Excerpt & #Giveaway: Nocturne by Tricia D. Wagner
- Archaeolibrarian
- 10 hours ago
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Book details:
Nocturne
by Tricia D. Wagner
Publication date: April 14th 2026
@TriciaDWagnerAuthor @XpressoBookTours
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Can ancestral stories and tales of ocean mysteries save a peaceful country from war? Could the daughter of a dying race, together with resistance fighters and mine-seeking dolphins, dismantle a military machine? What strength might myths deliver when one nation's tyranny threatens to destroy the world?
Sixteen-year-old Livi, from the coastal country of Merritaine, must reach the Nocturne Isles. For legends say Nocturne holds healing springs—waters that could cure her mamá’s cancer. Passage to Nocturne is scarce, though, for Nocturne keeps more legends than that of healing waters.
Sirens—powerful, human-like, aquarian creatures—are said to haunt the waters of the Mar de Basilisk raging around Nocturne. Not to mention, Merritaine and Nocturne have been engaged in an unjust war, incited by Merritaine’s Admiral Eris Machai.
Livi’s closest friends, Célian and Jules, have been drafted as reconnaissance scouts—boys who work with trained dolphins to find and disarm sea mines left in the wake of the Admiral’s war. Though the ocean is littered with warships and arsenal, the seafarers fear Siren reports more than the threat of the war reigniting. For Sirens, legends say, can rend steel and flesh. And they can manipulate human thought.
Livi, though, dismisses Sirens as mythical. Monsters don’t take the form of sea legends. Monsters take the shape of Admiral Machai, of volatile sea mines, of cancer. Or so she believes until she and her friends learn the terrible motivation of the Admiral's war. Livi may be the only person able to stop him. But first she must learn to master her birthright: powers of influence, of strength, and of destruction.
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Livi scanned the skyline for any tells of Célian’s boat, but the whole plane of blue stretched unbroken.
She turned her jacket’s collar against the night and drew her lantern close.
Soon, Célian would come sailing in on the shining dark water, the smooth risings of starlit dolphin skin trailing his sailboat. The boat would smell rancid with croaker fish, and so would he, and he’d hand her the bucket and let her feed the last of them to Teppo, to Rush, to Tate, to Demi, and to Etta, their smiling faces entreating for more, until her fingers would sparkle with scales.
The vanished sun curled in its lingering tendrils, leaving the west ghosted.
In the nascent dark water, way out, a silhouette appeared.
Livi picked up the lantern. Célian would know it was her and would sail here rather than pressing on west. She drew breath to call to him, but her voice hitched as the silhouette vanished.
She studied the water. That hadn’t exactly looked like a boat—but what else could it have been? A boat wouldn’t have just disappeared, though. There’d been a person’s head and the turn of two shoulders.
Maybe that hadn’t been anything. Just a trick of the moonlight.
Livi settled back. She’d been staring at the water so intensely, wanting so much to see Célian—it was no wonder she’d imagined him.
She set the lantern close, putting herself in the heart of its bubble of light. She listened as the canopy deepened to sapphire.
The ocean remained quiet, the ebbing tide just a blush.
Then a splash.
A punch of shade breaking the rippling ocean, water-colored by moonlight.
That was no boat.
Livi wet her fingers and pinched out the lantern’s flame.
Dark moments passing brought into sharp relief stars lighting something, the rolling waves carrying something.
The shape clarified as a person—a man in the water, facing her.
He seemed a man altogether made of bleakness. His face was barely visible. His eyes, catching the moonlight, were the most definite feature. He was looking straight at her.
Soon. The sea whispered. Or seemed to.
Had that been the wind? Or was it the person speaking? Was that a person?
She’d listened all afternoon to tales of the strange, the unexplainable, coming out of the sea. Her imagination had to be a touch piqued.
She blinked hard, but the shape in the water did not change, did not fade.
It was probably a Korps Mariner, swimming. The waters off Merritaine’s beaches were warm enough for a long swim.
But where could he have come from? Any swimmer setting out, Livi would’ve seen.
Livi. The voice was unmistakably clear. I’m with you.
The voice felt ghostly. Yet something about it struck as soothing. Familiar, even.
The men in The Orphic had called up the stories of sea demons and gods haunting the ocean. If that were a god, would it sound so inviting? If it were a demon, it certainly would.
“I’m imagining you,” she said.
Soon, said the wind. Or the demon. Or the god.
