THE SCOUT AND KEEPER INTERVIEWS
A NOTE BEFORE YOU READ
The following interviews were conducted as a conversation; unhurried, unscripted, and allowed to go where it needed to go. The series is called Scout and Keeper because every good story needs both: someone willing to venture into unfamiliar territory and ask the question nobody else thought to ask, and someone willing to keep the flame of the thing that matters.
The author goes by Kare. (Pronounced keh-ree, or nickname kehr.) The y in Karey was dropped after one too many autocorrects to the name Karen.
These five conversations cover the origin of the story, the person who received it, the moment the world collided with the cosmos, the medicine at the center, and the language that had to exist before any of it could be true. They can be read in any order; yet, they were written to be traveled through.
SCOUT AND KEEPER SERIES
Interview One: The World and the Whispered Word
A Conversation with K.S.R. Kingworth
On the Moment Before the Book
Scout: After our pre-interview chat I feel like we’re sitting at your table over lunch like neighbors. For our readers, let’s begin where most authors don’t. With the moment before the book. You had an unusual experience when Primørdiya found you. What can you tell us about that?
Kare: I moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in 2023 after life happened. I had never been to Mexico and only knew the town as a dot on a map. I had heard from an articulate man in Indian Wells, California that it was known as a place for writers. I was cat sitting for a couple who were on Patmos for their annual Goodworld Journey salons for soulful singer-songwriters and contemplatives. Anyway, I was cat sitting Max, their cuddly cat who is more like a dog. We were sitting on the sofa on a street with a lovely painting of koi fish behind us, on a street whose name translates to Souls.
That’s when I heard a word whispered in my ear: Primørdiya. With the word I saw a completed puzzle hovering above my head with the stars visible beyond it. Every piece was assembled. Whole. acing away from me.
I could only see the cardboard back of the puzzle. That felt, at the time, like a rather cruel cosmic joke. The picture — the one that would tell me what I was actually building — was facing the stars.
I wasn’t happy about it. I understood immediately that I would spend years turning it around. I also saw a handprint made from red ochre clay. Days later I would sketch out the island in the story, and later discover it was one version of Pangea.
Scout: You had been silent for fourteen years before that moment. After your first middle-grade fantasy received a starred School Library Journal review. After being on Goodreads’ most viewed profile page alongside Otis Chandler, Neil Gaiman, and Stephenie Meyer. Otis had asked you to help launch Oprah’s Book Club at Goodreads. What does fourteen years of silence feel like from the inside?
Kare: First of all, I failed miserably moderating the book club. I checked recently, and I’m still listed as a moderator, which makes me chuckle. By then, Lyme disease had made getting out of bed and crawling upstairs after feeding myself a full day’s work. To answer your question though — the last fourteen years were like waiting for something you can’t name.
I didn’t experience it as writer’s block. I experienced it as not yet. The world wasn’t ready. Or I wasn’t. Probably both. Because when the story was given to me, I had this overwhelming sense it already existed in its completeness. It was my job to let the pieces float down from the puzzle and fit it all together until I knew it was complete, free of what I wanted the story to be.
When you’ve written an entire manuscript from bed with full-blown Lyme disease and had it received the way Secret Speakers was received, and then the forced physical silence simply arrives — you eventually stop fighting it. You learn to trust the timing of things. Mexico taught me that on an even deeper level.
I’ll admit, when the story came to me I said a bad word. I said, blankety blank it. There is no way I’m writing another fantasy novel.
My mother called just then. I told her what happened. She said, I’m thrilled. I just got up off my knees praying you would keep writing for youth. My mother has always been in tune.
That did it. And here we are.
Scout: Tell me about Mexico. You write from a place the neighbors have a descriptive name for.
Kare: Funny. It’s true. They call it The Nosebleed. I live on a street too tiny for cars above a Mexican family who has taken me in as their own. High on a hill overlooking San Miguel. I have a beautiful view of my neighbor’s tile roof, a lush green tree, and the town that lies beyond. She used to be a Kirkus reviewer and wrote The View from Chepito. She jokes that my view is better than hers.
Before that I lived for a year outside of town at a horse ranch. A blonde mare named Peppy Jack pressed her nose against my kitchen window every morning while I drank coffee. I pressed my hand to her nose on the other side of the glass and we would hold each other’s gaze for long minutes. Those moments were like conversations, and she heard a lot of my troubles.
