Let’s Kill Evil

“We can never go home again.”

What if destiny doesn’t exist? What if evil isn’t supposed to be, and it’s actually just an unnatural anomaly? What if a single, random bolt of quantum lightning tore a hole in the fabric of reality, a single fluctuation ripping its way through time and space at trillions of points all at once? What if countless catastrophes and tragedies throughout human history could all be traced back to a rogue flash of chaotic energy that had just as much of a chance to never have come into existence?

And what if you knew where that fluctuation began? What if you discovered the origin point of every disaster and war and unimaginable horror to ever have occurred? What if you could travel to the advent of all that is unholy and see it with your own eyes? What if you knew how to stop darkness from ever coming to be? What if you could kill evil?

There are so many questions and so few answers, overwhelming uncertainty and also confidence in the minutes before launch when I pray to a God I’ve never believed in because everything science taught me might be a lie. When I was a child, I wanted to believe in something greater, a benevolent force watching over mankind that nonetheless let us make our own mistakes and hopefully learn from them. What a fool I was, thinking there was an easy way out – existence is chaos, and it’s arrogant to believe something as simple as God could design something so erratic and expansive, as though omnipotence would ever be so wise. I understand truth is subjective, that the universe is infinite and also ever-expanding – this is my opportunity to prove it, that reality is nothing more than random chance, that everything evil is just the result of an unbalanced equation waiting to be solved before it becomes a problem in the first place.

I want to kill evil, cut its head off before it learns to speak, end every nightmare before they had the chance to be born, ignite shadows in their infancy, and erase the very idea of war before it came to pass.

It started with the frequency, the one we found hiding throughout human history with the same signature wherever we looked. For how vast the cosmos truly are, there is order to the dissonance, patterns and rhythms we can forecast like the weather – but this frequency was erratic, like a song with no melody or tempo or beat that burned our ears whenever we heard it. Keepers of the old faiths believed it divine, an immaculate signal broadcast through all of history to call the faithful home again – they were wrong. Astrophysicists and cosmic etymologists claimed it was a upper-dimensional message from the distant future, an indecipherable beacon hurtling backwards through space-time – they were also wrong.

The frequency is a splintering singularity, a quantum fluxuation affecting everything all the time as an amorphous, semi-sentient conduit that both is and isn’t – and we found where it all began, the moment when evil came into existence and spread forth like the virulent plague it would eventually grow to become. We all know what we signed up for, that what we are doing means forcing the universe to bend to our will, and that no one will ever know the sacrifice we are about to make. But it doesn’t matter, now, because none of us could walk away knowing we could save everything – what’s five lives weighed against the corruption of an entire universe? I’ve been to space before, but it never felt like this, never so freeing and absolute.

We see thing we shouldn’t, things no one was meant to witness. We passed by the advent of society and law and goodwill, glimpsed the first fire built on a cold night with death waiting to pounce and the great beasts that roamed our planet millennia before man ever came to be. We watched prehistoric amoeba seed life on Earth – and then we keep going. We witness the cycle of life amongst the stars, alien species achieving advanced utopian societies, then back further to their earliest days, back through eons and epochs and all matter of inconceivable wonders, each worthy of a lifetime of study but that we only see for a single moment before they disappear into history.

Metrics of time are meaningless now, and not just philosophically. Some days, my hair is thin and grey, my skin old and weathered, and I can feel the pain coursing through every inch of my body. Other days I feel decades younger, stronger and more awake than I’ve been in years. I try to hold onto those feelings; one I thought I’d forgotten after so much heartache and pain, the other I never thought I’d be lucky enough to feel. But every time I wake up, it’s like everything that came before didn’t happen, as though my memories are just stories and I have to learn how to be me all over again. I wish I could blame the mission, but what good would that do?

It started to feel like we’d never get there, that the ship would just keep going and going until we all died, one by one. I wondered if something was missing, if there was a component we weren’t aware of or a variation we couldn’t compensate for; the farther back we went the more we slowed down, like some invisible force was keeping us from making it over the last horizon that just kept moving further and further away.

Then we saw stars, swimming in the air around us – just tiny pops of energy in all different colors, buzzing and flitting around one moment then gone the next. No one said anything; we just stare in silence, listening to the song even though there’s no music playing. Then it was too much, and I reached out to touch what must be providence at the end, the light to show us the way because it has been so dark for so very long.

Ryder holds wife one last time and reminds her that even when she doesn’t remember him, he’ll still love her. Freya plays a final show at the Met, arrangements that bring the entire house to tears, knowing that what they are hearing is beyond anything anyone has ever heard or will ever hear again – it’s perfection, and she feels it. Francis asks the question weighing on her soul her entire life, faithful now that the answer will be true – it scares her more than she could have possibly imagine. Rustin admits the truth, holds his breath in a that moment stretching forever in a microsecond, and he finds what he is looking for. It’s a moment where anything is possible and nothing is, too, because I don’t see anything – just the void for as long as I can remember and no time at all.

And now we’re here, at the advent of all things.

Dawn of the first day when existence becomes in the blink of an eye, time slows down and each nanosecond is an epoch. In the first, the stars are born in fiery forges of light and wonder. In the second, gravity forms and bends and splinters and folds. And in the third, the essence of sentience snaps into existence, aimless and without form floating through a virgin ether, nothing more than the will to live. Within this moment, the very first moment to ever be, all of reality comes into being; it is nothing less than sublime. And in the next moment, we thought we saw the singularity, the nearly-imperceptible thing that grows and mutates and festers and will one day birth all that is wrong in this existence. It is the spark of eventual darkness, primordial terror writhing in the abyss so far from anything warm and understanding, the purest form of evil we have come to slay.

“We were wrong – you could spend ten thousand lifetimes doing this, and you wouldn’t come even remotely close to affecting anything. We were wrong.”

We always knew it was a quantum frequency of an erratic and unstable nature, so we compensated and made adjustments for the variables of its quasi-compositional state. And that was the joke – we understood how the universe worked until we forced our own ignorance. Time isn’t real, but effect is everything, and our cause smashed its meaning to dust. We wanted a foe, something we could hit and strangle and beat into submission through sheer force of will – how foolish we must have seemed, so desperately foolish.

Just being there changed everything. From the distribution of the first cosmic dusts and the angle of this reality’s first physics, to the bending of matter and the life altered because of it – our presence was the effect, the only effect. We were the singularity we thought we’d executed.

I started laughing. It was reflexive – such a dark joke, so intensely Baroque, I couldn’t stop myself. It was just so damn funny how sure we all were, how confident we must have seemed – all of us, just staring at the universe like it owed us something after we tore it apart and tried to murder a cosmic force of nature only to see the shape of ourselves in the evil we wanted to kill.

And it’s funny because it’s true – we let go of everything human about us except our contempt for evil, stripped away anything but blind hatred for a concept we inadvertently created because we are flawed. Stuck here at the moment of conception, we let our anger and fear and hate and everything else dark inside us come forth, and we called it righteousness without a hint of irony.

Super Sampson! (Overture)

Super Sampson! A mighty American hero dedicated to truth, justice, and goodwill amongst all! From humble beginnings as a lowly dock worker, Stan Sampson inherits an ancient and cosmic power! – and with it super-strength and incredible agility! Super Stan Sampson: The Champion of Golden Gate City! Leader of the Mighty Protectors! Shining example for all mankind!

When they come of age, Sampson’s two sons follow in their father’s footsteps! Steve “Sensational” Sampson, and Sal “Stupendous” Sampson! The Super Sampsons: a heroic dynasty in the heart of America! Fighting in the name of all that is good when longstanding ethos and subjective hierarchy come under scrutiny! Founding the first superhero union in the midst of heavy socio-political turmoil! Beacons of justice in an unjust world!

And lo! Tragedy strikes! The aging Stan Sampson watches his sons fall at the hands of the nefarious Doctor Lawless, whose Mandroid malfunctions and murders the two young heroes! Unhinged in despair, Super Sampson murders Lawless with his bare hands! The Trial of Super Sampson captures a nation as its greatest hero falls further than they ever thought possible! The Super Sampsons are no more – Steve and Sal are dead, Stan is in prison for the murder of their killer, and only one person can save the Sampson name! – Stella Sampson, Stan’s only daughter!

Everyone wants to know what my Dad was like when I was a kid. They don’t want to think about who he really is, just how they remember what it felt like to look up in the sky and see salvation waving back. They want me to tell them he was a perfect dad, the epitome of fatherhood because anything less would sully their fragile nostalgia.

Stan Sampson was never a saint; he was angry, drank too much, and suffered from a depression he could never admit to himself let alone anyone else. My dad never hit us, but there’s more than one way to hurt the ones closest to you, and Stan seemed to find every way possible to make us feel like we didn’t matter. He didn’t have to say it, but I knew he resented us for being his weakness – I don’t think he ever wanted a family.

My mother’s the only reason I don’t hate my father. She truly was a saint, a woman who raised three kids with a husband who wasn’t there even when he was. Yet, she still managed to make us believe she was alright when really, she was dying inside. It took years for her to finally say it out loud and tell me what it was like back then, how she constantly feared my dad wouldn’t get out alive, that one of his enemies would enter our home and kill us all in our sleep, or that he would leave us for something better.

But my mom’s worst fear came true the day Steve and Sal got their powers; they were wrestling and slammed through the walls, destroyed the upstairs bathroom before realizing what they’d done. That afternoon, they were already flying and then sprinting around the block in seconds. I saw the tears in Mom’s eyes when Dad said it was the greatest day of his life; I was only twelve, but even I knew how much that hurt her. Because it was just another example of how much more she loved him than he loved her; she never said anything. Mom started drinking earlier and earlier in the day. I didn’t try and stop her.

I’ll never excuse it, but there was a silver lining to Dad’s shitty behavior – Mom and I grew closer. My brothers went off to fight the good fight with Dad, so it was just me and Mom in the house – the two ordinary members of an extraordinarily dysfunctional family left behind to wait. We spent afternoons watching talk shows, then Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! in the evening before the wine went to her head and she had to lay down. My mom wasn’t an angry drunk like my dad; she melted into the couch and her glass, because the world sometimes felt too heavy. I had to be the voice of optimism, the one who saw the bright side because she couldn’t anymore and my dad and brothers were too busy saving everyone else to recognize that we were losing her. The fleeting moments when I could get her to smile – those are some of the best memories I have.

And here’s the fucking rub – as shitty as Dad could be, but I could never shake this need for him to be proud of me, like his approval would somehow give me the strength to finally admit how I really feel, and at the moment when he loves me the most, tell him I don’t care so the truth will be just that much more devastating. But then I tell myself that’s petty and small, that wanting to kick someone when they’re down is what my Dad does, and I don’t want to be anything like him.

When we were younger, before Steve and Sal got powers, the three of us would dream about who we could be, all the different possibilities that could take us away, out from under his shadow where we could build our own lives that had nothing to do with capes or masks or super powers. But I think the truth was always there, at the back of our minds; knowing that if the day came for any of us, we’d follow him in a heartbeat. And then, they did – just like I knew they would. I could never fault my brothers for wanting Dad to love them, just like I know they didn’t hold it against me when I stopped calling because it hurt too much to hear them say how great things were. They were jerks, but they were still my brothers, and part of why they followed Dad into his world was to prove themselves to him, to show him they weren’t as worthless as we’d spent our childhoods feeling.

They didn’t deserve to die like that. The android was stronger, faster, more cunning; and Doctor Lawless let that mechanical monstrosity rip them apart, limb by limb, until there was nothing left. It took years of therapy to get over watching my brothers die in a gruesome massacre streaming live on every network while I couldn’t say a word to anyone. Dad snapped and nearly gave himself a heart attack tearing the android apart and throwing the pieces into the sun before beating the life out of Lawless. Mom went blank; she didn’t sob or scream or even lose composure. She simply sipped her wine as tears streamed down her cheek and she took a deep breath before finishing the entire glass and pouring another.

I’ve spent the past two years doing everything I can to stay positive, to keep my spirits high even though my father grew increasingly distant and my brothers left to follow in his undeserved footsteps while my mother slipped further into a black hole of despair. And there is no one to talk to, no one I can tell the truth to because no one knows my name is Stella Sampson.

After the War

Inspired by Jonathan Hickman, Esad Ribić, and Ive Svorcina’s epic 2015 Marvel Comics crossover event, Secret Wars, in which Doctor Victor Von Doom and Doctor Stephen Strange play god, well. Yet, their fall from grace is frustratingly brushed aside once the event ends and reality restarts. Their sins are great and many, yet the metanarrative is never confronted or questioned – this aims to.

Two desperate men, a scientist and a sorcerer, try to avert the end of all things.

When failure is the only option, they break the rules.

Harnessing power beyond reckoning, they save what little they can

One becomes a god, the other his prophet.

There was chaos, then there was order, and it was good.

But that was then…

Before god let petty emotion strangle his pale benevolence.

When his insecurity poisoned all that still was, and fear became law.

Ere god’s greatest enemy returned to end the charade and bring back infinite everything.

And in the twilight of his glory, god wept as something better grew from the ashes.

In the beginning, everything was born anew.

Yet, the scientist remembers, and so does the sorcerer.

They cannot forget what they did when all was lost.

One was corrupted by absolute power, the other murdered for making it plain.

Infinity does not know how close it came to ending.

Only the scientist and the sorcerer know.

And this is now…

When one staves off psychological demons by fighting ones in the flesh.

As the other disconnects from himself, bereft of meaning after losing divinity.

And one struggles to maintain composure, obsessed with how pointless he feels.

While the other falls apart because he cannot comprehend what he has lost.

No one knows what they carry, the pain and anger and overwhelming guilt.

No one can ever know that they did.

Yet, one cannot sleep knowing they will not answer for their sins.

While the other makes a choice: die a man, or rise again.

When they meet again, a strange doom will fall.

The closure necessary to break the cycle of in spite of itself.

A final reconciliation that one will not survive.

Redemption will come, but the cost will be too high.

Fate and destiny will die at their feet.

And their war will decide what everything means.

From Stellaris: Binary

I didn’t know what hate was until I was thirteen. It’s one of the only saving graces of living down here – kids get to be kids without the weight of knowing who they really are. But did I appreciate being kept in the dark? – of course not. I hated my parents for lying to me and pretending they were happy, for letting me believe I had a chance in hell of ever getting out when the truth is none of us do, because there’s no one who remembers when we could. All that’s left are just stories now, memories of a time when things were good. The truth could never set me free, so I decided to do it myself.

Under smoke-filled skies, walking down dirty streets littered with last week’s trash and stinking of piss and sweat as twin suns set behind too many factories, I realized none of it was normal because we’d grown up believing this was the way of things without asking why, and that when we learned the truth, we simply resigned ourselves to a life un-lived. The only hope we still had was in each other, and even that was starting to fade.

It made me angry. I walked for hours, out to the middle of the barren desert that was left behind when all the mineral deposits went dry and where nothing would ever grow again because the land was poisoned and wouldn’t heal. I screamed at the other, binary moon hanging in the sky as loud as I could until I lost my voice and nothing came out when I tried to curse them up above just one more time. Because this is just how it is. We are inferior, menial, less than – and it is wrong. They bend towards the sun the same as us, know the same gods, and bleed just like we do. We are their dirty secret, their unending sin kept hidden from the rest of the universe so they can keep living in bliss as we suffer in the shadows where we just exist. We cannot wait for another inversion that may never come, and I wouldn’t let the cosmos decide my fate, anyway.

It starts slow; just a feeling, at first. But the feeling grows into acceptance, and then into anger and rage when you realize acceptance means giving up on everything else just to hold onto something familiar – what you know isn’t worth anything without understanding what you don’t know, and understanding sacrifice is easier said than done. We gave up on wanting to more, and generations paid the price through subjugation, oppression, and hate. No one is going to help us; we must deliver ourselves from this life.

My husband left me when I told him I wanted to go. Through tears in both our eyes and those nights knowing what was coming on the dawn of the final day, I tried to hold onto what we had and not what we had become; divided and distressed because neither of us realized the home we had made was emptier than we thought. He saw hope between the cracks of this dingy moon, happiness in what was there instead of working for something better, and he saw a life growing old in this place I cannot be anymore. I think I loved him, and I like to believe he loved me, too; but I won’t ever really know, and that’s okay because this was never enough for me and it’s all he will ever want. When a good man and a good woman can’t find the good in each other, love dies; the others stole our potential and robbed us of our pride, and then I stood alone when they took my husband, too.

I have nothing to lose, and it is good. I hold onto the pain and sadness and frustration because it’s what gets me through each day and helps me remember that everything I left behind will still be there even though I won’t. The trek across the desert is cruel, and few are ready to make the journey, but those who join me see this place for the prison it truly is, and they will no longer be defined by being born on the wrong moon. I let them say their last goodbyes to families begging them to stay and reconsider such a fool’s errand. I don’t know how their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters cannot see the desperation in their eyes, that staying means dying without living — because it’s all I can see. At the edge of everything we’ve ever known, twelve set off with me across the barren wasteland towards the promise of anything else.

Ours was a baptism of fire, a crucible we brought upon ourselves that stripped us of pretense and forced us to survive with faith as our only guiding light. Through storms of thick dust and sharp sleet, days of unending heat that claimed one of us and drove another insane, nights so cold I often wondered if I would even wake up the next morning – through it all, we marched. Weeks felt like months in the summer expanse as the days stretched out and beasts hunted us in the pitch-black darkness of even longer nights. Comfort became little more than a memory, just a fading idea we used to know but could no longer recognize. I questioned myself more times than I can count, wondering if I what I was doing was right, or if I was leading us all to our deaths on the other side of the world where no one would hear us scream. But I would rather die knowing I tried than live wondering what could have happened.

After what felt like a lifetime, we reached the top of the ten-thousandth mountain and I saw the Moment; a small quantum singularity locking two moons together yet separating us so much more, the unstable point in space and time that I could see with my own eyes yet isn’t supposed to be real. But we stood on the summit of the mountain and looked upon the moment we’d been taught was a fairy tale for children too old to deny the lies but too young to accept the truth – it was magnificent. It was unlike anything we’d ever seen or would see again in our lifetimes; the nebulous, vague something pulsating with energy that crackled and spit and flared out from the center and across the crater’s face that meant freedom.

When the Moment first came into view, it felt like there couldn’t be anything else like it across all of Stellaris, that it was wholly unique in its lucid, breathtaking beauty. I wanted that moment to go on forever; just let me sit there and imagine what’s on the other side until I grow old and die with a smile on my face. But I stopped myself; that temptation wasn’t enough to keep me from moving forward. Two more stayed behind who were happy to watch the universe invert within itself in a shard of existentiality, content enough to accept they would die out there while the rest of us kept going.

It was the end of the world and the beginning of everything else, the only chance we had to get out, and every step was another towards deliverance. It felt right, struggling down the cliff face into the valley below where the Moment’s sheer force pushed a hole into the ground like a goblet spilling over with potential. I wanted to rip my clothes off and dance naked in the field of glowing flowers and vibrating trees warped by the Moment, so astonishing and extraordinary and uncanny and new. I couldn’t stop laughing the closer we got, like none of what I was seeing could possibly make sense yet it was there, and I could nearly touch it.

Reality swung like a boxer in a title fight when it’s fist connected with my mind as bullets from nowhere barely miss me. On the far side of the valley, they sent warning shots and moved to intercept. When they cut us off from the Moment, I panicked; sheer terror of never experiencing what laid within it’s shimmering perfection gripped me by the throat, and I couldn’t breathe. I ran faster than I’ve ever run before, as one by one the others fell behind me. I did hear them follow me when I took off, but I couldn’t look away from the Moment, and the closer I got the more I knew I made the right decision. Nothing I did on this world could make a difference, so my last hope was wanting to survive more than their guns could hurt me.

I jumped into the moment with a smile on my face when three of their shots found their mark and blood started streaming down my back. I cried with joy in the moment before I landed on the other side surrounded by strangers who nearly let me die on a busy intersection in a golden city. Before I lost consciousness, an old woman took my hand and told me everything was going to be alright. Somehow, I knew she wasn’t lying – I guess there’s a first time for everything.

