hi marcy

my story is called, "it's never too late to start over". its set in a planet with a hollow-earth structure to it, called chiranema. there are four sentient species that inhabit the hollow world: lamias, faeries, beetles (beetle people) and poppets (doll people created by the beetles to serve as slaves). on the surface world live the humans. the humans engage in a variety of settler colonialist projects underground. they send exiles and disfavored political figures down there to rule as petty governors and functionaries, but mostly act through local proxy comprador rulers. humans have been in contact with underground species for generations, and humans are the ones who inspired the beetles to make poppets in the first place ages ago, but eventually drilling into the earth becomes readily practical and the sort of imperialist bonanza begins. the protagonist is named sibilance. she is a poppet from underground who gets kidnapped from her maroon community of poppets and brought to the surface by some human imperialist grunt. when he returns with the poppet, the wife he always abused and neglected kills him and takes all sort of pains to get away with it. while going through her dead ex husbands things, the woman, itxalo, discovers the poppet and finds out it is alive and can speak. She takes sibilance in, nurtures her, teaches her all sorts of pragmatic skills and how to survive independently, and allows her to grow up by both disguising her, and by gradually reconstructed and mending sibilance's ragdoll body, so as to simulate her physical growth and not raise suspicion that itxalo, who is already a pariah in her community, is raising an anomalous creature from the hollow world. sibilance grows up under her mother's care, and gets interested in being a witch. but the witch cult on the surface world is mostly corrupt and full of charlatans: the real magic is all underground. this is what sibilance discovers in the course of her life as she grows disillusioned with her stupid fakey fake imperialist witch club, gets discovered as a young adult, stolen from her mothers home, and exiled underground. in the course of her journey, she will fall in love with a snake woman, pledge her life to a revolutionary political and military effort, and travel all the way to the core of the hollow earth, where the green glow resides, which is a huge pulsing core of glowing green slime which creates life in chiranema and fills it with magic. eventually the revolutionary political and military effort is successful, and the nature of the world itself changes. it becomes a really fucking good place to live in. the idea is to represent this as both the reward for all the heroic struggles driving the narrative of the story and a meaningful possibility in real life