At night she slept with her rump against the adobe wall on the other side of my bed. I spread a roll of brown kraft paper across the floor of that ranch and began mapping the world of Primørdiya. I sat on the couch until my body made a permanent depression in the cushions. I wasn’t inventing. I was receiving.
Scout: That distinction — receiving rather than inventing — runs through everything you say about this world. The puzzle, the whispered name, the mare at the window. Do you consider yourself a mystic?
Kare: I consider myself someone who has learned to listen. To honor that first gut instinct of intuition. To observe. To pay attention. I have a story about that.
A year ago, while I was standing at my doorway looking over San Miguel de Allende, glowing salmon pink, bells ringing, I spoke into the air to my brother who had passed away.
I said, Philip, if you’re watching over me, and you’re okay, come sit on my finger as a hummingbird. I remember thinking, that was an interesting thing to say. Two weeks later a hummingbird flew into my apartment and sat on my finger. Two months after that, another one did the same. I had the presence of mind to film both visits. I choose to believe what I choose to believe. But I also know this — I did nothing to make those tiny creatures come other than ask. I only opened my hand and waited.
There are many things I have let go of because waiting is so much more peaceful. Carli Rockell does the same thing. Her blue eye doesn’t command. It receives.
Scout: Carli’s blue eye sees what others can’t. She is hidden because of it, hunted because of it, and ultimately necessary because of it. Where did she come from?
Kare: It started with seeing her handprint in my mind’s eye. I knew she existed. Loveable, huggable Carli Rockell is every child who was ever told that the thing that made them strange was the thing that made them wrong. I was a multilingual child who taught myself ancient Greek in middle school for the pleasure of it. That doesn’t make you popular. Carli’s wound is universal. She is the child who doesn’t fit, but her circumstances are entirely her own.
She was born in a tree. Hidden for her eyes. Rescued by a bus that barrel-rolls through space. And then she arrives at Harbornacles Sanctuary of Primørdial Arts and discovers that her eyes aren’t a flaw. They are the reason she was born necessary.
Scout: The world of Primørdiya has its own constructed language, an original orchestral soundtrack, a magic system based on cooperation rather than command. This is not a book assembled quickly. How long did it take?
Kare: This is where my love of languages showed up. And I have my sixth grade teacher to thank for the moment she wrote a sentence on the green chalkboard at the front of class and said, we’re going to learn to diagram sentences. I thought I had entered heaven.
The Primørdian language has its own grammar, root families, verb conjugation. It is modeled after Native language systems that treat action as ever present, as ongoing. Nearly three years of almost daily work. Creating the verb roots, pronouns, possessive pronouns, nouns and articles was pure joy. That was woven into the countless mornings I woke up before dawn to warm what had become a sunken depression on the sofa at the horse ranch, then later my kitchen table, only to stretch and eat until dinner.
The soundtrack was composed in the spirit of two men who don’t realize they are my mentors: Hayao Miyazaki and Joe Hisaishi. Studio Ghibli’s stories have influenced and calmed me more than any other form of story. As I worked piecing Carli’s story together, I sensed music. Sound. The soundtrack I produced is the closest I could come to making certain scenes more tangible.
The magic system emerged from watching how things actually work in nature. Part way into writing, Einstein’s Unified Field Theory was proven. This validated how Carli and her friends are trained to wield primørdial power — a magic system that has to do with the way nature and the cosmos actually function. Nothing commands anything. Everything cooperates. A tree doesn’t command the rain. Sound doesn’t command the ear. The most powerful force in this world, and in Primørdiya, is resonance. Things that are in harmony with each other. That’s what the apprentices learn to wield, and even use as the ultimate weapon.
Scout: On the morning of the solar eclipse in April 2024, the large mesquite tree at your ranch split in half. You kept a piece of the wood. What do you make of that?
Kare: Two pieces. One of them is the footstool under my kitchen table where I write. I make of it what I make of the hummingbirds, Peppy Jack the horse, and the labradorite ring I bought that turned out to have exactly the same shape as Rinath Island in the story.
Some things arrive as confirmation rather than coincidence. The tree split at the exact point where two great forces met. That’s also what happens in Primørdiya. Gravity is failing. The cosmic Tree of Life is uprooted and dying. A girl born in a tree must find the Fire Seed that can save it. I didn’t plan that echo. The best way to explain it is that I received it.
Scout: Last question. Hayao Miyazaki said that if he ever made another film, its theme would be it is good to be alive. You’ve said the same about Primørdiya.
Kare: My most profound belief around story is that good stories are good medicine. Being glad to be alive is one of the most important themes worth writing toward in today’s world.
When I read that interview with Miyazaki three years ago, I felt a calm, comforting reassurance. Maybe it was the still, small voice. Maybe it was the knowing we are all born with. But I felt it was my torch to pick up and carry.
I’ll say this: every child who has ever felt wrong, different, forgotten, unnecessary, which is most children at some point, deserves a story that tells them the truth. Not that everything will be fine. But that they are necessary. That the world they live in is stranger and more beautiful than anyone told them. That their particular way of seeing — their blue eye, whatever it is — is not a flaw to be hidden. It is the thing the world has been waiting for.
Carli Rockell was born necessary. Right now, so were you.
SCOUT AND KEEPER SERIES
Interview Two: The Blue Eye and the Mostly Yellow Page
A Conversation with K.S.R. Kingworth
On Neurodivergence, Language, Threshold, and the Child Who Needed to Draw Every Blade of Grass
Scout: Our first conversation was about the book and the world it came from. This one begins somewhere earlier. With the person who was capable of building that world. You’ve described yourself as neurodivergent. That word means many things to many people. What does it mean in your life?
Kare: It means I was probably ten or eleven years old, lying on the floor of my grandparents’ basement with the neighborhood children, and we all wanted to build a fort in the field next to their house. And I said, first we need to sketch it out.
I started drawing. Every board. Every nail. Every blade of grass around the outside. And the other children looked at me and said, stop already. Let’s just go build it.
I remember that moment clearly. Not as a wound, exactly. More as the first time I understood I was assembled differently. I didn’t have a name for it until I was a grandmother. During the pandemic, one of my children sat with me in front of a Netflix series they picked, called Love on the Spectrum. Partway through several episodes, I got very quiet.
I said, I don’t know how to say this, but I feel like I’m watching my life on this screen. My child said, I know. I thought you might. And then, you might want to look up adult women on the spectrum.
I found a checklist. I copied it into a Word document. It ran to six single-spaced pages. When I was finished highlighting everything that applied to me, the document was mostly yellow. I remember thinking, so that’s why I have had to work so hard to practice looking at people’s eyes instead of their mouths all my adult life.
Scout: What was that moment like for you?
Kare: I wept.
Scout: Adult women on the spectrum are notoriously difficult to diagnose. The profile doesn’t match the textbook.
Kare: We learn to perform. We learn to read rooms, mirror people, laugh at the right moments, ask the right questions. We become, in public, very good at appearing to belong.
I am what you might call a gregarious introvert. I have trained myself to look into people’s eyes, to walk into a room and talk with anyone — from the humblest person in a rural village to the titled and well-known. It makes no difference. We’re all the same. I can make people laugh. And then I go home and learn, again, that I was not invited to the party. That I was asked to sing at the event next door but not asked with the same group the next week. That I am useful, even delightful, but somehow not quite held. You begin to understand that you are sometimes experienced as a prop rather than a person. That is a particular and quiet kind of loneliness.
Scout: And yet the same wiring produced something rather extraordinary.
Kare: That is the mercy of it. The child who had to draw every blade of grass before she could build the fort grew up to construct an entire world with its own language, its own physics, its own orchestral soundtrack. Nearly three years of daily work. Waking before dawn. Not getting up from the kitchen table until my body insisted.
Writing Carli Rockell wasn’t discipline. It was air. It is the way a neurodivergent mind works when it finds the thing it was made for. You don’t choose to go deep. You simply cannot go any other way.
Scout: Language has been a recurring thread in your life. Tell me about that.
Kare: In ninth grade I taught myself to read ancient Greek. I found a Greek-English dictionary in our massive home library that was three inches thick. I held it to my chest like I had been handed a treasure. I kept that dictionary for years. Into young motherhood. My most precious possessions were the three-language dictionaries with parallel columns. I would pore over them.
Every time my mother took us to the East Millcreek Library I went straight for the language section. Japanese first. Then Hawaiian. Then Native American hand signals and smoke signals and codes. Later, Sanskrit. As a young mother driving alone through the green mountains of Vermont, I sang the Gayatri Mantra. Over and over. To find peace. I can still sing it from memory.
