Chapter One

Jesus knelt where the dark grass thinned into ash and the first hills of the Realm rose like the backs of sleeping beasts beneath a bruised sky. The wind moved over Him without disturbing Him, carrying the smell of wet stone, old fire, and distant fear. Beyond the ridge, ruined towers leaned toward one another as if whispering about kingdoms that had forgotten mercy, and farther still, behind mountains veiled in red cloud, something enormous moved with the slow violence of a storm that had learned how to breathe. Anyone searching for the Full Jesus as Dungeon Master Dungeons & Dragons faith-based fantasy story would need to understand this first: He had not come to play with danger, but to enter a place where frightened hearts mistook escape for salvation.

He prayed quietly, not because the Realm ruled Him, and not because any power here could command His steps, but because love always begins in communion with the Father. His hands rested open upon His knees. His face held both sorrow and certainty. He knew the children were coming before the first scream touched the air. He knew their names, their fears, the gifts they would receive, and the ways those gifts could either become instruments of courage or mirrors of the wounds they were trying to hide. Somewhere beyond the veil between worlds, ordinary laughter was about to become terror, and an ordinary afternoon was about to open into a related faith-based fantasy reflection on courage, mercy, and finding the way home.

The Realm waited, restless and hungry. Its roads shifted when travelers lied. Its doors opened for some and vanished for others. Its forests bent toward secrets, and its caverns remembered every voice that had ever begged for a way out. Venger’s shadow had stretched across valleys and broken villages for longer than most creatures could remember, teaching the weak to fear power and the proud to worship it. Yet Jesus prayed beside the border of that darkness as calmly as a shepherd watching the gate of a fold before nightfall, and when the sky tore open with a sound like thunder trapped inside a bell, He opened His eyes.

The children fell through light.

They did not fall gracefully. They tumbled out of a spinning tunnel of color and noise, arms flailing, voices breaking, shoes scraping against stone that had not been there a moment before. Hank hit the ground first and rolled hard into a patch of gray moss. Diana landed on her feet for half a breath, lost her balance, and crashed sideways against him. Presto came down backward, his glasses crooked, one hand clamped on his head as if he could hold his panic in place. Sheila struck the ground with a gasp, vanished for a blink behind a ripple of dust, then reappeared when the dust settled around her. Eric landed last, or at least loudest, falling directly into a thornbush that seemed offended by the contact.

“This is not funny,” Eric shouted, trying to pull his sleeve free without touching anything sharp. “Whatever ride this is, I want the manager, a lawyer, and possibly a doctor.”

Bobby came through after him with Uni clutched against his chest. He hit the ground on one knee, hugged the little unicorn tighter, then sprang up with his small face flushed and furious. “Who did this?” he yelled, turning in a circle. “Who brought us here?”

Uni bleated softly, trembling against him.

No one answered at first. The world around them was too strange for quick words. The sky was not the sky they knew. It rolled in deep violet waves, with long bands of green light moving behind the clouds like hidden rivers. A road of cracked white stone curved away from the place where they had landed, disappearing between black trees whose leaves shone silver on one side and red on the other. In the distance, a castle stood broken across the crown of a hill, its highest tower split open as if a giant hand had crushed it.

Hank pushed himself upright and looked for everyone before he looked at his own scraped palms. He counted them silently, his breath quickening as his eyes moved from Diana to Eric to Presto to Sheila to Bobby and Uni. Seven. All there. Not safe, but there. The thought gave him half a second of relief before another thought came behind it, heavier and colder: they were all looking at him.

He did not know why. Maybe because he was usually the one who chose a direction when no one else wanted to decide. Maybe because he had a way of sounding certain even when he was guessing. Maybe because fear always searched for somebody to blame and somebody to follow, and sometimes those were the same person.

“Everybody stay close,” Hank said.

His voice came out steadier than he felt, and that frightened him more than the sky did.

Diana stood slowly, brushing dirt from her knees. Her eyes scanned the road, the trees, the slope behind them, the broken stones underfoot. She looked for balance even in a place that had none. “Does anyone know where we are?”

“Not Earth,” Presto said, then swallowed. “I mean, probably not. Unless there’s a part of Earth with purple clouds and haunted landscaping that geography class left out.”

Eric finally tore himself loose from the thornbush and stumbled toward them, holding up one shredded sleeve. “Great. Wonderful. We’re lost in nightmare country, and Presto is making jokes. That is exactly the leadership structure I was hoping for.”

“I wasn’t making jokes,” Presto said, hurt passing quickly across his face. “I was trying not to throw up.”

Sheila looked back toward the place where the tunnel had been, but the air had closed. There was no doorway, no light, no sound of the carnival ride, no ordinary world waiting behind them. Her brother stood only a few steps away, but she still felt suddenly distant from him, as if the Realm had slipped a pane of glass between her and everyone else. “It’s gone,” she said.

Bobby heard the strain in her voice and turned at once. “What’s gone?”

“The way back.”

The words did something to the group. They were not new words, not complicated words, but they landed with the weight of a locked door. Presto’s mouth opened and closed. Diana’s jaw tightened. Eric stopped complaining long enough to stare at the empty air. Hank looked at the space where they had come through and felt the first deep pressure settle across his shoulders. If there was no way back, someone would have to find one. If someone had to find one, they would expect him to know how.

He hated that he liked being trusted. He hated even more that he was terrified he would fail them.

A sound rose from the woods.

It began low, almost like wind moving through a hollow log, then broke into a harsh clicking rhythm that traveled from tree to tree. The silver-red leaves shivered. Something large moved behind the trunks. Then another shape moved to the left. Then another. Yellow eyes opened in the shade, one pair after another, until the forest seemed to be watching them from a hundred places at once.

Bobby stepped in front of Sheila and lifted one fist, though there was nothing in it. “Come on,” he growled. “Try it.”

“Bobby, don’t,” Sheila said, reaching for his shoulder.

“I’m not letting anything touch Uni.”

Uni pressed her face against his side.

The first creature emerged from the trees on four jointed legs, its body low and armored like black bark, its head narrow and eyeless except for the two yellow flames burning where eyes should have been. A second crawled after it, then a third, their claws clicking on the stone road. Their mouths opened sideways, revealing teeth like broken glass.

Eric backed away. “I vote we run. I’m putting that forward as a serious motion.”

“To where?” Diana asked.

“Away from teeth. I feel like away from teeth is a good starting point.”

Hank searched the road, the trees, the slope, anything that might offer cover. He could not find a plan fast enough. His heart hammered so hard he could hear it. The creatures spread out, blocking the road ahead and pressing them back toward the ridge. If they ran, the smallest would fall behind. If they stayed, they had nothing. He lifted one hand as if he could command the world to give him an answer, but the world gave him only the sound of claws.

Then the air changed.

It was not loud. It did not explode or flash. A quietness entered the road, so complete and sudden that even the creatures hesitated. The leaves stilled. The wind lowered itself. The children turned.

Jesus stood on the white stones behind them.

He wore no crown that the Realm could understand, and no armor forged by its smiths. His robe was travel-worn at the hem, and His sandals were dusted with ash from the border hills. Yet the darkness around Him seemed unable to decide whether to flee or bow. His presence did not make the place less dangerous, but it made fear tell the truth about itself. It became smaller, not because the monsters had vanished, but because Someone greater than the monsters had stepped into the road.

Hank stared at Him, breath caught in his throat. He did not know how he knew, but he knew. The man before them was not another traveler.

Bobby tightened his arms around Uni. “Who are you?”

Jesus looked at him with such tenderness that Bobby’s anger faltered. “I am the One who saw you before you were afraid,” He said.

Eric blinked. “That is not an answer that helps me with the teeth.”

To Eric’s surprise, Jesus looked at him too, not offended, not amused, but fully aware of the fear behind the sarcasm. “It is the answer you will need before the teeth are gone.”

The creatures hissed and lowered themselves to spring.

Jesus lifted His hand, not like a wizard casting a spell, not like someone begging the Realm to obey, but like a king quietly drawing a boundary no darkness had permission to cross. The stones beneath the children warmed. A line of light opened across the road, thin as a thread and bright as morning. The creatures shrieked and recoiled, clawing backward into the shadows. One tried to leap over the line, but the moment its claws touched the light, it collapsed into smoke and fled as a swarm of black moths.

Presto made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a hiccup. “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay, that happened.”

Jesus did not chase the creatures. He watched until the last pair of yellow eyes disappeared among the trees, then turned back to the children. “They hunt what panic separates,” He said. “Stay together.”

Hank found his voice. “Can you get us home?”

Every face turned toward Jesus with painful hope. Even Eric stopped moving. Sheila’s hand tightened around Bobby’s shoulder. Presto leaned forward as if the answer might become a door.

Jesus looked toward the empty place where the tunnel had closed. “There is a way home.”

Relief broke over them so quickly that Eric laughed once, sharp and breathless. “Fantastic. Great. Wonderful. Let’s go to it immediately, before the walking nightmares regroup.”

Jesus’ eyes remained gentle, but the relief in the children thinned beneath His silence.

“The way home is not behind you,” He said. “And it is not reached by frightened hearts using one another as shields.”

Eric’s laugh died.

Hank felt the words touch him though they had not been spoken only to him. “What does that mean?”

“It means the Realm will offer you many doors,” Jesus said. “Some will open because you are desperate. Some will open because you are proud. Some will open because one of you is willing to leave another behind. Those doors do not lead home.”

Bobby’s face hardened. “I’d never leave anybody.”

Jesus looked at him with sorrow and love. “Anger can leave people too, even while standing in front of them.”

Bobby looked down, wounded by the truth and not ready to receive it.

Diana stepped closer, her voice controlled. “Then what do we do?”

Jesus turned slightly, and the road ahead seemed to stretch farther than it had before. “You walk. You listen. You tell the truth when fear teaches you to hide. You protect one another without pretending you are not afraid. And when the door appears, you enter it as children who have learned what home is for.”

Eric rubbed both hands over his face. “That sounds very meaningful, and I’m sure it would be great embroidered on something, but we are children in a monster forest. We need practical help.”

Jesus reached toward the broken stones beside the road. The ground trembled, and from beneath the cracks came a low golden light. One by one, objects appeared, not dropping from the sky or bursting from magic, but rising as if they had been waiting for the children to become honest enough to receive them.

A bow lay first at Hank’s feet, its curve smooth and strong, its string shining with a light that did not burn. No arrows rested beside it.

Hank frowned. “There aren’t any arrows.”

“The truth will draw what is needed,” Jesus said. “But it will not serve the lie that you are never afraid.”

Hank bent and lifted the bow. It felt lighter than it should have, and heavier than he wanted it to be.

A shield rose next before Eric, polished bright enough to reflect his face. He stared at himself in it and immediately looked away. “Of course,” he muttered. “I get defensive equipment. Very subtle.”

Jesus said, “A shield may hide a coward, or guard a friend. You will choose which it becomes.”

Eric opened his mouth with a ready answer, but none came. He picked up the shield slowly and strapped it to his arm, trying to make the motion look casual.

Diana’s staff appeared with a quiet ring upon the stone. It was long, balanced, and carved with patterns that seemed to shift when she moved. She took it with both hands, testing its weight, and for the first time since arriving, something in her posture steadied. Then Jesus spoke.

“Balance is not never falling,” He said. “It is learning what to reach for when you do.”

Diana’s fingers tightened around the staff.

A pointed hat rose before Presto, soft, worn, and very unimpressive. He stared at it as if the Realm had insulted him personally. “I don’t suppose there’s a different option? Maybe something less… hat?”

Jesus’ expression remained kind. “You have spent much of your life fearing that what comes through you will be foolish.”

Presto’s cheeks reddened. “That’s because it usually is.”

“Not everything that looks foolish is useless,” Jesus said. “And not every gift obeys embarrassment.”

Presto picked up the hat with both hands. “No pressure,” he whispered to it, then put it on crookedly.

A cloak unfolded at Sheila’s feet, pale and soft, almost silver in the strange light. Sheila touched it carefully. “What does it do?”

“It can hide you,” Jesus said.

Her face changed in a way only Bobby noticed. It was not excitement. It was recognition.

Jesus continued, “But hiddenness is not absence. If you use it to disappear from love, it will become a prison. If you use it to protect love, it will become a mercy.”

Sheila drew the cloak around her shoulders, and for a moment the edges of her seemed to blur with the air.

Last came Bobby’s club, rising from the ground like a piece of young thunder made solid. It was large for him, but when he grabbed it, his whole face lit with fierce satisfaction.

“Now we’re talking,” he said.

Jesus knelt before him, bringing His eyes level with the boy’s. “Strength is a gift, Bobby. Rage is a thief that borrows strength and spends it on ruin.”

Bobby’s smile faded. “I just don’t want anyone hurt.”

“I know,” Jesus said. “That is why your strength must learn mercy before it meets what it hates.”

Uni nosed the club, then sneezed. Bobby almost smiled, but his eyes were wet, and he turned away before anyone could see.

The ground stopped glowing. The forest remained dark. The road remained dangerous. The gifts had changed what the children carried, not where they stood.

Hank looked at Jesus. “Are you coming with us?”

“I am with you,” Jesus said.

“That’s not the same as answering.”

“It is the answer you will understand by walking.”

Eric groaned. “I was afraid of that.”

A horn sounded from the broken castle on the hill.

It was deep and metallic, rolling over the road and through the trees until the creatures in the forest went silent. A shadow swept across the violet sky. The children looked up and saw a winged shape circling high above them, not close enough to strike, but close enough to make the air feel claimed. The shape turned, and for a moment they saw red eyes beneath a horned helm, a pale face stern with cruel intelligence, and wings like torn night.

Venger.

They did not know his name yet, but fear sometimes recognizes its teacher before introduction.

His voice descended without his body landing, smooth and cold. “Little wanderers. Lost so soon. Armed so poorly. Guided so gently.”

The word gently curled like an insult.

Bobby lifted his club. “Come down here and say that.”

“Brave noise from a small animal,” Venger said.

Bobby surged forward, but Sheila caught him with both hands. Uni cried out.

Jesus stepped between Bobby and the shadow in the sky. He did not raise His voice. “You may speak to Me.”

The air tightened.

Venger circled lower, his shadow passing over the road but bending strangely around Jesus, as if it could not touch Him. “You do not belong in my Realm.”

Jesus looked up at him. “No darkness owns what it has wounded.”

For the first time, something like anger broke through Venger’s composure. The clouds above the ruined castle flared red. “They want home,” he said. “I can give them doors. You will give them lessons.”

Jesus answered, “A door opened by deceit is another prison.”

Venger’s gaze shifted toward the children. Though his body remained above them, his voice moved close to each ear.

Hank heard, You will fail them, and they will know.

Eric heard, They already know you are afraid.

Diana heard, Need help once, and they will stop trusting your strength.

Presto heard, They laugh because they are right.

Sheila heard, If they cannot see you, they cannot leave you first.

Bobby heard, Smash what scares you before it takes her.

Uni heard no words, but trembled because innocence feels the weather of evil even when it does not understand the language.

Hank gripped the bow, and no arrow came.

That scared him more than the voice. He pulled harder, but the string remained empty. His face burned. Everyone needed him to lead, and already his gift would not work. The creatures in the forest began clicking again, encouraged by the confusion.

Jesus turned to Hank. “Tell the truth.”

Hank’s throat tightened. “Now?”

“Now is where truth is needed.”

Hank stared at the empty string. His first instinct was to say he was fine, to tell everyone to move, to sound certain until certainty appeared. But the bow remained empty in his hand, and Venger’s shadow circled overhead like a vulture waiting for weakness to become death.

“I don’t know what to do,” Hank said.

The words humiliated him. They also cleared the air.

A golden arrow formed against the string.

Hank stared at it, stunned. Jesus nodded once.

“Leadership begins where pretending ends,” He said.

The creatures lunged from the trees.

Hank turned, drew the bow, and released. The arrow flew not into a creature, but into the road ahead, bursting into a path of light that curved away from the forest and toward a narrow pass between two stone ridges. Diana moved first, understanding motion before the others did.

“Go!” she shouted.

They ran.

Eric held the shield awkwardly at his side until one of the creatures sprang toward Presto from the left. Presto froze, hands flying to his hat as if a spell might fall out by accident. Eric saw the teeth, saw Presto’s fear, and for one sharp second wanted only to duck behind the shield himself. Then Jesus’ words struck him harder than the creature could. Hide or guard. He cursed under his breath, stepped sideways, and raised the shield.

The creature slammed into it. Eric flew backward into Presto, and both of them hit the ground.

“Ow,” Eric groaned. “Heroism is painful.”

Presto scrambled up and grabbed his arm. “You saved me.”

“I noticed,” Eric said, trying to stand. “Please put that in writing.”

Sheila vanished beneath the cloak without meaning to. One moment she was there, the next she was a shimmer, then nothing. Panic seized her. Being unseen felt safe for half a heartbeat and lonely immediately after. Bobby shouted her name. She saw him looking around wildly, saw Uni backing toward a ditch, saw one of the creatures slipping behind them where no one else noticed.

She could keep hiding. She could remain untouched.

Instead she moved.

Invisible hands shoved Uni forward just as the creature snapped at the place where the little unicorn had stood. Bobby swung his club with a roar, but Sheila shouted, “Not at its head! The ground!”

Bobby obeyed before thinking. He struck the stone road. A crack of force ran through the ground, not crushing the creature but throwing it back into the trees. Sheila reappeared beside Uni, breathing hard.

Bobby stared at her. “You were gone.”

“I was still here,” Sheila said.

Something passed between them that the Realm could not steal.

Diana planted her staff across a gap in the broken road and vaulted over, then spun back to help Presto across. Her instinct was to keep moving, to stay quick enough that need never caught her. But Presto stumbled, and Eric was still limping, and Hank was looking back to count them again. Diana set the staff firmly, reached out, and let herself become a bridge instead of a blade.

“Take my hand,” she said.

Presto looked embarrassed even while terrified. “I can do it.”

“I know,” she said. “Take it anyway.”

He did.

They reached the pass as Venger descended low enough for the wind from his wings to batter them against the rocks. At the far end of the narrow way stood an arch of black stone. Within it shimmered a picture so clear it hurt: the carnival ride, the ordinary world, sunlight on pavement, the sound of people laughing without knowing anything had changed.

Home.

Bobby saw it first. “There!”

They stopped as one body, every breath caught.

The arch pulsed gently. No monster guarded it. No riddle appeared above it. No chains blocked the way. It simply stood open, offering the one thing they wanted most.

Eric laughed in disbelief. “Okay. I take back several complaints. Move, move, move.”

He started toward it.

Uni bleated.

The sound was small, but it turned Sheila’s head. The little unicorn had stopped several steps behind them, one leg caught between two stones loosened in Bobby’s strike. She was not badly trapped, but she could not free herself quickly. Behind them, the creatures were gathering again at the mouth of the pass, and Venger hovered above, watching with terrible satisfaction.

The doorway brightened.

Eric stopped halfway to the arch. “No,” he said, and his voice cracked. “No, no, no. We are not doing this. We are not losing home over a stuck unicorn.”

Bobby’s face twisted with rage. “She’s not stuck. I’ll get her.”

He ran back, but the creatures pressed closer. Hank lifted the bow, but his hands shook. Diana moved to follow Bobby, and Presto fumbled with his hat, whispering, “Come on, come on, anything useful, please.”

Venger’s voice slid through the pass. “One small creature. One open door. A simple exchange. Leave the burden, and be free.”

Uni cried again.

Sheila looked at the doorway home. She thought of her room, her bed, her own world where she knew how to be quiet without vanishing. Then she looked at Bobby, who was trying to pry the stones apart with his bare hands while gripping the club in the crook of one arm. He was angry enough to break the whole pass and frightened enough to break himself with it.

Jesus stood near the arch, between the children and the shining image of home. He was not blocking it. That somehow made the choice worse.

“Is that really home?” Hank asked Him.

Jesus looked at the doorway with grief in His eyes. “It is a door shaped like your longing.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No,” Jesus said. “It is not home.”

Eric stared at Him. “It looks like home.”

“So do many things that ask you to abandon love.”

The creatures entered the pass.

The first chapter of their journey ended there, not with an answer that made the road easy, but with a doorway shining in front of them, monsters closing behind them, and the truth standing quietly in the middle. Hank raised the bow again, and this time the arrow came when he whispered, “I’m scared.” Diana set her staff across the narrowest part of the pass. Sheila pulled the cloak around her shoulders and ran back toward Uni. Presto reached into the hat without knowing what would come. Eric lifted the shield and stepped away from the false door. Bobby knelt over the trapped unicorn, no longer swinging at everything that frightened him, but using both hands to free what he loved.

Above them, Venger’s shadow darkened the stones.

Beside them, Jesus remained.

And the false doorway home began to flicker.

Chapter Two

The false doorway did not vanish all at once, but weakened like a lie losing its voice. The carnival lights inside the arch wavered, then sharpened, then wavered again. For one painful moment, Hank could still see the shape of the ride that had brought them here, the painted cars, the metal gate, the ordinary world moving on without them. Someone on the other side laughed, and the sound nearly broke him because it was not cruel. It was just normal. It was the sound of people who still believed afternoons ended the way they were supposed to end.

Eric stood closest to it with the shield on his arm and misery written across his face. He had stepped away from the arch, but not far enough to make the choice feel finished. His body leaned one way and his conscience leaned the other. Behind him, Bobby was still on his knees beside Uni, trying to pry loose the stones around her trapped leg without hurting her. Sheila knelt beside him, half visible under the pale cloak, whispering to Uni in a voice so soft it almost disappeared with her.

“Hold still, girl,” Sheila said. “We’ve got you. I promise we’ve got you.”

The creatures pressed into the mouth of the pass. They were not brave now, but hunger made them persistent. Their glass teeth clicked together as Hank drew the bowstring back. The arrow of light trembled with his breath. He wanted to fire at all of them at once. He wanted to make the path clear. He wanted, more than anything, to sound like someone who had already done this before.

“I can hold them,” he said.

Jesus stood near him, watching the pass with calm attention. “You can resist them,” He said. “You cannot hold the whole world by pretending your hands do not shake.”

Hank hated how gentle the words were. If Jesus had rebuked him harshly, he could have defended himself. Gentleness gave him nowhere to hide. The first creature lunged, and Hank released the arrow. It struck the stone before the creature’s claws, bursting into a low wall of light. The thing screamed and reeled backward, knocking two others into the rock. Diana moved beside Hank with her staff braced in both hands. Her eyes flicked over the creatures, the stones, Bobby, Uni, the false doorway, and Eric, measuring every angle with a discipline that made panic wait its turn.

“We need to move,” she said. “Bobby, how long?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby snapped. Then, as if he heard his own voice and hated it, he said more quietly, “I’m trying.”

Presto stood in the middle of them, one hand buried in his hat up to the wrist. His lips moved silently. His face had gone pale behind his crooked glasses. “Please be something useful,” he whispered. “Please, please, please be something useful.”

He pulled out a long purple scarf.

Eric stared at it. “Perfect. We’ll entertain them to death.”

Presto’s face folded in on itself. It was such a small thing, one sentence in the middle of danger, but it found the old bruise exactly. He shoved the scarf back into the hat, blinking too fast.

Jesus looked at Eric, and Eric looked away first.

The creatures gathered again while Venger drifted above the pass with his wings spread wide enough to make the narrow road feel even smaller. He did not attack. He watched the way a cruel person watches a family argue beside an open grave.

“How touching,” he said. “They call You a guide, and still You let children bleed for lessons.”

Jesus looked up. “You call bondage rescue when it serves your pride.”

Venger’s eyes burned. “I offer what they want.”

“You offer it without love.”

“I offer it quickly.”

“You offer it empty.”

The false doorway flared at the word, as if angered by being named. Eric flinched when the carnival appeared again, brighter than before. In the vision, he could see the exit gate and the pathway beyond it. He could imagine stepping through before anyone stopped him. He could imagine telling himself he would get help from the other side. He could imagine making the selfish thing sound practical, which was one of the ways fear kept its dignity.

A shriek behind him cut through the vision. One creature had climbed the wall and dropped from above, landing near Sheila and Uni. Bobby grabbed the club, rage taking his face before thought could catch up. He swung high, hard enough that if the blow landed, it would crush the creature and maybe the stones around Uni’s leg with it.

“Bobby!” Jesus called.

The boy froze with the club above his shoulder, trembling from the force he had not spent. The creature hissed and drew back to spring.

“Mercy is not weakness,” Jesus said. “Aim where love is protected.”

Bobby’s jaw clenched. He lowered the club and struck the ground beside the creature instead of the creature itself. A wave of force cracked outward, throwing the thing against the far wall. It slid down stunned, then scrambled away into the shadows. Uni shook all over. Bobby dropped the club and returned to the stones, breathing hard, tears mixing with dirt on his cheeks.

“I could’ve hit it,” he said, angry at himself now. “I wanted to.”

Jesus came near and knelt beside him. “You wanted the fear to stop.”

Bobby nodded once, ashamed.

“That is not the same as wanting evil,” Jesus said. “But fear must not choose for your strength.”

Bobby swallowed and wedged both hands beneath the loosened stone. “Then help me choose.”

Jesus placed one hand over Bobby’s hands, and Bobby pushed. The stone shifted, not flying away, not dissolving, but moving just enough for Uni to pull free. The little unicorn stumbled forward into Sheila’s arms, then immediately pressed herself against Bobby, forgiving him for every frightening sound he had made. The arch behind Eric dimmed, and Venger’s voice sharpened with anger.

“No,” Venger said, and the pass filled with wind.

Diana braced her staff across the path as the creatures surged. “Now, Hank!”

Hank drew again. This time, before the arrow formed, he said what he did not want the others to hear. “I need help.”

The arrow came brighter than before.

Diana planted her staff and vaulted across a fallen slab, kicking loose a row of stones that tumbled down into the pass. Eric raised his shield beside her, no longer trying to look annoyed enough to be unaffected. Presto grabbed the purple scarf again because it was the only thing he had, and in desperation he flung it toward the creatures. The scarf unrolled through the air, widening as it flew until it became a rippling curtain that smelled faintly of rain. It struck the ground between the children and the creatures, and for several seconds the monsters clawed at it as if it were a wall.

Presto stared. “I did that?”

Jesus looked at him. “You offered what you had.”

“It was a scarf.”

“It became obedience.”

Presto did not know what to say to that, so he adjusted the hat and tried not to cry in front of Eric, who had the good sense to say nothing.

They ran through the far end of the pass as the false doorway collapsed behind them. It did not shatter dramatically. It thinned until it became only a pale rectangle in the air, then a line, then nothing. Eric glanced back once, and the loss hit him so hard he nearly stumbled. For all his complaining, for all his sarcasm, he had chosen to stay. But choosing rightly did not make the cost painless.

The road opened into a valley where the grass grew blue and low, and shallow pools of black water lay between leaning stones. The moon, though it was not night, appeared in every pool. In each reflection, the children saw not themselves as they were, but themselves as fear described them. Hank saw the group standing around him with disappointment on their faces, all of them older somehow, all of them saying nothing because his failure had already spoken for him. Eric saw himself alone behind a high wall of shields, safe and untouched, while voices outside called for him until they stopped. Diana saw herself balanced on a narrow beam above a bottomless dark, strong and perfect and completely unreachable, with no hand extended toward her because she had trained everyone not to offer one. Presto saw himself pulling useless object after useless object from the hat while the others laughed, not cruelly at first, then harder, until even his own reflection laughed with them. Sheila saw no reflection at all. That frightened her most. Bobby saw his club raised, Uni gone, everyone backing away from him as if he had become one of the monsters. Uni saw the children in the water and bleated with distress, stepping carefully away from the nearest pool.

Diana noticed first that the valley was changing them. Not outside. Inside. Her shoulders tightened. Her breath became controlled in that old familiar way, the way she used when she felt something slipping and decided she would simply become stronger than the slip. She lifted her chin and started forward.

“We don’t look in the water,” she said. “We cross quickly.”

Eric gave a brittle laugh. “Finally, a plan I support. Avoid cursed puddles. Very sensible.”

Hank looked at Jesus, who had walked with them into the valley but had not stepped in front of them. “Is this another test?”

Jesus looked across the pools. “It is a place where fear speaks in pictures.”

“Can You make it stop?”

“I can lead you through it.”

Hank waited for more, but Jesus did not add instructions that would remove the need to trust Him. The silence felt like a door of its own.

They began crossing the valley by weaving among the pools. At first it seemed possible. Diana found the firm ground. Hank kept the group close. Eric complained less than usual because the reflections bothered him more than he wanted anyone to know. Sheila held Uni’s mane and kept glancing at the water that refused to show her face. Bobby stayed near them both with the club tucked low, as if he no longer trusted his own grip. Presto walked last, looking at the ground, his hat pulled down almost to his eyes.

Then the valley whispered, not with one voice, but with memory. It used the tone of a disappointed teacher, an annoyed friend, an impatient parent, a sibling who did not mean to wound but did, and a crowd laughing from far away. Each child heard what would hurt most. Hank heard that they only followed because no one else had tried. Eric heard that jokes were easier than courage and everyone knew it. Diana heard that needing help would make her weak. Presto heard that useful people did not have to beg objects to obey. Sheila heard that unseen was safer than unwanted. Bobby heard that if he did not strike first, love would be taken from him.

The group slowed. The distance between them widened by only a few steps, but the Realm seemed to notice. Pools shifted where no pools had been. Stones sank. The path that had looked clear began to divide into several narrow ways, each one bending toward a different part of the valley.

Venger’s voice moved through the mist, soft as a thought they might have invented themselves. “You see? He calls you together, but your fears know you separately. Why should the brave be slowed by the frightened? Why should the useful carry the useless? Why should the strong wait for the weak? Why should any of you lose home because another child cannot become what the Realm requires?”

No one answered, and that was how division began, not with shouting, but with everyone privately believing the accusation that named someone else.

Diana moved ahead another few steps. “There’s higher ground this way.”

Hank turned. “Wait. We stay together.”

“We are together,” she said, though they were not.

Eric pointed to a ridge on the right. “Actually, if we’re voting, that route looks less like a swamp that hates us.”

Bobby snapped, “Nobody asked you.”

Eric’s shield flashed as his arm jerked upward. “You know, some of us are trying to survive instead of picking fights with every rock that moves.”

Bobby’s face went red. “At least I don’t hide behind a shield and pretend it’s thinking.”

“Bobby,” Sheila said sharply.

Bobby looked at her, hurt flashing beneath his anger. “What? He wanted to leave Uni.”

Eric went still. For once, he did not have a fast answer because the accusation was close enough to truth to sting. “I didn’t leave her,” he said.

“You wanted to.”

“So did the door!” Eric shouted, then stopped, breathing hard. “So did everything in me for about five seconds, okay? Is that what you want to hear?”

The valley quieted as if it were listening. Eric’s face changed when he realized he had told the truth out loud. He looked down at the shield, ashamed.

“I didn’t,” he said again, but softer. “I didn’t leave.”

Jesus stepped toward him. “Truth does not erase the temptation. It brings the temptation into the light before it rules you.”

Eric’s eyes remained on the shield. “I hate this place.”

“I know,” Jesus said.

Presto, who had been silent too long, made a small sound. Everyone turned. He stood near a pool, staring into it. In the reflection, his hat was gone. His hands were empty. The others were far ahead, not looking back.

“I slow everybody down,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” Diana said, too quickly.

Presto looked up, and the hurt in his face made her regret the quickness. It sounded like comfort trying to finish its chore. The pool beside him widened. Its black surface climbed the air like liquid glass, forming an arch shaped almost like the false doorway from the pass. Inside it, Presto saw a narrow room with a desk, books, bright safe lamps, and no one laughing. He saw himself there, alone, but not embarrassed. The hat slid from his head toward the pool, tugged by an unseen pull.

“Presto!” Hank shouted.

Presto grabbed for the hat, but the pool had already caught its tip. The black water climbed the fabric. Diana ran for him, but the ground between them softened. Eric lifted his shield and stepped forward, then hesitated as the water reflected the wall around him again. Bobby raised the club, but fear of his own rage froze his arms. Sheila disappeared under the cloak without deciding to and hated herself for how relieved she felt. Hank drew the bow, but no arrow came because he was not looking at the truth. He was looking at the chance to fix everything fast enough that no one would see he was failing.

Jesus walked to the edge of the pool, and the black water recoiled from His reflection because it could not invent a fear to show Him. It had no lie that fit His face.

“Presto,” Jesus said, “look at Me.”

Presto’s hands were locked around the brim of the hat. “I can’t pull it out.”

“Look at Me.”

“If I lose it, I’m nothing here.”

Jesus’ voice was quiet. “You were not nothing before the gift, and you will not become nothing if the gift is tested.”

Presto shut his eyes. “Everyone has something that works. Hank has the bow. Diana can do anything. Eric’s shield actually blocks things. Bobby can smash rocks. Sheila can disappear. I have a hat that gives me scarves and makes me look stupid.”

Eric whispered, “Presto.”

But Presto kept going because once truth began, he could not stop it without drowning in the effort. “I hate needing it. I hate not trusting it. I hate that when something comes out wrong, I feel like that proves something about me.”

Jesus knelt close to him. “A gift is not given to prove that you are enough. It is given so love can move through you.”

Presto opened his eyes. “What if love looks ridiculous?”

“Then pride will laugh,” Jesus said. “And someone in danger may still be saved.”

The hat slipped another inch into the water. Presto looked at the pool, then at Jesus. His fingers loosened. Everyone saw it and panicked.

“Don’t let go!” Hank yelled.

Presto let go.

The hat sank beneath the black surface and disappeared. For a moment, nothing happened. Presto knelt there with both empty hands held over the pool, his face pale with loss. Venger’s laughter rolled through the valley, low and satisfied.

“Such obedience,” Venger said. “Such wisdom. Now the fool has no gift at all.”

Presto bowed his head. Then Uni stepped forward and touched her horn to the pool. Light moved under the black water, small at first, then spreading in bright veins. The pool trembled. The hat rose back to the surface, not dry, not clean, but shining from within. Presto reached for it slowly. When he lifted it, the water clung to the brim like ink, then fell away as clear drops onto the grass.

Jesus looked at the group. “The vulnerable are not burdens in My care. Sometimes they reveal what the strong have forgotten to see.”

Uni pressed her head against Presto’s arm. He laughed once, not because anything was funny, but because relief needed a sound. He put the hat back on. It sat crooked as ever, and for the first time, he did not immediately fix it.

The pools began to withdraw from the path. Not all of them, but enough to show one road through the valley, narrow and difficult, leading toward a bridge of pale stone far ahead. Beyond the bridge rose a forest of black cedars, and beyond the forest, a mountain whose summit glowed faintly red beneath circling clouds.

Venger’s shadow gathered above that mountain.

Hank lowered the bow. He wanted to move quickly before the valley changed its mind, but he had begun to understand that speed was not the same as direction. He turned to the others, and the apology came out before he could make it sound impressive.

“I’m scared I’m going to get you hurt,” he said.

No one mocked him. No one looked away. Diana’s face softened with the tired recognition of someone who knew what it cost to stop performing strength. Eric shifted the shield on his arm and stared at the ground.

“I’m scared all the time,” Eric said. “I just hate giving anyone the satisfaction of knowing.”

Bobby wiped his face with his sleeve. “I’m scared something’s going to take Uni or Sheila, and then I won’t know what to do with all the mad.”

Sheila’s cloak shimmered around her shoulders. “I’m scared that if I’m not needed, I’ll disappear for real.”

Diana looked toward the bridge and spoke without looking at anyone. “I’m scared that if I need help, I won’t know who I am.”

Presto touched the brim of his hat. “I’m scared I’m only useful by accident.”

The valley listened, but the whispers did not return. Fear had lost the privacy it needed. Jesus stood among them with the patience of One who had been waiting not for polished courage, but for honest children.

“Now you can walk together,” He said.

Hank looked toward the bridge. “Will that take us home?”

“It will take you farther into the truth,” Jesus said.

Eric let out a weary breath. “I was really hoping for a different answer.”

“So was I,” Presto said.

Diana held out her staff across a soft place in the ground. “Then we go anyway.”

They crossed the valley slowly, closer than before. Hank did not walk as if he knew everything. Eric did not pretend the shield made him safe by itself. Diana accepted Hank’s hand once when a stone shifted beneath her, and though the gesture was brief, it changed something in her face. Sheila used the cloak to scout the ground ahead, but she kept speaking so they would know where she was. Bobby carried Uni over the last stretch of wet earth, not because she could not walk, but because he wanted to be gentle with something that trusted him. Presto reached into the hat only once, when the path narrowed, and pulled out a small lantern with a blue flame that gave no heat but showed which stones were firm.

At the bridge, they stopped beneath a sky beginning to burn red at the edges. The pale stone crossed a gorge so deep that the bottom vanished in crimson mist. The bridge had no railings. Halfway across, its center sagged where old damage had weakened it. On the far side, black cedars crowded together like watchers. From somewhere beyond them came a roar that shook the mountain.

It was not like the clicking creatures. It was older, larger, full of ruin. The red clouds above the summit rolled apart, and for one terrible moment they saw a shape moving behind them: many heads, vast wings, a body like a storm of scales and fire. Tiamat did not descend. She did not speak. She only turned in the distance, and the whole Realm seemed to remember that destruction could be enormous without being ultimate.

Bobby held Uni tighter. Eric’s shield arm dropped. Presto’s lantern flickered. Jesus looked toward the mountain, and His face held no fear.

“Chaos frightens what pride cannot control,” He said. “But you are not called to worship terror.”

Venger’s voice came from the cedars ahead, though he could not be seen. “Cross, then. Bring your honesty, your little lights, your trembling mercy. The Realm has deeper ways to teach children what they truly are.”

Hank looked at Jesus. “And what are we?”

Jesus turned from the mountain to the children, and the answer came without force, without flattery, without pretending the road would be easier than it was.

“Seen,” He said. “And called.”

The bridge waited under the red sky, and this time, no one ran ahead alone.

Chapter Three

The bridge taught them how narrow togetherness could feel.

From the valley floor, it had looked thin and dangerous, but from the first step it became something worse. The pale stone was smooth beneath their shoes, worn by rain that had fallen before any of them were born into the ordinary world. There were no railings, no ropes, no carved edges to guide a hand. The gorge opened on both sides with a silence so deep it seemed to pull sound downward before voices could finish leaving the mouth. Crimson mist shifted far below, and every few breaths, something unseen moved in that mist with a slow drag against stone.

Diana went first because her body understood balance before her fear could argue. She held the staff across her palms, letting it steady her, feeling the bridge through the soles of her shoes. Hank followed close behind with the bow ready, though he had learned enough not to pull the string merely to look prepared. Sheila walked near Bobby and Uni, her cloak gathered tightly around her shoulders. Presto kept the blue lantern lifted, its flame showing cracks in the stone that ordinary sight would have missed. Eric came last for several steps, then realized that last felt too much like being left, and hurried until he was beside Presto.

“No one say anything inspiring,” Eric muttered. “The bridge may hear it and decide we need character development.”

Presto gave a weak laugh, grateful for the joke even though it shook. “I was going to say something about looking down, but I think my stomach already did.”

“Don’t look down,” Diana said.

Eric looked down immediately, then made a strangled sound. “I have chosen regret.”

The bridge swayed.

It was not much at first, only a slight tremor that passed beneath their feet from one side to the other. Everyone froze except Diana, who lifted one hand without turning. “Stay still,” she said.

Bobby tightened his grip on Uni. “I am staying still.”

“You’re shaking,” Sheila whispered.

“I’m mad at the bridge.”

“You can’t be mad at a bridge.”

“I can be mad at anything.”

Jesus walked among them without the bridge bending beneath Him as it bent beneath the children. He was not untouched because He was distant, but because the Realm had no right to make Him uncertain. The red sky pressed low above His head. Venger’s mountain burned in the distance. Tiamat’s roar rolled again through the clouds, and the bridge answered with another shiver.

Hank looked back. “Maybe we should go one at a time.”

Diana’s eyes stayed on the far side. “If we separate on this bridge, we won’t be able to help each other if it breaks.”

“If we all stay together and it breaks, we all fall,” Eric said.

Bobby snapped, “You always think of the worst thing.”

Eric’s mouth tightened. “Someone should.”

The words were not as cruel as they sounded, and Bobby seemed to hear that too, because he did not answer. The group moved again, slower now. Halfway across, where the bridge sagged, the stone dipped under their combined weight. Presto’s lantern flame flickered wildly, painting the cracks in blue. Diana crouched to inspect the damage, and for the first time since they had met the bridge, uncertainty crossed her face.

“It’s weak here,” she said.

“We can jump it,” Bobby said.

“Sheila and I can,” Diana answered. “Maybe Hank. Maybe Eric if he stops arguing with gravity. But Uni can’t, and Presto might not make it with the lantern.”

Presto’s shoulders sank.

