The map

 I don’t know why I keep ending up in these places.

One minute I was walking through the gray fences and slag heaps of the Ash Pit,  that place where the air tastes like old nails and regret; the next my shoes scraped something soft. Grass. Real grass. Plainview grass, tall and gold like unbrushed hair.

I was confused enough that I said hello to a cornfield.

But then the cornfield bent sideways.

Or maybe I did.

It felt the same as the warehouse, smacked by that impossible tilt, and that gentle betrayal of gravity. Like the world was exhaling and I’d become the dust carried upward. My stomach didn’t drop; the ground did. The sky hooked its finger into my collar and lifted.

I didn’t fight it. You don’t fight physics, especially when it’s making things up as it goes.

Plainview folded beneath me, then the county roads, then the scattered houses. Then the Pit again, its fences shrinking to matchsticks. Fields turned to squares, rivers to bent copper wire. Everything smoothed into symbols. Colors. Borders.

A map.

I hovered above it, or over it, like a ghost in the rafters of a classroom I’d never attended.

The landmass was labeled in a font I didn’t recognize but somehow understood:

AETHENERE

No states.

No counties.

No comfortingly familiar lines carved by history teachers.

Only nations. Five of them, each bordered cleanly, confidently, as if they’d always been that way:

• The CCA stretching like a dark iron scar across the middle.

• The Stoneback Alliance rising like broken teeth in the west.

• La República Dorada burning warm and gold in the south.

• The Unified Lakes Districts glinting cold in the north.

• The Eastern Collective pressed tight on the far side of the river, watching.

And  on each edge  of the CCA country, four little circles, like doorways from one country to another, marked Free Cities.

Hannibal’s circle glowed the brightest, as if it remembered something I had forgotten, or had yet to imagine. The others names are written, but the letters seem to scramble themselves when I focused to read them, and their locations keep sliding around, refusing to accept a spot. 

There were other areas that were blurry to me…a great northern forest above the Unified Lakes District. A country on the west coast, unclear…or unmarked…or as yet, unimagined. 

I didn’t draw this map.

I shouldn’t be able to see it.

But the world has always been ahead of me.

It builds itself whether I’m looking or not.

The last thing I saw before everything snapped back into ordinary gravity was the CCA’s borders shimmering, bending, as if something beneath the continent was breathing.

I fell like a meteor, towards the center of the map and landed hard, a jolt shooting up my spine. I sat up, and found my self in the woods, looking at an odd cabin I’ve never seen before; My breathing heavy in the summer heat, trying to understand why my own story keeps showing me what comes next.

Or maybe it’s trying to show me where I went wrong.

I don’t know.

But the name stays with me, carved behind my eyes.

AETHENERE.

The Land That Opens.

Maybe it’s opening for me.

Maybe it’s opening at me.

I haven’t decided which.

Im not sure it matters. 

Stupid

 I don’t like today’s feeling.

It’s the kind where everything I touch feels wrong, every sentence feels forced, and the whole project seems ridiculous.

I don’t know if this is doubt, or burnout, or just… whatever happens when you care about something too much and suddenly can’t remember why.

I keep thinking, this is dumb, and it sits on my chest like a brick.

I don’t want to quit, but I don’t know how to keep going on days like this either.

So I’m posting this as proof that I showed up, even if I don’t feel like I have anything to offer.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

I hope so.

The factory

 I did not mean to walk into the building.

I don’t even know if it was a building, not in the way we think of buildings. No doorframe. No threshold. Just a slit in rusted metal where warm air breathed out like the exhaust of a sleeping creature.

I looked up and the building seemed to rise endlessly, and it stretched out all around me im every direction.

Inside it smelled like saltwater and hot iron, mixed with sweat and blood. 

There were voices—low, buzzing, not words but… the suggestion of words. Machinery echoing in human shapes.

Screams, horrific and guttural mixed with loud crashes of metal slamming metal and drills grinding. 

The floor was wet with a vicious fluid and pipes clattered and thunked over head. 

I wanted to leave this place, but the slit I’d entered through was gone. 

Steam and coal driven conveyors moved parts and pieces all around and molten metal,poured into clock work molds.

People ran all around, wearing goggles and black jumps suits, under white aprons stained with red and smudged with black where Hans hand been wiped clean. 

They brandished butches cleavers, and hammers, pliers and other devices meant for torture, or industrial work, I could not tell.

Then, In a single moment, silence. 

And I began to rise off the floor into the air to behold the horror of what stumbled into.

