The Show

PREVIOUS: Part 3 HERE.

Amidst an ocean of inky velvet darkness, the scarred and pitted silver globe of the moon loomed overhead above the teeming festering ordered chaos of the city. It was a Boschian vista of hell that sprawled beneath the nighttime sky, a monstrous forest of titanic spires and tower blocks, all imposing blackened stone and concrete punctuated only with obsidian glass that gleamed with an inky lustre from the outside. Some were still lit from within, their exteriors riddled with tiny scales of warm yellow and orange light, or cold white luminescence. More were dark pillars of grey and night, empty of any sign of life and ghostly in the gloom.

Beneath these titanic sepulchres to the heart and days long since faded, clustered around the lurid radiance of streetlamps and neon signs, there stood a vast throng of people, a living river that snaked down streets and hills, far past the boundaries of vision in either direction along its length. The line assimilated individuals from all walks of life, some native to the city itself, some from distant lands. All shared one thing in common - faith. Every one of them had travelled here in pilgrimage, for this night was a special occasion. Above the city among the kaleidoscope of stars scattered across the firmament, the planets were aligning, and that would allow this world to be visited by the gods.

There are many kinds of god that can be found across existence, and many are the forms they come in. Some are bound to single worlds, never to gain power outside their chosen realm. Some are incomprehensible in their scale, unfathomable eldritch leviathans that sprawl across realities and are as vast and terrible to mortals as a human might seem to a bacterium living in their pores. But between the two ends there could be found scattered across creation a form of divinity that transcended barriers and universes and lines of worship.

It was a band of these gods that were about to grace the city with their presence.

And so it was that The Blogger stood in that great stagnant mass of pilgrims, waiting to witness the arrival of the gods. He knew well the nature of these gods, for it was not too dissimilar to his own. They too were Storytellers, travelling across time and space and reality to forge something from nothing, to create new worlds and share them with any who would bear audience to them. If his suspicions were correct, then like him they did not so for any tangible reason, but simply out of instinct - stories and creation came naturally to them, and so they released them into the ether, radiating them as a star might radiate gamma waves. They laid their souls bare for all, for no other reason than the passion of creation.

The key difference however, was scale. A Storyteller he may be, but The Blogger was still only mortal, and limited in the scope of his creations. These gods acted on a level several orders of magnitude greater, and they wielded one of the most powerful forms of magic in existence. The forms of sorcery that existed in the world were perhaps even more numerous than the gods, and over many years The Blogger had learned and dabbled in almost all of them. But this one in particular was for the gods alone, as only they could safely channel it, crafting it into verse and melody. It was a power as ancient as time itself, and it constantly swept through every world and reality, echoing across eternity. It could move mountains, it could shape destinies and shatter realities and dimensions. It moved men to war and love. It spurred the beat of the heart and the rush of the wind. It permeated and weaved together everything that is, was and ever shall be, and there was no limit to what it could do in the hands of a skilled practitioner.

It was the essence of creation, emotion and magic in its purest, wildest form.

The Blogger would never forget the fateful night when he had finally understood this ancient unseen force, truly feeling for the first time what had always been there just outside perception. For every soul alive and dead this magic presented countless aspects, each one a different guise of the same energy. Some were well known, propagated throughout the land, while others had never been discovered, and lay silent waiting for someone to conceive of them. Yet for every soul - or at least, every soul The Blogger had yet encountered - there existed a facet of it that resonated with them on an intrinsic level, that reached every part of their being and invigorated them with energy, meaning and purpose. Some might go their whole lives without ever finding it, but any who did would know it instantly - for within it was a reflection of themselves.

And it was these myriad aspects that had given rise to the gods that The Blogger now awaited, an entire order of them with each devoted to a different face of that deep primal energy. The Blogger himself had attempted to harness a portion of it at times, using traces of it to scry and weave chance at a keyboard through long dark nights and carrying it on his words as he wandered along the winding paths that ran between worlds. But he only ever captured reflections of that magic, and he was very content to do so. He knew all too well that such power was never intended to be handled by mortals, and there was much danger in them doing so.

It was almost time now. The Blogger reached down into his bulky satchel and quested inside it. After some time he retrieved what he was looking for, an ornate sand-glass fashioned from ebony midnight and dire silver, adorned with scripture announcing death and darkened days to come. Upon its five-pronged stand were designs of loss and mourning, worked into the device far more precisely than any mortal hand or device could have managed. The grains held within it were pure gold, glittering in the night time gloom, but as they passed from the upper chamber they landed in the bottom one dull and grey as graphite. The Blogger frowned as he examined the sand-glass, for the upper chamber of it was less than half-full.

