In the end the specifics hardly matter. When the world folds in on itself, when gods die, when society falls, when all is not as it once was, the details get lost in the chaos.
Some may find comfort in that.
Polu does not.
Typically being called before the Mazzius council denotes the beginning of the inglorious end of a mages career which is generally followed by public fallout and the complete loss of said mages reputation. They would be lucky to find work in greater Folu much less Mazz its self.
Luckily for Polu he would not be losing his career today. Since the great folding, where the world began to turn in on itself, it didn't matter much how the public thought of you or your magical reputation since, in just a few weeks by most scientist estimations, there wouldn't be a world remaining.
Unsurprisingly, this thought wasn't much comfort to Polu. He wasn't necessarily a people person but he was fond of the world, afterall he did live on it. Add on the fact that, since the great folding, the Mazzius council has been largely silent on the state of the world, it can be understandably nerveracking to be the only mage called upon by the council.
Polu paces back and forth in-front of the councils chambers drawing the gaze of the two guards standing at either side of the door. He turns on his heel once reaching the bounds of the waiting room and fiddles nervously with a hangnail. This irritates the skin of his forefinger which he rubs incessantly against the hangnail making it looser and looser but never fully falling off.
He would bite it off just to be done with it, but he can't. Well, physically he could, but that habit was whipped out of him by his parents. Biting your nails, he was told, was unhygienic. Besides, biting your nails until they bled was hardly a healthy habit.
"Can you calm down," one of the guards asks. "You’re making me anxious."
"Yeah, calm down man. It's not like the world is ending." The two share a deep laugh that echoes off the walls of the marble chamber.
Polu does not share in their amusement, continuing to pace across the chamber until, eventually, a page pokes her head through the door to signal that the council is ready. Polu stops and turns to the doorway, repeatably wiping the sweat that has gathered on his palms against his trousers before walking through the doorway.
Stepping into the Mazzius councils chamber, a harsh chill overcomes Polu. It snaps the hairs on his arms to attention and creates a prickly feeling along the back of his neck as he nervously shuffles toward the council.
The council is made up of five highly respected mages, each seated behind a large connected desk fashioned in a semi-circle so that they can all gaze upon the unlucky prospect before them. They are five as to ensure no ties when it comes to voting on important matters such as laws governing how magic is utilized in a civilian and industrial capacity, as well as the excommunication of delinquent mages.
They sit as follows. The eldest, and most respected mage, at the center of the desk with the second and third most decorated at his sides. The youngest and therefore the newest members of the council sit on the edges.
Those on the council are appointed for life, and are expected to serve until they are no longer capable and once one leaves the others shift to fill in the space left behind. There would be no surprise indoctrination to the council for Polu as he walks towards the desk to see, unfortunately, every seat filled.
Despite the ever present talent among young mages within Mazz, the council has, and probably always will be, filled with geriatrics. This was a hotly debated topic at the time in Mazz, since with magic being ever evolving and therefore ever changing, the flexibility of young minds seem indispensable assets to a governing body such as the council. However, like minded people tend to share familiar company, so once one council member dies or surrenders their spot, another, likely older mage, is sure to take their place.
When Polu steps to the center of the desk, to be seen at all sides by the council, he cannot help be become hyper aware of the eyes. They hang halfway open under wrinkled skin but their presence is palpable. They do not only measure your appearance but also your aptitude. One must have some prominent level of magic to be seen by the council in the first place and despite Polus current wariness, he is not incompetent. A truth he would soon have to reckon with.
Ten eyes bore through him, a faint glow emitting from the iris’ of the council members, before the eldest, Marrigon, begins the session.
“Mage Polu Ozumand,” she begins, looking from Polu down to a jumble of papers, her glow disappearing. “Do you know why you have been summoned before us?”
Does he know? Well of course not. No one expects to ever stand before the desk like Polu now. Even less so does nobody want to be summoned at all. Yet when asked a question, you are to answer.
Polu swallows the lump in his throat before speaking. “I am not sure ma’am. Have I done something wrong?”
Marrigon gathers up her mass of papers and, giving up on the idea of ordering them in any specific way, shuffles them into one orderly pile. “I don’t know? Did you cause the world to begin folding in on its self?” Polu stands stunned by the question, unsure how to respond. “Relax kid. It was a joke. The real reason you are here is, well, it’s a special purpose. Something we can’t lightly discuss, do you understand?”
Polu cautiously glances about the room meeting the eyes of each individual council member. “I’m not quite sure I catch your meaning ma’am.”
“Good, it would be a problem if you did. Do you know why the world started to eat itself?” Marrigon asks, leaning over her pile of paper knocking them askew from their perfectly aligned stack to get a better look at Polu.
“No, I do not. I have heard what people have been saying on the streets though, it’s the end of the world. God has abandoned us. That sort of thing.”
“Well they are not entirely wrong about the God thing. Not that they abandoned us, no, we are not even sure that sort of thing is possible.” The rest of the council murmurer in agreement. Polu is struck by this since, until five minutes ago before he walked into the chamber, the validity of God was still up for debate in most circles. Marrigon continues, “we think, and by we I want to stress I do not mean just the Mazzius council but the broader leadership of the greater kingdoms of Folu, believe that God has died.” She pauses. “I see this comes as a surprise to you. Did you not believe in a higher power?”
The words come out of Polu in a quick succession of stammers. “I, well, I haven’t ever really gotten around to making up my mind on the whole God thing.”
“Well, there is no need to worry about it any longer. He, or She, or maybe It? Honestly no one has come to a conclusion on what or who this being is. What we do know is that there are consistent reports of someone falling from the sky in the middle of small town on the outskirts of Skorla. The area surrounding the zone of impact began to rapidly decay, followed by a great hole opening up, and warping the ground and buildings to flow down the sides of the hole. After two hours the whole of Skorla was consumed and caught in its reality warping effects. Now it has consumed at total of fifteen percent of the continent of Folu. We have sent people across the threshold and have observed that they are able to walk along the warped ground as if gravity suddenly changed directions. Unfortunately they have been unable to cross back through. Also, we have observed that time for those inside the threshold seems to flow at a slower rate compared to us outside of it. All of this to say, Mr. Ozumand, is that we have chosen you to take a part in an expedition of sorts. One involving you, and an representative from Lypus, Kathan, and Vollen. You will be escorting precious cargo to the epicenter where we believe the body to be located. Do you have any questions? You have a concerning look on your face.”
Polu realizes at this point that he has been staring at Marrigon with his jaw slightly agape. He makes the conscious decision to close his mouth before looking about the room to each council member. “I hope you can excuse me but you have to understand how this sounds. I mean, you want me to find the dead body of God?”
“Precisely.”
“This is too much to take in right now.” Polu says, pacing now across the length of chamber, repeatedly running his hands through his hair.
“Do not worry, Mr. Ozumand. Your reaction is not unique. We all were in a similar state when we had first learned of the situation. Nevertheless, these are the cards that we were dealt.”
One of the younger council members, Bolinthop, leans over to whisper behind papery hands to their neighbor, Rezzi. “This can not be the candidate we send.”
“Like it or not he’s going. Neither of us have a choice in the matter, including him.” The two pull away from each other to continue observing Polus nervous antics.
Each lap Polu completes causes him to move faster than the previous, where he started at a somewhat leisurely pace he now walks with fear on his heels. “I don’t get it. I just don’t get any of this.” Polu says, more to himself than anyone else. “First God dies. Which if that wasn’t strange enough he decided to take the world with it! Why make something only to destroy it when your gone? Why make it in the first place? How does a God even die?! Now they want me to go look for it. They must’ve gone insane. Yes that’s it, insane. Why else would they lock themselves away all this time. They’ve gone insane and I’m the unlucky sod who got swept into their delusions.”
“Mr. Ozumand,” Marrigon says, piercing through Polus spiraling psyche. “While the world may be ending I trust you understand that a certain level of decorum is to be maintained.”
“Decorum? Do you hear yourself?”