I am a philologist by nature if not entirely by training. That is, if we can name anything we are or do. Philologist is a label that describes my yearning to understand language and meaning that exists in countless cultures. No more. Anyway, I have always understood, at some level below conscious thought, that language is not just communication. Words are the structure through which a world becomes real. That is why Primørdiya has its own language. It had to. Carli’s world would not have been true without it.
Scout: Carli Rockell was born in a tree, hidden for her eyes, rescued by a high speed train or bus that barrel-rolls through space. She is the child who doesn’t fit. That is clearly not accidental.
Kare: Probably not. Carli is every child who was told that the thing that made them strange was the thing that made them wrong. I know that child. I was that child. I didn’t know it when I was writing. I only knew I was writing for that child. Not to tell them everything will be fine. That would be a lie, and children know it. To tell them that they are necessary. That their particular way of seeing is not a flaw to be corrected. They are, in all their uniqueness, what the world has been waiting for.
Carli’s and her friends don’t command with magic. They perceive, receive and work with natures forces which are beyond magical. That is also how I write. You do not force the world into shape. You wait. You listen. You draw every blade of grass until you understand what you are actually building.
Scout: You left the United States and came to Mexico near the end of the pandemic. That was not a small decision.
Kare: It was a life-saving one. I had witnessed something that changed everything. The laws in my home country around who may own and use a firearm make certain kinds of loss not only possible but predictable. I could not remain in proximity to that reality. I needed distance. I needed a different relationship with time, threshold and ordinary life.
Mexico gave me that. I live high on a hill in San Miguel de Allende, in a place my neighbors call The Nosebleed. One couple calls it The Chicken Coop. I call it a novel waiting to be written.
I have learned to stand at the threshold between the interior of my home and the world outside the way Mexican families do; at the doorway, not rushing in or out, simply present to the changing light.
There is a reservoir at the end of my street. Every morning, the moment the sun clears the mountains, the egrets fly toward me. Every evening when the light begins to fall below the far horizon, they fly back. I have learned to find my bearings by watching that. By trusting that the light will change, and the birds will know when.
I may not be in Mexico much longer, due to residency requirements. I’m exploring blooming where I’m planted in Europe. I’m partly quiety devastated. I’m also delighted I’ll be within a short flight to two of my three children and grandchildren who live on the continent and places I have dreamed of walking slowly in. I know enough about life, impermanence, and surrender to trust the process.
Scout: You mentioned a faith leader whose words gave you permission to trust yourself. Something was given to you.
Kare: Yes. In 2007, a leader in my church called me into his office in downtown Salt Lake City. He was a German speaker. A man of precision and weight. What he said to me gave me a foundation I have returned to many times since… he saw in me that I had a work to do with youth. At the time, I had no idea what it meant. These last three years, the words spoken to me echoed, and urged me on when discouraged, as if to say, “You figured it out.”
I returned to that foundation in the years of illness. In the silence after my first book. In the 5am mornings with Carli. There is a phrase in my tradition: line upon line. You receive what you need when you are ready to use it. I believe that. I have lived it.
Scout: What would you say to the child still lying on the basement floor, drawing every blade of grass for the fort while everyone else has already run outside to build it?
Kare: I would tell that child, keep drawing. You are not slow. You are not wrong. You are not broken. You are building something the others cannot yet see. The fort they build today will fall apart by Thursday. Yours is still standing.
Carli Rockell was born necessary. Right now, so were you.
Scout: Thank you for this quiet glimpse into your inner world. One final question: what do you see yourself doing when the trilogy is complete?
Kare: Nothing, in the very best sense of the word. Giving my grandchildren the love and snuggles they deserve. I haven’t been there for them as much as I’d like, especially the last three years. I see myself living in a charming little home with a stream, a garden, mountain views, trails for walking. A place to hang up my laundry. A village where people gather to laugh and tell stories in the local cafe.
Scout: My sense is that home is already waiting for you.
Kare: Mine too. Thank you for this kind, respectful visit. Blessings.
SCOUT AND KEEPER SERIES
Interview Three: The Ocean of Storms
A Conversation with K.S.R. Kingworth
On Artemis, the Moon Inside the Moon, and the Story That Knew
Scout: On April 11, 2026, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after becoming the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit in fifty-three years. Artemis II. The following month Carli Rockell and the Fire Seed published. I understand that convergence means something to you.
