Lastford Border Keep at night — a torchlit gatehouse hung with flame-and-portcullis banners, palisade walls, and the dark of the Ash Marches beyond.

The Blackwatch Songbook

Ballads of Lastford Border Keep

Still we keep

Twelve sung ballads and a novel in progress, from the last garrison on the Ash Marches — where the king's road ends and the law thins with every mile.

Newest ballad — A Funny Sort of Rebellion The novel — nineteen chapters drafted

A woven tapestry of the fall of Blackwatch: riders, the open gate, the closed gate, and arrows filling the sky. Its border reads TO LASTFORD OR TO HELL — STILL WE KEEP. — The tapestry in the great hall. Six panels, one night, and the two words the keep has left.

The Novel — in progress

The Engineer’s Daughter

Lastford Border Keep · Book One

The ballads are what the Marches remember. The novel is what actually happened — told by the engineer's daughter who arrived on the back of a wagon and never left.

“The country had grown bleak over the past two days. The green fields and wooded hills had given way to bare grey ridges and broken volcanic stone. Ash lay across the road and gathered in every hollow.” Chapter One

Nineteen chapters drafted — the twentieth to come Next chapter in the letters

The Songbook

Every ballad, in the order it was sung

Coming soon

Ride the Steel

The next ballad out of the Marches. Coming soon

The Chronicle

What the songs are about

Place

Lastford Border Keep

The last garrison before the Ash Marches. Grain, iron, salt and silver still pass its gate; the crown's protection no longer does.

Order

Blackwatch

Those who hold the keep. They ride at dusk, they keep no graves, and they ring no bells. Their whole creed is two words long.

Person

Brenimir, the Wolf

Feared across the wastes as a legend, remembered inside the walls as a cost. Four of the ballads follow him; one buries him.

Person

Captain Draven

Captain of the keep, and the Wolf's closest friend. He gives the order anyway — spare him, and lesser men ride in his place, and the keep pays for it.

Person

Anya

An engineer's daughter, a midwife, a healer. Her hands will pull you back from death. They do not save you from what follows.

The Ash Marches

Where the king's road ends

Fifty-five road miles from Greyhaven to the last garrison, and the green gives out a mile at a time. This is the Marches as the book opens.

A painted map of the Ash Marches. Green crown farmland and the walled city of Greyhaven in the west; the King's Road running east through grey ash country past a chain of signal towers; a smoking volcano north of Lastford Border Keep, which stands above the road beside the timber bridge over the Blackwater; beyond the river the road forks to Karsen in the north-east and the iron town of Veleskar in the south-east, each with a lit signal tower on its road.

Hover over a place, or tap it, to read what the chronicle knows.

The Muster

Those who keep

Petr

Mira

Anya

Brenimir

Draven

Katya

Tomas

Roderik

Marek

Pavel

Marta

Greta

Turn the cards — enter the Muster

Join the Watch

Be told when the next ballad is sung

One letter per song — the lyrics, the artwork, and what the chronicle says about it. Nothing else, and never your name to anyone else.

Riders beneath the raised portcullis of the old black wall.

← The Songbook

The Workshop

The Making of Blackwatch

The On AI page argues the why. This page shows the how: the wrong maps, the grey boxes, the faces that took four tries, and the rules that keep a machine honest inside a made world.

I — The Map That Lied

Image models paint beautifully and measure nothing. The first map of the Ash Marches was gorgeous and wrong — so the geometry moved out of the art and into a contract: every distance solved from canon, rendered as a layout the painting must obey.

The first AI-generated map of the Ash Marches, annotated with its errors — Where the map began: the first AI map — beautiful and wrong. Scale off threefold, the ford on the wrong side, towers everywhere.

A diagram of solved distances between every settlement and tower — The fix: geometry moved out of the art. Every distance solved from canon and rendered as a contract the painting must obey.

The clean layout render handed to the image model — The clean layout handed to the image model: paint over it, don’t rearrange it.