“Mr. Ozumand, I know this is a lot. Trust me, had there been a easier way to communicate this, we would’ve done so. Unfortunately, however, we must work with what we got. That includes you as well.”
“But why,” Polu is unable to finish the thought before Marrigon cuts him off.
“Why you? Well it’s fairly simple. When your party makes it to the epicenter and you find the body, someone, we assume, will need to take it’s place. This extreme amount of power is literally corrupting the land while searching for a new host. If, for whatever reason, your cargo in incapable or otherwise unable to take it on then we would like you to do so in it’s place.”
“But why?”
“Because, and I hope you do not take this the wrong way, we believe that out of all the citizens of Mazz, you would be least threatening when presented with inordinate power.” Polu is unsure if that can be taken as a compliment.
“You keep saying ‘cargo’. What do you mean by that?”
The council share hesitant glances between each other. “You will be escorting a child.”
“A child! Didn’t you just say the land is being corrupted and you want to send a child into it!”
“This was a decision that was highly debated between the kingdoms of greater Folu. We believe that a child would be the best choice for a vessel. Innocent, free of prejudice and preconceived bias.”
“Won’t it be dangerous for them?”
“Likely, yes. There are reports from those we sent past the threshold of certain,” Marrigon pauses trying to find the best word to describe them, “things that have been affected by the spreading corruption. It will be a dangerous journey for all of you.”
“You’ve been saying all of this like I don’t have a choice in the matter.”
“That is because you do not, Mr. Ozumand. We have done our research on you, we know that you would be our safest choice of candidate to send past the threshold and again, like it or not, you are going. We would rather you would do so willingly but we have no issue calling in the guards to put you in manacles and throw you in ourselves. I hope you do not force our hand in this decision.”
Polu stands stunned in the center of the council. The world is ending and he is to go to it’s center. Like a hero in a fairytale, or a victim of a nightmare. Polu rubs his palms together before addressing the council. “When do I leave?”
“Tomorrow. We will allow you the day to gather what you need. I trust you have your own spellcasting focus to bring with you?” Polu nods. “Good, we will provide you rations, a bed roll, and some other amenities that may help you on your journey to the epicenter. You will board a carriage in the early morning which will take you to your meeting place with the rest of your party. Are there any questions?”
There are, as Polu said earlier, millions however, none that would hold any value in the moment. Polu sighs, runs his hands through his hair once more, and says, “no.”
“Good. Get some rest, say your good-byes and ready yourself for the morning. This meeting is adjourned.” The council members each stand from the chairs and walk to door at the back of the room
Polu stands alone for a time before something in his mind tells his to get moving. He turns to walk through the doors back to the marble waiting room. One of the guards makes a comment to the other.
“He doesn’t look good.” The first observes.
“Yeah, I wonder what they told him in there.”
“They told me to find God.” Polu answers.
That receives a laugh from the two guards. “That’s a good one!” One of them says catching their breath between words.
Polu continues walking leaving the two guards to joke among themselves and debates internally on the validity of becoming religious
When I was first diagnosed with diabetes my nutritionist emphasized that I needed to get on a regular schedule. She was like I don’t care when you eat, I care that you’re doing it predictably.
And yeah the regular eating schedule has been good for my overall health I’ll admit that but I do kind of feel like a toddler when I don’t get my applesauce.
“It's not fair.” The little ghost kicks impotently at the chalk lines around her feet. “I ain't done nothing.”
I nod, setting down my chalk and spellbook. “It does sound like there might have been a bit of a misunderstanding.”
“She took against me, that's what happened,” the dead girl says with a scowl. She looks about fourteen, round faced and spotty, with whisps of brown hair peaking out from under her mob-cap. Her face and her crossed arms have a tell-tale bluish tinge to them. A cholera death.
“I been here for don't know how long and never gave any trouble. Nobody ever complained about me 'till her.”
…well, that's not strictly true.
Number 12, Barclay Street has been attracting rumours of haunting since the mid nineteenth century.
Sounds of faint singing and crying in the corridors at night. Cold spots. Doors that open and close by themselves. Animals acting strangely. Harmless, mid to low-level stuff, typical for a bored teenage poltergeist.
Still, pointing that out isn't likely to achieve much, and certainly the most recent complaints of blood running down the walls, screams in the dark and paralysing night terrors seem distinctly out of character.
The ghost toes the chalk again, more tentatively this time. It stays resolutely unbroken.
She could get out if she wanted to. I'm not one of those assholes who brings out their full arsenal of wards and sigils for a first meeting with a level 2 spectre. The summoning circle will keep her in one place for as long as I need her to talk, but it wouldn't hold for a moment if she really fought against it.
I take it as a good sign that she's still here. Pouting or not, she's clearly willing to work with me.
“None of the others could do this,” she says. “None of 'em even saw me.” She looks up. “Are you here to exise me?”
“Exorcise,” I say instinctively, and curse myself when she flinches. “Sorry, no, no! I don't exorcise people from their homes without good reason, not if they're happy where they are.”
“I was happy. Till she started calling in all them ghost hunters.”
Mrs Delaney had been quite persistent in her attempts to 'fix' her haunted house. Most of the people she found were charlatans, of course, but I'd still arranged an appointment as fast as I could once word reached me. It wouldn't have been long before she happened upon somebody with Talent, and unfortunately not everybody in this field knows how to behave like a professional.
“I think we might be able to help each other,” I say, careful to keep my voice calm and level.
“Don't see how. Not unless you can exorcise Her.”
“Not quite what I had in mind.” I pull out my phone and scroll through my photos. “You say that you're not the cause of the most recent incidents of paranormal activity?”
A pause. The ghost gnaws on her lip. I wait, patiently, keeping my body language open and nonthreatening. “I… I knocked her coffee cup over,” she admits at last. “She was being mean and talking on her telephone, saying I done all these things when I never did! So I decided to show her what I could do if I wanted.”
“Hmm.” The ghost eyes me nervously, as if expecting me to pull out a book, bell and candle and banish her on the spot.
“I only tipped it,” she adds. “I didn't break it or nothing!”
“You shouldn't have touched it at all,” I say sternly. “But… I can appreciate that you were frustrated, so let's say no more about it.”
The ghost looks relieved.
“My point is,” I continue, “if you weren't the one making blood rain from the ceiling or tormenting people in their sleep, then what was? There's no other ghosts on the property.” I find the picture I was looking for. “You can get anywhere around the house, right? Including behind the furniture and in the backs of cupboards?”
“Yes'm.”
I hold the phone up so that she can see the picture on the screen. “I'm going to let you go free in a moment, and I need you to see if you can find anything that looks like this.”
The ghost wrinkles her forehead. “What's that when it's at home?”
“Black mould,” I say, reaching out a foot to break the binding circle. “And I'm pretty sure it's the cause of this haunting.”
I remember meeting a guy at a bar a year or so ago who told me he worked at the international consortium that does the porn parodies of all the top-grossing film releases. He said that the whole Barbenheimer situation presented his combine with some spectacular highs and lows. Because he said that with Barbie, right, the thing about Barbie is that there's already kind of a three-way ideatic, structural parallel between the curated artificiality of Barbie as a children's toy, the curated artificiality of Barbie as a mass market film, and the curated artificiality of pornography as a genre. Add on top of that that Barbie as a film is already feeling this tension, right where it's trying to be about a character graduating from the platonic sexlessness of a children's franchise to the functional-and-frank sexuality of being a living human woman, but it's also being bogged down in the "Everyone-is-beautiful-no-one-is-horny" aesthetic restrictions of any contemporary big-budget mass-market film so the two states end up looking pretty similar, he said. I mean the film itself is very aware of that tension, right, with that joke about how "casting Margot Robbie is the wrong move if you want to make that point," all that jazz. So, all that in mind, Barbie-themed pornography, he said, is in a weird way actually kind of complementary to the extant project, gesturing at unaddressed tensions and ideas, a dark mirror, the shadow self it wants to deny but can't, there's a lot of room to play in the space. He used the adjective "Lynchian" a couple of times, he seemed super stoked, he was talking with his hands. Oppenheimer, on the other hand. Oppenheimer he said presented a problem. Because obviously you can eroticize the detonation of an atomic bomb, we're all probably three mutuals removed from someone on this site who does exactly that, but obviously that's a niche market, and moreover it's a market that has a ton of overlap with high-minded thinkers who treat the historical use of atomic weapons against Japan with the level of gravity that atrocity demands. So they were stuck. They were really stuck. He told me that they'd been pulling their hair out for months trying to square the circle and all they had to show for it was a big whiteboard with the phrase "Grope-nheimer" written on it
by march of 2025, it was official. i had been dangerously suicidal for an entire 3 straight years. no hotline was going to help me. i had no money for inpatient care or therapy. i spent most of my days so numb it was terrifying, became a void of a person. suicide was no longer a choice so much as an inevitability to me: it all made a terrible, dark kind of sense. it was as if i was writing a very long equation and kept arriving at the exact same answer. it was a twisted but peaceful kind of self-forgiveness - my dog would be happier with my brother, my family would have less to worry about.