Kare: It stopped me cold when I first saw it clearly. The Artemis program spans the exact window of the trilogy. One mission, one book, each year. That kind of parallel isn’t something you plan. You receive it. And then you sit very quietly with it for a while.
Scout: Tell me what happens in your story when Carli and her friends reach the moon.
Kare: They don’t land on it. They go inside it.
The Omringle Bus — a seven-sectioned vintage VW bus, stretched and modernized and capable of flight — carries the earth volunteers toward the moon and enters through the Ocean of Storms. There is a crack in the surface that looks like a wink. A tunnel. And on the other side of that tunnel is something no one on Earth knows exists: a smaller moon, rotating slowly inside the larger one, with a dark space between them. Moon Inna Moon.
Inside, they meet the Nonterras; round beings with hands and feet like flippers on spindly arms and legs that retract so they can roll. And it is there, in that interior world, that each child receives a Portuna Key sealed into the web of skin between their thumb and index finger. A communication device. A covenant. Something that will be with them the rest of their lives.
Scout: You wrote that before anyone had returned to lunar space in half a century.
Kare: Yes. While I was sitting at a kitchen table at a horse ranch in Mexico, mapping a world on brown kraft paper, four astronauts were in training to fly around the actual moon. While I was writing chapters eight, nine, and ten (the Moon Inna Moon sequence) NASA was preparing the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since 1972. And within weeks after Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific, Carli Rockell was published. Artemis III will launch somewhere around the time Book Two releases in 2027. Then another Artemis in 2028. The window holds across all three books.
I did not know this when the story arrived. There is no way I could have planned it. Which means either it is one of the most extraordinary coincidences I have ever encountered, or the story knew something I didn’t. I believe the story knew.
Scout: What do you think the Artemis program and the Primørdiya trilogy are both reaching toward?
Kare: The same questions. Are we part of something larger? Can we voyage out beyond everything familiar — beyond the boundaries of this world, into different realms entirely — and find confirmation that our life is worth celebrating? That there is nothing that ultimately divides us?
Artemis is asking that with rockets and heat shields and four human beings in a capsule named Integrity. Carli Rockell is asking it with a girl born in a tree and a bus that enters the moon through a crack that looks like a wink. The question is the same. The longing to belong and merge from separateness to oneness is the same.
Scout: The mission that just returned was named Integrity. Carli’s world is called Primørdiya, a word that arrived as a whisper. Is there something in these names that speaks to you?
Kare: Everything. Integrity is not just a name for a spacecraft. It is a quality that has to be taught, practiced, inhabited from childhood. To act in integrity. To perceive in integrity. To speak what is true as true, and refuse to call an untruth by any other name.
Right now, as a civilization, we are watching children grow up in the middle of the precise opposite of that. Untruths dressed as facts. Facts dismissed as lies. The capsule that splash landed was named Integrity. I don’t think that’s accidental. I think something in us is reaching for the word because we know how badly we need integrity to splash land as a way of being in our collective soul.
And Primørdiya, the whispered word on Soul Street… what it has said to me from the outset is we are part of something ancient. This universe is boundlessly, ineffably old. We spin through it on a blue marble, held to its surface by forces we didn’t create and can barely explain. The primordial realm isn’t unseen our untouchable. It’s underneath us. It’s the ground of everything. The stones, a breeze, the sunrise, moonlight. The water that quietly washes over and soothes us as we cleanse ourselves, our dishes or clothes.
When Carli and her friends go to Harbornacles Sanctuary to learn to wield the primørdial arts, they are not learning magic in the fantasy sense. They are learning to work with what was always already there. The oldest forces. The ones that hold everything together without commanding anything. I hope some day to see this form of primordial magic on screen by someone with the vision of James Cameron.
Scout: And the Portuna Keys… what do the children discover when they receive them?
Kare: That they are not alone and never have been. The key doesn’t give them something new. It opens a form of communication that goes beyond whoever is standing in front of them, beyond whatever room they’re in. It connects them to something greater. And when you have that — when you feel genuinely connected to something beyond the immediate — the loneliness that used to feel like your permanent address just quietly steps back. It doesn’t vanish. It steps back.
Scout: Is that what Artemis is doing for the human story right now?