Diana noticed and looked ashamed. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” he said, too quickly. “I know what you meant.”

Eric lifted the shield and tapped the broken section with its edge. The stone groaned. “For the record, I object to my athletic ability being placed in the same category as a small unicorn’s.”

Uni huffed at him.

“She objects too,” Sheila said.

That almost made them smile. Almost.

Jesus knelt beside the sagging stone and placed His hand near one of the cracks. The children watched, waiting for the bridge to mend. It did not. The crack remained. The missing pieces remained. The gorge remained hungry below them.

Hank felt frustration rise in him before he could stop it. “Can You fix it?”

Jesus looked up. “Yes.”

“Then why not?”

“Because not everything broken on your road is given so you can avoid trusting one another.”

Hank had no answer for that. He wanted a miracle that would keep them from needing each other in ways that could fail. He wanted the bridge whole, the path obvious, the group obedient, his own heart steady. Instead, Jesus stood and looked at Diana.

“What do you see?” He asked.

Diana swallowed. The question placed weight on her without crushing her. She took one more careful look at the broken section, then lifted her staff. “If I brace the staff across the gap, people can use it for balance. Hank can anchor one end with the bowstring. Eric can use the shield as a sliding plate over the weakest stones. Bobby can carry Uni. Sheila can cross unseen and warn us if the far side shifts. Presto’s lantern can show where not to step.”

She paused, and the next sentence cost her more than the plan. “But I can’t do all of it. I need everyone to listen.”

Hank nodded. “We’ll listen.”

The bowstring glowed when he wrapped it around one end of Diana’s staff, and the staff held firm across the gap. Eric laid his shield flat over the most broken stones and looked at it unhappily. “I do want that back.”

“You’ll get it back,” Sheila said.

“That’s what people say right before someone loses the shield.”

“Eric.”

“I’m cooperating.”

He was. That was the strange part. He knelt and pushed the shield carefully into place, using it not as a wall before himself, but as a support beneath another person’s feet. When Presto crossed over it, Eric held the edge steady with both hands and stared at the stone instead of the gorge.

Presto whispered, “Thanks.”

“Don’t make it weird,” Eric whispered back.

“It was already weird. We’re on a broken bridge in a dragon sky.”

“Fair.”

Sheila crossed next beneath the cloak, but she kept speaking softly as she moved. “Left stone firm. Right stone loose. Don’t step where the blue light bends. Diana, there’s a crack under your heel.”

Diana shifted just in time. “Thank you.”

The simple words seemed to surprise Sheila, as if she had expected to be useful without being noticed. She reappeared on the far side, and for a moment the cloak no longer looked like a way to disappear, but like a quiet lantern turned inward. Bobby came after her with Uni in his arms. The little unicorn was heavier than she looked, and the sagging bridge did not appreciate either of them.

A stone broke loose under Bobby’s foot.

Sheila cried out. Hank pulled the bowstring tight. Diana leaned hard against the staff. Eric lunged forward and shoved his arm beneath the shield to stop it from sliding. Presto dropped to his knees and held the lantern over the crack, though his hands shook so badly the blue flame trembled across all their faces.

Bobby’s foot slipped into open air.

His first instinct was to clutch Uni and thrash. His second was to swing the club he was not holding. His third, the one that did not feel like him yet, was to go still.

“I need help,” he said, and he sounded furious about it.

Diana hooked the staff behind his knee. Hank pulled. Sheila grabbed the back of Bobby’s vest. Eric braced the shield with a grunt that turned into a yelp when the edge caught his wrist. Presto reached into his hat with one hand, not looking away from Bobby, and pulled out a coil of rope with tiny brass bells tied along its length.

“Why bells?” Eric shouted.

“I don’t know!”

“Use it anyway,” Jesus said.

Presto threw the rope. It wrapped around Bobby’s waist with a chorus of bright, ridiculous ringing. Under any other sky, Eric would have made a comment. Under this one, he pulled the rope with both hands. Together they dragged Bobby back onto the bridge. Uni scrambled from his arms into Sheila’s, unharmed but trembling.

Bobby lay on the stone, breathing hard. He looked at the bells around his waist and then at Presto. “Your hat saved me.”

Presto was crying openly now, though he seemed too startled to be embarrassed. “With stupid bells.”

Bobby sat up and wiped his face. “Good bells.”

That was all he said, but it was enough. Presto nodded, then laughed once through the tears because the bells kept jingling every time Bobby moved.

They crossed the rest of the bridge with less grace and more honesty. When the final child stepped onto the far side, the bridge behind them cracked down the center and fell in great pale pieces into the crimson mist. No one spoke until the last stone disappeared.

Eric stared into the gorge. “I would like it noted that I hated every part of that.”

Jesus looked at him. “And still you crossed.”

Eric’s face shifted, caught between embarrassment and something like wonder. “That better count for something.”

“It does,” Jesus said.

The black cedars closed around the road beyond the bridge. Their trunks rose straight and tall, their bark dark as charred iron. The branches did not sway, though wind moved above them. Every needle seemed to drink light. As the children entered, the blue lantern dimmed to a smaller flame, and the world narrowed to the sound of their own breathing and the soft step of Jesus walking with them.

The forest did not attack them. That made it worse. It listened.

After a while, the trees began to show them things.

Not reflections this time. Possibilities.

Between two trunks, Hank saw himself standing before a gate of gold, the bow in his hand, the others behind him cheering because he had found the way home. He looked taller in the vision, older, certain. No one questioned him. No one knew he had ever trembled. The vision warmed him in a dangerous way. It offered not home, exactly, but the version of himself he wanted to bring home: the leader who had never confessed fear.

On another path, Eric saw a stone house with thick doors, bright windows, food on the table, and no monsters outside. The shield hung over the fireplace, polished and unused. No one needed him to be brave there. No one asked him to step into danger. The vision did not call itself selfish. It called itself reasonable.

Diana saw a tower of white steps spiraling up into clean air. At the top, she stood alone, perfectly balanced, admired by people far below who never came close enough to ask anything of her. No one slowed her. No one needed more than she could give. No one saw her fall because in that vision she never did.

Presto saw a workshop full of shelves and books, where every object came from his hat exactly as intended. People applauded with kind faces, not mocking ones. He bowed again and again, and each time the applause grew louder until it became something he could hide inside.

Sheila saw a garden behind a wall where no one could find her unless she wanted to be found. There was no danger there, but no one calling her name either. The quiet looked peaceful until she noticed it had no doors.

Bobby saw a field where Uni ran free and Sheila laughed beside him. Around the field stood walls made from every enemy he had ever knocked down. Nothing could enter. Nothing could threaten them. He did not notice at first that nothing could leave.

Uni saw something gentler, and because she was innocent, it frightened her differently. She saw the children walking home without her, not because they were cruel, but because they believed she would be safer left behind in a meadow. She nudged Bobby’s hand and would not look again.

The forest paths separated around these visions. Each one offered a way that seemed shaped to the child who saw it. The road beneath their feet softened. Hank slowed. Diana’s steps pulled toward the tower. Presto drifted toward the workshop glow. Eric paused before the safe house with the thick doors.

Jesus stopped in the center of the road. “These are not doors home,” He said.

Venger appeared ahead between the cedars, standing on a stone rise with his wings folded behind him. Up close, he was more terrible than he had been in the sky, not because he was larger, but because his face carried the cold patience of someone who knew how long fear could be trained. His horned helm cast sharp shadows over his eyes. His hands glowed with red fire, but he held them at his sides, as if violence would be unnecessary.

“Not home,” Venger agreed. “Something kinder. A self each of them can survive being.”

Jesus looked at him. “A prison shaped like desire is still a prison.”

Venger’s mouth curved. “You wound them with truth and call it mercy. I offer them relief.”

“You offer them a smaller heart.”

“I offer them protection from disappointment.”

“You offer them loneliness.”

Venger’s eyes flashed, and the visions brightened. Hank’s golden gate opened. Eric’s safe house door swung wide. Diana’s tower filled with clean sunlight. Presto’s applause grew loud enough to shake the cedars. Sheila’s garden bloomed with flowers that gave off the scent of home. Bobby’s walled field filled with Uni’s happy running, and for a moment, Bobby took one step toward it.

“Bobby,” Sheila said.

He stopped, ashamed and angry. “It’s safe there.”

“For how long?”

“Forever.”

Sheila looked at the walls in his vision. “That isn’t forever. That’s being trapped with everything you’re afraid of.”

Bobby’s hands clenched. “I just want her safe.”

“I know,” Sheila said. Her voice trembled, but she did not disappear. “I want to be safe too. But I don’t want to vanish to get it.”

The garden behind her wall dimmed.

Diana stared at the tower. She could feel the pull of it in her muscles. Every step upward promised freedom from depending on people who might not catch her. She thought of the bridge and the brief terror of accepting Hank’s hand. She had not become weaker when she took it. That confused something old inside her.

“I can’t be strong alone,” she said.

The tower cracked from top to bottom, spilling white dust into the trees.

Presto looked toward the workshop. The applause there became desperate, almost needy, as if it required him to enter so it could keep existing. He touched the hat. “I don’t need to be impressive to be loved.”

The applause cut off.

Eric stood before the open house. Warm light spilled across his shoes. He could smell food. He could almost feel a chair beneath him, a roof above him, walls thick enough to keep every demand outside. The shield on his arm felt heavy. “What if I’m just not brave?” he said, not to Venger, not even to the group, but to the question that had followed him his whole life.

Jesus answered, “Then come afraid and do not come alone.”

Eric stared at Him. “That is a very inconvenient definition.”

“Yes,” Jesus said.

Eric took one step backward from the house. The door slammed shut, and the whole vision folded inward until it became a black leaf falling at his feet.

Hank was last. The gate of gold remained. In the vision, he was everything a leader should be if leadership meant never admitting need. The others looked at him with complete trust because they did not know the truth about him. He wanted that gate more than he wanted to admit. He wanted to be the kind of person who deserved trust before receiving it.

Venger’s voice softened. “They need certainty, boy. Give them that, and they will follow you home.”

Hank’s grip tightened around the bow. “And if I don’t have it?”

“Then pretend until they are grateful.”

For one tired heartbeat, Hank almost believed him.

Then he looked back. Eric stood afraid and still there. Diana stood strong and no longer alone. Presto stood with a crooked hat and eyes wet from being useful in a way he had not planned. Sheila stood visible. Bobby stood beside Uni with both hands open. None of them looked like the cheering followers in the vision. They looked frightened, dirty, wounded, and real.