As he waited The Blogger reached out with his inner senses. Peculiar to The Blogger was his ability to see the invisible. He beheld not just the tangible world but the secret forces which drove and twisted it. The Blogger could feel the focus of a scene or sequence, see the setup and foreshadowing around him, and - if he listened very closely - he could hear the non-diegetic score that underpinned the universe.

There was a very distinctive sound to the background on this night, one The Blogger had heard before. He recognised it as a tense shrill chord, a sharp clear note held in the air like a sword of Damocles. The Blogger thought it was a string of some kind that made it, but he had never definitively narrowed down the instrument that produced it. Nonetheless it left the world charged and on edge, poised for the dramatic. The Blogger could also pick up a second sound in the score, a roiling electric riff that surged in the distance like a whirlwind on the horizon. The Blogger knew it as the sound of the guitar, and it rang with defiance and moody darkness, a burning cry to action against conformity and a call to the wild black shadows of years gone by.

Some way down the line, from beneath a dark grey camouflage-clad hood, a pair of eyes landed upon The Blogger, and recognised that he did not belong.

At last the time had come, and The Blogger shuffled into the dark hall where the gods were to hold audience. It was a cavernous square space, yet retained a cosy atmosphere that permeated from its wooden floor and humble catwalks. One side held a small bar, bathed in a warm orange radiance from the lights over it. More illumination came from the ceiling somewhere far above, though the roof itself was invisible within the gloom. Pilgrims piled into the space by the dozens, crowding the catwalks and swarming the main floor. Acolytes handed out refreshments from behind the bar to those who were willing to pay. The Blogger made way for the front of the hall, pressing through the masses to get as close to the stage at its head as he could.

The Blogger still remembered the first time he had witnessed a visit from the gods. He had gone one night into a complete unknown, walking into a crowded amphitheatre alongside one of his closest and dearest friends. It did not matter how little he knew of what was to transpire, for it was important to her and he would make sure she was safe as best he could. That night The Blogger had been awestruck at the power he witnessed. The magnitude of it was overwhelming, and it took over a day for him to fully recover.

It had been the highlight of that year for him.

Above the chamber, the planets completed their convergence... and all hell broke loose within. The front of the hall erupted into light and smoke, dazzling with all the furious radiance of a solar flare. But it was the staggering unstoppable sound that struck first and hardest. It started with a beat, a tremendous concussive THUMP that struck the room like a thunderclap, and continued to punctuate the air with explosive percussion. Less than a second after it hit home it was joined by the song of guitars and bass, melding into a ringing roaring howl that coiled and twisted like a serpent. The arcane forces unleashed surged from the ambience and rolled over the crowd like a hurricane and left the air itself charged with energy. There was no respite given by the eldritch thaumaturgy as it belted along in a recklessly fast rhythm, racing across the ether and into eternity.

At the epicentre of the spectacle, in the eye of the storm, there marched the gods themselves, a band of figures that radiated might and wielded the overwhelming magic with deftness and ease as if it were utterly intrinsic to them. At their head was a goddess wreathed in a halo of burning radiance, who commanded the sorcery with words of fire and lightning. Standing no more than a few paces from the front of the room, The Blogger was directly before display and marvelled at how close he was to divinity. His heart filled with honour that he might be so close to these master Storytellers who he had nought but admiration for.

And after what had seemed like far too short a time, the enchantment was finished - though it was but the first of many for the night - and for the slightest fraction of an instant silence fell over the hall. The overwhelming power of the magic had coursed through The Blogger and left him reeling. His hearing had gone as the arcane force sucked all sound out of space and left only a sonorous void in its wake. His limbs were drained. And yet The Blogger was utterly invigorated, brimming with energy from the spell. It flowed with the blood in his veins and saturated the breath in his lungs. Now he could face down anything. He could march to hell and back again. For the time being, he knew neither pain nor fear nor weakness.

And before the instant was through the silence was gone, chased from the face of the earth as the crowd of pilgrims let out as one a tremendous uproaring cheer, bellowing to the heavens cries of praise and reaffirmed allegiance. It was a deep primal base wave of voices that welled up and charged forth in answer to the challenge of the gods. The Blogger threw his voice into the mix, and was joyous to do so. Like all his people The Blogger was at once blessed and at twice cursed with a gift of volume, his voice almost never truly able to reach a level of softness that could be considered quiet. Heavy, emphatic and commanding as it was his voice was one of the only features of him that The Blogger did not abhor, and he considered it an exceptional treasure, but all to often it would betray him in crowded locations and places where subtlety was called for. Thus it was that he was often left feeling hunted and reviled for something he had little control over. That was what made this moment important.

For here was one of the only places he felt free to be loud. Here, in this moment, he was neither blunt and invasive nor voiceless. Here, in this moment, he was at once his own self, and at twice a complete equal.