Kare: More than that. Artemis is giving us the chance to pull up and look down. I used to call it the eternal perspective. When life got too hard, too small, too crushing, I would try to see it from further out. That still works.
What works for me now is simpler: pull up. Look down. See the earth as a planetary object. A blue marble spinning in something ancient and vast and mostly quiet in its orbit in space that is mostly dark matter.
When you actually do that, even just in your imagination, the problems that felt monumental start to sort themselves. You can suddenly tell the difference between a big problem and a problem that only felt big from inside it. Most of what we are calling catastrophic right now is catastrophic from very close up. Pull back far enough and a different proportion emerges.
Artemis II went out nearly a quarter million miles and looked back. That is not a small thing to offer a civilization that has forgotten how to find its bearings.
Carli does the same thing from inside the moon. She looks back at the world she came from and understands, for the first time, what it actually is.
Scout: And what is it?
Kare: Worth returning to.
SCOUT AND KEEPER SERIES
Interview Four: The Dog Who Stayed
A Conversation with K.S.R. Kingworth
On Worth Staying For, the Candle in the Window, and the Medicine at the Center
Scout: The first three conversations were about the world, the maker, and the convergence. This one begins somewhere quieter. With a dog.
Kare: With a dog. Yes.
There is a dog in my first book, Secret Speakers. There is a dog in Carli Rockell — mentioned at first, but gone. Gone in the way things sometimes go, without explanation, without farewell. That particular kind of absence is its own kind of wound. Especially for a child.
I didn’t plan the connection between the two dogs across fifteen years of writing. I received it. And when I finally understood what I had been doing, or what the story had been doing through me, I sat very still for a long time.
Scout: What had it been doing?
Kare: Asking the oldest question, underneath everything. The question a child asks before they have words for it: Am I worth staying for?
Scout: Margaret Mead said something about that need, a phrase you have cherished for decades.
Kare: She spoke about it as an ancient human requirement. That we need to feel there is someone keeping a candle in the window, waiting for us to come home. The candlelight doesn’t need to be earned. We don’t need perform well enough or fit in or hid the right things for someone to light it for us. The candle is placed in the window because we are the ones waited for at home. The candle is lit because we exist. We are missed when we are gone.
That is not a small thing to tell a child. In fact I think it may be the most important thing. Because if a child knows, really knows, in their bones, that they are worth staying for, worth waiting for, worth the lit candle and the open door, then something else becomes possible. Not guaranteed. But possible.
Scout: What becomes possible?
Kare: Being glad to be alive. Those two things are not parallel themes that happen to appear in the same book. One grows from the other. Worth staying for is the root. Glad to be alive is what the root makes possible. You cannot easily be glad to be alive if you have spent your life suspecting that your absence would not be noticed. That the candle would not be lit. That the window would be dark.
Carli Rockell is that child at the beginning of the story. Born in a tree. Hidden. The thing that makes her who she is treated as something to be concealed. And then her dog is gone. That is not background detail. That is the wound the whole story is tending.
Scout: And what tends it?
Kare: The discovery that something has always known her. Before she could prove herself. Before she learned to wield anything. Something patient and ancient was already there, already watching, already waiting. She didn’t earn that. She couldn’t have. It was simply true.
That is the medicine at the center of both books. It took me fifteen years and two novels to understand I had been writing it the whole time.
Scout: You use the word medicine deliberately.
Kare: I want to be precise about what the medicine actually is, because it isn’t one thing.
Some people can learn to be glad to be alive in a contemplative, solitary way. Still, quiet, its own kind of beautiful and connection to what is transcendent; yet, most of us are not wired that way. Most of us are wired for human connection. Wired to hope we are worth staying for. Wired to need another person, or a story, or a dog waiting by the door to confirm that our being here matters. The medicine of a good story works precisely because it meets us in that wiring rather than asking us to transcend it.
The first medicine is wonder. Being taken along an undiscovered journey into realms and possibilities you didn’t know existed. A moon within a moon. A high-speed flying bus that enters the Ocean of Storms on the moon through a crack that looks like a wink. A mind-blowing magic system rooted not in command but in resonance. The world is stranger and more beautiful than anyone told you. And story is the proof.