Hank lowered the bow. “I don’t want them to follow a lie.”

The golden gate went dark.

The forest shook. Venger’s patience ended. Red fire burst from his hands and struck the cedars, not burning them, but waking them. The branches twisted downward like claws. Roots rose from the ground, wrapping around ankles, wrists, and weapons. Diana swung the staff to knock a root away from Presto. Eric raised the shield over Sheila as a branch came down. Bobby lifted the club, then stopped before smashing at roots tangled around Uni’s legs, forcing himself to strike the ground nearby instead. Hank drew the bow, and the arrow came only after he shouted, “Together!”

Light flashed through the trees, but Venger did not fall back. He spread his wings, and the visions shattered into thousands of red sparks that became little doorways, each one showing home in pieces. A bedroom. A school hallway. A kitchen. A street. The sky above an ordinary town. The fragments circled the children like fireflies made of longing.

“Choose,” Venger commanded. “One doorway for one heart. Each of you may go if you stop carrying the rest.”

The fragments drifted close. One hovered before Sheila, showing a quiet room with her own bed and no danger. One hovered before Eric, showing a door with his hand already on the knob. One hovered before Hank, showing his family turning toward him with relief. Not false-looking this time. Not twisted. Real enough to hurt.

The group began to turn in different directions.

Then Uni stepped into the center of them.

She was shaking. Her leg still trembled from the pass, and her eyes were wide with fear. She had no weapon, no words, no clever plan, no defense against Venger. She only stood there, small and vulnerable, and pressed her body against the nearest child, which happened to be Eric.

Eric looked down at her. The fragment of home hovered inches from his face.

“Oh, don’t do that,” he whispered, but his voice broke.

Uni leaned harder against his leg.

Eric lifted the shield, not toward Venger, not toward himself, but over Uni. The fragment before him dimmed.

Bobby saw it and moved beside him. Sheila stepped close on Uni’s other side. Presto raised the lantern. Diana planted the staff. Hank drew the bow but did not aim until every one of them had gathered around the vulnerable creature in the center. The fragments of home circled, bright and pleading.

Jesus stood just beyond them, His face full of grief and hope. “Now you see,” He said.

Hank looked at Him through the red sparks. “See what?”

“The doorway home cannot be entered by abandoning the one love has placed before you.”

Venger snarled. “Sentiment.”

Jesus’ eyes did not leave the children. “Mercy.”

The word moved through the forest with more force than Venger’s fire. The roots loosened. The red sparks flickered. Tiamat roared from the mountain, and the sound tore through the cedars so violently that the tops of the trees bent flat. The enormous dragon shape moved behind the clouds, many-headed and furious, not serving mercy, not serving truth, only destroying because destruction was its nature. Fire fell in the distance, and the mountain path lit red.

The children pressed closer around Uni. Not one of them stepped toward the fragments of home.

Hank understood then, not fully, but enough to change the weight inside him. Getting home still mattered. It mattered terribly. Their families mattered. Their world mattered. But if home could only be reached by becoming the kind of people who left the frightened behind, then the thing they reached would not be home in the way their hearts needed it to be.

He lowered the bow. “We go together,” he said.

Eric swallowed. “Even if together is slower.”

Diana nodded. “Even if it means needing help.”

Presto lifted the lantern higher. “Even if what helps looks ridiculous.”

Sheila’s cloak shimmered, but she remained visible. “Even if hiding would be easier.”

Bobby rested one hand on Uni’s neck. “Even if I have to be gentle when I want to break something.”

Jesus looked at them, and for the first time since they entered the Realm, the children felt not less afraid, but less ruled by fear. Venger saw it too. His face darkened with hatred, and the fragments of home burst into ash around them.

“Then walk toward ruin,” he said.

The cedars opened behind him, revealing the mountain road and the red glow beyond it. Tiamat’s shadow crossed the sky again, vast enough to cover the path, but Jesus stepped forward, and the shadow broke around Him like water around stone.

“The road continues,” He said.

No one asked if it led home. Not this time. They gathered their gifts, steadied one another, and followed Him out of the forest toward the mountain where fear would have one more chance to name them before love did.

Chapter Four

The mountain road did not climb so much as accuse.

It wound upward through black rock cut by red veins, past broken statues whose faces had been scraped away, past dry wells full of warm wind, past banners hanging from poles with no kingdom left to claim them. Ash drifted across the path like dirty snow. Every few turns, the children saw the Realm spread below them: the forest of black cedars, the shattered bridge, the valley of pools, the narrow pass where the first false doorway had promised home at the price of love.

No one talked much at first. The road took breath from them, and what breath remained was too precious to spend pretending they were not afraid. Hank walked near the front, but not ahead of everyone. Diana moved beside him, staff in hand, watching the rocks for hidden breaks. Eric stayed close to Presto because he had noticed, without announcing it, that Presto’s steps had grown uneven. Sheila walked where Bobby could see her. Bobby carried Uni for a while, then let her walk when she nudged his shoulder and insisted in her own small way that love did not mean refusing to let the beloved use her own legs.

Jesus walked with them, quiet and steady. Sometimes He was beside Hank. Sometimes He was behind Bobby. Sometimes He was near Sheila when the cloak began to shimmer around her without her choosing it. His presence did not flatten the mountain or cool the red sky, but it kept the road from becoming only terror. Every time the children looked toward Him, they remembered that Venger could threaten, Tiamat could destroy, and the Realm could confuse, but none of them owned the One who had called them seen.

At the ridge just below the summit, the road ended at a gate carved into the mountain face. It was not large, but it felt ancient, made of black stone fitted so tightly there was no crack for a blade of grass or a finger of light. Seven empty hollows marked its surface in a half circle. Above them was carved a sentence in letters none of the children knew and somehow understood.

No one enters whole by leaving the truth outside.

Eric read it twice, then sighed. “I miss signs that say exit.”

Presto lifted the lantern. The blue flame bent toward the seven hollows. “I think this is about us.”

“Of course it is,” Eric said. “Doors here have very personal boundaries.”

Hank touched one of the hollows. It warmed beneath his fingers, and the bow in his hand answered with a low hum. “Maybe our gifts open it.”

Jesus stood a little apart, looking not at the gate but at the children. “Your gifts may touch the door,” He said. “Only truth will open it.”

The mountain shook.

A roar split the sky, so loud that Eric dropped to one knee and Bobby threw both arms around Uni. The red clouds above the summit burst apart. Tiamat came into view, not descending fully, but circling the peak with vast wings that stirred ash into storms. Her many heads moved in different directions, each one breathing a different ruin. Fire spilled from one mouth into the clouds. Ice flashed from another and turned the air white before it shattered. Poison-green vapor trailed from a third. Lightning crawled across the scales of a fourth. The fifth head watched the gate with hatred that seemed older than speech.

She was terrible. She was not holy. She was power without mercy, force without love, destruction without wisdom. The children stared upward, and every gift they carried suddenly felt small.

Jesus lifted His eyes to the dragon-shadowed sky. He did not shrink back. He did not bargain. He did not speak to her as an equal ruler of anything eternal. He simply stood with the quiet authority of light in a place that had forgotten morning.

“She cannot give you names,” He said. “She can only make noise around the names fear has already used.”

Venger appeared before the gate.

He did not arrive with thunder this time. He stepped out from the ash as if he had been walking beside them all along in the space their fear left open. His wings were folded. His hands burned dimly. His face was calm, and that calm was worse than rage.

“You have brought them far,” he said to Jesus. “Far enough to understand the cost. That was unwise.”

Jesus answered, “Truth is never endangered by being understood.”

Venger’s gaze moved over the children. “Then let them understand this. Behind this gate waits a doorway strong enough to pierce the veil between worlds. Not a reflection. Not a trick of water. Not a pretty lie in a forest. A true passage. Home.”

The word struck them all.

Even after everything, it still had power. Maybe it always would. Home was not less precious because they had learned mercy. It was more precious now because they had begun to understand what kind of people they wanted to be when they reached it.

“What’s the catch?” Eric asked.

Venger almost smiled. “The boy with the shield has learned.”

Eric did not smile back.

Venger lifted one hand, and the seven hollows in the gate filled with red light. “Each hollow requires one confession. Not the small truths you have been practicing like children repeating lessons. The truth beneath the truth. Speak it, and the gate opens. Refuse, and the dragon above will break this mountain until the road behind you falls away. I need not defeat all of you. I need only wait until fear makes one of you silent.”

Hank’s stomach tightened. “Why would you want us to confess anything?”

“Because shame is strongest in darkness,” Jesus said before Venger could answer. “And he believes you will choose darkness rather than humility.”

Venger’s face hardened.

The gate waited. Tiamat circled. Rocks broke loose from the cliffs and fell into the red air below.

Hank stepped forward first. Of course he did. Then he stopped because the old habit had moved his feet before his heart was ready. He looked back at the others. “I don’t have to go first.”

Diana nodded once. “But you can.”

That was different. It did not feel like pressure pretending to be trust. It felt like permission.

Hank placed the bow into the first hollow. Golden light met red. The gate trembled. He tried to speak the truth he had already said, that he was scared, but the hollow did not answer. That truth was real, but it was not deep enough now. He closed his eyes. The mountain rumbled beneath him.

“I wanted you all to need me,” he said, his voice rough. “Not just because I care. I do care. But I liked being the one people looked to. I thought if I could get everyone home, then I would finally know I was worth following.”

The bow flashed. The first hollow turned gold.

No one mocked him. That mercy almost undid him.

Eric walked next with the shield on his arm. “I would like to file a complaint about the emotional nature of this door,” he said, but there was no strength in the joke. He placed the shield against the second hollow. It reflected his face, then the false house, then Uni leaning against his leg in the forest.

He swallowed. “I act like fear makes me smarter than everyone else. Sometimes I call it realism because cowardice sounds worse. But the truth is, I have wanted people to fail for being brave because then I would not have to feel small for being afraid.”

The shield rang softly. The second hollow turned gold.

Bobby looked at Eric with surprise, not because Eric had been afraid, but because he had said it without running from them. Something in Bobby’s anger loosened.

Diana stepped to the third hollow. The staff felt firm in her hands, but her voice was not. “I thought needing help meant losing myself. I thought if I stayed strong enough, no one could pity me, and no one could leave me waiting for a hand that never came.”