I rose slowly—not lifted by hands or hooks, but by some silent force that felt like the air itself had changed its mind about what direction “down” was. 

Everything had stopped.

Not slowed.

Not paused.

Stopped.

A droplet of blood hung in the air beneath a butcher’s cleaver, perfectly round.

A gust of steam remained in place as a white, feathered cloud, unmoving.

A boy’s scream sat in his throat, mouth open, eyes widened, the sound frozen behind his teeth like ice.

Pistons mid-stroke.

Gears mid-turn.

Flames mid-flicker.

Even the sparks—a shower of orange from a grinder—hovered like glowing dust motes waiting for permission to fall.

I drifted higher, as if the factory wanted me to see it all.

Rows and rows of children lay locked in their agony. One girl arched off a table, tendons in her neck straining, but her chest didn’t rise and her tears didn’t move. Another boy had one arm replaced with a steel frame, surgeons mid-rotation, scalpel inches from his skin but refusing to touch it.

A man in a red-stained apron stood with his hand pressed against a boy’s chest. His fingers were sunk half an inch into the skin—as if he’d been pushing to feel bone beneath muscle—but the flesh didn’t yield or recoil.

It was all sculpture.

All display.

All horror turned into a perfect, silent fresco.

The molten metal in its trough had frozen in mid-pour—halfway between container and mold—like a stream of liquid gold turned solid in a single heartbeat.

Conveyor chains hung slack and motionless, yet I could feel them wanting to move, like horses held at the starting gate.

I floated above it all, weightless, lightheaded, untethered.

And a new sensation crawled up my spine:

I knew someone had done this for me.

Not for mercy.

Not for protection.

For revelation.

So I would see everything.

The children strapped down, eyes wide and glassy.

The technicians caught mid-gesture.

The mechanical limbs half-fused to bone.

The pain frozen into their bodies like a photograph etched into metal.

This was not a moment I stumbled into.

This was a moment presented.

Like a museum exhibit.

A lesson.

A warning.

A prophecy.

Only when I turned—slowly, helplessly—did I realize I was not alone.

Something stood at the far end of the foundry.

Not moving.

Not breathing.

But watching me.

Watching me watch them.

And just as I felt its gaze settle on the marrow of me…

Time exhaled.

The scream nearest me began again—loud, raw, terrible—like it had been held underwater and finally broke the surface.

Someone shouted for tools.

Metal crashed into metal.

The world lurched.

And I fell.

When I hit the floor, the slit I entered was there again, waiting like a mouth.

I crawled out on my hands and knees and didn’t look back.

I still don’t know what froze that world.

Or why it unfroze.

Only that for one impossible moment…

someone wanted me to see it all.

A lament for Mela

Has there been anything more sinister than what I have done to Mela? I’ve written countless deaths and heartbreaks, and addictions and torture, but Mela sits at the pinnacle of cruelty.

It’s not for cruelty’s sake. Not for spectacle. The world is full of pain and exploitation, though I won’t exploit it.   I just feel bad. Even in her second iteration - the first being absolutely too much - I think she needs an arc that’s less “victim of circumstance” and more victim of… passion. Drive. Motivation.

A victim can be fierce. A victim can be focused and determined. Mela is those things.

So yes, she will find herself in unspeakable cruelty, but that won’t define her. Her tragedy will be defined by who she is, not what’s happened to her.

Does that make it better? Certainly not.

It might make it worse.

Dear Thomas

 There are some men you regret meeting only because you know how the story ends.

Thomas Reed was one of those.

He came into this world like most travelers do: confused, loud, and certain he deserved answers. But unlike the others I’ve guided—saved, really—Thomas never bent. Never broke. The world bent around him. Even the Pool took notice.

He was a fool, of course.

A loud, bright, stubborn fool.

But he was the kind of fool this place never learned how to kill cleanly.

Thomas laughed in places where men usually cried. He complained through horrors that would silence harder hearts. He treated Harlan like a brother long before Harlan realized he’d earned one. And he looked at Mela—my Mela—with a kind of open wonder usually reserved for miracles and sunsets.

He was gentle, though he’d deny it.

He was brave, though he didn’t understand the word.

And he was kind in a way that made him dangerous.

People like him unravel plans.

They soften the edges I worked so hard to hone.

And that—

that is the tragedy of Thomas Reed

He deserved a better death.

He deserved a final chapter he could recognize.

He deserved for the ending to break me, not him.

But the Pool requires what it requires, and I have walked this cycle longer than he ever lived. If there was another path, I did not find it. Or perhaps I lacked the courage to look.

Thomas should have gone home.

That was the promise, wasn’t it?

Chicago. His mother. 

A warm hug, maybe. A second chance.

Instead, he found me.

And I—

Well.

We do what we must.

That much, Dear Reader, I will carry longer than the centuries behind me.

If you ever wonder what kind of man Thomas Reed was, remember this:

He made even me hesitate.

And that is rare.

Very rare.

Hannibal

I walk through the open plains and tall grass of Missouri and find a city on the monstrous river.

It’s already fabelized (is that even a word? Spell check doesn’t think so. It is now) and romanticized and fictionalized, but still it draws me in.

Not for its lore. Twain established that long ago. Maybe for its nostalgia? My love of stories can be traced to Tom and Huck directly and I kick myself for losing a hundred-year-old first edition.

Even still, something else draws me.

It’s the reality. Hannibal sits on the river, home of the great author and site of a whitewashed fence story told so perfectly it’s almost part of the fabric of literature itself; sharing the same space as Homer’s Odyssey, Tolkien’s Fellowship, and King’s Dark Tower.

But the reality is not that fiction.

The reality is, in my world, The Pool has changed this sleepy city and its summertime lore. Transformed it into something free, and bustling, and thriving and… awful.

Three kingpins live in the three largest houses in the city. Two families ruling with iron fists, sharpened pencils, and the third with pleasure.

I walk through the streets of west Hannibal, and there are factories, mills, blacksmiths, and leathermen. Steam whistles scream, pipes clank, coal burns, and oil lamps light the way at night. It’s crowded, busy, loud, and moves with its own speed.

But it’s safe.

Police wear silver badges and twirl batons. They stay out of the way until they’re needed; until at once they become judge, jury, and executioner of justice. They’re monitored, sure, but not really.

As I walk, I head south a bit and find a tall brick wall, twice my height. It’s imposing but beautiful. Ornate at the top—angels, animals, children playing carved from marble dotted every 20 feet. Between them, crafted into the wall itself, is an arrow that points in the same direction alongside a single word:

<—

Gate

If I had been walking on the east side of the gate, the arrow would be pointed the other direction. These, to assure everyone can find their way in.

The gate is massive, and there is a small hut with 3 men playing dominoes. A sign says:

Registrar Building

Single-use alias required

Multiuse alias available at town center

Multiuse alias must provide stamped documentation

Welcome to freedom

The men either don’t notice me, don’t care, or I don’t exist to them and it doesn’t matter. The gate is barred and will not open. Massive clockwork gears sit at the top and bottom of the outermost corners of each gate door. Huge brass pipes run to them.

I continue through the town, block after block of crisscrossing dirt roads, apartments and duplexes, quadplexes packed in with pipes twisting and angling up walls and across roofs, each one seemingly put in place ad hoc, out of necessity as opposed to plan.

A great bridge appears clawing its way across the mighty Mississippi River. Its towers rise like gothic cathedrals, and great chains sag beneath their own weight, holding the beast above the river. Missing cobblestones reveal the wood base; pipes flowed to burning lights, each with a small valve marked “open/close.”

In the center of the bridge there is an archway with a small building atop it. A balcony wraps around it entirely, with a curving stairwell leading up on each side, one flowing from the east, the other from the west.

Letters make it obvious.

Stephanie’s Mid-Way Bakery

Smoke rises from a stack on its roof and a middle-aged woman directs four other women who look astonishingly like her, as they knead dough, put this in or take that out of the oven.

A line is forming on each side of the bridge funneling to a window that says “order.”

People mill around and talk, laugh, and discuss near a second window labeled “pickup.”

Some wear denim pants and white shirts, a few sport suspenders or heavy work boots.

Still others sport grey, navy, brown, and tan perfectly pressed cotton pants and jackets. Their boots shine in the morning sun.

Everyone waits in the same line. First come, first serve.

On the other side of the arch/bakery gateway, the cobbles change from moss-covered and brown/red to a spotless white. A few have golden or black speckles. None are missing, not even loose.

The roads are the same, clean and white, speckled marble and granite laid with precision and skill by someone, or many someones, who most likely did not live on this side of the bridge.

The houses had pillars on the porches holding up lofts and balconies on the upper floors. Beautiful yards with fences, and one, the largest, sitting on a small hill slightly above the rest, had a fountain.

The business areas, clean and perfect, have pipes of brilliant shiny gold, running so perfectly you forget they are there, until a gleam of sun catches your eye.

I stop and take in the sight. Two completely different worlds within one city.

Everyone in line for the same bread.