The second medicine is the hero’s victory. Children need to believe they have the capacity within themselves to face darkness, to confront doubt and despair and rise. When a child reads alongside a hero, that is to say when they feel as though they are that hero, they win when the hero wins. They don’t just observe the triumph. They inhabit it. And that inhabiting does something. It leaves the marvelous residue of courage. It lives on in a child’s bones well into adulthood.
The third medicine is feeling. Laughter. The cry that comes from nowhere when a story touches something you didn’t know was waiting to be touched. Children sometimes have no other avenue for what is simmering inside them. Story is one of those avenues, along with dance, play acting, line drawing and artistic expression, however messy.
Story gives permission to feel things fully, holding the book almost in the shape of embracing oneself, in the safety of a world that isn’t quite real, so that when the feeling arrives in the world that is, they recognize it. They’ve been there before. The book and story held them as they held the physical book and greater story.
Which is why I think of story as inoculation. Story isn’t protection from darkness. That would be a lie, and children know it. Story is inoculation as preparation. If a story can take a child through fear and doubt and loss and out the other side, it has done something a vaccine does.
The story has introduced the shape of the terrible thing in a survivable form so that when it arrives in actual life, something in them says — I know this. I have been here. I came through this before. This is not only survivable, but I will feel relief again.
Scout: What do you want a child to feel when they close this book for the first time?
Kare: Relief. Relief that something has always known them, waits for them, and holds them even in their unknowing. Something knew before they could speak or read or prove themselves in any way at all. Something patient and ancient and warm has always been just outside the door. Nothing to earn it. Nothing to get right. Simply because they are and always have been worth staying for.
Scout: And for the child who doesn’t believe that yet?
Kare: That child is exactly who I wrote it for. The one still drawing every blade of grass while everyone else has run outside. The one hiding her blue eye. The one who lost the dog and didn’t understand why.
I would say to that child what the story says, and what I believe with everything I have: keep going. Something is keeping watch. The candle is lit. And the world you are about to discover inside the moon, inside the story, inside yourself is stranger and more beautiful than anyone told you.
You were born necessary. And you were always worth the wait.
SCOUT AND KEEPER SERIES
Interview Five: The Language That Had to Exist
A Conversation with K.S.R. Kingworth
On Primørdian, the First Words of Power, and the Grammar of Belonging
Scout: Every constructed language begins somewhere. Tolkien began with sound. He said he invented Elvish because he wanted a language beautiful enough to have made the word cellar door. Where did Primørdian begin?
Kare: With a need. Not an aesthetic one, though the sounds mattered enormously. A practical, almost urgent one.
The moment I understood that Harbornacles Sanctuary of Primørdial Arts was a place where young apprentices came to learn to wield primørdial power, I knew the wielding had to happen in language. The gestures, symbols and incantations couldn’t be from somewhere else entirely; however I scoured etymological meanings of each root words to guide me in sitting with possible sounds for a word. The words needed to arise as a first language, the language of existence itself. The one that was there before any other.
Once I understood that, Primørdian wasn’t optional. It had to exist.
Scout: How did you begin building it?
Kare: At a kitchen table at a horse ranch outside San Miguel de Allende, before anyone could claim it was created with AI assistance, before I had anything except brown kraft paper spread across the floor and a deep instinct about how the language needed to sound: Soft. Melodic. Like a breeze. Like nature in a calm state. Nothing harsh. Nothing that clenched.
I began where any language has to begin. With the self: I. And with the verb that describes we exist: to be.
Scout: Why there?
Kare: Because before you can name anything in the world, you have to establish that a presence exists to do the naming of existence. The pronouns and the foundation verbs had to come first. Not the words for star or fire or water. The words for I exist. You exist. We exist.
I sat with the sound of the word for I for a long time. What arrived was ish. And what struck me immediately was that ish doesn’t sound like ego. It sounds like belonging. Like something that knows it is part of everything around it rather than separate from it. The English I stands alone, upright, a single vertical line. Ish softens at the edges.
Scout: And to be?
Kare: Omra. That one arrived with a double resonance I hadn’t planned. The om at its root carries the Sanskrit echo, the sound that many traditions hold as the fundamental vibration of existence. For me, it sounds like the English word, home.
So when I sat down and filled out the T-charts by hand, conjugating it in every pronoun form, what I felt was this: The I we use to describe ourselves as individuals is, in Primørdian, the I am that says, I am not a lone self declaring existence. I am at home in myself, in something larger than myself. One with it all.
