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...

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.