The End of History

It's been a while, hasn't it?

I seem to be starting every post with that these days. I don't think I really write less than I used to, but I certainly post less of what I write. Or maybe I just feel more of an obligation to post frequently, now that I split my time between this and our Tumblr.

I remember how frightened I was at the concept of starting a blog there. I imagined being insulted by people who I had come to imagine I knew after peering into the tiny glimpses of their lives which they presented online. Would my stories be hated? Would my amateurish drawings be mocked? Would my persona be attacked?

Instead, I found silence.

This is the only capacity in which I really post online, so maybe my expectations were unrealistic. But to finally overcome that fear, to accept that vulnerability and open myself up to others with my best foot forward, to be met with absolute apathy...

Well, I'm not owed anything, of course. But it's strangely discouraging, after a lifetime of storing completed manuscripts deep in folders and drawers and printing little chapbooks to hide away, to realize that I needn't ever have bothered. The text I set down here is no more impactful than the grocery lists I scrawl across scrap paper and toss at the end of the day.

One day these empty apologies will be the only content we post, and then there will be nothing new at all. Just an abandoned site left to await the day the server blinks out, and all of this is lost forever.

– ♥, Nacchi

Small flecks of white drift gently down beyond the frosted glass of the windowpane. Snow, glittering in the early-morning light, slowly piles against the concrete foundations and twisted rebar outside, stretching over potholed pavement in uneven tracts like flesh growing over a wound. Winter has come early this year, it seems.

I make my way to the back of the convenience mart and stoke the fire. It crackles cheerfully as it burns through a hardwood table, sending up little sparks that quickly vanish into the cold air. After some time I untie the tarp and step out into the frozen world. The soft static of falling snow lays like a thick blanket over the remains of the city, a stillness deeper than silence. I have to collect water now, while it’s still safe enough to drink.

After filling several coolers, I scoop up some of the new snow in a pan and head back inside. Heating the pan over the fire, I remove one of my last chocolate bars from the wrapper and chop it on the front counter. A white, powdery substance covers the brittle candy. I must have held onto it for too long, but I had wanted to save it for a day just like this. Soon there will be no more left within walking distance.  

The rhythmic thud of the knife against the counter brings back faded memories of warm kitchens and old friends, and I chop until the bar is nearly a creamy powder. I was good at cooking once, I think. It’s become hard to remember what life was like before all of this. I suppose that’s probably for the best.

Scooping the chocolate into a plastic container, I add it to the pot and stir until the hot chocolate is glossy and smooth. Thick, almost unbearably rich and just as hot. I savor it slowly, trying to commit to memory the sensation against my tongue, the tastes of cocoa butter and milk and sugar. Even if I forget, I want to be able to recall something like this. At the end of history, there’s nothing left to do but pile up empty memories.

---

I find ways to pass my time while the snow rises against the remaining glass. Repairing tools, checking supplies, humming the same songs I’ve hummed for years as the uncertain notes proliferate. I can only hope that there are enough resources left around here for me to pass the rest of my time in comfort. Moving is a risk I don’t want to take, and anyway, I can’t stand the thought of leaving all of my things behind and starting over again.

Besides, what would be the point?

The twitches have already started, tapping out their own crazed rhythm alongside that of my heartbeat. Even if I had the energy to drag myself away, I would only be losing one more thing.

The setting sun dyes the fresh snow a deep blue, and the snow flurries cease just before night has properly settled. Then the Milky Way emerges, sprinkling the clear sky with millions of stars. To think that something so magnificent could have hidden for so long behind the dull gray pollution of streetlights and signs. The last thing I see as I close my eyes is the cosmos twinkling overhead.

---

A chilly dawn creeps into the convenience mart, rousing me from a deep slumber. I yawn and stretch, feeling every time I’ve slept on concrete or asphalt deep in my bones. Outside the snow is high and fresh, blanketing the earth as far as I can see.

Although it’s beautiful, the start of winter also means that bitterly cold days and long, dark nights are on their way. I scarf down a quick breakfast, throw a jar of peanut butter into my backpack and uncover a boarded-up window. I should have already gathered food and fuel for the winter.

Stick in hand, I trek through the snow. Last year I was able to move much more quickly and travel much farther. Then, at the start of summer, I first noticed a creeping exhaustion setting in. At first I convinced myself it would pass, but as the days grew colder it only grew, and now...

Well, I’ll just have to find something nearby.

Most of the shops have become dusty museums, filled with nothing of value to anyone. Rusted-out bikes fallen from crumbling walls, peeling linoleum flooring, bells that will never ring again rusted solid against useless doors. A vague nostalgia, or perhaps sympathy, tugs at me as I pass them. All so carefully laid out, waiting for customers who will never come. One day there won’t be any sign that they were ever here at all.

