The world of Berbia — places, people, and the stories between them.
The Berbian Chronicles has roots that go back to the early 1990s — notebooks, character sketches, fragments of a world that was just beginning to take shape. Life intervened, as it does. The project went into a drawer.
When Dook retired and came back to those old notes, he found them locked inside file formats that the modern world had quietly abandoned. Getting them out required Frankensteining together a computer and operating system old enough to read them — a minor archaeological dig through his own past. The notes survived. The world of Berbia was waiting.
Many of the characters you’ll meet in these pages are drawn from real life — people Dook has known, worked with, and learned from across a lifetime of teaching, training, and paying attention.
The themes that drive the Chronicles are the same ones that drove the work: growth, transformation, and the building of a better, wider world. The belief that humanity’s reach should keep expanding. That we wouldn’t need soldiers if everyone had good homes, great teachers, and the ability to reach their potential. Those convictions are woven into the world of Berbia, into the lives of its people, and into every story told there.
A huge thank you is owed to Sprucewood Library in Edmonton for the computer time and the patience. Satellite libraries rock — visit one near you, get involved, volunteer, and use it. It’s one of the best free resources you’ll ever have.
A note on the artwork: The illustrations in this section were developed with AI image generation tools. Dook worked as an art instructor and teacher for many years. His approach was deliberate: he provided the tools with a collection of hundreds of his own works as a baseline. If there is derivative work in these pieces, it is derivative of the artist himself. Dook is fine with that.
⸻ Places ⸻
Mariopolis — Before the Emph
A great city, thrumming with light and motion. Three hundred and forty-one years ago, it all went out at once.
Mariopolis — Now
The rubble has long since been reclaimed by forest. This is not a story about collapse. It is a story about what comes after.
Trigger Lake Camp
Where the journey begins. A hill folk settlement at the edge of everything — and the place where something very old and very patient has been waiting.
The Road to Berbia
The journey takes the travellers through the ruins of the Before — structures the forest is slowly, patiently taking back.
The Smiling Sun CoOp
A steam-powered agricultural community descended from the original staff of a pre-collapse poultry operation. The Spectral community here has, almost single-handedly, reinvented steam technology.
Pratchett Square — Berbia
Pratchet Square; the beating heart of Berbia. Adam’s tea stand fills the square with warmth, and check in with him for the latest – he has everyone’s ear.
Tina’s Healing Hut — Berbia
Where the sick come and the weary rest. Tina runs it with a warmth that is, as Witch Woman noted, hard-won and entirely real.
Jonno’s Gate
The entrance to Berbia. Where Jonno holds court, hears disputes, and welcomes new citizens with his giant GULPO SIZE mug of tea.
The Keep — Mariposa Ruins
An underground archival institution in the ruins of old Mariopolis, where thousands of artifacts from the Before are catalogued, preserved, and reverently misunderstood.
Chronicle & His Droid — Petawat
A campfire in the deep forest near Petawat. Chronicle — the recovered AI artifact carried by Scar — and his custom-built droid companion, at rest between the world’s larger demands.
⸻ People ⸻
Shasta Constanza
A young girl travelling with her family on the night the world ended. She appears in the prologue. She does not appear again. But she is never entirely absent from what follows.
Scar
Fourteen years old. Hill folk. Carrier of Chronicle, a recovered AI artifact operating in find-a-friend mode. The spark at the centre of everything.
Witch Woman
Scar’s guardian. A woman of deep knowledge, careful judgment, and a hard warmth that has kept both of them alive across a very long road.
Hank & Jake
Two boys who join the journey. Hank’s discovery that a shower can maintain a perfect temperature without touching it is one of the great moments of his young life.
Nancii
Appears in Part Two and plays a major role through the rest of the book. Only Zan Li is faster at mathematics. Her absence, when it comes, is the event that opens Book Two.
Primo Michael — The Keep
Archivist of the Keep. He began as a fumbling pre-intern in the Greenery, half terrified of Before technology. He learned patience, precision, and how to receive a living relic without dropping it.
Chief Sysamin Trinnian — The Keep
Head of the Keep’s archival order. She watches without haste, decides without drama, and leads expeditions beyond the walls when the artifact demands an answer.
Varley
A wandering puppeteer who runs the Puppetorium in Pratchett Square. His ancient Punch and Judy figures have strong opinions about everything — and a habit of being right.
Bartholomew Shine — Orange Sash, Scavenger
One of the few native-born Berbians. Jonno’s most trusted Scavenger. He reads the Before the way other people read faces — patiently, carefully, and with healthy respect for what it can still do to you.
Tea with Tina
Tina the Healer, in Book Two. Central to the crisis that opens Shadows of Dawn. Her warmth is real, her competence absolute, and she is already moving before anyone else has understood what has happened.
⸻ Incidentals ⸻
Homme avec le bâton — Punch & Judy
From Varley’s Puppetorium. Ancient, opinionated, and almost certainly correct about everything.
⸻ You found something ⸻
Piece #3 of 6 — collect all six to unlock the Berbian puzzle.
⸻ collect your puzzle piece ⸻
Dook — A Life in Art 