by Rovan Eryk
A Thousand Miles of First Steps is not a traditional story, but rather a story of stories, and how they came to work out as they did. Why one choice was made, and not another. How events were balanced out. How Niria ended up with violet eyes instead of a color more mundane. How two light cruisers and a pair of destroyers defeated a battleship, and why the fight was necessary. How and why I chose to hide Science fiction behind a façade of fantasy, and then discarded it.Part memoir, part writing journal, part lore, A Thousand Miles of First Steps tells a larger story in the real world: How a fictional world came to be what it is.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 16 Oct 2026, 12:38 UTC
Entry forecast updated 16 Oct 2026, 12:38 UTC
Ranking model: rs-public-oracle-state-v1
Forecast model: rs-model-entry-v1
Chart history contains only this ranking model's runs; legacy points are not spliced in.
Not enough recent follower history to estimate a shadow rank yet.
beats 25% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 38% of similar stories
Mid-pack, room on both levers
Traffic and conversion both sit mid-field for a story this size. Growth here compounds from consistency: steady cadence feeds traffic, and a sharper hook lifts what each view is worth.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 10–19 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.