I noticed something the table reveals to anyone who looks closely. In the present tense, across every pronoun — I, you, he, she, we, they — the verb doesn’t fully conjugate. It simply becomes om. Ish om. Lah om. Lahley om. The full word retreats. The ra falls away. Every being, when speaking of present existence, arrives at the same quiet syllable. As if the language is saying: in this moment, we are all at home in ourselves. We are the same. We all simply om.
The past tense is omyahm. I was. There is a weight in that yahm. A syllable that holds what has been lived and released.
The future is omnin. I will be. The nin reaching forward into what is still becoming.
And then there is the active state: omdriom. I am in the ongoing process of being. Existence is not a fixed fact but a continuous way of being. A practice. As choice. That is the state of being Harbornacles Sanctuary of Primørdial Arts is training the young apprentices toward. More than simply being, but to be actively, presently, participating in something larger.
It suggests service. Being a light. The language knew before I did what the story was about.
Scout: You’ve mentioned that Native language structures influenced the grammar. What did you find there?
Kare: I came across an interview with Shawn Leonard, a Native Canadian known among his people for communicating with the deceased. Something in the way he spoke sent me down a rabbit hole into what makes Native languages grammatically distinct. And what I found — what seemed to be an overarching thread across many of them — was that action is treated as ongoing. Nothing is simply completed. Verbs exist in a kind of perpetual gerund state. The ing that English reserves for continuous action is closer to the default. Things are always in the process of being, growing, moving.
That changed everything about how Primørdian handles time and power.
Scout: How so?
Kare: In Primørdian, there is a verb aspect called the active state. You add driom to the verb root. Ish thudriom. I am in the process of breathing. Not I breathe as a simple fact. But I am breathing, right now, as an ongoing act of being alive.
When the apprentices at Harbornacles learn to wield primørdial power, they are not casting spells in the conventional sense. They are not commanding. They are entering the active state of the force they wish to work with. Aligning with it. Resonating with it. The magic system and the grammar are the same thing.
Nothing commands anything. Everything cooperates. The language knew that before I did.
Scout: Is there a word in Primørdian you’d be willing to share — one that captures something the English language doesn’t have a clean word for?
Kare: Hesur. It means wisdom that comes from the heart. Not intellectual knowing, not what you can prove or argue. The understanding that arrives through feeling, through experience, through having lived something rather than studied it.
English has to use six words to say what hesur says in two syllables. And children understand it immediately when they encounter it in the story, because they already have it. They just didn’t have a word for it.
That’s what the language is for. Some words and languages strive to impress. To perform complexity. Primørdian, names things that were already real.
Scout: The Beginner’s Guide to Primørdian — which exists as an actual in-world document at Harbornacles — is written by a character named Tutelargen, Planetary Keeper of Balance. The embodiment of Jupiter. He is not what you would call a relaxed educator.
Kare: Tutelargen is deeply committed to dimensional stability. He has his reasons. There have been incidents. The sentient bookshelf. The ceiling moss garden. The dormitory gravity reversal that resulted in an entire wing of apprentices waking up on the ceiling. Spoiler for Book Two. Whoops. He documents everything meticulously and he is not amused by carelessness.
Underneath the stern warnings and the mandatory initials and the footnotes about shower singing being expressly prohibited, he loves these children. He wants them to get it right because he understands what they are being handed: a language that can realign dimensional boundaries, that communicates across cosmic distances, that awakens dormant awareness. You don’t hand that to a first-year earth volunteer without protocols.
His voice was one of the great joys of building this world. He arrived fully formed.
Scout: One last question. Tolkien said that the mythology of Middle-earth grew from the language, not the other way around. Do you feel that Primørdian shaped the story, or the story shaped the language?
Kare: The story arrived first as a completed puzzle hovering above my head on Souls Street, facing the stars. The story couldn’t fully become itself until the language existed to hold it. You cannot teach primørdial arts in English. The magic wouldn’t work. The resonance wouldn’t be there.
So perhaps neither shaped the other. They arrived the way a song arrives — as a single felt thing that gradually becomes itself. Primørdian was the melody humming before I had words. The story was the words that finally gave that melody somewhere to live.
For readers who want to go deeper, a beginner’s guide to learning Primørdian will be available in the near future. Tutelargen insisted on writing the foreword himself. I didn’t argue with him.