I woke up two days later in a hospital, scared and confused; I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I threw up over the side of my bed and a kind nurse came in to clean it up. I asked her where I was, and she told me I would know in due time. Even though I wanted to scream, my body wouldn’t let me and I fell asleep again.

It took hours, but someone finally arrived in my room to give me the talk, the same talk every one of us who’s ever made it through gets when they wake up and don’t know where they are or what to think. That was his job; to tell us the truth without a hint of despair, to admit he and his kind oppressed people like me, to explain how I lived a lie for twenty-nine years based on an arbitrary cosmic design. I never imagined the truth would set me free, and here it was to prove freedom was never really an option to begin with. I was born on the wrong moon, and nothing could change that. No matter how much I wanted to forget them both and just leave, all my hopes and dreams disappeared as quickly as the Moment. That feeling of pure ecstasy I felt jumping in was inverted completely, and the dread pushed me over the edge.

Because everyone knows – the whole universe, all of it. They all know what’s was happening, and they don’t care because they don’t want to lose what our suffering produces. They’re more worried about the refined minerals we thought only those above us used in their vain glory, but instead sell for next-to-nothing for political favors and financial clout while the rest of the galaxy lets them keep us like animals. We are not a dirty secret or a shameful sin – we are the result of their necessary evil, the means to justify their ends, the terrible truth they don’t deny because everyone’s hands are dirty. The man went on about refugee rights while I tuned him out completely because I realized they were going to send me back. Everything I went through, all the heartache and disappointment and fear, the pain and sacrifice and broken promises – none of it meant anything because the only possible outcome was always going to be regret.

Of course, I would be the exception, the one who made headlines when my case defied all precedent and I was allowed to stay as a citizen of their glorious and shining city that stretched across the entire moon even though I couldn’t bear the sight without thinking of everything I once loved and gave up to live amongst those who treat us worse than the dirt they’ve never even seen. I thought it would be amazing to be someone else, to find my way to a new life and a new me in a new home because that’s all I’ve wanted since I was thirteen years old. But the air here stings, and what smells beautiful to them reeks like death to me.

I am a pariah, a child of neither world because mine is a trap and theirs will never truly accept me. There are those sympathetic to us lowly drifters – more often in some perverse obsession with our dirty world – and others like me, but when we see one another in the streets, guilt stops us from ever speaking – guilt from leaving behind those we claimed to love, guilt for surviving when others fell, and guilt for wanting to not feel guilty anymore. Mostly, they hate me and anyone like me. They hate me because seeing me is a reminder of the dirt they can’t wash away, the bloodstains that won’t come out, the tears seared into their minds every time they degrade and insult me because they don’t want to be reminded that I’m just like them.

My husband and I used to sing songs about dreams, melodies our parents taught us that helped make life a little easier when it felt like nothing would ever be okay. Those funny little songs got me through the first weeks on the higher moon; I would sing under my breath when they passed by, staring at me, the blight on their perfect little world, without thinking about how their sneers and upturned chins made me feel…like they would care even if they knew. I often thought about my husband back home, wondering if he still thought about me or if he found a nice girl to settle down with and have the children I never gave him. I asked myself every day if it wouldn’t be better to just pretend like none of this ever happened and jump off tallest building I could find. I wanted to do it so many times, and each time I didn’t, I cried myself to sleep knowing I was just that much more of a failure.

But I’m also a coward, and even though I dread waking up each morning, I still get out of bed and go to work at the printing press where they keep me in a windowless room processing paperwork from the moment I arrive until I leave at the end of each day. They don’t care that my home is never clean of hateful slurs and broken glass, or that each moment I endure their hate, I hate myself even more. This is a dark place full of shadows masquerading as light, just a shiny veneer hiding such a terrible truth that no one dares challenge it, lest they upset the profit margins and miss quotas.

On my deathbed, as cancer ravaged my body, I watched the inversion through my window, the anomaly I never thought would come in my lifetime; the world I once called home rose up from below, out from under the horrible, shadowy nightmare it had known for three-hundred years and bathed in the golden glow of a radiant and welcome sun — and it was good.

I knew we would soon descend back into the darkness I fought so hard to escape, that this golden world would soon fall like mine did centuries before, but I was finally happy. Because as the acidic, putrid smoke I recognized from my youth filled the air outside the hospital, it felt right – karma is a bitch, and this ‘higher’ moon would finally know what it’s like to be down below. Part of me wished I could have been there with my family and friends, but I gave up that right a long time ago. And so, I took comfort in knowing the ones I loved the most were finally in the light, and went to sleep accepting that I would never wake up.

Reverie Man

(or This Last Life I Shall Live)

I still remember the first time I died. My loving wife and beautiful daughters stood by me when the doctor told us it was cancer; through them I found strength to accept what was coming, and faced it knowing they would not leave me until I left them. They held a funeral, grieved for a time, then eventually moved on with their lives. Just like it was meant to be.

The second time I died, I was scared. They finally caught up after I’d successfully subverted them for months, and they put three bullets in my chest before I even had a chance to explain my side of things. There was a bright, warm light while I was bleeding out in the street praying to a god that wasn’t going to answer no matter how loud I screamed. No one cared that I was gone, my goldfish Ramsey died when no one fed him, and life went on. Just like it should.

Death found me again when barbarians broke through the outer perimeter, slaughtering any who stood in their way as they stormed the city an embodiment of violence – unstoppable, unrepentant, insatiable instinct to destroy and conquer come to lay waste to our society. I held my husband close and he told me he loved me as they broke down the door and fell an axe onto his head and I screamed in horror. They chased me down, left my body to rot in the fields with the rest, and burned the empire to the ground. Just like it needed to be.

I was an underdog boxer in Washington, an agent of change when the world rejected reason, a skilled paralegal in Essex, a gambler with delusions of grandeur, a child soldier in Aleppo, a charismatic orator for misguided masses, a celebrated artist in Venice, a feared and ruthless smuggler in Bogota, a schizophrenic who believed he was the Second Coming (or third or fourth or…?) and inspired faith in others, a reluctant sociopath in Duluth, a degenerate father, a loving husband, a willing partner, and a victim of something much larger and more complex than anyone will ever know. After I lived and died those ten more times, the memories began to survive.

At the height of prohibition on New Year’s Eve in a Burnham Park speakeasy as I drank myself blind with friends of the Family, I suddenly remembered a wife I did not have, a conspiracy I did not recognize, an heirloom I’d never seen, and a novel I never wrote. I was there for all of it even though the memories felt so far away, each instance just a faded tracing of the actual experience I once had but could never truly understand. The Family thought I’d lost my mind and sent me to sleep with the fish.

