Discover the Mysteries of the Tellafrog Series

From X:  @Advocacy_tech

Nobody tells you that a man's theology shows up in his monsters.
Not his heroes, his monsters.

The thing the author understood, maybe without fully meaning to, is that if you want to know what a writer believes about the soul, you don't look at the saint. You look at what he built to stand in opposition to it.

Tellafrog: Part One is, on its surface, a wild fever dream of a book. Yellowstone meets Little House on the Prairie if Little House had goblins, High Elves, ancient sentient machines, and a priest dying with two arrows in his chest in the Montana wilderness. It's the kind of book that shouldn't work and then absolutely does. But here's what lives under the rocks of it: this is a book about what happens when sincere faith reaches for the wrong tool.

Father Callious is the wound the whole story grows from. A genuinely good man. A man of prayer. A man who kept a Latin bible with a scrap of paper tucked inside, Leviticus 19:31, as if he knew, even as he was doing the thing, that scripture itself had warned him against it. He wasn't deceived. He was lonely for answers in a way that made him porous to the wrong ones. And that's the sharper, truer thing. Evil doesn't usually come in through the front door in good men. It comes in through the crack that faith left open by asking too hard.

Raileanu is the counter-argument and the author writes him quietly enough that you almost miss it. His God is not dramatic. His prayer is just keep an eye on me. That's it. No cathedral. No ritual. Just a man asking to be witnessed. And somehow that small ask survives everything the book throws at him.

The High Elves are where it gets genuinely brilliant. They're not evil. They're optimized. They chose knowledge. They chose power. They chose to not reproduce, not bind themselves to anything so messy and metabolic as love. And now they can feel only "the dim shadow of a soul," which is, frankly, one of the most devastating lines in contemporary fantasy, indie or otherwise. The author didn't need to say it loud. He just put it there under the rocks, like everything else that matters in this book.

And then there's Father John's gift to Raileanu, years before the story starts: evil is grime on the outside of the soul. The soul itself cannot be damaged. That theology of hope is quiet and load-bearing. It's why Raileanu can show up to bury his enemies. It's why the book doesn't collapse into vengeance and ash.

The lesson, if you're reading for pulse and not plot: the things that save you are the things you cannot manufacture. Not the ancient machine. Not the root wand. Not 14,000 years of accumulated power. A ring made from copper scraps. A proposal in a tunnel. A man who just asked to be watched over.

That's what the book is about.

The rest is just a really spectacular way of saying it.

TL;DR: A frontier fantasy with theological bones and a genuinely wild imagination. Read it for the goblins, stay for what the author hid underneath them. First book. Not the last.

Looking forward to book 2. Amazing world building here.