The painted terrain plate with every marker in place — The terrain plate that kept every marker where canon put it.

An art pass marked up in red against the specification — Marking up an art pass against the spec — a ridge painted as a wall, tan where there should be ash-grey.

Settlements, towers and the bridge, generated as one consistent painted sheet, then cut and placed by script.

The finished map of the Ash Marches — The assembled map: terrain from the model, geometry from the spec, structures stamped at their canonical coordinates.

II — Grey Boxes to a Town

The keep is built twice. Once as arithmetic — a Blender whitebox generated from a JSON spec, where every wall is a number and every distance is true. Then as pictures, painted over geometry that already holds.

A top-down plan render of the Blackwatch whitebox model — The keep as arithmetic: a headless-Blender whitebox, generated from a JSON spec.

An aerial render of the grey whitebox keep — First aerial of the whitebox — every building a grey box, every distance true.

A contact sheet of tavern interior render passes — The tavern interior, reviewed like a film set: one contact sheet per pass.

Before and after renders of the tavern exterior — Before and after on the tavern’s exterior stonework.

The floor plan of Anya's cottage — Anya’s cottage, drawn from my own sketch and the novel’s own sentences.

The floor plan of the chapel — The chapel — altar east, south door, the graveyard crowding the inner ward.

The layout plan of the common ward's 105 houses — A hundred and five houses of the common ward, tiered from stone near the inner wall to lean-tos at the palisade.

A render of the training ground — The training ground: corral, quintain lane, the butts.

A render of the common ward with houses in place — The common ward growing its houses — the latest pass.

A render of the palisade wall — The palisade pass: the wall that makes it a keep.

A lit render of the common ward as a living town — The moment the boxes became a town.

III — Raising the Buildings

Whiteboxes prove the distances; these passes make them places. Building by building the grey gives way — stone, timber, thatch and candlelight — with a pink placeholder man standing in the doorways to keep the scale honest.

An early flat-colour render of the whole keep — An early pass at the whole keep: flat colours, placeholder blocks, red markers standing in for people.

The inner ward with the textured keep, strong tower and lodging — The same ground once the passes piled up: the keep, the strong tower, the timbered lodging — every wall still where the spec says.

Anya's cottage in stone while surrounding buildings remain grey — Anya’s cottage takes its stone while the buildings around it wait their turn in grey.

The cottage front door in a stone wall — The cottage door, close enough to touch.

The infirmary front with herbs under the eaves and a pink scale figure — The infirmary from the ward, herbs drying under the eaves. The pink figure is the scale-check — every doorway is measured against him.

The half-timbered bathhouse entry — The bathhouse door: timber frame over a stone footing, and a sign nobody has painted yet.

The keep yard with the timber stair to the raised door — The keep yard: a timber stair up to the raised door, a ladder to the wall-walk.

The candle-lit tavern hall with tables and benches — Entering the tavern hall — candles lit, benches set, the evening rush forever a moment away.

The tavern bar and backbar with jugs on shelves and one candle — The bar and backbar, jugs on the shelves, one candle burning.

The chapel nave looking to the rood screen and altar — The chapel nave to the rood screen and the altar beyond — stone benches, coloured glass, candlelight.

IV — Finding the Faces

A face is canon too. Portraits are rebuilt pass by pass, compared side by side and verified by embedding rather than by eye — and when a picture contradicts the world, the world wins.

The veteran's face before and after rebuilding — Rebuilding the veteran’s face for *No Wound to Show* — before and after.

Four variants of the veteran's gaze — Four tries at where a man looks when he is not looking at anything.

A parameter grid of the young brigand's face — The young brigand’s face, tuned across denoise and guidance — verified by embedding, not by eye.

Marta in priest's vestments — the rejected version — The Marta canon rejected: vestments and crosses this world does not have. Kept for a future priest.

Marta in kerchief and apron — the kept version — The Marta canon kept: kerchief, apron, linen — and only the keep’s own flame on the wall.

V — The Marks

The heraldry that holds the world together — the arms of the keep, the crown that forgot the road, and the Watch itself.

The Blackwatch arms, banner and seal — Sable, a portcullis argent, flamed gules: the arms, the banner and the seal.

The arms of the crown of Vardena — The crown’s arms — the realm that forgot the road.

VI — The Outtakes

Not everything the machines hand back deserves the wall. Some of it deserves this — the shots that were nearly magnificent, kept as a standing reminder of why every plate gets its fingers, hooves and lance-heads counted before it ships.

Blackwatch cavalry charging through mud, the lead horse with too many legs — The charge of Blackwatch — rain, mud, banners, terror, and a lead horse galloping on five legs, one of them bending the way no leg does. The serjeant, for his part, is couching a broom handle.

The map itself hangs in The Marches; the finished faces stand in The Muster.

The Argument

On Artificial Intelligence

Why Blackwatch uses AI — openly, deliberately, and without apology

Blackwatch uses artificial intelligence.

It uses AI in the creation of music. It uses AI in the creation and animation of imagery. I use it while developing ideas, testing concepts, researching, revising and working through problems.

I don't hide that, and I don't intend to.

I am a single author. I cannot sing. I cannot compose an orchestral score. I cannot paint. I cannot animate. I certainly cannot employ a film crew and build a medieval border keep in the wilderness.

What I can do is tell stories.

And for the first time in my life, technology has made it possible for me to take a world that existed largely inside my head and express it through several different forms at once: prose, music, images and eventually moving pictures.

That is what AI is doing here.

It isn't the reason Blackwatch exists.

It is the reason you can see and hear it.

The criticism of AI is not entirely wrong

There is a strange tendency in discussions about artificial intelligence for everyone to be required to occupy one of two trenches.

Either AI is the miraculous solution to everything, or anyone who touches it should apparently be drawn and quartered somewhere in the public square.

I don't find either position particularly useful.

There are legitimate ethical questions surrounding generative AI.

The most obvious is training data. Artists, writers, photographers, musicians and others created work that was used in the development of some generative systems without necessarily having meaningful control over that use, receiving attribution, or sharing in the value subsequently created.

I think that concern deserves to be taken seriously.

The second concern is simpler.

AI is going to replace some paid work.

In some areas it already has.

There is no intellectually honest way around that.

Years ago, I paid around $1,500 for artwork for a professional project. The artist worked hard. The process took weeks. The final result was competent.

It also wasn't quite what I had imagined.

That wasn't really anyone's fault.

The artist could not see what was inside my head, and I could never describe it with enough precision to make our two mental pictures identical. After enough revisions, friction inevitably develops. The person commissioning the work feels they are still not quite there. The artist quite reasonably becomes tired of making yet another alteration.

Eventually everybody wants the thing finished.

Generative tools change that equation enormously.

I can now pursue an idea through twenty, thirty or fifty iterations without exhausting another human being, spending thousands of dollars, or eventually accepting something simply because continuing the process has become impractical.

That inevitably changes creative industries.

I understand why people within those industries are frightened or angry about it.

But we have seen versions of this transition before

For much of human history, access to information was expensive.

Books were expensive. Encyclopaedias were valuable possessions. Specialist knowledge was difficult to acquire. Tutors and teachers were sometimes the only realistic way to gain access to information that today can be found in seconds.

Then came mass publishing.

Then computers.

Then the internet.

Then Wikipedia, YouTube, online courses, forums and search engines.

Every step made something that once required a specialist easier for an ordinary person to access.

Artificial intelligence is a much larger step, because it doesn't merely retrieve information. It can increasingly help people do things with it.

Creative work is now experiencing a transition that other information-based professions have already been living through for decades.

That doesn't make the consequences painless.

But pretending the transition isn't occurring doesn't make it disappear either.

I use AI in my other life too

When I'm not writing Blackwatch, I work as a doctor.

AI has already changed the way I practise medicine.

