It is a truth universally acknowledged that a good story starts with a good first line. In TODAY’s “Cold Open,” authors tease their buzzy upcoming release by revealing and explaining its first line, paragraph or page.
Victoria Aveyard first met her latest heroine that same way readers do in the opening lines of her adult fantasy debut, “Tempest”: in a city filled with gallows, staring out at corpses.
Aveyard is a self-proclaimed linear writer, so she always knew how this story would begin.
“Openings for me, at least that initial jump, that’s always quite easy,” Aveyard tells TODAY.com. “I always sort of saw Cat for the first time in my head the way that we see her in the book.”
“Tempest,” out Sept. 8, follows Catrine Rose, a former lady of the Meridian Empire turned pirate tavern owner, in two timelines: before and after. Chapter 1 is firmly set in the “after” and opens with the following scene:
It was hardly an unusual sight in the islands of the Lyrian Sea, where trade winds and swift currents brought countless vessels. Ships of war, ships of trade, ships of passage, ships with no direction at all. Ships of every flag — and none.
Catrine Rose watched in silence from the shore, staring out at the Archenport harbor as it woke up. She looked past the small boats and grander ships, her eyes fixed on the stone arch rising out of the water beyond the docks. Wind and waves and time carved it thus, the white rocks worn smooth, older than living memory. Once the arch had held the black flag, but the Meridian navy burned it upon landing. Now the nooses hung in its stead, the bodies flag enough. Her gaze snagged on the last salt-eaten rope in the line, its loop undone, leaving no trace of the man it once held.
“May the sea always sing for you,” Cat whispered, so low the gentle waves swallowed up her words.
Aveyard has described “Tempest” as an homage to the cinematic high fantasy stories she grew up, such as “Pirates of the Caribbean.” She’s since pitched it to her readers as a “pirate epic” chronicling a “10-year situationship between a fallen lady and a rogue captain.”
The book’s premise establishes that in the “before” timeline, Cat had been married to a “loathsome lord.” But in the after, she lies low as the Widow Rose, working at a tavern until she’s forced, by penalty of death, to track down and capture a pirate from her past, Valerian Kane.
Aveyard wants the first few paragraphs to establish the “violence” of the after timeline — where the pirates that sailed the Lyrian Sea have been wiped out by the Meridian Empire, which Cat once belonged to. She watches the destruction and quietly, passively, prays for them — and herself.
“She’s very much a ghost sort of walking through the echoes of this life that she lived,” Aveyard says. “She knows what this place used to be. She sees what it is now, and she’s sort of caught in the middle. So she’s almost giving up this prayer to the other people who have gone essentially the path that she thinks is going to be set for her as well.”
The image is also meant to illustrate something ending, one that will gain significance the more you read of “Tempest.”
“I want there to be a moment where we’re halfway through the story, we didn’t realize in the moment what this image was really going to do to us, and then we see what the world was and we have this bittersweet sort of recollection of, ‘Wow, I started at the end,’” Aveyard says.
It’s also far from the only time readers will encounter the phrase, “may the sea always sing for you” — it’s printed on the book’s cover, after all. Aveyard says that line hints at a “simmering” mythology under the surface of “Tempest,” which, while originally written as a 1,000+ word standalone, is now a duology. (Book 2, “Tyrant,” is due in summer 2027.)
