Overview
Auspicia is a publishing house established in 2012 for books that invite interpretation: books that can be read for story, image and information, then read again for the patterns beneath them. The name comes from the Latin auspicium, referring to divination through the observation of birds. An auspex was one who watched closely enough to recognise a sign and consider its possible meaning. That ancient act provides the emblem of the house—a woman looking towards a bird in flight—and its guiding idea: reading begins on the page, but it should never be confined there.
Auspicia: A Publishing House for Those Who Read Beyond the Page.
The phrase expresses the central purpose of the imprint. To read beyond the page is to recognise the relationship between a story and the life surrounding it; between an invented creature and the emotional need that produced it; between an ancient myth and the new forms it assumes centuries later. It is to understand that books do not finish when their final sentences end. They continue through memory, association, conversation, art and the private worlds formed within their readers.
Auspicia is the publishing form of the work I have pursued across writing, visual art, design, music, production and interactive media. My public work has long moved between the pattern-based art of Resonant, conversations with artists and creators through The Albert Chessa Network, and The Quantumyth, a shared storytelling universe conceived across literature, art and interactive forms. The purpose of Auspicia is to give these different strands a permanent physical home: carefully designed books with substance, texture and longevity, made to be revisited rather than briefly consumed and forgotten.
At the centre of this publishing programme is a complete sequence of 101 tales. One hundred of them comprise The Quantumyth: one hundred stories developed across more than two decades, each conceived as its own world, protagonist, identity and compact volume. The 101st is One Special Day, the book-length version of the optional framing story that surrounds those hundred encounters and reveals their relationship to the Resonant Library. Together, these works form The 101 Tales.
The hundred Quantumyth stories may be read individually, followed in sequence or approached as parts of a wider architecture whose connections gradually reveal themselves. One Special Day provides an additional path through that architecture without becoming a compulsory explanation for it. The hundred stories remain complete in themselves; the framing tale offers another perspective from which to understand how they may coexist.
A future The Quantumyth Omnibus will bring all 101 tales—the hundred Quantumyth stories and One Special Day—together within a single collected volume. The individual editions will preserve the autonomy and physical identity of every story, while the omnibus will reveal the full scale of the undertaking in one object.
This first Auspicia entry introduces four planned bodies of work. Steed begins with the great creatures who carry young heroes into larger worlds. The Myth Series will reflect upon the meaning, construction and synthesis of myth after the completion of the full Quantumyth endeavour. The Resonant Art of Albert C.W. Chessa will gather the complete century-spanning body of Resonant art into a large-format compendium. The 101 Tales will provide the narrative centre of the house: the hundred worlds of The Quantumyth and the single framing story that gathers around them.
Steed: Great Beasts and the Passage into the Wider World
A cultural history of the creatures who carry young heroes beyond the boundaries of childhood.
Steed is a planned illustrated book about one of the oldest and most affecting relationships in storytelling: the young hero and the enormous creature who accompanies, protects or carries them across the threshold of the known world.
These beings appear everywhere. They may be horses, dragons, dogs, wolves, birds, luckdragons or creatures for which no ordinary category is sufficient. Some are literal mounts. Others never bear a rider, yet fulfil the deeper function contained within the word steed. They enlarge the hero’s possible world. They provide strength without erasing vulnerability. They allow a small human figure to pass through distances, dangers and emotional territories that could not be crossed alone.
Pegasus emerges from Medusa’s death within the story of Perseus, although Bellerophon became the classical hero most closely associated with taming and riding the winged horse. Their partnership allowed Bellerophon to confront the Chimaera, while later art and popular retellings increasingly placed Perseus upon Pegasus. That changing association is itself revealing. The image of the airborne hero and the impossible horse proved so compelling that it travelled between myths, adapting itself to the needs of successive storytellers. The exact genealogy became less culturally powerful than the essential image: a mortal carried into a domain that the mortal body could never reach unaided.