Ten dozen more deaths, ten dozen more lives; each time I remembered more. Sometimes, I lived long and happy doing what I loved and surrounded by good, honest people that I cared for until I died a satisfied and content old man. Other times, cruel twists of fate led me down dark and dangerous paths filled with heartache and struggle and injustice and pain.

Sometimes, the memories resurface earlier, when there is still potential to affect change. Usually, I don’t remember until the end is near, with only days or hours or minutes before my time is up. I’ve taken my own lives when the existential dread becomes unbearable and I obsess over all the ‘me’s I used to be, each different but also the same. I’ve fought fate more times than I can count and done everything I can to reject that which can’t be denied.

I am a reverie of myself, abstract memories from hundreds of lives compounded into one that just repeats over and over again. I have worn a cape and mask as a champion of goodwill and justice in a world full of heroic angels and villainous demons. I have given blood and sweat and tears to vile prejudice and putrid hate with symbols of discrimination and bigotry seared onto my skin for all to see. I have marched against the horrors of war and fought in them just as often. I have been a king, a pauper, a slave, and a saint. I have watched this world exist in more ways than I know, and seen it go down so many different paths that none feel more or less real than any other.

My self is a diamond where each new life is a new facet scored, a rock of eternity carved and shaved each time I die. Now, the memories are just pieces, fragments and shards of what once was because every new existence leaves less room for what came before. I try to hold onto some, the achievements and failures that still speak to who I want to be, but that means letting so many others disappear into the back of my mind where I can’t see or hear them. I’ve spent whole lifetimes deciding what’s important, meditating on which memories mean the most to what I mean in a vain and fruitless attempt to quantify a soul.

Hundreds and thousands of chances to fail and in the end, it’s always the same because there will always have another me waiting just around the bend. There’s more in these veins that blood, more in this mind than thoughts and memories, more to what I am than what should be possible. I used to compartmentalize the grief and store the doubt away to live my best lives without contempt or regret or resentment or fear.

But it’s not enough to remember, anymore. I’ve loved so much and lost even more, held faith in pure gods and false prophets alike, found myself more times than I can count – it is no longer a blessing but a curse I cannot escape, a constant barrage of memories that are no longer mine but will always be there, the unending crucible through lives I miss and the ones that won’t let me sleep.

Because not knowing why I am haunts me no matter who I am. In this last life I shall live, I will find answers. I am chaotic neutral, in service to no one but my own ends. Just the way I need it to be.

The clerics deem me heretic, the doctors think me mad, the learned call me instigator, and only the fools have my back. I found enlightenment in a life of unbound instability, an existence pocked by societal irrelevance but insightful to a truth I want to forget but never can. They want to grow and prosper and learn and love, but they are held back by shame still unchecked over actions that can never be undone and words that can never be unsaid.

Legends and myths and fantasies and fables are memories that bleed through when realities grind against one another and vestiges of a dying existence drip into the next – no less real, simply less realistic. They are incursions from what’s no longer there, anachronisms that persist as stories of fiction because accepting their truth means letting go of what everything means, and it is terrifying. Yet, when it becomes clear that a human soul is simply a collection of tales stitched together by conviction and hope, it is so much more beautiful to behold – anything of consequence is a moment of testimony, another gospel of the unknown when certainty is valued more than life itself.

Belief is a thin layer of unfettered faith forever trapped beneath miles of unbreakable doubt, a place of unrepentant confidence in possibility hidden by dependence on actuality. I followed myths and listened to legends, stoked rumors and spoke of many truths. More than a mantra, beyond mere credo, above earthly gains, I believe in untempered, incalculable anything.

Call it the eye of god or delusions of a madman, spiritual awakening or nervous breakdown – a truth is a truth when it suits to be true, an opinion when it threatens faith, and a lie when it offends perception. Words will always be inconsequential. And when a single glance reveals Destiny and Fate and Prophecy and Omen at odds with their own machinations, belief is no longer an idea, but now the last truth worth fighting for and the only universality in an existential maelstrom of relative nothing. The first time I saw, I wept with joy – I jumped higher than ever before only to fall back down below the warm glow of everlasting light. Instead of bitter, I was driven. Instead of spiteful, I grew focused. Instead of vengeful thoughts, my faith blossomed. I shouted fire at the sky, sang tempest to the heavens, cried havoc in their name, all in belief I would see them once more.

Then, it happened again. Through the eyes of what we call gods they saw an insignificance, a speck of microscopic permanence on an otherwise fluid tapestry that was me. Perhaps for the first time in how they exist, they deigned to look upon what lies beneath like curious and ignorant children would a colony of ants. And then I wept with fear when they didn’t care.

Something changed, though, and each time I blink it is a new me; a film reeling too slow or a flipbook with sticky fingers, every life only as long as a thought that becomes something else entirely before I can process anything. Experiences and personalities stacked then serrated until all that’s left is lifeless confetti where I once stood. And still I persist, a pile of shredded humanity without hope of repair, through a listless night into a new dawn, because they cannot break me no matter how much my existences offend them.

To be or not to be; that is not the right question. For it infers there is something that isn’t, and that can’t possibly be true. There must be a reason, some grander schemata devised and executed with purpose and meaning. I beg them for clarity, plead for insight I never knew, and believe they will answer because there is nowhere else to go and I am tired of fighting ghosts of myself.

But the truth hurts more than it should, the sinking sensation that none of it meant anything at all, that all my lives and all my deaths are just side effects of negligent archetypes slowly staving off omnipotent insanity by playing with the whole of all realities like soft putty in a vacuum. I am nothing more than a forgotten idea, a story meant to be told but left on the shelf to gather dust and linger in narrative limbo.

If a tale goes untold before the pages go up in flames, does it cease to exist? Is a character just the sum of her parts or a larger idea that can never die? I smile and let my life end one more time, the last time because they promised it will be. And then I come to my senses and weep because they lied; I still remember the first time I died.

Labrynthian Pomp

“What are you?” Clark pulled the trigger on the pistol again and again to no avail.

“Labrynthian,” it responded, monotonous and unmoved.

“Fuck you! The Labrynthian is a myth, a damn fool’s journey! YOU CAN’T BE LABRYNTHIAN!” Clark began to sob as he fell to his knees and the man walked forth, unbuttoning his coat.

“No, Mr. Tull. Labrynthian is very real and it shows itself.” The man kneeled down next to Clark. “Sometimes it’s an allegory, other times a challenge. And sometimes, it’s a person.” He put his hand on Clark’s back.

“Mr. Tull, you are an artifact of bygone conclusions that were poisoned from the start even though you consecrated them into belief. You still cling to concepts proven wrong, continue to suffer when you need not. And there is blood on your hands because of it, Mr. Tull.”

Clark’s soul was wrenched from his body, not by the Labrynthian or one of his siblings, but by his own certainty. Clark Tull ripped apart as blank energy seared what remained of his humanity. His corpse withered into dust then blew away as the Labrynthian wept with joy.