i had tried everything. everything on earth i could think of to try. distractions and burnout and medication and all of it. i integrated with my community and practiced my hobbies and tried to make smart choices and exercised regularly and kept putting it off until tomorrow. i would wake up and think - what if i am just like this, forever? three years into the worst depressive spiral of your adult life, the sensation of it becomes almost smooth, like a worrystone. nothing matters. it is almost a bone that never healed correctly. i was never quite mentally healthy, this was just the crystallization process.
i genuinely thought i was never going to recover, ever. that it would just be an eon of that experience, forever and ever.
my happiness did not come back like a bolt of light. i saw one very-small flicker and i snatched that moth out of the sky with my teeth, held her pinned against me. i worked so hard it felt stupid; i faltered; i continued.
on saturday, i had the best day of my life. it didn't start out that way. it just unrolled into one beautiful moment after another, even though i expected nothing from it. i spent the entire ride home grinning so widely that my cheeks hurt. i watched the sunset in silence. all i could think was holy fuck i'm glad i didn't kill myself.
in the bad place, i couldn't see the happiness coming for me. it wasn't like i wasn't aware good things could theoretically happen (and did sometimes happen even to me), it was that i just genuinely believed joy was no longer a possibility. i had tried to fix joy against my ceiling, after all, and it had bled down and spoiled in the air above me. i assumed that i had simply run out of the opportunity - that if i did experience joy, it would be difficult to parse, muted. a mumble instead of a shout.
the shout i am feeling is still echoing inside of me. i am joyful when i touch moss and i am joyful when i stand in the sun and i am joyful when i make my dinner. i am joyful when i text my friends and when i skinny dip and when i sing off-key to my girlfriend. i am joyful and i dance in the rain like a stupid lesbian manic pixie dream girl and i build little forts for mice to hide in and i hug trees without warning and i am joyful about the cringe of it all, about the silly abandon i feel.
i have bad days, but the good outshines them. i cannot fathom that. last year at this time, the bad days were still outnumbering the good by a margin so wide it was the difference between a pond and the ocean.
but the good days were there, which was new. and if they were there, it meant they could exist, and i could multiply them, and i could get out and get through. if the good days were there, laid out in white stars along the black beach of my life - i could pick them up gently and carry them, one at a time. each new one so blisteringly precious.
i can't tell you when i became overwhelmed with happiness. i think it snuck up on me, a blade in the night. i just woke up one day, and i was so intimately, wildly glad for it. for the gift of my one and only life.
rule two. things are infectious and they cannot touch each other. you will rot and die and perish and suffer. your new sickness will eat and destroy you from the inside out
eatinggg
what if it kills us?
it's a magnet.
it will infect our soup and rot the can the reaction is happening right now. we can see it.
the can is closed.
we can feel it
don't eat the soup. please don't eat it, just be safe. no risk, just safety. we can eat something else
Broken.
i was hungry and i didn't forbid myself soup. demons plagued us and wanted for us to starve
gummygunk
areudirty
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2087
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