The same image returns in Falkor and Atreyu. Falkor is not simply a horse translated into another shape. He is an immense, benevolent creature whose body becomes a passage through Fantasia. The young hero can be lifted out of exhaustion and despair because something older, larger and freer has found him. The NeverEnding Story begins with a lonely child and a book that draws him into a world of creatures facing destruction, making the act of reading inseparable from the act of entering another reality. Falkor’s flight gives physical form to what the book is already doing to its reader.
Clifford and Emily Elizabeth express the archetype through domestic affection rather than heroic combat. Clifford is rarely treated as a conventional mount, yet his extraordinary scale transforms every ordinary place around him. A child’s love has produced—or at least sustained—an animal too large to fit comfortably within the structures of the adult world. The deeper appeal begins with the visual relationship between them: the very small child and the impossibly large dog whose size remains gentle rather than threatening. Clifford is childhood attachment made monumental. He is protection, companionship and emotional abundance given a body too large to overlook.
Trico and the unnamed boy in The Last Guardian bring greater difficulty into the relationship. Trico cannot be reduced to transportation or obedient machinery. He is wounded, frightened, powerful, instinctive and sometimes resistant. Progress depends upon reciprocal trust. The boy must feed him, free him, understand his movements and learn the limits of command. The creature’s immense scale gives the boy access to the wider world, but that access is never automatic. It must be built through patience, attention and repeated acts of care.
This recurring difference in scale is central to Steed. The beasts are physically greater than their heroes because the world beyond childhood is greater. It is high, ancient, dangerous, magnificent and initially unreadable. The child cannot master it through size or force. They must approach it through courage, observation and relationship.
The creature often resembles adulthood without becoming an adult. It possesses the size and power the young hero lacks while remaining outside human institutions. It does not belong to the school, court, army, family hierarchy or ordinary social order. It moves on four legs, wings or some hybrid arrangement, retaining contact with instinct, landscape and the non-verbal world. Its authority comes from presence rather than title. It can therefore carry the child towards maturity without simply becoming another parent, teacher or ruler.
These companions also complicate the usual heroic ideal. The hero does not reach the larger world solely by becoming stronger and more self-sufficient. The journey begins through dependence. To be carried is to surrender some control. To climb onto the back of a much larger being is to accept vulnerability, uncertainty and trust. The hero’s courage lies partly in allowing another life to bear their weight.
The position of the creature on all fours is visually and symbolically potent. Its back forms a bridge. Its body becomes moving ground beneath the hero. It is animal, vehicle, guardian and temporary home at once. A child upon a great beast occupies a space between earth and sky, safety and danger, dependence and independence. The relationship turns travel into transformation.
Steed will examine this image across mythology, folklore, children’s literature, fantasy cinema, animation and interactive storytelling. Its subjects may include winged horses, luckdragons, colossal dogs, flying bison, dragons, wolves, guardian birds and imagined hybrids such as Trico. The book will consider how scale, posture, movement, touch and trust shape these relationships, and why the image of a small hero beside a vast creature continues to exert such emotional force.
It will not be a catalogue of fantasy animals. Its subject is the passage they enable. Each creature offers a different answer to the same underlying question: how does a young person enter a world larger than the one they have known?
Sometimes they ride. Sometimes they fly. Sometimes they walk beside something whose presence alters the scale of existence. In every case, the creature makes the wider world reachable.
The Myth Series
Following the completion of The 101 Tales, Auspicia is intended to publish a three-volume sequence reflecting upon the endeavour: The Meaning of Myth, The Making of Myth and The Melding of Myth.
These books are planned for after the work itself is complete because they require the perspective that can only come from having travelled through the full undertaking. The Quantumyth is a lifelong multimedia storytelling project and shared universe combining literature, visual art, game design and interactive forms. Its one hundred central stories form a constellation of independent worlds, while One Special Day presents the optional framing narrative in which those tales return as memories of encounters with the Resonant Library. Together, they form a complete sequence of 101 tales.
