A spark of imagination from six-year-old Noah has led him and his father to co-author Beneath the Song, a new 31-chapter fantasy novel.
What began as a playful question about whether a dragon or a griffin would win a fight grew into a much bigger idea: a world so vast that its inhabitants don’t even know it’s alive.
This idea became the starting point for Chris and Noah Robert’s book, Beneath the Song. A dark epic fantasy novel that follows Caiven, a young man approaching his 18th birthday and the rite of passage known as the Closing of Sight.
This ceremony is meant to dull people’s memories, shielding them from dangerous truths of their world. But Caiven’s rite goes wrong. Instead of forgetting, he begins to see and hear things that other members of society don’t. As he searches for answers, he uncovers a mystery tied to his father, who vanished six years ago, and learns that someone has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the truth hidden.
And Caiven begins to understand why.
The Freeport local father-and-son duo novel began to take shape spontaneously one day. Noah and his friend were playing and imagining fantastical creatures battling each other when Noah started developing ideas for a living world.
“[He] created this dragon that was so big, it was as big as a world, and it was alive, and nobody knew it was alive, and all these people lived on it. That’s kind of how [Noah] started creating it.” Chris explained.
When asked how he thought of it, the six-year-old said, “When I was running, I was playing, and then I got this [idea], and then my mind just like shooted it. Then I got the story.”
His father helped shape those ideas into characters, a plot, and eventually, a 31-chapter novel.
“I kind of started putting it together, and as we were putting the ideas together, I’m like, man, this could actually be something.”
Noah remarked that his favorite part of the process was imagining an enormous, invisible dragon with every power; a reminder of the imaginative ideas that helped start it all. And while dragons may have started the world and taken up most of Noah’s imagination, Chris elaborated that there were no dragons in the novel.
Yet.
Laughing, he explained, “[Noah] is really obsessed with dragons. So, I don’t know if dragons are in book two or three or not. I don’t know where we’ll go from there, but I feel like it deserves to be told right.”
For Chris, completing this book with his son means more than just that. It means creating something the family can keep for generations, pass on, and continue the story.
“We created something forever.”
Beneath the Song is a coming-of-age story for young adults and older readers. It is an epic fantasy novel expected to become a trilogy. The physical book will be released on November 3rd, with digital editions currently available for preorder.
Visit https://www.cnrobertsbooks.com/ to preorder the book now.