I need to find something deep within the sprawl, some untouched place worth the trip. I pull out my map. No ordinary city map, this. Patterns and symbols and blacked-out areas denote resources and hazards and impassable terrain. It is nearly complete by now, but a few blank spaces remain—mostly on the peripheries, but there are also a few areas of interest I’ve circled and never bothered returning to.

I try the nearest one. Even the short distance seems to take me an eternity, and the damp cold begins to seep in through my protective clothing. I feel a flash of annoyance at myself for not bundling up more securely—if there’s one thing not in short supply these days, it’s clothing. Formless jackets, drab shirts and piles of rubber sneakers still line shelves, slowly disintegrating in the musty air.

As I pass a strip of decimated restaurants a cough doubles me over, rattling my lungs. The air is too cold and too dry. Still, leaning heavily on my stick, I continue onward to my destination, dragging my feet in twin furrows across the snow. I have no choice but to go on.

The buildings thin out as I follow the road, and then a mall looms into view. I have no intent of stopping there, but the moment the promise of shelter enters my mind my feet refuse to take another step past the entrance.

It’s immediately clear that no one has been in this building for quite some time. Dust as pale as the snow outside lies thick over the marble flooring, and silk trees shed their leaves into a dry fountain. I break into another fit of coughing as the dust enters my lungs before thinking to cover my mouth and nose with an undershirt.

Without really knowing why, I find myself trudging into the depths of the mall. A jewelry store remains barred to possible thieves, spared for eternity by the utter worthlessness of its contents. The faded faces of models peer out from yellowing posters, slowly succumbing to moisture, light and time. I pass it all, uneven footsteps echoing strangely in the silence.

The food court. Though I already know it’s useless I still find myself pressing against the counters, checking for any fortune cookies or stale bread that may have remained somehow edible. Of course, there’s nothing.

I go to take a seat, and then freeze.

From the other end of the food court a sign beckons:

Hot Topic.

The storefront looks nearly untouched, and I can’t resist its strange call. Whether it’s because fond memories of dragging my parents there still glow faintly at the back of my mind or out of some dim hope that boxes of kitschy candy and energy drinks might still be inside, I am drawn to the storefront. Someone has already disdainfully removed the lock on the security grille, and I begin to roll it up.

The strain proves too much for my degraded body and a series of wheezing coughs doubles me over. I taste copper on the back of my tongue as I finish the task and step inside, stick striking heavily against the threshold.

Plastered to the walls and still lining the shelves in neat rows, I see them. Posters and vinyl figures and t-shirts and collectible cards, peeking out from the dust. All asking the same questions.

“Do you remember the ‘80s?,” they scream out from all around me. “Do you remember the ‘90s?”

My body contorts around another fit of coughs that seems to go on forever. The sudden shift in weight sends the stick slipping out from under me, and I strike the tile floor hard. Vision swimming, chin and nose sticky with the blood saturating my undershirt, I strain to focus on the movie poster dancing across my eyes.

I do! I do remember the ‘80s!

I do remember the ‘90s!

It all comes back to me, and I laugh in delight, ragged, painful chortles punctuated by gasps.

I remember it all. I haven’t lost a thing.

I remember it all!

My body shudders with laughter, a rattling laughter that echoes throughout the silent mall.

It's time for the launch of our second album!

Hey. It's been a while since I posted here, huh.

In the context of the internet, that space between posts is effectively the end of that person.
We only really exist through the content we produce. It's the only thing that confirms our existence in the digital landscape.
When you stop communicating, or change your username, or take a break, that 'you' that you left behind, that vessel you stopped filling, remains.

Dead pages, dead users, entire swaths bathed in 404.
Sometimes I imagine the web as a vast graveyard. The tiny places of the net I grew up with are gone, replaced by hub pages with massive communities and centralized product, all in one convenient place. Pages controlled by uber-massive corporations that only care about turning the internet into TV. Pre-packaged, commercialized, content goo for us to lap up.


Anyway, onto the main topic.

This has been a pretty good year for our music side project, Red Honey. Today is the launch of our second album, Type Your Text Here, and I'd love to share it with you all.

You can check out the whole album here on our newly created Soundcloud:

Soundcloud

Or you can check it out, just like last album, on our Youtube channel:

Youtube

Finally, Nacchi has been working on something really cool for us. We're finally getting a proper Tumblr page. It won't necessarily replace our Blogspot here, but it could potentially draw in some new eyes to our ongoing meme project. You can check it out right here:

Tumblr

(At the time of writing this it's still a WIP. We'll have some of our best stories ported over there soon. Maybe even some singles from our Red Honey albums?)