The Myth Series will step outside that sequence and examine what was learned by building it.
The hundred stories of The Quantumyth form the mythic and imaginative foundation of this reflection. Each has its own protagonist, realm, visual identity, creatures, artefacts and potential interactive form. Some began as drawings, fragments or images long before their stories became clear. Others arrived almost whole. Some changed titles, protagonists or worlds over many years. Together they form a body of work that can be read as one hundred separate imaginative encounters or as parts of an expanding structure held together by recurring questions, symbols and emotional patterns.
One Special Day forms the 101st tale. It is not another isolated world placed beside the hundred. It is the story surrounding them: the account of a life, a threshold and the Resonant Library through which the separate worlds may be remembered. It provides a point of entry into the complete architecture while remaining optional. Readers may encounter the hundred stories without it, read it before them, read it afterwards or allow it to emerge gradually between them.
The 101 individual volumes will preserve the physical autonomy of every tale. The hundred Quantumyth books will each open onto one world and one protagonist. One Special Day will stand beside them as the framing volume that gathers around the entire sequence. The Quantumyth Omnibus will eventually contain all 101 tales in one consolidated edition. The Myth Series will then look back upon the completed structure from beyond it, considering the decades of memory, revision, design and synthesis through which it came into being.
The Meaning of Myth
The Meaning of Myth will ask why human beings continue to create, preserve and return to myths. It will consider myth as a way of placing experience into a form large enough to contemplate: birth and death, separation and return, sacrifice and inheritance, terror and wonder, the known world and whatever may lie beyond it. It will examine why certain structures recur across distant periods and cultures without reducing every tradition to a single formula. Myth can preserve cultural memory, organise moral conflict, embody spiritual questions, legitimise power, resist power or give private experience a form that can be shared.
The book will also examine what myth means within a contemporary life saturated by cinema, games, television, recorded music, books and digital archives. Many people now encounter their foundational figures through several media at once. A hero may first appear on a television screen, then return through a novel, a game, a drawing or a piece of music. The modern mythic imagination is layered, recombinant and intensely personal. The Meaning of Myth will explore how inherited stories coexist with the unofficial pantheons formed during childhood, and how those private constellations continue to influence the stories made in adulthood.
It will also consider the relationship between myth and interpretation. A myth does not remain identical across every life that encounters it. Readers carry different memories, fears, histories and expectations to the same figure. What begins as a shared story becomes privately inhabited. The book will examine how myths acquire new meaning through repetition without surrendering the earlier meanings embedded within them.
The Making of Myth
The Making of Myth will turn towards process. It will document the construction of the complete 101-tale sequence: the one hundred stories of The Quantumyth and the framing story, One Special Day. It will follow the movement from first image or intuition to invocation, premise, synopsis, structure, design and eventual adaptation.
The book will consider the particular challenge of building one hundred worlds that must function both independently and collectively. Each tale needs enough identity to stand alone, while the complete sequence must retain a sense of underlying kinship. The stories cannot simply be fragments of one immense narrative, nor can they become disconnected exercises. Their relationship depends upon recurrence, contrast, echo and the gradual accumulation of meaning.
The framing story presents a different creative problem. One Special Day must connect the hundred tales without enclosing them too tightly. It must reveal a possible relationship between them while allowing each world to retain its mystery. Its function is not to reduce the hundred stories to components of a single plot. It provides a surrounding human story through which their separateness, recurrence and emotional connection can be contemplated.
The Making of Myth will include abandoned directions, accidental connections, recurring images, names that arrived before their meanings, works that changed identity and stories that waited years for the correct form. Mythmaking is frequently discussed in terms of inspiration, but inspiration is only the beginning. A lifelong project also requires cataloguing, revision, continuity, patience and the willingness to return to material created by an earlier version of oneself.