Every moment of Clark Tull instantaneously imploded, his entire history burned from existence and his every effect stricken from any record. Reality reworked and restructured itself without a Clark Tull; a new paradigm. In his place stood a Steward of these Immaculada, a shepherd across the rising seas to take them away.

“Thank you for finding me; it’s been far too long.”

“It’s good to see you, too.”

“But, my friend, we cannot continue like this.” Labrynthian knew the Steward was right.

“Then where will you go?” he asked, shed of all pretense and forgery at twilight on the final day.

“Where do you think?” The Steward spoke in riddles as titans often do.

The Steward stepped aboard and took his seat beside the Corinthian and Alcazar on the ship to brilliant Alchera helmed by the almighty Zot. As the sun dipped behind golden shimmering waters, the Labrynthian stood ashore gazing at his facets taken form, casting themselves into the great uncertainty of he could never approach. Each time, the Labrynthian gets closer to the boat that sits in wait for lost memories turned into stories who want to go home.

“I didn’t think it existed.”

“Then don’t think of what you might, and we will discover what we seek.”

The Labrynthian watches their ship sail beyond the horizon, past the seven seas and into the eighth one hanging in the heavens. Because he’s sitting on the edge of the world, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cheap beer as he waits for the next story that wants to end.

(Original Draft: January 4, 2016, Revised: October 3, 2017)

The Agent & The General

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“I can guess.”

The room is dark with only a single lamp shedding light on the situation.

“Humor me.”

“…You think I’m responsible for the Centennial.”

There is no emotion between the agent and the man sitting across from her.

“You’re not?”

“You would just assume, wouldn’t you?”

A weak interrogator loses focus under pressure.

“Militia fatigues were found in the wreckage; your men were there.”

“You’re still so ignorant, aren’t you?”

The agent lets the silence sit for two minutes exactly as she flips through her papers.

“What’s your name?”

“The General.”

“I didn’t ask your former rank, soldier – what’s your name?”

“I told you: I am the General.”

There is a moment when tension begins to build between the agent and the general.

“Who are you, then?”

“Please, Agent – what’s the point in saying it out loud?”

The agent stares back at the general without flinching.

“Pretend I’m ignorant.”

“Very well. I am the General of the Militia, once of the United States Marine Corps, now leader of the free people of Earth.”

The agent realizes the extent of the general’s delusions.

“You really believe that, don’t you?”

“And you believe you have some control over human destiny; I suppose we all have our vices, don’t we Agent?”

There is a folder on the table with reports covering five years of militia incidents.

“The Centennial; why?”

“Was I not clear enough – I had nothing to do with that.”

“I thought you were the leader of the free people of Earth, General.”

“Don’t condescend to me, Agent – it’s not very becoming.”

Time is of the essence and lives are on the line.

“They were children, General; why?”

“Why anything, Agent? You’re all so worried about singular events that we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.”

The agent notices the general says ‘we’ as if she and him share some common enemy to which she is ignorant.

“You really don’t know, do you?”

“No, I don’t. And I would have condemned their actions if I did.”

There is sincerity in the general’s voice, candor in conviction of his own ignorance.

“So if not you then, whose doing this? This can’t just be an isolated event – something is coming and I want to know what that is.”

“You fear death, don’t you Madam Agent? I can see it in your eyes.”

“What’s coming?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

The general slams his hands on the table and the agent can see he has no reason to lie.

“Yes…I’m afraid to die.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not done.”

They lock eyes and do not stop for sixty-seven seconds.

“Well said, Agent.”

“What’s coming, General?”

The general sits back and changes his tone.

“You know, man was meant to create his own destiny, not have to ripped out from under him. Do you understand, Agent?”

“Destiny is a lie, little more than a comforting idea in a hurricane that eventually means nothing and only causes pain.”

“I’ve underestimated you, Agent Raphael; you know more than you’ve let on.”

“Enough to know how much I don’t, General.”

Agent Raphael has spent her life dealing with men who underestimate her ability, and the general is simply the most recent one to make the mistake.

“Pretending the world isn’t falling apart simply isn’t enough anymore, Agent – there’s too much at stake and your governments are far too happy to simply sit back and let someone else deal with their problems, to rely on – as you might say – a fleeting moment in a tempest instead of taking the initiative as human fucking beings to better ourselves.”

“And your solution is to shift the blame, it seems – to forget that they’re not just power-sets and flashy names but rather people under those masks.”

“But they aren’t anymore, Agent. They’re simply ideas now, and what happens when one of them decides the idea should be faith?”

“You assume the worst in man, General.”

“I assume human nature! I know existential dread comes for us all, and I know we work together to overcome and persevere. But what happens when one of them asks “why?” and none of our answers make sense? What then, Agent?”

“None of us know, General. What you seem to lack is the ability to accept that relativity.”

“Acceptance of injustice is the foundation of tyranny, Agent.”

“And obfuscation of reality is the basis for insanity, General. You’re advocating for their internment based on your fears and that sentiment has turned your followers toxic.”

“What I see is a world that sets aside fear because children with the power of gods say they’re our friends. Fear is a tool, Agent, and as that blade is dulled by false security, we will all shoulder the blame at the reckoning.”

“Tell me what’s coming and I may be able to reduce your sentence.”

“There’s nothing left for me to gain, Agent. Don’t you understand?”

“You have two choices. You can be responsible for the deaths of a few dozen of your radical, insane followers who even you seem to disavow. Or, you can be responsible for the death of millions because you know what they are planning.”

“There is value in saying what others won’t, Agent. For that, I will tell you what I know, the secret you’ll wish I hadn’t.”

Agent Raphael stays her hand and concentrates on not sweating.

“What’s coming – you’re the General, right?”

“That’s just it – your question is flawed, Agent Raphael.”

“What does that mean?”

“There’s more than one General.”

Agent Raphael’s earpiece suddenly jumps to life with overlapping reports and emergency signals like a storm of panic.

“And what’s coming isn’t just one melody, but rather the whole orchestra brought together for the first time, you see.”

“What’s happening?”

“The General is not a person, Agent Raphael. It is the movement and the mantra: we are all the General. All of us are the leaders of this world because we will not be left to die.”

Each new report brings new horrors of death and murder across the globe, simultaneous acts of terror and destruction raining across civilization.

“You…you’re insane.”

“No, Agent Raphael. I finally understood that the truth doesn’t matter when it’s wrong, and telling yourself it’s right doesn’t change anything.”