Anyway, I think that'll do it. My New Year's resolution is to be around this site a little more. I've been itching to get back into storytelling, and this new album has me fired up to make more music, too.

Happy holidays, everyone!

-Aleximander

Housekept (Also the First Legend of BloodLines ONLine)

Okay, that should do it.

Did you know that adding something in the HTML to make a section of the page transparent can arbitrarily make Blogger stop accepting CSS inputs? Did you know that the preview renderings of the page don't display this error, so you have to work with the live page? Did you know that I want to die?

Anyway, it's fixed. Five hours later.

Does anyone use this platform anymore, and if so, why?

While I'm here, have a piece of writing that I did a while back but never posted. I wrote a couple of things centering around this character but I can't find any of the others, which... is probably no great loss. I don't currently have any plans to write more in this vein, but I don't really plan most of what I do.

I also don't remember writing about this first part, but I'm going to assume that the description I typed at the time was accurate (which would also explain why this doesn't read very smoothly. I'm not editing it) and I was mired deep in some strange nostalgia for something I only observed from a distance at the time: the emo subculture.

That's right, I'm just a fake. A posuer. I was never emo online in its ripeness.

And for this, I live a lifetime of atonement.

– ♥, Nacchi

All around me I see parasites. Parasites who dig down into the fertile earth and spread their concrete excreta, their drywall-and-steel mounds, pustules erupting in luminous shopping centers along the blackened veins of the land. A swirling torrent of noise and filth and heat, the voice of the human race.

I prefer the night, the dark, little quiet spaces. I live in the emptiness between stars, in the frigid not-being of the cosmos, infinitely vast, infinitely quiet, but struck through with burning light. Stay out of the light for as long as you can. Hug the walls, keep your head low, find where the shadows pool deep enough to choke out its tendrils. It’s the only way to live, to grow as the life springs from the black soil, to protect those inner seedlings yet uncovered by the concrete.

The night air reminds me that my shape is not mine. It is that of all the things I am not, the boundaries of flesh and warmth which might mingle and soften in the darkness but are so starkly drawn in light. The most egregious of language’s sins is to pretend to clearly demarcate as absolute what it instead softens, mixes and muddles, takes into shadow and allows only glimpses of. Language is darkness masquerading as light.

A poor ally, but I have so few these days.

Years spent balancing on the edge of a knife, whittling myself down to its thinness. Becoming sharper, keener, never thinking about what I left behind. Such is the nature of survival. Such are the teenage years of an American after the ages of subculture. At least intersecting blades might form an axis, something on which to build. Some way forward from the white emptiness, something to cast a shadow among all that light.

When the light becomes searing electricity, when the shadows wane and falter, when space becomes a precious commodity, you compact into a single, hard edge. Things emerge from the static as points of either black or white, flash judgments made within all the time you can steal to react. You need to cut through the blinding light, to find your precious shadow, and ultimately to cut through that thickest shadow and tumble, scorched, into the purgatory of American young adulthood, which is neither dark nor light but gray and shot through with iridescent fractals. But not now. Not yet.

Now, you must become a master of yourself. To keep keen the edge you’ve fashioned of all those empty days, that blade you’ve oiled with your tears.

You must become an edgemaster.

You try to define the boundaries of selfhood, grasping at the things you could never have, to wrest power from those who would shape you—but selfhood is the overlapping of murky tendrils of shadow and you mangle them in your haste. The forgiving shadow, writhing like a cut gas-line in the throes of pneumatic agony. Fluid everywhere. You’ll try to kill it because killing is all you have, your only mode of interaction with this world, but to kill you must slash through with a line of hard, sharp light and you’ll burn yourself over and over again, scorching your fingertips dark on the blade.

Soon enough you’ll spend your Fridays getting drunk off two glasses of wine, listening to three Fleetwood Mac songs and crying. Or something like that, at least—these lives all interconnect, yours and ours. But not yet, dearheart. When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know. For now, you will be bathed in the psychic piss of teenhood, and you will not emerge unbent. For now you must be BlackheartSasuke.

And you should be, and it is good that you are. Never apologize, BlackHeartSasuke, for the life which radiates from you in crackling tongues, though they may singe. Do not limit you own power, so long and so readily limited by others. Go in peace, shadow of days gone by,  and let this be your offering:

 A tale of BlackHeartSasuke, the strongest vampire assassin in BloodLines ONLine, Server: Eden

I am the one who traverses carnadine skies on bat’s wings. I am the one who does not fear the light. The sun will fall, and when it does, the night will be there, as it always has been, the absence of light, of artifice, the truth of this world. And I am there, in the night, a hard form, bruising and undeniable, and I mix copper tones into the blacks and blues and silvery light.