The physical publishing programme will become part of that account. The hundred individual Quantumyth volumes will reveal the tales as distinct objects, each with its own title, protagonist and world. One Special Day will reveal the framing structure surrounding them without imposing itself upon readers who prefer to encounter the stories separately. The Quantumyth Omnibus will reveal the complete design at once. These are not merely alternate formats for identical material. Each arrangement changes how the reader perceives sequence, connection and scale.
The Making of Myth will therefore be both creative record and archaeological study. The creator becomes an investigator of his own accumulated work, attempting to determine why certain symbols appeared, where separate ideas converged, which fragments endured and how memory altered their meaning.
The Melding of Myth
The Melding of Myth will consider what happens when influences, memories, traditions and invented worlds begin to combine. It will examine synthesis across cultures, media and stages of life: how an ancient motif enters a modern game; how a childhood film influences an original creature decades later; how a private memory becomes part of an invented cosmology; and how interactivity changes the reader or player’s relationship to mythic structure.
The title refers to a process more complex than mixture. Melding requires separate materials to retain their histories while joining within a new form. The book will address influence, adaptation, homage, transformation and responsibility. It will consider how creators can acknowledge the origins of what they inherit, remain attentive to cultural context and still form genuinely personal work from a lifetime of encounters.
It will also examine the boundary between conscious influence and creative recurrence. Some connections are deliberately constructed. Others appear years later and reveal themselves only when the work is viewed as a whole. Across the hundred Quantumyth stories, images created in childhood may reappear beside ideas developed in adulthood. A figure imagined for one tale may quietly anticipate another. A recurring shape may pass from a sketch into a creature, from a creature into an artefact, and from an artefact into a Resonant work.
One Special Day introduces another form of melding. It brings the hundred tales into relation through memory, identity and the Resonant Library, joining them without erasing their separateness. It considers how innumerable possible lives can coexist around one person and how the imagined worlds of a lifetime can return through a single remembered day.
Together, the three Myth books form a progression. The Meaning of Myth studies why myths exist and why they endure. The Making of Myth studies how one extensive mythic body of work was constructed. The Melding of Myth studies how stories, traditions, media and individual experience meet within new creation. Meaning leads to method; method leads to synthesis.
They will be written after The 101 Tales are complete, from the far side of the endeavour rather than from its centre.
The Resonant Art of Albert C.W. Chessa
The third project is The Resonant Art of Albert C.W. Chessa, a large-format art compendium bringing all one hundred Resonant works together in a single volume.
Resonant is the visual counterpart to the hundred stories of The Quantumyth: a body of abstract, predominantly monochromatic symbols concerned with pattern, nature, movement, existence, connection and the hidden structures from which forms appear to grow. The one hundred works form a visual sequence beside the one hundred worlds. Each may stand independently as an abstract artwork, yet each may also operate as the surviving mark of an encounter with one of the realms contained within the wider project.
Within One Special Day, these symbols are connected to the protagonist’s passages through the Resonant Library and the worlds beyond it. A work may therefore be approached in several ways: as an autonomous composition, as an emblem associated with a particular tale, as a record of a period in the artist’s life or as part of a century-spanning visual language. The interpretive relationship remains open. The image does not merely illustrate the story, and the story does not exhaust the image.
The compendium will give these works the scale, sequence and physical continuity they have never possessed online. The images will lead. Text will remain restrained: titles, dates, materials, dimensions and carefully selected notes concerning the circumstances of creation and each work’s relationship to the wider project. Reproductions will preserve the charcoal depth, raised white surfaces, paper texture, edge detail and small irregularities through which the works reveal their making.
The complete sequence is divided into five long arcs.
Auspexistence
Auspex | Existence
2005–2015
Auspexistence combines Auspex and Existence. The name describes the observer at the beginning of the search: a consciousness examining existence for signs. These early works establish the fundamental visual vocabulary of Resonant—black fields, pale structures, branching forms, masks, figures, creatures, gates and marks that seem simultaneously biological, architectural and symbolic. The auspex watches the patterns forming and begins to interpret them.
This first period contains the exploratory force of an emerging visual practice. Forms appear before their full significance is known. Some resemble organisms, diagrams or emblems from unwritten cultures. Others feel like the remains of encounters that cannot be recalled in conventional narrative. Their identity resides partly in this uncertainty: they appear to have been discovered as much as invented.
Beaconfluence
Beacon | Confluence
2016–2026
Beaconfluence combines Beacon and Confluence. Here the works become both signals and meeting points. Separate influences converge: nature, memory, constructed worlds, parenthood, mortality, digital and physical media, personal history and the growing architecture of The Quantumyth. The beacon sends outward while the confluence draws inward. Together they describe an art practice becoming increasingly connected to the rest of a life.
During this period, Resonant develops from a sequence of related images into a more consciously articulated counterpart to the hundred stories. The works retain their independence, but their relationship to the wider project becomes clearer. They begin to feel like signs transmitted between worlds, lives and periods of creation.
Eternalucence
Eternal | Lucence
2027–2037
Eternalucence combines Eternal and Lucence. It concerns continuity, illumination and the attempt to create forms capable of carrying light across time. The period will begin beyond the present body of work, allowing its identity to emerge through the works themselves rather than being prescribed in advance. Its title establishes a direction without dictating the destination.
The future periods are not rigid stylistic programmes. They are long fields of possibility. Their names provide a point of orientation while leaving the individual works free to contradict, complicate or enlarge the ideas associated with them.
Naturesonance
Nature | Resonance
2038–2048
Naturesonance combines Nature and Resonance. It will examine the correspondence between natural forms and the patterns repeated within mind, memory and art. Resonance implies that a form does not remain isolated. It sounds through another structure, another organism or another period of life. Nature becomes neither decorative subject nor distant ideal, but an active system of recurrence.
This period imagines the artwork as part of an ongoing exchange between observation and invention. Branches, bodies, shells, cells, landscapes and imagined architectures may answer one another without becoming direct representations. The visual mark becomes a place where natural process and symbolic thought meet.
Originascence
Origin | Nascence
2049–2088
Originascence combines Origin and Nascence and extends from 2049 to 2088. It places beginning at the far end of the sequence. Rather than treating a late period as closure, it imagines age as a return to emergence: the origin reconsidered after a lifetime of transformations. The final arc will ask whether sustained creation eventually leads back to the first mark, now seen with the accumulated perspective of everything that followed.
The sequence therefore ends by reopening itself. Origin and culmination occupy the same field. The final works may return to the simplicity, uncertainty and directness of the earliest period while carrying the accumulated history of the intervening decades.
These dates form an architecture for a lifetime rather than a prediction of what every future work will contain. They give the project room to continue changing. A conventional retrospective looks backwards after the work has been made. The Resonant Art of Albert C.W. Chessa is conceived as both retrospective and prospective: a book whose complete shape has been imagined before many of its pages exist.
The hundred works will ultimately appear together as a continuous visual record extending from the first drawings of 2005 into the later decades of the century. Seen individually, each is an emblem. Seen together, they become a language developing across time.
The 101 Tales
The 101 Tales is the complete narrative body at the centre of Auspicia: the one hundred stories of The Quantumyth, accompanied by One Special Day, the optional framing story that forms the 101st tale.
Each of the hundred Quantumyth stories opens onto its own realm and follows its own protagonist. Every volume is organised around a distinct archetypal identity—Father, Saviour, Entity, Hero, Maiden, Wizard, Wanderer, Child, Adventurer, Researcher, Dreamer, Mother, Explorer, Being and the many figures between them. Each tale possesses its own visual language, inhabitants, creatures, locations, artefacts and internal mythology.
The titles are simple because they act as doors. They identify the figure at the centre of each tale while leaving open what that figure may become within an unfamiliar world. A father may be biological, adopted, symbolic or cosmic. A robot may possess greater tenderness than its makers. A hermit may conceal an entire civilisation. A child may remember lives that have never occurred. The archetype provides the first sign; the story complicates it.
The hundred tales are not conventional chapters in one continuous saga. Each is intended to function independently as a complete story and as the potential foundation for a game, film, animation, illustrated book or other adaptation. Their unity emerges through accumulated echoes rather than a single mandatory plot. Certain images, ideas, creatures and symbols recur, but they do so as resonances between worlds rather than as clues that must be solved.
This allows the reader to approach The Quantumyth from almost any direction. The tales may be read in their intended sequence, selected according to title or instinct, or encountered independently over many years. Each world is a complete destination. The larger structure grows through memory: the recognition that something seen in one story has changed the way another is understood.
One Special Day forms the 101st tale and the optional frame surrounding the hundred. It follows the human story through which the worlds of The Quantumyth may be remembered as encounters with the Resonant Library. The passage from childhood into adolescence becomes a threshold into innumerable lives, realms and possible selves. What first appears to be one day begins to contain the memory of a much larger existence.
The framing story does not declare that there is only one correct way to understand the hundred tales. It offers one path between them. Readers who prefer the stories as independent myths may leave the frame aside. Readers seeking the larger autobiographical, metaphysical and emotional architecture may follow One Special Day through the Library and into the worlds associated with the hundred Resonant works.
Published separately, the 101 tales will form a physical library of compact clothbound books: one hundred Quantumyth volumes and a companion volume for One Special Day. Each will remain a distinct object with its own identity, title and place within the complete sequence.
The Quantumyth Omnibus will gather all 101 tales into one large collected edition. It will contain the complete hundred-story sequence together with One Special Day, allowing the entire architecture to be encountered continuously. The omnibus will not replace the individual volumes. It will provide another scale of reading: the difference between entering one world at a time and holding the full constellation within a single book.
The separate editions and the omnibus therefore serve different purposes. The individual books emphasise encounter, distinction and return. The omnibus emphasises accumulation, sequence and the immense physical shape of the completed work. One Special Day provides the bridge between those experiences, surrounding the hundred worlds with the memory of the life through which they were reached.
The 101 Tales is both a library and a single undertaking. Its hundred central stories look outward into separate realms. Its final framing story turns back towards the person who imagined, visited or remembered them. Together, they form the complete narrative expression of The Quantumyth.
Reading the First Signs
These four projects establish the territory Auspicia is intended to occupy.
Steed begins with an image found across human storytelling: the small hero and the great creature who carries them beyond childhood. The Myth Series will look back upon the creation of the complete Quantumyth endeavour and ask what myth means, how it is made and how separate inheritances can be joined. The Resonant Art of Albert C.W. Chessa will gather a life in symbols into one enduring visual sequence. The 101 Tales will contain the narrative worlds themselves: one hundred independent stories and the framing tale that gathers around them.
One project studies companionship. One studies mythmaking. One studies visual form. One contains the worlds from which those investigations emerge. All four are concerned with interpretation, and all four follow the same larger creative principle: that an image, creature or story can possess an immediate surface while carrying further meanings beneath it.
The one hundred Quantumyth volumes embody that principle through individual narrative. Each book opens one world and follows one protagonist, allowing every tale to retain its own identity. One Special Day offers the optional story surrounding those encounters and becomes the 101st tale in the complete sequence. The Quantumyth Omnibus will gather all 101 within a single collected volume, revealing the full scale of the undertaking in one physical object.
They ask the reader to look at Pegasus and see more than a winged horse; to look at Trico and see more than a digital creature; to look at an abstract mark and consider what memory, story or natural structure may be moving through it; and to look at one hundred apparently separate worlds and consider the life, Library and special day that may connect them.
They treat books as objects of thought and return, capable of opening paths well beyond their printed boundaries.
The bird within the Auspicia seal is therefore more than an ornament. It represents a way of approaching stories and images. Look closely. Notice movement. Recognise recurrence. Read what is present, then consider what may be passing through it.
This is Auspicia.
A publishing house for those who read beyond the page.