Her eyes flicked toward Hank, then Sheila, then the broken road behind them. “But I also used strength to keep people at a distance. I made it hard for anyone to love me closely.”

The staff touched the hollow. Gold light moved through the carved lines. The third hollow opened.

Presto stared at the fourth hollow as if it might laugh first. When he put the hat against it, nothing happened. He took it off, held it in both hands, and spoke to the black stone.

“I wanted a gift that would make embarrassment impossible. I wanted proof that I was not a mistake. But I think maybe I kept calling myself a mistake so no one else could hurt me by saying it first.”

His face twisted. “And I’m tired of agreeing with shame before anyone even asks me to.”

The hat glowed from within. The fourth hollow turned gold, and one tiny brass bell from the bridge rope fell out of it, ringing once on the stone. Bobby smiled at him through tears. Presto laughed and wiped his face with his sleeve.

Sheila came to the fifth hollow and almost vanished before she reached it. The cloak shimmered around her, turning the edges of her body transparent. She stopped, closed her eyes, and forced herself to remain visible.

“I thought being unseen protected me from being hurt,” she said. “But sometimes I disappeared because I wanted people to prove they would search for me. And when they didn’t know how, I told myself that meant I didn’t matter.”

Bobby made a wounded sound. Sheila looked at him gently.

“I know you love me,” she said. “I just didn’t always know how to stay where love could reach me.”

She laid the cloak against the hollow. Gold light spread like dawn under thin clouds. The fifth hollow opened.

Bobby gripped the club with both hands and walked to the sixth. Uni followed close, nudging his side. His face was red, and he looked furious at the tears he could not stop.

“I thought if I was angry enough, nothing bad could happen,” he said. “I thought if I smashed everything scary, then nobody I loved would leave or get hurt. But I know I scared people too. I scared Sheila. I scared Uni. I scared myself.”

He looked at Jesus then, and his voice became smaller. “I don’t know what to do with all the mad when I’m sad.”

Jesus stepped closer. “Bring it to Me before you spend it.”

Bobby pressed the club into the hollow. “I want to be strong without being mean.”

The sixth hollow turned gold.

Only the seventh remained.

Everyone looked at Uni.

The little unicorn stepped backward, ears pinned. Bobby immediately crouched beside her. “She doesn’t have to confess. She didn’t do anything.”

Venger’s eyes gleamed. “Every door has its price.”

Jesus turned toward him. “You do not set the price of mercy.”

The seventh hollow remained dark.

Presto whispered, “What does it want?”

Jesus looked at the children, not Uni. “The vulnerable do not open the way by proving they are useful. Love opens the way by refusing to treat them as a cost.”

The meaning settled slowly, then all at once.

Venger raised both hands, and the mountain shook violently. Cracks shot through the road behind them. Tiamat screamed above, and fire fell on the ridge, bursting against the rocks in sheets of heat. The gate glowed red around its edges. A doorway began to form inside the stone before the seventh hollow had opened. Through it, they saw home again, clearer than ever: not a false carnival image, not a lonely room, but the real ordinary world waiting like a mercy beyond pain.

Venger’s voice thundered over the ridge. “Leave the creature. The door will hold for the children. It will not hold for the beast.”

Bobby wrapped both arms around Uni. “No.”

Venger’s face sharpened. “Then lose the way for all of them.”

Eric lifted the shield and stepped beside Bobby. “That argument was more persuasive before I met her.”

Diana planted her staff on Uni’s other side. “We are not balancing the door on abandonment.”

Presto put the hat back on, crooked and shining. “Ridiculous mercy worked before.”

Sheila drew her cloak wide, covering Uni and Bobby both, not to make them disappear, but to shelter them from falling ash. Hank raised the bow toward the gate, then lowered it because this was not a target he could shoot.

He turned to Jesus. “What do we do?”

Jesus’ face was full of sorrow, but beneath it there was joy, deep and steady. “Choose who you are becoming.”

Hank looked at the others. No speech rose in him. No command. No performance. Just one honest sentence.

“We go together, or we wait together.”

The seventh hollow filled with light.

It did not come from Uni, though she stood nearest. It came from the circle around her, from the shield held outward, the staff braced, the cloak sheltering, the hat surrendered, the club lowered, the bow resting, and the children refusing to purchase escape with lovelessness. The gold spread across the gate, swallowing the red until the black stone cracked open from within.

Venger screamed, and for the first time it was not anger alone. It was loss.

The gate opened. A true doorway shone inside it, bright with a light that smelled of rain on pavement, clean laundry, summer grass, and rooms where people were about to discover how badly they had been missed. The children felt home pulling at them with a tenderness so strong it hurt.

Then Tiamat descended.

She came through the torn clouds with all her heads crying ruin. The mountain vanished under the shadow of her wings. Fire, ice, poison, lightning, and raw destructive wind spiraled toward the gate. The children cried out and dropped close to one another. Venger laughed through his fury, as if he would rather see the doorway destroyed than see mercy enter it.

Jesus stepped between the children and the dragon.

He did not raise a weapon. He did not reach for spell or charm. He lifted His hand, the same hand that had drawn a boundary on the road where the first monsters hunted them. The storm struck the air before Him and stopped. Not gently. Not quietly. It crashed against an unseen authority and broke apart in streams of harmless light that fell around the children like warm rain.

Tiamat recoiled, roaring with every head. She was destruction, but not sovereign. She was terror, but not truth. She beat her wings, and the mountain cracked behind her, yet she could not cross the place where Jesus stood.

Venger stared at Him with hatred beyond words. “This Realm is mine.”

Jesus turned to him. “No. It is wounded.”

Venger hurled his red fire at the open doorway, not at Jesus, not at the children, but at the path home itself. Hank understood before the flame struck. The final test was not whether they could confess. It was whether they would protect the way for one another when the door had finally opened.

“Now!” Hank shouted.

Eric raised the shield. Diana locked her staff behind it. Bobby placed the club beneath Eric’s arm to brace him without swinging it. Sheila’s cloak spread over all of them, holding back ash and sparks. Presto reached into the hat and pulled out nothing but the purple scarf from the pass, singed at the edges and soft as ever. For one terrible second, his face fell.

Then he smiled through his fear.

“Obedience,” he whispered, and threw it.

The scarf wrapped around the shield, the staff, the club, the bow, and all their hands, binding their gifts together in one trembling line. Hank drew the bowstring against that shared knot of courage, and this time the arrow that formed was not his alone. It held Eric’s frightened protection, Diana’s surrendered strength, Presto’s humble trust, Sheila’s visible love, Bobby’s merciful power, and the small faithful presence of Uni standing beneath them all.

Jesus looked back at them. “Let truth fly.”

Hank released.

The arrow did not strike Venger’s body. It struck the darkness behind his words. It tore through the red fire, through the false doors, through the shame he had fed, through the loneliness he had named wisdom, through the fear he had dressed as survival. Light burst across the ridge. Venger staggered backward, wings flaring, his face suddenly exposed not as unstoppable evil but as a proud, furious creature unable to rule hearts that had stopped hiding from the truth.

His fire went out.

Tiamat roared one last time, but the sound no longer filled the children with the same obedience to terror. Jesus stepped forward, and the dragon-shadow withdrew into the storm beyond the mountain, still terrible, still dangerous, but unable to define the road.

Venger fell to one knee before the open gate, not in worship, but in defeat. His eyes burned with hatred as he looked at the children.

“You could have gone sooner,” he whispered.

Hank held the bow at his side. “Not home.”

The doorway shone brighter.

Jesus turned toward the children. “Come,” He said. “The door is open.”

They stood before it, filthy, trembling, changed, and not one of them moved alone.

Chapter Five

The doorway home did not pull them in like a trap. It waited.

That was almost harder. After everything the Realm had done to rush them, frighten them, tempt them, divide them, and offer escape at the wrong price, the true door stood open with no hand reaching out to seize them. Beyond it lay ordinary light. Not fantasy light, not enchanted fire, not the red glare of Venger’s mountain, but the plain beloved light of the world they had lost. They could hear distant voices, shoes on pavement, the hum of a summer crowd, and somewhere beneath it all, the sound of home continuing to exist without understanding why seven children had been changed before returning to it.

Eric stood with the shield hanging at his side. “So this is it?”

Jesus looked at him. “This is a door.”

Eric gave a tired little laugh. “You know, a person could spend an entire lifetime trying to get one straight answer around here.”

Jesus’ eyes were kind. “And still receive one when it is needed.”

No one moved. Hank understood why. The door was open, but crossing it meant admitting the journey had mattered. It meant they could not return to the ordinary world as if all they had survived was a strange accident. He looked at the bow in his hand. The string was quiet now. No arrow waited. Leadership did not feel like standing above the others anymore. It felt like standing with them long enough to tell the truth.

“I kept thinking home would fix this,” he said. “All of it. The fear, the pressure, everything. But I think if I go back pretending again, I’ll carry the Realm with me.”

Jesus nodded. “A heart can leave a place and still live by its fear.”

Diana leaned on her staff, not because she was weak, but because she no longer needed to prove she never needed support. “Then how do we go back?”

“With what you have learned,” Jesus said. “And with the humility to learn again.”

Presto touched his crooked hat. “Do we keep these?”

Jesus looked at each gift with quiet understanding. “Some gifts belong to the road that revealed them. Some gifts remain in ways no hand can hold.”

Presto seemed disappointed at first. Then he looked at the others and smiled faintly. “I guess the hat would be hard to explain at school.”

“I was prepared to deny knowing you,” Eric said.

“You already do that sometimes.”

“Not under oath.”

Sheila laughed, and the sound surprised them all. It was small, but it was real, and it did not vanish. She drew the cloak tighter around her shoulders, then slowly took it off. For a moment, fear crossed her face. Without it, she felt too visible. Then Bobby reached for her hand, and she let him take it.

“I don’t want to disappear when I’m hurt,” she said.

Jesus received the cloak from her. “Then when hurt tells you to hide from love, remember that you were seen in the dark.”

Bobby looked down at his club. It had felt powerful when he first held it, then dangerous, then useful in a way he had not expected. He laid it at Jesus’ feet with both hands. “What do I do when I get mad back home?”

“Bring your anger into the light before it becomes your master,” Jesus said.

Bobby’s lip trembled. “What if I forget?”

“Then remember again.”