And upon hearing the cheer the gods responded in kind, and returned the favour with another arcane maelstrom. Once more a great thunderous tempest of sound crashed into the audience, soaring and weaving as a great invisible dragon of music, punctuated by strobing bolts of brilliance that left the surface of reality seared. After the song was over and met with another roar of adulation, they began again. This was how it was to be for the rest of the night, the gods casting song after spell after song after spell. They let loose rousing enchantments that set blood ablaze and implored all who heard them to death and glory in defending what they cherished. They cast slow, sombre ballads of sorrow and contemplation that drew tears from stone and were as dark and beautiful and mysterious as the infinite depths of the night sky. The Blogger could not always discern one from the other, such was the immense magnitude of the staggering forces turned loose, but it mattered not one bit to him as he reveled in the power washing over him. And in those instances where he heard a glimpse of his favourites, and saw a facet of himself reflected in the awesome display before him and sensed the eldritch energy that resonated every molecule, he knew implicitly that ancient unspoken truth:

Music is magic, songs are spells.

After an eternity sealed in an evening, the show came to its final conclusion, and the gods took their final bow, cast down to the masses relics blessed by their hand, and withdrew back from whence they came. As the hall fell dark and quiet and the pilgrims began to pour out, The Blogger staggered out into the night with jubilant triumph. He reached into his satchel and retrieved a packet of M&Ms, celebratory chocolate of the highest order. The Blogger tore off the top of the sac-like packaging, opened the top and began to enjoy fistfuls of the crisp round delights as he started on the long journey home.

And as he walked, a figure shrouded in a dark grey camouflaged hoodie slipped through the shadows behind him in pursuit...

Late At Night

PREVIOUS: Part 2 HERE.

Darkness lingered and mustered in pools of shadow around the soft golden light that faintly illuminated the room and the stuttering icy radiance of the TV that perched above a wooden cabinet at the far end of the lounge. Behind their blinds the windows beheld nothing but the inky abyss of midnight. On a sturdy, ornate wooden couch with cushions of red velvet lay a half-empty plastic tray of crumbs and Toffee-Pops, all sweet chocolate, simple biscuit and smooth honeyed caramel. Just the kind of thing for late night TV watching, especially under the familiar aegis of a blanket. On a shelf stood a glass that had once contained deep red nectar, but had since been depleted (why was the drink always empty?). Somewhere in another room a clock ticked with the undying percussive march of a metronome, only audible when the noise from the TV allowed it to be. Flashing upon the brilliant screen was the weekly episode of Scrubs, or at least one of the two that played consecutively. The Blogger had only recently discovered the show for himself after hearing much about it, but while he had come to find great humour in the hospital staff's bizarre antics, at present he was lost in a maelstrom of dire thoughts and non-digetic background scores.

For it was late, and it was at late hours like these that The Blogger pondered most deeply.

At the moment there was only one thing that the swirling winter darkness of The Blogger's innermost self was focused on utterly, and that was Her. Of course it was, it was always Her. Ever since they had first crossed paths he had been incapable of escaping the memory of her that echoed across his dreams like starlight. Everything about her had been extraordinary, down to the very nature of their meeting, a story which The Blogger would not have imagined even himself capturing - to find what he had been looking for, yet what had always been maddeningly distant, just by a magnificent chance after all these years, right when he wasn't looking, and to then find her again not once but twice, after being separated by gulfs of centuries and worlds, by ways that were so thematically intrinsic to him... the entire narrative fit together with a level of intricacy found only in truly memorable works.

The Blogger was loosing his mind. He had witnessed titanic clashes, strange and terrible creatures, epic quests, valiant heroes, terrifying villains and countless thousands of worlds, and yet in all his travels and adventures he had never encountered anything like her. The first time he ever saw her she had looked at him in a way that no-one else ever had before in his existence. He doubted he would ever forget the sly hint of a cautious smile he swore he could see her wearing.

From the moment he first beheld her he sensed great might and some tremendous significance about her, but that was to be only the beginning, a mere glimpse at what was to come. As soon as he had crossed paths with her again he started to encounter the phenomenal power about her, an immense energy the likes of which he had never known. Simply being near her set his nerves on fire and made something ancient deep inside him sing. Feelings that normally took months or even years to gestate in him she had managed to ignite in mere hours, and they only grew exponentially from there. By the time The Blogger was most recently in her company it was as if every molecule in his being was magnetised towards her, an unstoppable pull as irresistible as gravity, and it was all he could to to preserve him from taking flight then and there. For days afterwards he was unable to do almost anything other than sit and think of her, and his waking dreams were utterly consumed by visions of them together. when he was around her the music that permeated the universe swelled to a roaring crescendo until it was deafening.

And when she smiled at him, something ancient and deep inside him soared.

In just the short while he had known her The Blogger already knew she was an incredible person. In talking with her he had seen a person who was clever, wise, independent, kind, witty, and a litany of other attributes that could fill a book with their praises. He listened to her as she spoke of the daring adventures and arduous trials of her youth and marvelled at her elan and prowess. And in her he saw, perhaps, himself - the best aspects that he had (or thought he might have, at any rate), reflected and exemplified. He saw the kindred spirit he had always longed for, and he yearned to venture with her on all manner of mighty quests and adventures - for there was no doubt that she would be the finest of allies to fight by his side.

But perhaps what was most astonishing of all was how The Blogger responded to such forces. For almost an eternity now The Blogger had, in the end, been a broken soul, Long ago he had been trapped in the most agonising reaches of Hell, which had reduced him to a tortured, feral state from which he had never really fully recovered. While he had certainly made progress in restoring his humanity, he still often found great difficulty in engaging with... well, almost anyone really. This was not helped by his unique ways, values and methods, which only further distanced him from most others. But there was none of that with her. He did not know why, but whenever she was near him things were suddenly simple. There were no doubts, no hesitance, no overthinking. It was as if the sun shone through him and everything was suddenly clear, and despite being simultaneously reduced to a wrecked mass of fried nerves and exoneration The Blogger found he was more coherent, confident and calm than he had felt in aeons. He was more comfortable around her than he had ever really known with anyone in living memory. There was no fear, no horror, just two souls connecting over common ground and enjoying themselves.

Yet none of these things was deliberate on the part of The Blogger. All the reactions, all the thoughts, all of the feelings were happening entirely outside of his control. They were as immediate and automatic as the fusion in a star.

And it was this that horrified The Blogger most of all. From virtually the start of his sad, sorry history of relations romantic in nature he had been told several consistent messages from the wider world, and not least among them was the rightful order of how such feelings should come about - as a gradual process formed by great stretches of repeated contact with the object of one's affections. To form anything even resembling those infamous four letters and the nuclear reaction they caused when properly arranged after anything less than a full rotation around the sun was unnatural and wrong. Given his current predicament, The Blogger could reach only one logical conclusion - that he was truly even more of an abomination than even he had imagined, a wretched cancer and diseased failure for harbouring such weakness. After all, to the best of his knowledge none of the lasting couples he had known had arisen from such circumstances.

Not that it mattered now, of course. Before he was able to tell her anything of how he really felt it had ended the way it always did with The Blogger - she had said she lacked the time for anything of the sort. He could not think of any reason she might have to lie, but it would be far from the first time such a justification had been used as a pretext for unrequited feelings. Either way it left him with a strange and troubling mystery, for it had come entirely without warning or omen - until the dire message came she had shown what seemed to be nothing but interest in him, conveyed in nearly everything from what she said to how she acted. According to all he knew, every sign pointed towards a positive end, and he had taken tremendous pains to do as much right as he could. He had been certain that at long last he had found someone who might understand him, who might actually want him for what he was (perhaps that was his great mistake), and every indication he had seen had led the same way. Of course, The Blogger was no stranger to such things misleading him - indeed, as he had been sure to remind himself for years now, no matter how sure he was that he was right, he was still wrong. He was always wrong.

But then he had heard of a similar happening, and another possibility had occurred to him.He recalled how people could sometimes be afraid, and wondered if perhaps that might have happened here. Maybe when she had more time free he would see more of her. And that was the most damming agony of all, not knowing. Maybe she did like him, maybe she didn't. Maybe he would see her again, maybe she had already been swept away by someone else. Maybe he was wrong, maybe he was right. Maybe she was just frightened, maybe he had read everything wrong. It was this black, nightmarish, venomous splinter in his mind that was driving him ever further towards total insanity: maybe.

Maybe Maybe Maybe Maybe...

It was late now, very late. Infomercials played on the TV, before The Blogger silenced them. The plastic tray was now empty.

At once, the clock ceased, and the noise went out.

NEXT: Part 4 HERE.

What Happened The Other Week On A Walk

PREVIOUS: Part 1 HERE.


The afternoon sun raged and stormed as it drifted down towards the horizon, leisurely inching over hours down to earth. As it drifted across the heavens the world below was blanketed in a warm golden-amber light, which painted the surrounding scenery in friendly, saturated tones of colour. This left the environment reminiscent of long summer afternoons, ice cream from corner stores, childhood memories and better days long past.

Meadows of Heaven.

It was Autumn now, and so despite the glowing warmth of the sunlight the air was permeated with a sharp growing cold, driven at times by a chilling wind that scattered leaves the colours of fire and blood across the forlorn grey footpath, past lines of shops with quaint, comely storefronts lined with chained nests of flowers. There was something tragically reassuring about the sight of those flower-nests, suspended from the overhanging roofs like spiders on silk, for they only ever seemed to grow away from the relentless grind of existence, in places that seemed possessed of charm and authenticity, grass-roots places that grew out from the wild expanse of the beyond. Where the grass grew green and the trees yielded to the untamed wind beneath the unbound skies of sea grey or robin red, where the roads stretched ever onward away from the great hives of humanity, where homes grew small and quiet and intimate, there they flourished in front of humble shops with genuine signs that sang with the hum of drink cabinets and smelled of hot frying batters to steel the soul against the cold night.

It was in places like these that he could hear the strings and the pipes and the hurdy-gurdy at the end of the world.

Along this path of sun and cold and memory walked The Blogger, relentlessly striding forward as wandered along the footpath. Behind him was the sea and before him was the road to the city. And beyond that lay the endless all-encompassing insane web of the universe. Though initially a mundane activity purely done out of practical need - for there was little other choice for transportation - The Blogger had long begun to discover that walking held a substantially more intrinsically endemic aspect for himself. As he walked across the wilderness of the world and the wilderness of humanity, he found his mind began to collate and organise itself far more sharply. visions, revelations, ideas and dreams all began to tessellate, fitting together like pieces of a mechanical puzzle. In an hours' walk he could plan an entire campaign, explore whole worlds, craft every turn of a sprawling epic or map out the dire, looming sword of Damocles that was the future.

As he roamed along his adventure, The Blogger began to become unstuck in time and space. As a storyteller he was able to traverse the boundaries between worlds and universes, amongst other strange gifts. There were limits of course - to cross over between worlds was no small matter, despite how easy it might appear, and to do it required finding a suitable crossing point, but The Blogger always seemed to find them in abundance on such walks as he roamed the endless infinity both within and without. Once an appropriate point was reached, and if the individual was gifted (or cursed, from another point of view) in the right way, crossing over seemed and felt as simple as entering a dream; there was no memory of how you got there, or what had come before, and yet you somehow instinctively knew that this was where you were meant to be, and what needed to come next. At one moment you were stepping in one place.

And the next moment you were stepping somewhere else entirely.

The Blogger wandered across all manner of places among the yawning abyss of eternity. He walked across past, present and future. He strode through the battlefields of old, when he had commanded vast armies in titanic clashes against all manner of horrors. Demons, machines, invaders from beyond this earth, all had perished in defeat by his hand. He had led his legions to victory after victory, and the cheers of triumph still roared in his ears. He saw his warriors, comrades and friends hurl themselves forwards to certain death, and emerge from the other side. He saw himself direct them in fiendish defences he had planned against which unstoppable waves had dashed themselves over and over until the sun finally rose. As he went he would at times make slight adjustments to things - shifting a person here, moving a bullet there - so that they were more as he remembered them. It felt like the right thing to do. And throughout it all he saw these people, the mightiest of his warriors, fighting through fire and fury and Armageddon, all because they believed in him.

He broke apart inside knowing where that had led.

The Blogger walked through the foundries of today, where empires were built, where events were crafted and from which all potential outcomes stemmed. He witnessed the ignition of things to come, the first flickering chances that would set into motion tremendous calamities. He pierced the veil and saw around the corner to the production of his own escapades - nightmarish horrors to face, darkened days to come, moments in time where cataclysmic forces would pivot on his actions, the rage and agony of gods, a young woman in a jacket with a taste for music. He saw the formation of endless new worlds to explore, and the plots that would unfurl on them. He walked past memories of joy and pain. He walked into dreams where he adventured and sat laughed and wandered in infinite utter bliss with the brightest star in the night sky.

With Her.

And the Blogger walked towards the empty darkness of tomorrow. He beheld the incomprehensibly vast all-consuming gaping maw of the future, devouring everything that inevitably reached it. He saw the end of time and crumbling towers. He saw the withering of comfort and felt the sand inside his hourglass trickling into nothingness. He saw himself die, over and over and over again - murder, disease, mercy at the end of his time, the quest from which he would never return. He saw through scrying how he would one day come to be no more than an empty shell, drifting through motions until he could finally rest forever, and how the others would be left - at once in pain, at twice with the indifference of never having known of him. He saw this and a thousand other myriad possible futures, and the bright ones were few and far between.

The Blogger walked through flames and darkness. He walked in the void between stars, and the shadows behind the universe. He walked through love and death, darkness and light, and emerged at a quiet suburban street corner, with trees lining the footpath.

At the end of the horizon, lost among the sands of an ancient forgotten desert stood the store that was The Blogger's current destination. In truth this was not the full building, but rather the one aspect of it that was closest to The Blogger at the time. The shop itself had fronts in multiple dimensions, situated as it was upon a nexus between realities, very hard to reach - which was only fitting given its name. It was a whimsical place, a simple looking two-story building of painted wood with a front door at the bottom flanked by two wide windows. Inside there was a small counter cornered in by the towering shelves and piles of books that filled the remainder of its interior.

As he entered the Blogger was greeted by a tall, slender young lady with an expression that was at once both kind and wise, with the hint of secret knowledge. Her hair was short and light, a contrast to the night-black nails that tipped her fingers and the dark loose-fitting garments she wore draped between a white shirt and a grey scarf. The Blogger did not recognise her, and could only assume that she must be new to the staff, but he already liked her - she radiated dark metal, black magic and arcane wisdom. Only the total delectability of Berry and Biscuit Whittaker's was missing. The Blogger had long since learnt that there was nothing that could not be made better with Berry and Biscuit Whittaker's.

After leaving his bag with the counter, The Blogger travelled up a forlorn wooden staircase to the shop's upper floor. It was this part that he usually had the most interest in during his visits to the store, for it was here that the items most valuable to him were contained. As a storyteller, The Blogger maintained a keen interest in strange and ancient knowledge, and had over the ages amassed a sizeable collection of dark grimoires and eldritch tomes of forbidden lore. Stored safely in secret caches and repositories among The Blogger's many places of refuge that were scattered across existence, these mystic volumes held immense power - True Names, the dark arts of scrying and necromancy, spellcraft and words of power, rituals for summoning and binding any manner of creature, forgotten languages, guerilla warfare, sigils of warding, astral projection, thaumaturgy, the very deepest workings of reality and much, much more were all able to be unlocked from them. This arsenal was vast, but The Blogger was always looking to add to it, either to prevent such items from falling into the wrong hands, or to use for his own purposes. To this end The Blogger would visit the shop from time to time, for all books passed through it sooner or later and it would often accumulate such tomes of eldritch lore. What The Blogger was about to find, however, was beyond what he would ever anticipate.

He felt it more than he saw it, at first. It lay buried behind a pile of other publications in a large cardboard box, so that only the barest hint of colour peeked through to the light of day. It was just a tiny sliver of deep moss green and rich blood red, but to one with second sight like The Blogger it was more than enough to identify its true form. In the recesses of the box, where shadows pooled, its colours glowed in the darkness, the radiance pulsing at the pace of a fading heart. Light touching the upper parts seemed to prism as if through stained glass, and if The Blogger focused enough on it, with his hearing attuned as it was to non-diegetic sounds inaudible to most, he could faintly hear music coming from it. It sounded distant, but unmistakably loud, dramatic and dark. And he sensed a presence that he had not felt since...

The Blogger swiftly flicked through what lay in front of it, dexterously parting the many publications that were lined out upright, and pried it out for a closer examination. It was a bound volume, roughly A4 in size. He felt its cover, hard and glossy and cold to the touch, dark red and ivory green, with thorned roses and fallen angels, with a woman in leather and a peek-a-boo, skulls adorning her clothing and tears trailing in anguish across her face. It resonated dark rock and old Vampire gamebooks. It was pure crystallised underground 90s. He turned it over in his hands. The back was entirely in shades of blood and horror, patterned in yet more roses. On the spine was an etched sigil, a stylised eye crying three tears. Below that was the volume's title, concerning none other than the Devil, and something of crucial importance to it. He looked over at the blurb. Below it was etched in scratchy lettering a publisher, the name of a star. The Blogger keenly scanned the blurb's text. It was a codex of life roles, angels and demons, goddesses and New York. Now for the real test. He turned the volume over and opened it. Immediately inside were chains and more crimson flowers, beneath a macabre drawing and an inscription - EVERY TIME I DIED I THOUGHT OF YOU. The Blogger could not help but relate to that statement. As he flicked further through the volume, the non-digetic score that permeated the world soared, and he beheld a fantastically bizarre world - light, darkness, magic and beauty (though with some perhaps regrettable costume choices). He knew now that what he was holding was ancient, and very, very powerful.

The Blogger collected his bag and left the shop with haste. He travelled back homewards and made all speed to all the information centres that he knew of. He arrived at vast gleaming silver archives, decrepit dust-filled crypts, colossal shining temples and incomprehensible libraries, and scoured every one of them for any information there might be about this mysterious volume. To his pleasant surprise he did not need to search far, and began to learn more about it. He learnt that it was not the only one of its kind - there were at least two other companion volumes, which themselves were derived from earlier writings, as well as numerous related artefacts floating within the ether. He also learnt more about what was contained within - secrets to planar travel, summoning gods, the cycle of life and death, and the nature of heaven and hell.


Clearly, The Blogger thought, this volume could be of some use...

NEXT: Part 3 HERE.

Among The Ruins

Bubbles drifted in the massive thick glass of ice-chilled, frosty, foaming liquid, rising up in sporadic twos and fives and dozens to break free to the surface and burst in minute pops that tickled the lip and gave an ambient cool moisture to that space that existed between the surface of the drink and the top of the glass, like a raging sea on a winter's evening, cold and harsh but nonetheless with a forlorn and wild beauty to its crisp purity. As they ran upwards in the drink, so too did drops of condensation run down the outer edge of the glass to pool on the coaster below in a swollen moat over the quaint little painting that rested below the glass. The Blogger looked down into the refreshing sea of colour and faint pleasant fruity aroma, lost as he often was in deep contemplation somewhere far, far away...

"You know, some folks might find it strange to go to a bar and order a non-alcoholic drink," Commented a bargoer next to him, "This must be the only place for how long that serves that stuff?"

"It's Chi," said The Blogger, "And the next place isn't for... a long, long way actually."

A long, long way was a drastic understatement. The Blogger had yet to find another venue in this entire plane of existence that sold Chi. But then you only needed one...

"Well, I guess you're lucky to have this place then." the bargoer replied.

"Yes... lucky. Let's... let's go with that."

There were things that were common in The Blogger's life, but luck was not one of them. For the last few years he had been lost in a brutal gruelling quagmire from which there had been no escape. He had been led there under false pretences, told that it would be a time of magic and fun, the best years of his life. He had been told he would find countless other like-minded people there, that it would be something he remembered forever... but it was all a lie. The truth was, as he had always known, that the sun had set on the best years of his life some time ago, and they would forever be confined to the dark dust-filled crypt of history where they had now lain for decades. Where he really belonged. And so when he had set out for this new chapter he instead found a merciless regime of isolation and misery, where not a day went past where he was not told repeatedly that he was wrong, where souls that truly understood him were fleeting and where the one real friend he could say he made was driven out by the same relentless grind that had worn him down to the bone.

"You don't sound very convinced." said the bargoer.

"I take it then you've watched The Simpsons before," The Blogger said, "I don't think I'd call anyone who went through what I just did lucky."

"Who hasn't seen The Simpsons? The real trick is picking up the conventions," the bargoer remarked, toying with a glazed cherry in her mouth, "So what happened to you then? You make it sound like you just literally went through hell."

"You'd be surprised," The Blogger said before taking another gulp of Chi, "But in fairness it's probably not as bad as I'm making it out to be. I guess the real problem was a conflict of natures."

"What do you mean?"

"Well I suppose one way of looking at it is like water and fire. On the one hand you have water, a big blob of hydrogen and oxygen compound molecules in a liquid state. It has structure, order, even if it's not readily apparent on the surface. It's clean, cold, logical, it flows naturally from one point to the next in a steady orderly stream. It gives life and sustenance, and can be useful for other things as well, but it will drown you if you give it the chance."

"Right, OK, I'm with you so far."

"Now, on the other hand," The Blogger continued, "You have fire - pure energy. Fire is the opposite of water, it doesn't have mass or any real structure, it's just heat and light, just energy. It's chaotic, wild, irrational, it burns out in any direction it can with no real order. People aren't often as fond of fire as they are water, after all fire is dangerous. It's destructive and it burns you if you try to touch it-"

"But it also gives warmth and light," the bargoer said.

"Exactly. It also does some other good stuff, like give inspiration for stories and whatnot, but you get the idea. Where I've been for the last three years, that was water, but I'm fire. Now really the universe needs both water and fire in it to work well, but if you put the two together, they destroy each other. Metaphorically speaking of course."

"So if I get you right, what you're saying is that this place was, like, the opposite of who you are?"

"Pretty much. Hey what's your name anywhich?"

"It's Sharon."

"Well Sharon," The Blogger said, "You don't know me very well, but I'm pretty far from a rational person. I'm sensitive, I'm erratic, I imagine a lot, I'm a dreamer. What I'm saying is I generally feel rather than think. But that place wanted people to think rather than feel. One time I will never forget, we're all sitting down in the room, and the instructor is explaining what we have to do. And this one guy, making sure he's understood right, comes up and says 'argue don't preach', which turned out to be spot on. But the trouble is, I can't argue without preaching. I am a preacher. That is what I do, that's how I convey things. I am incapable of not preaching when I argue something, because I'm an inherently emotional person, so I naturally appeal to other people's feelings. That's just how I make a case. It's part of who I am."

"Geez, that must be rough," said Sharon, "I bet you must get a lot of assholes telling you you're gay or to grow a pair or man up or stop being a crybaby or something."