(Original Formatted Draft: November 2, 2016)

ROAD (Part 5 of 5)

Scene 1: The Beginning of the End of His Life
Scene 2: At a Meeting of Fractured Souls
Scene 3: Ignoring What’s Right There
Scene 4: On Top of a City That Breaks
Scene 5: When the Past Cuts Deep Like a Knife
Scene 6: As Destiny Fucks Over Potential
Scene 7: And There is Nothing Left to Fight For
Scene 8: Looking for Hope in the Abstract
Scene 9: To Find Peace in His Own Death
Scene 10: Discovering the Only Truth that Still Remains

SCENE 9: To Find Peace in His Own Death

Everything lives, everything dies – the perfect metaphor that says so little yet means so much. They call it apocalypse or Ragnarok or the End Times or whatever else may explain the entirety of all cosmos shuddering in the same moment. Because my focus now falters under a weight growing too heavy on my back, the unyielding Nothing come to finally see the twilight of all that ever was. The only choice I have is to accept the entropy and take it within to spare everything else, to let myself bear the cost of the coming nightmare so this version of infinity at least stands a fighting chance.

It hurts, more than anything in any actual or possible existence, burning out from the center as my skin cracks and insides begin to atrophy and degrade. But I am eternity embodied, just a perceptible resonance of what so many hope is God or Allah or Jehovah or whatever else. And to burn that away means scorching the ties that bind, melting the chains holding me in this form lest I expand and become the only. The fissure within break through to the past, like open wounds revealing when I was Tobias Frank the Warlock, to when the Great Calamity first sparked the power inside me, to when I spoke with those who came before me who warned that keeping the memory of my one true love’s death would be my downfall.

So, I let part of myself step back and take a journey on the road through my own life that leads back to this same moment but a different me. I remember trying to kill myself using my own powers. I remember weeping with my beautiful, amazing, brilliant Sam in my arms as he told me he loved me then died. I remember watching the world get torn apart because I was too selfish to accept what I was becoming until it was too late. I remember finally recognizing that the only real truths exist outside reality, and that I was one of them. And I remember that the Demiurge is defined by humanity, made weak by being human.

But I am still the myth above all others, though, the almighty of almighties who keeps what is so destined to fail yet always maintained. I can change the rules even with Death’s grip on my shoulder, because it does not yet have my throat or my hands. I reach through the rifts into myself, back to the moments most clear.

I deserve my own possibilities, the young sorcerer thinks.

I need to remember my failures, the grieving husband pledges.

I must accept my responsibility, the budding god decrees.

I will always keep my promise, the existential entity affirms.

Different reflections from the same prism, each of them facets of me coming more into focus the more I unravel. But they won’t remember because I don’t. The young me will not recall learning what he is years before he should, like the me that was married won’t know where he was in those hours after Sam’s death, or how the me just starting to see infinity will never remember how much worse everything gets, and even the me that sought guidance from other divinity will forget this last mistake. But here and now, as I turn to face the Meaningless, they are me and I am them existing in all points of time at once, so synced with the endless everything that nothing can strike me down because that would be the only lie.

And then it arrives, the Unknown I so feared and ignored and denied until I couldn’t, the End come to rip me apart bit by bit until the last piece of me flickers in the wind like a dying flame that finally goes out, Unstoppable judgment for all the mistakes I’ve made.

But I’m wrong.

SCENE 10: Discovering the Only Truth That Still Remains

“What are you?” I ask even though I already know.

“The answer.”

“What do you want?” I demand even though he could only say one thing.

“Nothing from you.”

He is me, the me I would have been. He is the part of me that always wished things could have been different, the ideal and the worst versions of myself twisted into a single reflection of everything I’m not.

“Why are you here?”

“Why am I here?”

He was me trapped on the opposite side of everything, truly alone and forgotten as he watched his own voice direct the heavens and his own hands orchestrate the cosmos. He is antithesis, the me that grew every time I lost a piece of myself, the collective fragments of Tobias Frank that fell from me and found him in the endless abyss I ignored for far too long.

“You were so close…” he says with a sigh. Because I am wrong, again – it’s the other way around.

I am the reflection. I am the road not taken. I am not real.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t want things to go like this.”

“Just…why?” It’s the only answer I want.

“I had to know the costs. I had to know who I really am.”

It’s painful and I hate it and it makes me angry, but it’s true. I fade away more with each step he takes towards me because I no longer have a purpose. I am just an idea, a hypothetical god in a conceptual abstract programmed to believe in an existential facsimile. What hope does a character in a story have past the final page? What future is there for mythology that everyone eventually forgets? Does an idea know when it no longer makes sense?

But I will never forget when the Demiurge was me…

…And just like that he was gone. He was the me that lost himself, the me that forgot his name is Tobias Frank, the me who gave up everything because he thought it was the only way. He was me stripped of the human center, the one who lived in fear of what he would become if he didn’t. He was a more perfect me that will never come to pass, a memory of something that never existed, a different version never released.

He was I is you was us becomes them can be me again, but now he’s gone and all that remains is me.

ROAD (Part 4 of 5)

SCENE 7: And There Is Nothing Left to Fight For

I used to wish I wasn’t so alone. The nights are long and cold and I can’t count how many times I’ve nearly just stopped and let myself fall into an even more endless abyss. The only reason I don’t jump is the memory of a young man’s death on my hands. Because life is an unbelievably beautiful struggle, a raging sea of what’s possible and what happens distilled through emotions and dreams and doubt – his life a miracle of coincidence and fate, his death a celebration of the past and future unmade, the memory of him a beacon in the unrelenting hurricane I spend every single moment trying to control. This omnipotence is a prison, a nonstop, everlasting, undeniable duty to a frail cosmic balance that is structure and chaos and infinite points of diversion seemingly persisting on its own because no one can perceive the hand the guides.

Sometimes it’s a city, a sprawling metropolis that goes on forever and keeps expanding as buildings and houses appear then disappear and never stay in the same place for long with streets and alleys and rivers that reroute and realign without notice – burghal in abstract where I walk alone putting out fires and patching roofs.

It has been a young child with irrational demands and meaningless offenses, a petulant toddler lacking sense or context for anything outside itself that throws tantrums when it doesn’t get its way.

Once it was a foundry, when a lost soul stepped outside all relative time into the superfluous he couldn’t possible comprehend and I became legion, a whole quantum civilization of individual fragments maintaining the infinite tapestries of the multiverse like a factory of the impossible.

I do not create or destroy, only nurture what is there. I redefine and redraw, but never erase or expel. I cannot remember my name, but I know every single shining soul throughout all the countless realities to ever exist. I am the fourth Demiurge, a most ancient idea wrapped around mortality because true divinity fails when stripped of empathy for those down below. Perhaps it was selfish to keep a memory from the days before I became this, and maybe it was inevitable that I would come now to see it as a mistake. Because it is the last shield I have against what’s coming, my last line of defense in the darkness eclipsing all the work I’ve done in these millennia I’ve been alone.

Across every reality, silence falls. The city is quiet, the child stops crying, and the foundry goes dark. It is dawn of the final day after untold eons of tranquil service, and I must steel myself for the confrontation against the only unknown left to fight.

