The site
News
What has changed here, newest first. The story itself is in the archive, and it grows on its own schedule.
A page of your own
An account here could do four things and show you none of them. You could write a comment and never see it again. You could tell me the search was broken and hear nothing back, ever. The name beside what you said was a word in bold that went nowhere. The only thing about yourself you could change was the password.
There is a page now, at the person in the top bar, under Your page. It holds what you have said, when you started reading here, and two things that are yours to write: a name to be known by, and a few lines about yourself if you want them.
The name you sign in with cannot change, and that is not laziness. It is how the site knows that two people asking for one name cannot both have it. So there are two names instead. The one you signed in with stays, and the one beside your comments is whatever you like. They do not have to match, nobody else's has to be different from yours, and wherever a chosen name is shown the signed-in one is shown beside it. That way anybody can call themselves anything and it is still plain who they are.
A name beside a comment is a link now. It goes to that reader's page, which is the same page you have, minus the boxes only you can see.
What you tell me comes back to you. The report button at the foot of every page has always gone into a queue nothing on the site could read, including you. If you are signed in when you send one, it now carries your name, and your page shows it with one of three things beside it: waiting, on my list, or dealt with on a date. Signed out it is still anonymous, and still welcome. The panel says which it is doing before you start typing, because that is the sort of thing you want to know first.
And there is a way back in. Until this week, making an account here came with a warning: there is no address to send a password reset to, so if you forget it, the account is gone. That was true and it is now only half true. On your page there is a set of eight recovery codes. Each one works once, and one of them sets a new password at readsoultale.com/back-in without needing anything else.
They are shown once and never again, because nothing here keeps them: they are made in your browser, and what reaches the database is a scrambled form that cannot be turned back. So write them down somewhere that is not this browser. Making a new set destroys the old one. If you have no codes and you forget your password, nothing has changed and the account is still gone, and I cannot open it for you either: there is nothing on it that says who you are.
None of this was here a week ago, so if some of it behaves oddly, the report button at the foot of the page is the place, and now you will be able to see what happened to what you sent.
Where you left off
The site has been writing down how far into a chapter you got since the day it went up, and it has never once read it back. Continue on the front page knew which chapter and then dropped you at the head of it, which on a four thousand word chapter is a screen of scrolling to find the line you left.
It puts you back on the line now. So does opening the chapter any other way: from the list, from a bookmark, from a link you sent yourself.
It leaves you where you are when you have not asked. A chapter you finished opens at the top, because opening that one again is re-reading it. A link to a particular comment wins, so a reply out of your inbox still lands on the reply. Going back to a chapter you were just in leaves your browser's own answer alone, which is the better one, because it remembers the exact place and this only remembers a fraction. And on the act read in full it does nothing at all yet, because the place recorded there is a fraction of the whole act rather than of one chapter. Nothing new is stored anywhere either: it is the same marker Continue has always used, a chapter number and how far down it you were.
Two new controls in the reading options. Line height moves the lines apart or brings them closer. Line width sets how wide the column of text runs, and it only appears on a screen wide enough for it to do anything, because on a phone the window is already narrower than the narrowest setting and a slider that moves nothing is worse than no slider at all. Both follow your account to whatever you read on next, the way the size and the face already do. Each one has a pair of letters beside it showing what it does.
The panel itself was too long for a phone, so the themes at the foot of it were off the bottom of the screen until you went looking. Two rows have lost their heading and their description and now read simply Bionic Reading and Read Full Act, and the seven faces sit in two rows rather than three. It is still longer than a phone screen and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but the themes are in sight now.
One thing went with that trim, so here it is instead: bionic reading bolds the opening letters of every word and steps the rest of each word back a shade, so your eye lands on the shape of a word rather than reading it through letter by letter. That sentence used to sit under the switch.
Your place is written down every few seconds rather than continuously, so it can leave you a paragraph short of where you actually stopped. If it leaves you somewhere stranger than that, tell me with the report button at the foot of the page.
