"Do you see? I am the orchard. We are the orchard. You, too, are the orchard, in a different way from I. It is from all of us that fruits are grown, taken, ground to pulp and left to turn to ash before the never-ending new."
— The Keys, Crepuscular Angles
Crepuscular Angles is a novel by Prae Obscura.
On an unnamed, remote world, there is a City. Its towering body - not unlike a mass interconnection of malls, shipping terminals, and apartments - is held up by the Pillars. Below, divided by distance, are the small communities whose obliged work is exploited to keep the City running. Also reptiles that eat you, hallucinations, and rot that turns you into an instrumental tree. The world is getting hotter, everyone has failing organs, and replacements that can stand up to the changing world are hard to come by.
The novel follows two narrators. The Lantern is a former priest of the resident religion, Direction. The Keys is a former organ donor. Both characters are nameless. Their driving goal is to get their names (or the rights to use them) back. Told achronologically, the story follows their early lives, their meeting, their escape from the City, and their return after it falls to ruin.
This novel includes examples of:
- Anachronic Order: The novel is split into six periods of time, represented as tracks on a cassette tape. The Table of Contents shows where every chapter falls chronologically; the chapters themselves are out of order, strung together like flow of thought.
- An Arm and a Leg: The Lantern uses a prosthetic peg-leg during the later time periods. His original leg was infected with Listening Rot. The Keys eats it off to prevent the rot from spreading.
- Artificial Animal People: The Keys (plural) are humanoid and sapient, but are derived from a native reptile. Their biological ancestors are described like a mix between tuatara and monitor lizards.
- Bad with the Bone: The Keys carries a "sword" that is actually a spine cast in resin. The spine belonged to the Hunter, who has the underlying biometric access of the city elite.
- Black Eyes of Evil: Subverted. While Lantern originally views them as this, he comes to see Keys' eyes in a positive light. When he is in medical isolation, and his leg is rotting away, he desperately looks for them as a source of comfort.
- Body Horror: The Listening Rot. Described as your body turning into twisted wood, full of pustuling sap, and lined with holes like a flute. At its final stage, you are left as a shambling ent-like creature that walks across the surface world, the wind whistling music through your holes. You might be unable to die in that state. Also, most of the Pale Figure's appearances.
- City with No Name: The novel is fond of using title-names. "The City" is one of them - there is never a proper name given to the place.
- Gravity Screw: The Pillars that hold up the city double as driveable access roads. The gravity inside is manipulated to let you drive vertically, before evening back out to horizontal on either end. One of the gravity wells breaks, with explosive consequences.
- Hallucinations: Both narrators experience psychosis, with frequent visual hallucinations. The Keys is prone to a static companion. The Lantern is prone to seeing eyes, visual tearing, and alternate events.
- Human Disguise: The Keys takes a bulky approach to this. Big gardening gloves hide their hands, but the rest of them is more difficult. They usually just hide inside of a heavy blanket, wrapped and corded like a whole-body shawl. One scene has them disguise in a rolled up carpet.
- I Have Many Names: Both narrating characters, as well as several others. A central point of the book is that, with cybernetic biometrics, people can be locked out of using their own names. They both regain their names at the end. The Lantern, whose name is blocked out in earlier chapters, is named Kavian. The Keys, who was not given a name at birth, takes the names Veeshta and Mathus, one of which is in commemoration.
- Imaginary Friend: The Pale Figure is a vaguely humanoid entity that The Keys holds one-sided conversations with, usually in moments of stress or despair. Her descriptions always overlap with [1].
- Interspecies Romance: The Keys and Lantern, beginning when they are escaping the city and more formally once they're on the surface world.
- Lizard Folk: The Keys (plural) have biological ancestors are described like a mix between tuatara and monitor lizards. They all very much look the part, despite being large and upright now.
- Long-Lived: The Keys (plural), implied. It is ambiguous how much time passes between the two narrators leaving the city and coming back to it. From various different dialogs, it is implied that the Keys have a much longer lifespan than humans, assuming they aren't killed first.
- Made from Real Girl Scouts: The Keys Project is an initiative to cultivate and harvest organs from human-like donors, while ensuring those organs are adapted to disastrous climate change. They are presented, without the context of their source, as an ethically grown medical marvel.
- Never Learned to Read: Keys is illiterate, and comfortable in that fact. They draw well, recognize patterns, and have a knack for picking up new languages orally, but don't decipher inherent meaning or matching sounds from written words.
- Non-Human Non-Binary: The Keys are referred to with they/them pronouns exclusively throughout the novel. Slightly subverted in that several humans are, too.
- Sapient Eat Sapient: Keys eats Lantern's leg when the Listening Rot infects it, in order to prolong his life as a human. This becomes their regular preventative arrangement.
- Take Away Their Name: A central point of the book is that, with cybernetic biometrics, people can be locked out of using their own names. The main characters seek to undo this lock-out, and eventually succeed.
- Transflormation: The Listening Rot. The final result of infection leaves its victims a shambling ent-like creature that walks across the surface world, the wind whistling music through the holes in their bodies.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The focus of several conversations between Keys and Lantern. The Lantern first sees Keys as subhuman, then as a human. The Keys never sees themself as human at all, and is strict on how they see that as irrelevant to their own treatment and worth.
