A novel #DecRecs for today:

Fable of the Swan, by Jenna Katerin Moran (whom you may know from her RPGs Nobilis, Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, Glitch, among others), is a novel told by a girl who has lost herself and seen the True Thing. It is the story of her loss and her glimpses and her few moments redeemed in the radiance of the swan. It is an explanation of why and how she must unfold herself into a leviathan of burnished brass and gleaming chrome, why she must swim out into the void and fight with he Death—the lord of Death's Dominion, the first of the Riders, the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy is he named. It is perhaps my very favorite work of fiction.

I must offer the content warning that reading it reliably induces minor dissociative episodes in me and leaves me temporarily unable to believe in the reality of the world. I have intentionally reread it more than once knowing this.