Those who hunt us do not hunt me. I am the hunter, always. As fearsome and opaque as the blackest night, as sharp as the clearest moon. I am the master of vampires, and under my grace the blood flows freely, velvet-rich and twice as smooth. I am the reason humans hole up in their homes when the sun sets, and I am the futility of their thin walls and steel blades.

I am BlackHeartSasuke. I have girlfriends in six realms and boyfriends in four. And I am with you. When you feel the chill night air, will you spread your wings? Or will you die in fear, your back to the wall, bleeding out into the darkness?

Why should I care?

The day is cruel, host to all sorts of inhumanities—chief among them my human form. Denied my powers, chained to this broken society, I await the night when I might shed my skin and emerge wreathed in stars. The tides of dusk bring friends, purpose, control. All earned, and all stolen by me from the break of dawn.

Those who fight for the day must be given no quarter. They would slay every last one of us if they could, and those who use the night to such ends—those who find no solace in the solar daylight but mimic it in the graces of the night, my night—the hunters—they have buried themselves in sin, and not even the rain of blood may cleanse them of their guilt.

They were fools to come on this server. This is our domain, and we will not be hunted. We will strike back, strike deeper and deeper until we might bring the fight to the daylight, to those who would inflict their miserable order upon us when we are deprived of our wings.

I will not tell you who I am by daylight. I will not subject myself to the humiliation imposed upon me by everyone else in this miserable excuse for a town. Everything you need to know about me, you’ll hear in hushed whispers. That I carry a blade not seen since the first days of the founding. That my wings crackle with the power of my cold blood, that they darken the sunlight beneath them. That is who I am. That is all that you may know, for it is the only truth I can tell you. The only truth there is. Carved into fleeting shadow, yes, but such is the nature of truth.

They have a different conception of truth in this daylight world. A truth that binds, that effaces those who do not fall within its sharp edges, edges which crush down with the weight of all of civilization. An eternity of lies and murky half-somethings, and bodies thrown within, wingless, fangless, helpless. Rotting within the mire.

I will not rot. I am beautiful, terrible, incandescent darkness. And I will create a better world, one gorged on the blood of those who would stand above us. I am the eternal night, the black heart of the universe. And I will never die.

-BlackHeartSasuke, 2006

Housekeeping

Hi again!

I have no meme to offer you! Skip this post!

Anyway...

Now that I'm actually paying attention to this site again, I'd like to make it look just a little bit less like a mess–or at least, a bit more consistent. Don't expect any dramatic redesigns, but whenever I have free time (which is something I think I used to have, long ago when I helped start this project) I'll play with the shoddy coding I did a while ago and try to actually fix the background. It happens to be broken in a way that looks more or less okay on the majority of devices I've had a chance to test it on, but on my widescreen monitor it looks markedly not-okay, and it's never consistent.

I'd also like to make text posted here more readable since that's kinda the entire point of this site. I posted the last story in big font partially as a stopgap measure and partially because something on Blogger's end broke and wouldn't post the text at a normal size (it also frequently makes seemingly random snippets of text large or small and refuses to change their size until they're retyped), but consistency would probably be ideal. Theoretically this should take about five minutes to implement, but since I want to standardize everything and have to make allowances for working with Blogger I want to set aside a few hours and do it (as) right (as I, without any coding experience, can).

Frankly speaking, I'm well aware that this site doesn't receive any significant number of visitors. That said, it's still a space I work in and so I want to keep it nice, or whatever passes for nice in the context of deliberately creating meme hell. It's also the only place we currently have all of our content collected. Maybe someday someone will end up here through our FanFiction.Net account link and notice that we do other stuff–I won't be holding my breath. If anyone does, uh, feel free to leave a comment. We actually do really value the reviews we get on our other profile, and speaking personally I've adjusted my writing a bit with the one actually useful bit of criticism I've received in mind (but really, it's also just nice to remember that when I spend hours of my busy life crafting these... things and then dump them onto the internet, they sometimes actually reach other people).

We should probably create a Tumblr or something somewhere where interaction is actually the norm, but I don't wanna. Maybe Aleximander will do it (lol).

If I break something and this site becomes unusable, sorry in advance~

It took all my willpower not to make this the cover photo for our FanFiction.Net story post, but I don't want to give them any more reason to ban us than we already do every time we submit content.

– ♥, Nacchi

Troubling of the Water: A Todd Howard Story

It's Nabocchan. I'm back, sorry.