Livi peered into the water beneath her.
The voice struck her with a strong sense of comfort, and with it, the whole ocean, rippling with stars and with moonlight, felt soothing. Inviting.
This warm, salted sea—how delicious it seemed it would feel, sheathing her like a skin as she dove.
If that shadow was a figment of her imagination, there’d be no consequence to diving. If the man in the water proved real, diving would deliver answers.
And if she met with a monster?
But she wouldn’t. Monsters didn’t take the shape of sea legends. They took the shape of Alastar Deimos. Of Admiral Machai. Of cocked sea mines. Of cancer.
Livi stripped off her jacket. The figure was way out, but she’d swam farther than that, many times.
A song rose—not of words, exactly, but of a low, even chanting.
A warm current rushed in and whirled the coastal waters into a tiny maelstrom.
The figure held up something that glinted in the moonlight, then he laid it in the water.
A wave took it. It bobbed through the slipping breakers, tight in a current sweeping near.
Livi climbed down from the pier. She kept the figure in her sightline as she moved through the shallows.
The breakers delivered the shining thing quite close.
It was a corked bottle. It lilted before her until the frothy waves pushed it onto the wet sand.
She drew it out of the tetchy wash and knelt.
Inside the bottle, seawater was sloshing together with sand, with shells, with wisps of sea grasses. And strewn among everything—at least two dozen silver pearls were jostling, shimmering where they weren’t marred by algae. They were as big as acorns.
A flashing in the water clipped her gaze from the bottle.
She glanced up to catch a flicker—the dive of the figure—the arc of legs kicking.
She stared at the water so hard, for so long, her eyes burned. She let them fall closed, felt the relief of warm tears. The flash of starlight on glassy skin lingered in her mind’s eye.
She looked up again to see the shore waves tumbling.
The moon blanched and climbed a hand’s width up the dome.
Livi felt spent, as though she’d woken from a restless sleep. She struggled over a sense of having seen something important. But she could hardly remember what.
The impression of something in the ocean way out—someone watching her—seemed to have been an illusion. The gist of a dolphin tail striking the water seemed real enough, though.
As a young reader, writers were like gods and goddesses to now author Tricia D. Wagner. She never could have imagined weaving tales like her favorite storytellers, until a fateful April dinner conversation with her husband about a lecture he attended got her mind whirling. By the end of that summer, she’d written 400,000 words: a speculative fiction trilogy. Wagner felt as if she’d emerged from a cocoon as some new sort of creature. She was hooked.
It was important to Tricia to sharpen her skills, and she immersed herself in workshops, guides, and writing communities, learning from editors how to hone her craft. She did this for years, and the result is her newly released novella The Strider and the Regulus, two independently published novelettes, four soon-to-be published novellas, and five as yet unpublished novels. She found writing to be a method for becoming the person she felt she was born to be. Wagner finds that writing inspires her to be a better person, truer to herself.
The ideas and substance of Tricia’s writing comes from a very deep place that is strongly stimulated by setting. Often, when she has completed a story, she feels as if she’s been to her story world, whether it’s on the map or not. She likes to believe all the places she writes about exist somewhere, somehow.
In writing her stories, Wagner was surprised and delighted to discover how real the characters become to an author; that for many writers, their characters end up as their most treasured friends. She loves to delve into them to mine their natures, secrets, and desires—to tell their stories with the legitimacy they deserve. In studying her characters, she finds she has the opportunity to shape herself, inching closer to the person she wants to become.
Wagner believes revision is magical in its power to make a good book great, and early drafts are only the beginning of a story’s journey. Any idea can wind up a good story, but with reflection and time and improvement, it can become art. Once Wagner completes a revision project, it feels miraculous how many fresh approaches have manifested and how much truer the story feels.
Wagner hopes her readers feel enchanted when they read her stories; that after completing one, it seems they’re drifting out from under a spell. This is exactly how she feels when she finishes writing a story. She hopes to that her writing might expand their minds, spirits, and worlds a bit, and she hope they fall in love with her characters and are moved by her artistry of language.
When she isn’t writing poignant works of literary fiction, Wagner is a Director of Adult Education – ESL Programs at a community college, a job and staff that she loves. In her spare time she enjoys refining her writing craft to discover new angles and landscapes that might enrich her writing palette. One such example is a recent course she took in learning to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, something that’s sure to end up in a story at some point. Wagner lives in Rockford, Illinois, with her husband and three darling cats.
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