"You have no idea," said The Blogger, "This other time they told us that with this one assignment where we had to write this giant essay that they wanted to see how we thought, how our minds worked. Which was all well and good, except that an accurate depiction of how my brain works would nor be an essay. It wouldn't even be remotely like an essay. If you wanted to see how my thought process looked, you'd get a short story, maybe two characters sitting down and having a conversation about the subject, like this one we're having right now, or maybe you'd get a little etched cartoon with crudely drawn parrot caricatures, or literally anything except a fucking essay. Because I just don't work that way, that's not how I think."

"Ouch."

"You can say that again. Every time I had to write one I'd basically end up spending all day, if not all week, banging my head against the keyboard trying to get enough words out. If it had been X amount of dialogue between some characters, I'd have nailed it effortlessly, it'd be hard to stop at just the maximum wordcount. But as an essay? Needing respected sources? It was torture just to get to half the required wordcount."

"Damn. Was there any upside to it?"

The Blogger thought about this. He thought about the good things from the last three years - few though they were. He recalled his friend from there, the gamer who battled demons and approached him when it seemed that no-one else would, who held an inner fire and ferocity that could turn aside any antagonist that beset her and who he was sure would do great things in this life. He recalled charging across the night, riding over hill and dale to the aid of a beleaguered ally in need of support, just like the heroes of old. Once he had a dream, and on a scant handful of days on the third year, while it never truly came to pass he did at least come to hold a glimpse of it from the other side of slumber. And then there was Her - Eyes that held heaven and the future, and a smile like sunlight...

"There were a couple, but not many," said The Blogger.

"Well at least it wasn't a total waste then."

"I suppose. The worst part of all though, even more than all the other stuff, is the... the.. the block I have around it. I don't know why, but for some unfathomable reason I can never seem to be able to articulate what was wrong there. I try to, but whenever I do something suddenly locks up and I can't find a way to put it into words or say it in a way that doesn't make me sound totally insane, so then when I try to people just don't seem to get it and I end up looking like I'm mad."

"It's OK," Sharon said, "We're all mad here."

"... I like you," said the Blogger, before taking another gulp of refreshingly fruity Chi.

"So, lemme guess," Sharon said, narrowing in on The Blogger with her eyes as she sought to read him, "You're some kind of writer right? Like a blog or something?"

Deep inside, The Blogger crumbled. He remembered when he had first started writing the blog, in a long bygone age of revolution and beginnings. He remembered the drive he had, the ambitious dreams to turn it into a rallying point and meeting place of discussion and fun, the bold new regime he would build to turn it into something great, something that would be looked on fondly by all. He had been entrusted with the blog in its infancy, and he would make it into his own corner of the internet, where everyone could share in his ideas and where he could reach out to those he rarely could otherwise. But like all revolutions it ended all too soon in tatters. The relentless grind of the last three years had grown worse and worse, and eventually he had been forced to sacrifice almost everything in order to survive. He always meant to come back and update the blog, every other week or so he would be possessed of an idea for a brilliant blog post, but there was always one more assignment, one more problem, one more thing to do, and so he had to let it fall by the wayside. When he finally had time again, it was too late, and he found all that remained of it were faded ruins, visited only by what he presumed was the occasional porn robot.

The Blogger took a deep sip of his Chi, letting the herbal goodness and subtle flavours of kiwifruit and honey wash through him. "I had a blog once," He said, "A long, long time ago. It was for this group of friends. I was supposed to talk about books on it, but I ended up posting other stuff instead. I suppose that was a bad omen of what was to come. The last three years I had to cut out a lot to get through, and that included the blog. I've been getting everything else back up and running again, but that still hasn't left much time for it. I feel awful about not getting around to it you know. I feel like all these people I care about were counting on me, especially the ones that gave it to me in the first place. The main reason they did was because I had more time for it than they did, but since I couldn't find time for it anymore, I feel like I've let them down."

"You should update it," said Sharon, "Go back to it and give it a reboot. You could start with a crazy story or something."

"Maybe I will Sharon," The Blogger said, "Maybe I will. Enough crazy stuff has happened for me to write on it for a while."

"Oh yeah?" asked Sharon, "Like what? Now you've got to tell me more."

"Well," said The Blogger before finishing his glass of Chi, "I've got some time before the person I'm waiting for gets here. Tell you what, you get me another Chi, and I'll tell you what happened the other week when I was out for a walk."

"Getting a woman to buy you drinks? My my sir, what kind of man are you."

"The kind that believes in gender equality and that either of two mature adults can provide for the other. I'd offer to get you something as well, but that could be taken the wrong way and I'm assuming you're not really looking for that kind of thing with me."

Sharon nodded in consideration, and after a moment's conversation another glass of delicious Chi made its way to The Blogger...

NEXT: Part 2 HERE.