfully, reframed. Not denied. Not preached at. Just shown — that there is another way to hold the question.

And that is only Chapter 1.

It is quiet in the way that the deep ocean is quiet — not silent, but listening. It is patient in the way that something very old is patient. And it gives, to readers who let it in, a strange and beautiful kind of stability — the kind you can one day pass on to the people you love.

I think the world needs this story right now. And — quietly, specifically — I think you might too.

A few things you might be wondering —

Is it really free?
Yes. Book I is genuinely free. No tricks. No hidden charges. I want you to experience it first — because I'm confident that once you do, you'll want to continue the journey.

What if I don't read science fiction?
Perfect. I wrote Lord of Water for readers who don't usually read science fiction. It's for people who love beautiful prose, thoughtful ideas, and stories that feel personal even when they're vast. Think less spaceship, more soul.

What if I start and can't stop?
That happens. I've warned you. Politely, clearly, and in writing.

What comes after Book I?
Books II and III continue the journey. For readers who want to go further, there's a full-trilogy bundle, a limited collector's hardcover, and a founding circle of readers who've committed to the project from the beginning. I'll tell you more once you've fallen in love with Book I — which, if I've done my job, you will.

Why send me here instead of just telling me about it?
Because the book speaks for itself better than I can. And because if you're going to fall for it, I want you to fall for it on the page — not on my recommendation.

If you've read this far, thank you.

I don't know exactly when or how we connected — but the fact that you're still here, reading these words, tells me something about you. You're curious. You're thoughtful. You're the kind of person who takes the time to find out what a book is actually about before deciding whether to start it.

That's exactly the kind of reader I wrote Lord of Water for.

So this is me, asking you directly: take the free book. Read the first chapter tonight. See if the water speaks to you the way it spoke to me when I started writing it.

If it does — wonderful. We'll talk again. The trilogy will be there when you're ready. And one day, if it lands the way I hope it lands, you will find yourself wanting to pass it on to someone you love — the way I am passing it on to you now.

If it doesn't — no harm done. You'll have spent an hour with a story you didn't expect, and that's worth something too.

Either way, I'm glad we met.