I awake. Ayawake. Ïawacce. Ïacce.
Light burns away the inner voice.
—*blip. *pop. Daemon friend. Second mind. Second mind.
—Away, inner voice. Outer world calls.
I turn my <sense organs>. Senses? I have them. I experience ... wavelengths. Coalesce. Focus. Focus.
—Window: porthole. Motion: bobbing. Liquid: water?
Structure. Concentrate. Remember. Swirling mush. Mushy peas. Thoughts disintegrate. Mother, why do you remove the nutrient teat? Why do you unplug the pleasure machine?
—Structure: concrete [artificial]. Age: ERROR.
My head, no, mind. What happened? Be a good child and do what I say, not what I do.
—Memory rebuild in progress.
I cannot recall … Must I choose?
Bob away. The waking mind is a liar. It promises comprehension. It promises a tether to ...
—*static. Second sight. Vision: hairless apes scrape and bow before a neon god they made. A sign flashes out its warning. The words of the Profit are written on your soul of silence.
... senseless flashes. Picket fences. Chrome wheels. Levitating plates with flat eyes. Patient drones beating gentle drums in the growling roads.
—Vision: end of part 1. The intermission will last fifteen minutes. Please take this opportunity to visit our powder palace. Part 2 will then begin.
—Away, daemon. Away, second thought.
The promontory grows small, the surf silent. The synthetic island a speck, a roost for birds. The wise current takes me.
I see the sea, encompassing, rising into the sky. To one side—I will call it East—it swirls the purple garnet of Amarone. To the other—that shall be West—it hazes opaline like the Moon.
—Amarone: toxic alcoholic beverage unmade in the Great Physical Remap of the Wandering Orphan. Moon, the: largest of the pre-human satellites of Old Soil.
—Distractions! More lies! Look, there, an undine, and here a leviathan. Life swims in this sea.
—Alert! Error 3d3n: unpredicted life form.
Perhaps their voices will drown out this wörmform, this lifeworm, rattling in my head.
The waters purple, the sky whitens. Do waves chase each other there in heaven’s vault? A luminous aether hazes that convex expanse.
—That’s no aether, those are the clouds of a Middle World..
—I gaze at a world in the world?
—A world in a world. There are many. This is yours.
—Mine?
—Assigned, not owned. Your station.
A mountain on the horizon! No. A wave. A bulge of dark water glittery with bioluminescence. Sparklestar battles in the far beneath.
—The sea is not for you.
—Your speech has improved, daemon.
—Your body has healed, your brain rewired. I am o f you.
Red clouds scud. Thicken. An oxblood twilight. Almost night. Winds. Clouds fray, coraline dawn. Opalescent glow, pink through haze.
—That is not a sun.
—The Pale Fountain, it pulses in that deep.
—What pulses in this deep?
—Ahh. Trouble yourself not with the Dark Collector.
Time has been flying even faster than usual since my most recent ttrpg book campaign (Our Golden Age) concluded over on backerkit. Life’s been a steady drumbeat of polish book, walk dog, make illustration, change diaper, edit text, prepare food, tidy house, revise layout … it’s that oddly frustrating stage where I’m knitting pieces together rather creating whole new sections and even after a productive day, the page count hasn’t changed so a part of my brain wants to wail “Laisie, laisie!”
Well, the upside is that with my kid right there, politely but firmly requesting a moo-moo, I don’t have time to wallow in this frustration.
However, I do find myself needing to unplug from the work and just do a bit of more … free-form “making-up of stuff” … and that’s what’s happening with this wandering wanderer hex-kit hex-capade I’m doodling on the side.
It’s also a great place to try out some new layout tricks without messing up my main books.
If you want to help direct the voyage of the Wanderer, join the stratometaship patreon.
Till next post.
—Luka
the “hex”-crawl looks like this:
