The chapter plates keep faces turned away or in shadow. That is not an aesthetic accident.
I learned it the hard way with the early plates. All the plates are AI generated. As each set of plates got created for new chapters, we didn’t get the same image for a character. There was a slow drift. The jaw softens. The hairline is different. I concluded that by chapter forty we’d be showing a completely different person.
So I decided to keep faces out of the plates for each chapter. Instead, they live on the cast page.
Each person is drawn once, from their character notes, locked, and available in the same five styles as the rest of the book - minimalism, art deco, brutalism, pop art, psychedelic.
I got this request from a reader who wanted the people settled so he could keep inventing the rest of the book in his head. So, the cast page is simply an example. If the Samantha in your head looks nothing like the one on the cast page, yours is the correct one!
No character appears on the cast page until you have met them in the book. The cast grows as the story does. There are eleven characters so far. More will show up when they are introduced in future chapters.
Meet them here in whichever style you are reading in. Or turn the art off (and ignore the cast page) and keep the version that is in your head.