The Drowned
Concordat
Behind the walls of a sealed-off Netherlands, the food is grown in vats and the truth is rationed like everything else. Elara Di Canti has never doubted the system — she's devoted her life to keeping it running, certain it's the righteous thing to do. What it costs the soul is a different question. The Drowned Concordat — by Hamish C. Rannoch.
The Drowned Concordat
A dystopian Netherlands, walled off and running on synthetic, corporate-grown food — and the quiet machinery of belief that keeps everyone inside it fed, docile, and sure they're safe. Covers and final titles below are placeholders; the Book One teaser is real.
Who You'll Meet
A handful of the people caught in the widening gap between the Council and the Covenant — kept spoiler-free, so the story can still surprise you.
Elara Di Canti
Brilliant and pragmatic, Elara has spent six years keeping the synthetic reactor supply chain that feeds the Delta running. Shaped as a child by her grandmother's memories of real farming and the grief of lost land, she's devoted her career to building a flawless artificial food supply — and finds herself reluctantly drawn into the mounting crisis between the Council and the rising Covenant, where scientific rigour becomes its own kind of battleground.
Gidyan
Once an ordinary man named Wayne, Gidyan has spent two years becoming the public face of the Covenant — preaching dignity, faith, and liberation from the Council's bureaucracy to the sub-strata's poorest. Beneath his certainty runs a growing unease about what his movement is becoming, and what leadership is starting to cost him.
Malachi
Reclusive and coldly precise, Malachi works behind the scenes of the Covenant's public face — orchestrating logistics, security, and ideology with a patience that unsettles even his closest allies. He sees the movement not as a religious awakening alone, but as a total correction of a failing world.
Major Bastiaan Kroll
A decorated commander and trusted right hand to Commodore Rousseau, Kroll is intimately familiar with the Corps' tactics and dispatch doctrine. As the crisis between the Council and the Covenant deepens, his loyalties are tested in ways neither side fully sees coming.
Dr. Henrike Solberg
A rigorous rationalist and former professional rival of Elara's, Solberg has spent her career optimising yield without ever quite asking what it was for. Grief, and a cold, mathematical doubt about the Council's own allocation math, start to pull at everything she's built her reputation on.
Sister Anke
A former municipal structural inspector who lost her certification in a corruption purge, Anke brings the same sharp, cataloguing eye to the Covenant's own operations that she once brought to failing infrastructure — asking the hard questions others are too frightened or grateful to voice.
Becca Di Canti
Elara's younger sister has chosen a radically different path — running the hydroponic yield division at the Terra Annex, chasing real, soil-grown food as a parallel answer to her sister's industrial synthesis. Nine years in, she's still trying to prove it can be done at scale.
The Council
The centralised governing body of the surviving Delta, managing its hyper-dense arcologies and synthetic food production through the Enforcer Corps and a sprawling bureaucracy. Split between weary pragmatists and hawkish hardliners, the Council sees the rising Covenant less as a social movement than as a threat to regional stability.
The Covenant
Born two years ago in the damp concrete bilges beneath the city, the Covenant has grown from a ragged collective of the desperate into a disciplined, organised body of believers. United by the spiritual idea of the “First Breath” and led publicly by Gidyan, it combines genuine faith with increasingly sophisticated underground logistics.
Kept intentionally light on plot — the full story does the rest.
About the Author
Hamish C. Rannoch is a writer of hard science fiction and dystopian futures, best known for The Drowned Concordat — a trilogy spanning The Rise of the Covenant, The Unbound Lattice, and The Sterile Eden.
Drawing on a fascination with advanced chemistry, complex systems, and structural logistics, Rannoch builds hard-edged narratives set against flooded coastlines, hyper-dense arcologies, and subterranean resistance movements — stories at the intersection of human resilience, large-scale technological adaptation, and the quiet ideological cost of survival.
When he isn't mapping dystopian political friction and resource-allocation algorithms, he's usually deep in research or tinkering with chemical architecture. He lives and writes in Europe.