It's been a while more than, uh, last time I said that. I might go back and post some of the short things I wrote in the interim later, but I wanted to return in style and I have certainly returned in... something.

The new album I talked about last time I made one of these godforsaken posts should be coming soon–we're hoping to have it out by the end of the year. I'm starting to get really excited at what we've put together this time, but I'll let it speak for itself, shriller than all the meme.

Oh, also, I want to go by Nacchi for now so that's what I'm going to do. Think of it like a short haircut or something. Or start putting together your "Red Honey is the side project of popular singer and actress Natsumi Abe" conspiracy theories. I mean, you never know.

(It's really been a long time since we've posted a new multiple-page fic, huh? I talked too much about other things to introduce this one, but it's probably better that I don't anyway. )

– ♥, Nacchi

On the Production of Compact Discs

Information is stored in CD format as a series of microscopic burns. The unblemished disc, useless in its current state, is irreversibly charred with millions of tiny wounds until it is assigned order, meaning and utility based on the organization of its injuries. Hundreds of millions of identically-scorched discs are mass-produced in factories devoted to this purpose, and then they go out into the world to be used until they are forgotten, obsolete and soon unreadable.

But CDs are fragile things, and they can be damaged beyond that damage which defines them and thus have their identity erased even before they are outpaced by the march of progress. CDs can break. What becomes of these scratched and shattered discs? What becomes of the information within, of the libraries locked away behind the cracks and scuffs? What is the fate of objects with no use?

Chapter I: You Can Climb That Mountain

Changing the world is a conceit of children. We enter this world bereft of understanding, vulnerable little things ready at any moment to impale themselves upon their towering hopes. Exhausted and seeking renewal, our parents foster those dangerous hopes even as they nurse their own injuries. Indulging vicariously in our youthful indiscretion, they salve the gashes where once their own aspirations, those iridescent parasites, lurked in their breast—and so we are cursed to make the same mistakes, and to repeat the same cycle.

As foolish an adult as I was a child, I once raged against the injustice which had thrust me, tattered and bleeding, out into the cold. At the time I felt that, hardly having had any say in the circumstances of my arrival, I was at the very least owed a warm, fair world like the one sold to me in my youth. It wasn’t until later that I realized the scars on my body perfectly matched the grooves of the machine into which I would either be slotted or thrown away without a second thought—that was my curse; that was the gift which my parents gave to me.

Jettisoning my aspirations among the bloodslick of early adulthood, I fought as hard and as cruelly as was necessary to secure my own lowly position. I had made it. I had become the shape and hardness required of me, and had limited the bounds of my imagination to the realities of my existence—I had become a cohesive part.

And yet. Even with my own hands stained by my initiation, even knowing that I could never again claim to deserve anything more, my mind at times wanders from its padded cage. Wasn’t I promised something more than these long days and tearstained nights? Wasn’t there supposed to be something else, somewhere?

This, I believe, is referred to as the death drive.

---

November 11, 2011. Veterans Day. Already tasting vodka-flavored oblivion on my lips, I clutch my meager earnings in my hand as I walk to my local GameStop. As I enter I am immediately assaulted by three screens blasting three different advertisements for video games. It would seem that If I am to return to nothingness, I must first embrace hell.

“J-just this, please,” I stammer, holding out the empty box and a worn plastic card as if they were an offering to let me pass through the store unmolested.

In this, as in all things, I am disappointed.

“Oh, you’re a fan of Elder Scrolls, huh? You want that for PC? You know, PC is really the best, since you get all the mods…”

I nod along stupidly, a lamb to the slaughter. I can’t tell if I’m being lamely hit on or limply sold a useless product, but it ultimately makes little difference. After a  thirty-second monologue I am permitted to leave the store with my game, if not my pride. Driving home, I wonder when I stopped liking video games, and why I keep buying them. Well, what else would I waste my money on? I enjoy little, and have time to enjoy even less. Better to run headlong into whatever means of burning through my empty days is most expedient, knowing that to raise my eyes to the horizon would only invite deeper injuries. It’s a strange kind of responsibility I practice, but then responsibility is always painful.

---

The game disc feels light and cheap in my hand as I place it into my computer’s CD tray. It would only stand to reason that this action, which would come to amount to throwing away the rest of my life, would be mundane and weightless.

The game installs, and I am plunged into a world bespattered by grime and filth. Searching desperately for the magic I was so sure I found as a child, I am left with nothing but burning eyes and a mouse slick with sweat. My character holds seven iron swords, a mace, three sets of armor and miscellaneous fruits, vegetables and tableware—but my own hands remain empty. A sickness overtakes me, a deeper sickness which lies atop and entwines with the one already provoked by cheap alcohol. I just want to stop playing and—maybe take a walk outside, and see if I can’t find something to like about this world. For one brief, excruciatingly bright moment, I am filled with fresh purpose—and then a sword intersects with a table, begins to twist rapidly around, and shoots off with an indescribable thud.

It may be difficult to fully describe the enjoyment I derive from this nonsense. It’s as if, having just cleared of clouds, the sky were suddenly set ablaze with a brilliant sunset. I begin to chuckle, a strangled, raspy sound, and soon break into full laughter. This, surely, is why I purchased this game. This is why I spent the money I earned with my long hours of work. This is the fruit of my years of labor, the unforeseen end of the journey on which I embarked as a child: unadulterated, cloying meme.

There is a kind of love so pure that it can only be understood as among the gravest perversions. A love which ignites the body with passion, such that through it even the most meaningless of things toss aside empty human logic, overflowing the cardboard cells of the mind and consuming all reason in a bright conflagration. A love which rewires the mind with no consideration of the demands of the outside world. A transcendent, fatal, repulsive sort of love. This is the love that I, an absolutely miserable human being unworthy even of contempt, hold for meme in its raw, unattenuated form. The only love which a creature like me can muster.

Meme is the hope at the bottom of the modern Pandora’s box. A single redemptive force amid the chaos and control—capture the effervescent radiation at the borders of the crushing arbitrariness of everyday life, look into those spots where the clamps malfunction and crush into bone, find where the canopy of steel grows so thick that you remember sunlight—that is meme. The last, bitter laugh of a bloodied martyr, screencapped and attached to a shitpost.

The following day I discover console commands, and the fire of my passion burns so hot that it chars my ribcage, so hot that it melts the chains which I had fashioned from the iron of my own blood to bind me to survival’s sharp edges.

I am not set free. A being like myself is incapable of understanding freedom, even if I were to somehow deserve it. No, I am more of a slave than I ever was—a slave to that neon, excruciating joy which has in a single instant melted me down and shaped me anew.

Less than human, I have become a gamer.

Chapter IIa: Put What You Want in Your Hands

Having broken free of those chains which I chafed against for most of my life, I began to tumble painfully through my new cage. The next six years progressed uneventfully despite the constant stream of new adventures and alterations in my beloved game—I had nothing to lose, and I lost it. 

Though my face had become tired, my eyes burned with the reflected light of a purpose still blazing within me, and I was radiant. I truly believe that I could have progressed in this manner forever, but my past existence would not be escaped so easily; the costs of living piled up, as did the price of new consoles (that I may experience Skyrim again, anew, plunging into its most secret depths and exploring those unique flaws which were native to each platform). Finally, reality bared its jaws fully.

Having just purchased a PlayStation VR, I was too broke even to acquire new debt—and then Skyrim was released for the Nintendo Switch, and I desperately needed the funds to buy it. There was nothing left to sell, nothing but my piles of Skyrim games and the consoles to play them with. I had even given up alcohol, having found a more efficacious means of self-destruction. At wit’s end, I contacted Todd Howard himself, hoping against hope that the man might take some mercy upon his most loyal fan.

Nothing in my life could have prepared me for the consequences of this action. Whatever sort of creature I might have been, I held only a human understanding of this reality at best; I was incapable of comprehending the level at which a being like Todd operates.

And so it came to be, though even now I’m not really sure how, that I was in Maryland face to face with the man himself. He said nothing, his cold silence a marked contrast to the meek personality he presented in interviews. There were no words to be said, no words but those listed on the contract before me.

I saw my whole life laid out there, neatly bound in threads of black ink. And then I signed with grim resolve, as if I were spilling my own blood across the page.

I earnestly believe that each of us desire, at our core, to be bound by something greater than ourselves. Floating freely through the horrible nothingness, unavoidably harming others as we tumble about, we have no hard form, no justification for the parasitism of existence. And so we cage our infinitely dispersed conscious, that the cage may become our body and its borders our self. Having changed my cage was tantamount to rebirth. But was I entering a cycle of enlightenment, or one of atonement?

Perhaps if I knew either way, I would have refused to sign the document. But the danger reacted with my passion deep within my mind, shaking my heart to the core and shattering the thin facade of reason. The ink I signed with was nothing other than the very hot blood which flowed from the depths of my bruised heart up through those cracks, flushing my body with warmth.

Todd picked up the contract, wordlessly looked over my signature, nodded. I suppose the taste of my blood was to his liking.

Chapter IIb: Make Yourself Proud

A car soon arrived to pick me up. As it wound its way along the highway, I stared out into the sky—today it was a deep, brilliant blue, and, perhaps because I knew this would be my last sight of it, I couldn’t drink in enough. My thoughts drifted back, as soft and free as the clouds in that sky—not in regret, but from the satisfaction of having my affairs settled, really settled.

The feeling was itself nostalgic. How long had it been since I could complete everything I hoped to in a single day and enjoy the rest of it with a clear mind? Even since I had devoted myself completely to Skyrim, I never found the time, or more accurately the mental discipline, to feel satisfied with my progress when it was time to sleep. There was always some other barrow, another Draugr to sneak attack, ten more frost trolls to spawn in. But, sometime before that, surely...

In truth even as I reminisced about simpler times I knew they were probably an invention of the current me projected onto a past self which could no longer speak for itself, but being that I was in a rare whimsical mood I chased the thoughts as they rolled around.

Where exactly had my life diverged from the paths of human society, and when had the gap between the two become too wide to cross? Though I no longer felt any pain when considering that sort of thing, it was still a hazy question. Even as I tried to turn my memories over I found myself refashioning them, reshooting events and adjusting details until they supported convenient interpretations. By this point the original memory, if such a thing could be said to exist, had long since been lost.

In the back of that car, in that tiny world populated by only me, I invented a past self to bid farewell to.

What sense of obligation drove me? I was sure it must have been something like going to a distant relative’s funeral—unable to feel the emotion I had been awaiting, unsure of even what that emotion was, I made a stiff attempt at propriety in its stead. As could be expected it was an awkward affair, a lot like meeting an old friend one has long ago fallen out of touch with. Actually, it was exactly that—the sense of trying to invent an already-vanished identity, working backwards to justify a bundle of artificial, too-neatly-wrapped feelings.

A funny thought struck me: what if I had never been anyone at all? Having clung to those few things which granted me some momentary sense of enjoyment, having diligently guarded myself against anything which might render me vulnerable, had I allowed my pain to consume me while I hid behind a screen of flimsy plastic?

But that would have been too convenient.

I, whose parts had never quite fit together properly, couldn’t be satisfied with an answer that tied a neat bow on my life. In other words, I refused to accept an explanation that “just works”—surely I must myself be as full of meaningless switchbacks, unintended paths and displaced objects as the game I had chosen to devote myself to.

A sharp turn pulled me out of my half-dreaming state, trailing loose thoughts in air still thick with sleep. We had arrived, and it was time to leave the beautiful sky behind.

Chapter III: You Can Play Forever

My thoughts hardened again as I approached the Bethesda offices, and my blood, which had cooled during the long car ride, pounded hot in my ears once more. There I stood, at the edge of eternity, awaiting consummation of my obsession. My driver came too, standing patiently behind me in a smart suit and sunglasses that gave him a cartoonishly coherent image. I wondered if he wasn’t a beginner at this, momentarily crossing paths with me as he strode out to the fringes of his own world.

All of my earlier contentment evaporated in the heat of that moment, a heat that seemed to exude from the manila walls of the office as surely as if they were the sands of a far-off desert. Perhaps they were heated by the golden sunlight which lapped against the outer walls of the building but went no farther. It was strange to think that they and I would soon exist on opposite sides of that light which had been shining down on me for all of my life. The glass door, when I pushed it, seemed impossibly heavy despite the smoothness with which it opened.

As the door came to a close behind me with a puff of air, I was bemused to find anxiety and regret welling up within me. It must have just been the cliche of a final door playing tricks on me—what was I leaving behind? A life worth less than nothing. Having entered the (figurative) dungeon with no (figurative) healing items and suffering deep wounds, I had been (figuratively) tip-toeing around trying futilely to avoid further damage even as I knew deep in my heart that I would be broken the moment I tried to do anything.

I had been wrong my whole life. There may be a place for the injured in society, in the same way that I often basked in sad songs. There is a place for those things which break and then go on, that are marked with that rainbow promise of human resilience, of the faded glory of that distant day when scars will have become old friends.

There is no place in this entire world for those who have broken irreparably. For those who cannot go on, for those who have no future, whose lives are forever sent spinning off the trajectory of consensus human existence. There is no promise of the infinite and indefinite palliative care needed simply for that kind of person to survive on a day-to-day basis. And, instinctively feeling that shortcoming, fearful that understanding the curse would be to invite it, those fortunate, blind souls for whom tomorrow will surely come are enraged by the existence of those like me.

But Todd was different. Ever since our meeting I believed, I had to believe, that he alone among this pathetic species had an uninjured heart. Or rather, I had to believe that his heart pulsed with such a vulgar, careless muscularity that those injuries which would tear a sensitive person to shreds could not stop its beating, but only wreathe it in a rosy mist of hot, rich blood as it pumped.