SCENE 8: Looking for Hope in the Abstract

“What will it mean for who I am?”

“This form is both integral and inconsequential”

“Will I remember?”

“Your humanity will be the fulcrum, but your humanism would be a weakness.”

“Remember the past but focus on the future.”

“Not really; but if that makes it easier, then sure.”

Outside time and space, Tobias sits in league with three pale shadows against the walls of known existence so he might learn what he has become.

“I don’t think I’m ready.”

“None of us were. That’s not the point.”

“Why do we doubt?”

“Because doubt is the only real truth. Because doubt leads to acceptance.”

“Acceptance of what?”

It is this question Tobias fears the most, the one he has never been able to answer before this moment.

“That I am a failure.”

“Almost.”

“It is acceptance that you have experienced failure, yes.”

“But that those failures are not you.”

“I could have saved him…I can’t forget that, ever.”

“It will be your downfall if you take it with you.”

“Because we can never go home.”

“And you will spend eternity knowing you could have given it up.”

“That’s the promise I made.”

“Why does it matter so much?”

“When you are ready let go of everything else?”

“Why hold onto this pain?”

“You answered your own question: I’ve already lost so much. This memory is the only thing I can’t.”

“An anchor is only as strong as the one who wields it.”

“If in this you place your faith, you can never let it go.”

“Even when you cannot remember why.”

“As the expanse becomes you more and more.”

“When your sheer will dictates the flow of time and the meaning of space.”

“And you constantly feel every instance of every infinite possibility all at once.”

“I know.”

“You don’t.”

“But that’s okay.”

“It makes no difference now.”

“I met a cypher that told me what was to come. I’ve known what I am for a long time, and I’ve done everything I can to stop it from coming to pass. When none of it worked, I tried to forget even though fate reasserts itself every time and punishes me. I can’t change the past, but I can damn sure hold onto one piece of it.”

A bright light breaks through the walls of eternity, a blinding glare shining back from the end of all things when the only hope left is to be found in what Tobias forgot.

ROAD (Part 3 of 5)

SCENE 5: When the Past Cut Deep Like a Knife

The hubris of gods is infallibility, that they cannot see past themselves enough to accept their many flaws. Yet, this is why gods exist in the first place – nothing is without imperfection, not even divinity. They play at omnipotence but kneel at the altar of their own religion, the myth of myths of the Demiurge above the rest whose will eclipses heavenly chambers and whose hands weave the fabric of reality itself. Petulant godlings are born, reign, then cease to exist in a blink of my eye, whole pantheons created, praised, and forgotten in an instant. And they have no idea; not really. They have no concept of what they do not know because they think they know everything even though that doesn’t mean anything.

There’s a single memory seared onto my soul from before time stretched out and days went by like eons. Under the sight and the touch and the endless machinations clashing and singing together lies that lone moment I can’t let go, the only part of my past not stripped away to make room for the endless eternities. From that serendipitous morning when I learned what my future held to the moment that destiny came to pass and through a baptism of fire to when I ushered in the fifth age of chaos and order – through it all I’ve forced myself to keep remembering because forgetting means losing the last part of what makes me human, the final shred of what I meant and how I failed.

I am the tapestry now, the very fibers of my being spread out across any and every one of the infinite possibilities that coalesced long ago into an ageless throng of alternate timelines and realities all equal in their glory and terror. At my beginning, there were gaping holes, festering wounds, and bleeding scabs on the skin of the endless multiverse from the trauma of a violent rebirth, scars of a timeless conflict that stretched through eons of astral relativity and spilled into actuality where its wake tore whole veins of possibility apart. I inherited a home in distress, the ashes of that war like a body so frail it might have fallen apart had I not steadied the ship and corrected the course.

I’ve recreated everything, rewritten every single rule, and remade countless realities more times than I will ever remember. I fixed and stabilized the superfluous between it all, the endlessly complex arteries connecting all existences and binds every notion of reality to ever be conceived, and then infinite more that will never be known by a single living soul. And through every abstraction of the most basic and most complicated versions of what I might be or could become, I remember that moment from when I was a man playing at being something more, that solitary fragment of a life lived and nearly forgotten. It’s the reason I’m still here, the only thing that separates me from a more sinister vision of what should be. That memory keeps me anchored and stays the more lucid whims of a celestial who forgot long ago what it was like to have a body that could feel and eat and sleep and fuck.

Whatever’s coming, that unspoken something behind me like a shadow that won’t move, it wants me to forget and let it all go, to free myself of this final human vestige and accept that I can never be that again. I can feel how much it longs for my despair, obsessing over the only piece of me I will never let go. It’s been feeding on me for hours. Days? Years? Centuries? But it will never satisfy that hunger, never sate that lust for a moment of actuality in an endless ocean of abstract allegories and metaphors stacked so high they reach the heavens themselves. It wants to break me. It wants me to know it’s coming to break me. And it knows Sam’s name.

SCENE 6: As Destiny Fucks Over Potential

“What if I don’t want to do this?”

“That’s not really an option.”

They run through the woods on an island in a lake, still a mile out from where they need to be as the sun disappears and the day turns to night without warning.

“But nothing’s set in stone. Right?”

“This conversation proves that’s not true. You see that, don’t you?”

“Then I should be able to change it.”

“And you’d tear everything down in the process. All of it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, you don’t, and you’ll have to be okay with that.”

From the tips of his fingers Tobias lights their path through the dangerous forest as the very ground beneath their feet begins to tremble and crack open.

“Who are you?”

“How many times do we have to do this?”

“As many as it takes.”

The lake surrounding their island catches aflame while meteors the size of minivans hurtle through the atmosphere into mountains that break and fall apart. Tobias can see it all happening at once, the devastation washing over the entire planet one trouble spot at a time until the entire world is on fire and all he can hear are screams.

“I’m a cypher, an abstract realization of what you’ll rewrite the laws of nature to represent. My world is a metaphor, an allegorical existence. When I chose to leave, I discovered a weak point between realities that I was always meant to find because you put it there for me to find my way here. I’m a herald of you.”

“Why do you always talk like a goddamn riddle?” Tobias asks as he falls to his knees, clutching his head from the overwhelming pain.

“Because that’s what I am, and I can’t change that any more than you can stop what’s coming.”

“You’re asking me to give up everything for this.”

“I know. But really, you already have.”

Clouds burn away as smoke pours from volcanos across the globe. Mass power outages, airliners dropping from the sky, and rioting everywhere – Tobias could feel it all under his skin and in his head, the searing pain of every conscious soul on the planet praying for help as the world falls apart and even the most valiant efforts fail in a most dire eleventh hour.

“It’s…all too much.”

“Concentrate. You are in control. This is your destiny.”

“Well then, destiny can go…fuck itself.”

And in a single moment, everything changes.