Read it with no connection
The site now works without a network. Open the chapter list on any act and there is a second button under the cover, beside the download: keep this act on this device. Press it and the act's chapters come down onto your phone or your laptop, one at a time, with a mark appearing beside each one as it lands. After that you can read them on a train, on a plane, in a basement, or anywhere else the signal gives up.
It saves the chapters and the act read in full, and nothing else. The shortest act is about a third of a megabyte and the longest is about two and a half, so even the big ones are smaller than one photograph. Press the button again and it all goes.
If the connection drops halfway through, you keep whatever arrived. The marks are per chapter, not per act, so the button will tell you something like "18 of 38 kept" and you can finish it later.
Nothing about this involves an account. It is all on your own device, nothing is sent anywhere, and I cannot see any of it. If your browser runs short of room it may throw the pages away on its own, and if it does, the marks clear themselves the next time you open the act rather than promising you something that is no longer there.
You can also add Soultale to a home screen now, on a phone or a tablet, and it opens without the browser's address bar around it. On iOS that is the share button and then "Add to Home Screen". On Android your browser will usually offer it.
Two smaller things that came with it. The reading is unchanged when the connection is fine: everything still comes off the network first, so a chapter I have corrected reaches you the moment you load it rather than whenever a cache feels like expiring. And signing in, commenting and everything else with an account is deliberately left alone by all of this.
If you keep an act and it does not open offline, that is a bug and I want to hear about it. The report button at the bottom of the page is the way.
Every act is a book now
You can take the story with you. Every published act can be downloaded as an EPUB, which is the file almost every reading app on a phone or an e-reader opens. The button is at the top of the chapter list, under the act's cover, on any chapter page and on the act read in full.
Fourteen books, one for each act that is published. Each one carries that act's cover, a contents page you can turn to, and its chapters in order, and each one is between about 90 KB and 285 KB. Nothing is recorded when you take one. It is a file sitting on a server, and downloading it tells me nothing.
The part worth knowing is that these are not copies of what is on Wattpad. Twenty-one chapters have been corrected since they were published there, and the corrections only exist here. A date that contradicted three later chapters, a speaker's name that had been swallowed into the line before it, and nineteen others. This site reads the corrected text, so the books carry it too. If you want the version I would hand somebody, it is this one.
The books deliberately set no typeface, no colour and no page background, so whatever your reader is already set to is what you get. If you read in the dark, it stays dark. The bold on a speaker's name is left as plain bold rather than the gold it wears here, because a colour that reads well on this page has no way of knowing what colour your page is.
Act 15 is not in the list, for the same reason it is not on the site yet.
One thing I decided against. It would have been easy to offer the whole saga as one enormous file, and I am not going to, at least not yet. 440,000 words in one book is slow to open on a phone and hard to find your place in. An act is the size the story is actually written in.
The acts have covers
Until this week the front page drew fifteen rectangles with the act's name set in gold across the middle of each one, because there was nothing else to draw. All fifteen are pictures now.
They are ink paintings, and they are meant to be read as a set rather than as fifteen separate things. Each one leaves its left side as empty paper and carries whatever it is about up the right, which is why they line up the way they do on the page. One of them is mirrored from the picture I started with, so that it points the same way as the other fourteen.
The act's number sits in that empty corner in black, on every cover, so you can tell at a glance which one you are looking at without reading the name underneath it.
The frame they sit in was quietly cutting them. It carried a little padding on all four sides, and because a cover is much taller than it is wide, the same amount off every side left a shape that no cover matched, so the browser trimmed about a twentieth off either edge of each one to make it fit. The saga's own cover on the front page had been losing its margins the same way. Both are fixed, and every cover now runs right out to its border.
They are also sharper than they were going to be. The page had been asking for a cover at exactly the size it drew it, which is fine until you read on a phone, where the screen holds two or three times the pixels the page counts in. It asks for the larger ones now.
One more thing, unrelated. Chapter 174 ended with a paragraph containing two asterisks and nothing else. It is a piece of the chapter's closing furniture that never got cleared away, and it is gone now.
Bionic reading, and who is speaking
Three things changed about reading a chapter this week, and the first one is new.
Open the reading options and there is a row called The words, with a switch in it. Turned on, the opening letters of every word are bolded and the rest of each word steps back a shade, so your eye lands on the shape of a word rather than reading it through letter by letter. Some people move faster that way and some find it maddening, which is exactly why it is a switch and why it is off until you turn it on. It changes nothing about the text itself, and it follows you to whatever you next read on.
The second thing is not a setting and you will see it whether you want it or not. Every line of dialogue opens with a three letter tag saying who is speaking, and until now the only thing marking one was that it was slightly bolder than the words after it. In a serif at this size that is barely a mark at all. A tag is now gold and a little spaced, on every chapter, so you can find the speaker without reading to the colon. Where a word in the prose is emphasised it stays as it was, because that is me leaning on a word and not somebody talking.
The third is for anyone reading on a phone. The bar across the top of a chapter carried eight controls and had no room for them, and two were being drawn small enough that they were hard to hit at all. Six of them have moved into the chapter list, which is where you were already going to look for them, and the act's name has come back now that there is space for it. Everything left in both bars is big enough for a thumb. And picking a chapter from that list now closes it, which it should always have done.
One line in chapter 32 was written with the bold in the wrong place, so Matta's answer to the freed prisoners read as a bolded sentence with nobody attached to it. That is corrected here. It is still wrong on Wattpad and I will get to it.
You can tell me what is wrong now
There is a button at the foot of every page that says Report. It opens a box with three things in it: a few words naming what this is about, which of three kinds it is, and what happened.
The three kinds are something is wrong, something is missing, and something else. A chapter that will not open, a wrong date on a wiki entry, a search that gives nothing back for a word you know is in the book, or a thing you would like this site to do and it does not. They all go to the same place, and the same place is me.
It needs no account. Nothing about you is asked for and nothing about you is kept: no name, no address. The one thing that travels with what you write is the page you were standing on, because that is the first thing I would have had to ask you.
You will not get a reply, and I would rather say so than leave you waiting for one. It goes to the list I work from.
The search reads the chapters now
The search knew a chapter's title and the words it opened with. It reads every word of every published chapter now, so half a line you remember is enough to find the chapter it is in, and the result shows you that passage rather than the opening.
Some smaller things, for a book this long. A chapter says how long it takes to read, and the front page says it for a whole act. A chapter you have finished keeps a tick beside it in the list. The left and right arrow keys turn the page. And a chapter now ends with who and what it names, each one linked to its wiki entry.
If you have an account you can change its password, or close it for good, which takes everything with it: what you said, where you got to, and how you read.
There is an about page as well, saying who writes this and where it is published, and answering the questions people arrive with.
An inbox, and comments that follow you
Two changes to how a conversation works here.
If somebody answers something you said, you are told. There is a bell in the top bar, it wears a mark while something is waiting, and following a notification takes you to the reply itself rather than to the top of the chapter it sits in.
And the comments have moved. They used to hang off the foot of a chapter, which meant that reading an act in full, where the foot is thirty chapters away, you never saw them at all. They are now a panel, opened from the button in the bar at the bottom of the page, and it works the same way whichever way you are reading.
That has a second effect you may notice: a chapter now ends where the story ends, on the narrator's line, instead of on a box asking you to say something.
An account, if you want one
You can now keep an account here. It remembers how far you got, in which chapter and how far down it, and it carries your theme, your reading face, your text size and your alignment from one device to another.
It asks for a name and a password, and nothing else. There is no email address, because there is nothing here that would ever need to reach you, and an address the site does not need is an address the site should not hold.
That has one consequence worth knowing before you choose a password: there is no way to reset one. A forgotten password cannot be recovered, because there is nowhere to send the recovery to.
You can also say something under a chapter, answer somebody who said something, and report a comment that should not be there.