The Origin

by Lacunae

Singapore, now. She is unremarkable by design: works, goes home, says as little as the room requires. She is also the commander of the most feared faction in the most complex game anyone has built, and the two halves of her have never once been in the same room. Then people start crossing between them.

Vienna, 1887. A watchmaker's daughter has spent her life doing to one feeling what her father did to clocks and her mother did to bodies: taking it apart to find out what makes it run. She is close to something. What it will cost her is not a thing she has calculated.

Two women, a hundred and forty years apart, who have never heard of each other.

Book Two of Perpetūra completes the cycle Book One begins. The second of these stories is the last in the series, and it is the one that explains why the others rhyme.

Mature romance by Lacunae. Contains explicit sexual content. Intended for readers 18+.

343 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 25, 2026

About the author

Lacunae writes love stories about people who are very good at dangerous work. She likes them best at the point where being good at it stops being enough.

She writes in two shapes. Pantheon is a romantic conspiracy thriller, the first of three, about a woman who used to kill for a living and has spent five years making sure nobody looks at her twice, and the man who will not stop looking. Perpetūra is five interconnected stories across five centuries, published as two books and also readable free as an interactive novel.

Both are self-published, and both are written in the evenings around a full-time job.

Everything, including a journal about how the books actually get made, is at lacunaedesigns.com.

Reviews

[Lupe Farkas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished The Ones Before with theories.

I finished The Origin staring at the wall.

So that went well.

Book One asks:
What does it feel like to have a feeling you cannot name?

Book Two does something far more dangerous.
It starts showing you why the feeling exists, and suddenly, all those little things I had been suspicious about in the first book no longer felt little at all.

This time, we follow two women.
Lia lives in the present day and somehow manages to be both the commander of an empire nobody can defeat and almost invisible inside her ordinary life. She can read systems, patterns, people, and risk. She can build an entire world at four in the morning and then sit at breakfast answering questions in four words.

I loved her immediately.

Possibly because I recognised the poor life-work boundaries. LOL! No further questions...

Then there is Ophelia:
Vienna, 1887, and I am saying almost nothing about Ophelia because you need to meet this woman without me standing in the doorway waving a giant spoiler sign.

What I will say is this:
Lacunae knew exactly what she was doing in Book One.
The repetitions were not decoration.
The objects were not decorations.
The strange moments were not decoration.
The feeling was never decoration.

There is a point in The Origin when things from the previous stories begin clicking into place, and I genuinely wanted to go back and reread The Ones Before immediately.

That is one of my favourite things a series can do!

Do not simply answer the first book... Change the first book!

And somehow, even while giving us answers, Lacunae refuses to destroy the mystery by explaining it to death.

That matters.

Because the central question of Perpetūra was never really asking for a neat definition.
It was asking whether something has to be explainable before it can be real. Whether a feeling is less yours because it began somewhere else. Whether love is still chosen if something in you was already reaching before you understood why... and whether knowing the architecture underneath something beautiful makes it more real or less.

Yeah.
This book did things to me.
Again.

There is also an enormous amount of love in The Origin, but Lacunae does not write love as possession.

Again and again, the important gesture is someone leaving a door open and allowing another person to decide whether to walk through it.

For a series obsessed with connection, it is remarkably interested in choice.

And then Ophelia takes everything you thought you understood and quietly rearranges the furniture.
By the end, the title The Origin means considerably more than it did when you opened the book.

So does Perpetūra.
So does that unnamed feeling.

I received both books as early ARC reads from the author, and after finishing Book One, I was ridiculously grateful that Book Two was already waiting for me.

Now I have finished Book Two.
There is no Book Three waiting.
This feels like a personal attack.
Lacunae, we need to discuss your behaviour.

Because Perpetūra is not just a pair of romances connected by a clever concept.
It is architecture... and Lacunae built the foundations before we even knew we were standing on them.

Lacunae, you left me speechless!

Now you... reading me... Go grab both books immediately!