One of the least glamorous but most consuming parts of medicine is documentation. Traditionally, that means dividing your attention between the patient and a computer screen, trying to listen, examine, think, remember details and simultaneously produce an adequate record.

AI-assisted documentation allows me to spend substantially more of that consultation actually looking at the person in front of me.

I can listen.

I can examine.

I can think.

At the end, the system can produce a structured draft from the consultation, which I then review, correct and accept responsibility for.

The AI doesn't become the doctor.

I remain the doctor.

Its suggestions are not automatically correct. I reject them when they are wrong. Sometimes it notices something useful. Sometimes I notice something it missed.

That is exactly how I think these tools should be understood.

AI does not remove responsibility from the human using it. It increases what that human can potentially do.

The same principle applies here.

So who actually created Blackwatch?

I did.

The world, characters, themes, history, geography and stories of Blackwatch weren't generated by asking a machine to:

"Make me a cool medieval fantasy universe."

Blackwatch has been built through an absurd number of decisions.

How far one settlement is from another. Where the river runs. What the Crown claims and what it can actually control. How many riders constitute a line. What people eat. Where they sleep. How the walls are constructed. Why a character behaves a particular way. Who dies. Who survives. What somebody thinks they heard while half-conscious. What another person cannot bring themselves to say.

The songs come from those stories.

The images come from those stories.

The music is directed by those stories.

AI participates in turning those ideas into things that can be heard or seen.

It does not decide what Blackwatch means.

I do.

And, very often, the process is anything but instantaneous.

An image may be generated repeatedly because a face is wrong, a wall is wrong, a piece of heraldry is wrong, a road runs in the wrong direction, somebody is standing where they should not be standing, or a castle has suddenly become three times larger than the settlement established in the canon.

Songs go through the same process.

Lyrics are written, rewritten, discarded, reordered and tested. Arrangements are generated and rejected. A technically impressive result can still be useless because it tells the wrong story.

There is curation, revision and direction involved at every stage.

That doesn't make me a singer.

It doesn't make me a painter.

And I have no interest in pretending otherwise.

But neither does pressing a shutter button make the camera responsible for the photograph.

Tools matter. So does the person deciding what to do with them.

Why bother doing any of this?

That probably deserves its own page eventually.

But the short answer is that Blackwatch is interested in ordinary people.

Fantasy is filled with chosen ones, kings, legendary warriors and heroes whose destiny apparently began before they were born.

Blackwatch contains extraordinary people too.

But they are extraordinary mostly because ordinary circumstances eventually demand extraordinary things from them.

That interests me far more.

Medicine has allowed me to see versions of that throughout my adult life.

I have watched apparently ordinary people encounter moments that would break most of us.

I once saw a man brought into hospital from the dance floor at his own wedding under CPR.

He died.

His wife arrived still wearing her wedding dress.

Only hours earlier she had begun what was supposed to be a completely different life.

There are images from medicine that never really leave you.

What remains with me from experiences like that isn't simply death.

It is what people do around it.

Families arriving.

Someone putting their own grief aside because another person needs them more.

People demonstrating courage that they never knew they possessed because circumstances have left them no alternative.

Beauty and tragedy can occupy the same moment.

So can fear and bravery.

So can weakness and extraordinary strength.

Those are the stories that interest me.

Music reaches somewhere prose sometimes cannot

I have always thought music can reach emotional places that writing and imagery struggle to reach alone.

A novel can explain something beautifully.

An image can freeze a moment.

But sometimes a song can make somebody feel the idea before they have consciously articulated what the idea is.

That was one of the reasons the Blackwatch Songbook began.

These aren't intended merely as fantasy songs about swords, castles and battles.

They are another way of exploring the people who inhabit this world.

A rider opening the gate again despite knowing that eventually probability will collect its debt.

A woman doing the work that must be done because everyone else is occupied with surviving.

A community remembering those who did not come home.

The tools used to create the music are artificial.

The reasons for creating it are not.

AI has given me back things I abandoned

I used to write.

I began stories and novels when I was younger and, like many people, gradually allowed the practical demands of life to displace them.

A career in health takes time.

Training takes time.

Family takes time.

Becoming competent at one thing often means accepting that you will never become competent at twenty others.

For a long time I thought that was simply the bargain.

Recently, I changed my mind.

Passion matters.

I came back to flying. I came back to writing. I started building things.

AI has accelerated that process enormously.

It doesn't give me another lifetime in which to become a composer, illustrator, animator, programmer and filmmaker.

It gives me enough leverage that I don't necessarily need those additional lifetimes.

And I think that is genuinely remarkable.

The democratisation of imagination

This is the part of AI that I think gets lost beneath the argument about productivity.

For most of history, there has been a massive gulf between imagining something and being able to show it to somebody else.

You might have an entire world in your head.

But unless you could paint it, compose it, finance it, code it or persuade other people to help you build it, that world largely remained there.

That barrier is falling.

People who cannot draw can create images.

People who cannot sing can explore music.

People who cannot code can build software.

People who would never have called themselves writers can discover that they actually have something they want to say.

Some of what results will be terrible.

Of course it will.

Human beings have been producing terrible paintings, terrible novels, terrible films and terrible songs since the invention of paintings, novels, films and songs.

The existence of bad work has never invalidated the medium.

And yes, you are free to hate it

Some people will see the letters AI and stop there.

That's fine.

I'm not going to persuade everyone.

If somebody wants to call this AI slop, they're welcome to.

Blackwatch isn't being made to win an argument about artificial intelligence.

It's being made because I wanted to tell these stories.

Without AI, there would probably still be a manuscript somewhere on my computer.

With it, there can also be songs.

There can be portraits.

There can be places.

There can be moments from these stories that exist outside my imagination.

Eventually there can be movement, voices, landscapes and scenes that I could never have created alone.

I think that's worth doing.

So, the disclaimer

For anyone who simply wants the answer without the essay:

Blackwatch uses generative artificial intelligence extensively and deliberately.

AI tools may be used in the production of artwork, music, animation, video, research assistance, development, editing and other supporting creative work.

The lore, characters, narrative, themes, worldbuilding, creative direction, selection, revision and final responsibility for the project remain mine.

I do not claim to have painted images I did not paint.

I do not claim to have sung songs I did not sing.

I claim to have created Blackwatch.

And these are some of the tools that finally allowed me to show you what was in my head.

Still We Keep

The Muster

Those Who Keep

The people of Lastford Border Keep, card by card. Click a card to turn it over.

The Wolf of Blackwatch

Brenimir

Riding serjeant of the Watch

Brenimir

Feared across the wastes as a legend, remembered inside the walls as a cost. Sent down every road no one else would survive, because Blackwatch cannot afford to send anyone lesser.

Sung in

She Would Not Be Taken · The Rider Does Not Tire · No One Came Home · At The Gate or At The Fire

The Engineer's Daughter

Anya

Healer of Lastford

Anya

An engineer's daughter, a midwife, a healer. Her hands will pull you back from death. They do not save you from what follows.

Sung in

The Engineer's Daughter · She Would Not Be Taken · She Only Speaks a Name · Let the Boys Play Soldier

He Gives the Order

Captain Draven

Captain of Blackwatch

Captain Draven

The Wolf's closest friend, and the man who sends him out. Spare him, and lesser men ride in his place, and the keep pays for it.

Sung in

At The Gate or At The Fire (Of Our Forefathers)

Master of Works

Petr

Military engineer of Lastford

Petr

Anya's father. Fortifications, drainage, bridges, and the traps between them — the keep stands because he keeps it standing. He taught his daughter to brace a gate.

Sung in

The Engineer's Daughter

The Herb-Girl

Mira

Apprentice herbswoman

Mira

Raised in the Merchants Guild world of caravans, manifests and prices — quicker with accounts than herbs until the infirmary pulled her in. She does not stop being frightened; she becomes useful while frightened — and when the moment came, she dropped as she was taught.

Sung in

She Only Speaks a Name

The Barber-Surgeon

Tomas

Barber-surgeon of the keep

Tomas

There is no surgeon at Lastford, and no physician. There is Tomas. His jokes belong to the same machinery as clean linen and sharpened instruments — a way of keeping frightened people human while unpleasant things are done to them.

Sung in

No Wound to Show

The Alewife

Katya

Of the tavern at Lastford

Katya

Broad-shouldered, warm and difficult to embarrass, Katya keeps the casks, the cellar and the crowded tables at the heart of the keep. She came from northern Vardena; she built her life here, with Marek. Some people hold the wall. Katya helps give them something to come back to.

Sung in

A Funny Sort of Rebellion · Let the Boys Play Soldier

He Did Not Return

Lord Roderik

Last lord of Blackwatch

Lord Roderik

Blackwatch had a lord once. When the western towers fell, Lord Roderik went west with his family and a company of troops, leaving his Master of Arms to keep the border until his return. The appointment was temporary. The keep still uses the word.

Sung in

A Funny Sort of Rebellion

He Kept His Manners

Marek

Senior rider of the Watch

Marek

He came east for the pay: crown heavy cavalry, discharged, riding with louder men. Katya noticed the quiet one. He stayed. The young riders measure themselves against him now — he knows competence means doing the necessary thing while frightened. And he once carried a living flower home to her, roots, soil and all.

Sung in

No Wound to Show

The Young Rider

Pavel

Rider of the Watch

Pavel

Nineteen, and enthusiasm has somehow survived contact with Blackwatch. A capable rider, not a boy playing soldier — though his horses, Borek and Orik, are loved without embarrassment. Polite, good-natured, and serious the moment somebody truly needs him. Marek thinks well of him. At Lastford, that matters.

Sung in

No Wound to Show

She Knows Everything

Marta

Of the chapel and the infirmary

Marta

She tends the chapel's candles and linen, washes for the infirmary, and assists at births — when the child is considerate enough to arrive correctly. Neither priest nor physician: the keep runs on people who quietly hold the space between. And nothing moves in Lastford that Marta does not hear of first.

Sung in

Not yet sung

Hello, New Here

Greta

Bathmaid of Lastford

Greta

Warm, irreverent and almost completely untroubled by anyone's embarrassment, Greta works the bathhouse — one of the strange crossroads of frontier life, where gossip travels faster than horses. She is the first to treat a newcomer as someone who ought to have friends. Anya had barely arrived before Greta linked arms with her.

Sung in

Let the Boys Play Soldier

He Had No Country

Kamran

Travelling bard of Blackwatch

Kamran

He came out of Persia with a merchant caravan, carrying a lute, a tanbur and enough of twenty tongues to bargain and pray. He passed through Lastford once and did not stay — they seemed a bit busy. He came back. Nobody here asks where a man is from before they ask what he can play. Someone tuned a fiddle, and he never left.

Sung in

A Road With No Country · Let the Boys Play Soldier

The Appearances

Those the Songs Do Not Name

Some pass through the chronicle without leaving a name behind. The cards remember them anyway.

He Spoke No Bargain More

The Young Brigand

His name was never taken down

The Young Brigand

Run to exhaustion by the Wolf and brought in alive. Anya cut the rope away and fought the dark three nights until he breathed again — then told him plainly what waited in the yard. He mistook being heard for being pardoned. The bell never called his name. He chose his judgement when Anya spoke the same.

Sung in

The Rider Does Not Tire · She Only Speaks a Name

No Wound to Show

The Veteran

The muster lists nothing against him

The Veteran

He came home from every road they sent him down. The muster lists no wound against his name, and the muster is wrong. Some men carry the war where no surgeon can reach it — and the keep is only now learning where to look.

Sung in

No Wound to Show