I would be crushed carelessly by the weight of that existence, a bug upon a windshield. The thought excited me beyond comparison. If I met that sort of end, lower than a stray dog, I was certain a pillar of incandescent meme would split the heavens in that spot. A life so carefully brought to nothing... It was a peculiar sort of alchemy, but it was my last hope.

I was led deep within the bowels of the Bethesda facility, through winding halls and past unmarked doors. I knew that I was underground because I had been descending from the first floor, but I soon lost track of anything more than that. As I passed each silent chamber, I wondered if some other contractee was within, and for the first time in years I felt a twinge of true jealousy deep in my heart. I was motioned through another door, shut inside, and then with the click of a lock I was left in a blackness thick as death.

How much time did I spend drifting among that abyss? As soon as I realized that I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face, I started to fret about my appearance. I had come first to Todd on my knees; now that I had incurred a debt of gratitude too heavy to ever repay, I could at least have kept myself presentable for his sake. But there was nothing to be done about it, and so, adjusting my hair by feel with one hand, I set about groping around the limits of my chamber with the other.

It seemed I had been granted a bed with a cold steel frame like those in a hospital, a large, rectangular chest of some sort and a standard toilet awkwardly shoved in a corner. Beyond that, there could have been anything or nothing at all. Even my thoughts seemed to dissolve into the endless night, and soon I was unsure if I was asleep or awake.

It was in this state that he came to me, emerging from a thin slit of light and into the darkness of my dream like the mirror image of an infant poking its head into the world. He clapped twice, waited. Clapped again.

The darkness erupted into light.

“You, uh, you could have… They were supposed to…”

So this was the real Todd after all. The weight of a universe in the body of this strange, overgrown child. Drawing some strange comfort from that thought, I walked toward him with a sly smile, my confidence restored.

Todd continued stammering out an introduction. He seemed profoundly uncomfortable with the words people use, out of his element outside of the incestuous twin worlds of gaming and press events. His nervousness grew as I approached, and I took a cruel delight in embracing him mid-sentence. His monologue, hardly a viable birth from the start, died in his throat as he hesitantly placed his hands around me.

No matter how quickly I tried to dispel the thought, his unsure hands reminded me of a child grasping out for its mother as they searched my body. Perversely, this stumbling touch sent tremors through my entire being as I patiently guided him. Only when he had found what he sought did he move with a feverish brute force, channeling the sudden strength awkwardly through his lanky frame. Carelessly, roughly, like blind puppies pulling at the breast of a sleeping dam, those hands tugged at me with such raw, artless desire that I thought my entire body would surely be pulled apart.

I gasped, Todd gasped. We were one in the stagnant, torrid air of the chamber, entwined and unequal (though who was what, how power flowed through our forms like live wires, it all blurred into the sickening haze of the moment). Thought became plastic, molten, flowed out until I was sure that I was entirely gone, lost in the raw sensation, his breath hot upon my ear, the agony and magnetism, apart from the boundaries of life and death, too far from myself to ever return.

And then, in an instant, it was over. We tumbled over and apart from other, spent and filled.

The copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for Xbox 360 Todd had shoved into my waistband sat cold against my stomach, stretching the fabric. Todd clutched the sixty dollars he had extracted from my back pocket in front of his face as he lay on his back staring blankly up into the concrete ceiling. It was a look I might have expected from the dead of war, a vacant gaze turned accusingly to the heavens.

We lay like corpses, like beings reverted to clay, in that chamber where time did not pass.

Even before the moment withered, I knew the silence must break, and I was filled with a bitter sadness in anticipation of that inevitable point at which the rotation of the earth and caprices of biology would reassert their tyranny over the cold and statuesque world in which we alone had found some fleeting shelter. Tears fell wet and hot on my cheeks, streaming from my motionless head onto the hard floor. Todd, I realized in some periphery of my mind, was crying too.

Gently, apologetically, Todd slaughtered the moment before it could be taken by decay.

“I’ll back tomorrow the same time,” he said with a sad smile. “I—I always operate on the same schedule”.

And then he was gone, and I was alone with myself, the disc and a cabinet filled with consoles and a small television. All according to contract, all belonging to Todd—and yet I could hardly bear even this momentary custodianship of those things I had dragged around for so long. Not any more. They had become so, so awfully heavy.

Long after he had disappeared, three more twenty dollar bills appeared from the crack beneath my door.

Returning uncertainly to life as if awakening from a heartbreakingly beautiful dream, I breathed three words to the emptiness:

"I'll be waiting."