Uni pressed against Bobby’s side, and he bent his forehead to hers. The little unicorn’s horn glowed softly. She could not go where they were going. They all knew it at once, not because anyone said so, but because some good things are given for a road and not for the room at the end of it.

Bobby’s face crumpled. “No.”

Sheila knelt beside him at once. “Bobby.”

“No,” he said again, clutching Uni’s mane. “We didn’t leave her. That was the whole point. We don’t leave her.”

Jesus knelt close, and the entire mountain seemed to quiet around Bobby’s grief. “You did not leave her to save yourselves,” He said. “Now you must entrust her without calling trust abandonment.”

“That’s not fair,” Bobby whispered.

“No,” Jesus said softly. “Love often hurts where it is most real.”

Uni nudged Bobby’s chest, then stepped back toward Jesus. She was shaking, but not from fear alone. Something in her knew she had been loved well. Bobby covered his face. Eric looked away, pretending ash was in his eyes. Presto cried without pretending. Diana put a hand on Bobby’s shoulder, and Sheila kept hold of his hand.

Jesus touched Uni’s head with tenderness. “The vulnerable are never forgotten by Me.”

The little unicorn stepped into a fold of golden light beside the gate. She did not disappear like something erased. She became hidden in care. Bobby watched until the light settled into the stones, then picked up the club and laid it down again, as if surrender required more than one motion.

Venger remained at the edge of the ridge, weakened but not gone, his hatred turned inward like a blade he refused to drop. He watched them with cold contempt. “You will return to your small world and become small again.”

Hank looked at him. Once, that would have wounded him. Now it only sounded like the voice of someone who had never understood love. “Maybe small is where courage starts.”

Eric raised his shield and set it down. “And for the record, small people can still make excellent complaints.”

Diana placed the staff beside the shield. Presto laid the hat down after pulling one last object from it by accident: a tiny blue ribbon with a brass bell tied to the end. He handed it to Bobby, who held it like something sacred. Sheila folded the cloak beside the other gifts. Hank placed the bow last.

As each gift touched the stone, its light moved into the children, not visibly at first, but in the way their shoulders changed. Hank stood without needing to look certain. Eric stood afraid without hiding behind mockery. Diana stood strong with her hand still resting on Bobby’s shoulder. Presto stood embarrassed and loved. Sheila stood visible. Bobby stood grieving and gentle. Uni was hidden from sight, but the bell in Bobby’s hand rang once though no wind moved.

Jesus turned toward the doorway. “Go in peace.”

Hank took the first step, then stopped and looked back. “Will we remember You here?”

Jesus’ face held the sorrow of all partings and the promise beneath them. “You may forget the shape of the road. Do not forget the truth it taught you.”

“What truth?” Presto asked, though he knew there were many.

Jesus looked at them as if each answer belonged personally to the one who needed it. “That home is not merely the place you reach when danger ends. Home is where love receives you truthfully, and where you return ready to love truthfully in return.”

The doorway brightened until the Realm became a shadow around its edges. One by one, the children stepped through. Hank went with his hand open, not raised in command. Diana followed without rushing. Presto looked back once and touched the brim of a hat no longer on his head. Eric hesitated longest, then gave Jesus a small nod that held more gratitude than words could have carried. Sheila and Bobby entered together, hand in hand, and just before the light took them, Bobby heard the tiny bell ring again.

They fell back into the ordinary world on a sunlit platform beside the ride that had taken them. No one around them seemed to understand what had happened. The crowd moved. Music played. A worker called for the next group. The sky was blue, painfully blue.

For a moment, none of the children spoke.

Then Eric looked at his empty arm where the shield had been and said, “I am never going on anything with the word adventure in it again.”

Presto laughed first. Diana followed. Sheila was crying. Hank was too. Bobby opened his hand and found the blue ribbon with the tiny brass bell resting in his palm.

No one said Uni’s name immediately. They did not need to. The bell said it for them.

They walked away from the ride together, slower than before, closer than before, carrying no weapons anyone else could see and more courage than they had brought. They still wanted their homes, their families, their rooms, their ordinary lives. But the longing had changed. Home was no longer only escape. It was a place where truth would have to be practiced, where fear would have to be brought into light, where strength would have to learn mercy again and again.

Far beyond the veil, near the edge of the Realm, Jesus returned to the dark grass where ash thinned before the hills. Venger’s mountain smoldered in the distance. The forests still held shadows. The roads still shifted. Other frightened hearts would one day need guiding through doors that would not open empty. Jesus knelt beneath the bruised sky, hands open before the Father, and ended as He had begun, in quiet prayer.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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Conventional wisdom says that fewer publishers read submissions in the summer. And there are a few categories of publishers this is often true of. University journals, for instance, often close their submission forms over the summer when students and faculty aren't on-campus. But there are also a lot of independent publishers and literary journals that aren't impacted by the academic calendar, and who do keep reading work from submitters through the summer. 

I have a few stories seeking a home currently, so I've been consulting my usual sources to find some places I can send them, and figured they might also be intriguing markets for some other writers out there, too. I mostly focus on places that publish fiction, since that's what I'm shopping around, but a lot of these places also publish creative nonfiction, poetry, or other things like visual art, if you're looking for places to send those. And of course, these aren’t even close to all of the options that are out there. If you don’t find any that speak to you here, give a quick look at Duotrope or ChillSubs. You might be surprised how many spots are still out there reading, especially for writers in the genres.

Augur

Deadline: 7/15 Genres: Literary speculative (sci-fi, fantasy, apocalypse, fabulism, splistream, etc.) Fiction wordcount: up to 5,000 Pays: .14/word (CAD) Duotrope acceptance percentage: 0.82%

A top Canadian publisher of speculative fiction, Augur is only open to international submitters during limited windows, one of which is in the first half of July. This is a good home for pieces that straddle the literary/genre fiction divide, and they’re open to work from most speculative genres.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Deadline: always open Genres: Secondary-world adventure fantasy Fiction wordcount: up to 15,000 Pays: .08/word Duotrope acceptance percentage: 0.78%

Beneath Ceaseless Skies has a very specific focus: fantasy stories set somewhere other than Earth, or in an alternate history version of Earth, and where some kind of adventure happens. Within that category, they’re an excellent home for fantasy written in a literary voice, though the clarity of the plot and character development should always be paramount.

Black Cat Weekly

Deadline: Always open Genres: Sci-fi, fantasy, mystery Fiction wordcount: 1,500-45,000 (up to 15,000 preferred) Pays: .01/word ($5-$50) Duotrope acceptance percentage: 11.03%

Black Cat Weekly publishes fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery stories, and since it comes out weekly they need to buy a lot of them. This is an excellent home for quick-paced plot-driven stories. Genres like space opera and epic fantasy do well here. Note that they don’t accept simultaneous submissions.

Black Fox Literary Magazine

Deadline: 11/30 Genres: All Fiction wordcount: up to 5,000 Pays: $20 Duotrope acceptance percentage: 0%

One of the unique things about Black Fox Literary Magazine is that it accepts genres that are often hard to find a home for in a short length, like mystery, romance, and YA. It is also a highly competitive market, and with good reason because it can make a beautiful home for stories in a broad variety of genres.

Body Shots

Deadline: Currently open (deadline not stated) Genres: Any Fiction wordcount: up to 7,500 Pays: $35-$150 Duotrope acceptance percentage: 3.03%

The literary journal of Subtle Body Press, Body Shots is relatively new, debuting in late 2024. Their vibe veers toward bizarro, transgressive, and counterculture work, though they’re not limited to things in that area. Generally, it’s a good home for work that’s got a bit of an edge, or work that blurs genre or takes experimental approaches to form and voice.

Dragon Soul Press

Deadline: 7/31 (Midnight Bites), 8/31 (Once Upon a Tale, Curses & Crystals), 9/30 (A Winter in Love) Genres: Sci-fi, fantasy, horror, romance Fiction wordcount: 3,000-20,000 Pays: Royalties Duotrope acceptance percentage: 44.12%

Dragon Soul Press publishes themed short fiction anthologies that all generally fall under one genre umbrella or another. They usually have several anthology calls open at any given time and they’re often announced several months in advance, so you can plan ahead if you have stories that might fit their aesthetic.

The First Line Literary Journal

Deadline: 8/1 (The line of people stretched all the way around the block), 11/1 (Lawrence was the last to arrive). Genres: All Fiction wordcount: 300-5,000 Pays: $25-$50 Duotrope acceptance percentage: 4.55%

The First Line does something I think is unique in literary journals. Each issue’s prompt is a sentence that starts every piece published in that issue. They announce all of the year’s themes at the start of each calendar year. They same press also runs The Last Line, which is the same concept but the final line is provided, which has a deadline of 10/1 (It was after midnight when we finally made it home.)

Fusion Fragment

Deadline: 7/31 Genres: Sci-fi and literary sci-fi Fiction wordcount: 2,000-15,000 Pays: .04/word (CAD) up to $400 Duotrope acceptance percentage: 0.68%

This online sci-fi journal is open to a range of subgenres, but across them tends to favor character-driven stories and is more drawn to work that focuses on things like voice, language, and emotion than ones that are primarily built around an adventurous plot. They’re especially interested in getting work from underrepresented voices in sci-fi.

Havok

Deadline: Rotating theme deadlines (next one 7/10) Genres: sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, thriller, comedy Fiction wordcount: 300-1,000 Pays: No payment for online; $25-$50 if picked for an anthology ChillSubs acceptance percentage: 8.33%

Havok publishes a story every weekday in a rotating set of genres: Mystery Monday, Techno Tuesday, Wacky Wednesday, Thriller Thursday, and Fantasy Friday. They also have occasional seasonal themes that stack on top of those, so make sure to check on that before submitting

Image

Deadline: 8/1 Genres: Literary Fiction wordcount: up to 6,000 Pays: $25/page Duotrope acceptance percentage: 0.75%

The focus of Image is on work that engages with religion, specifically the religions of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. It can be in a critical or a slant way, but they’re looking for work that somehow engages with those faiths. They’re currently reading on a theme of “trash” in all possible meanings and interpretations.

Phano

Deadline: Currently open (no deadline stated) Genres: sci-fi Fiction wordcount: up to 5,000 Pays: .02/word Duotrope acceptance percentage: 0%

Even though this is a newer journal, just founded in 2024, it’s quickly shot up to become a highly regarded publisher of literary science fiction. They are the best home for near-future sci-fi that makes realistic use of technology but doesn’t focus only on that, but also has deep emotion or explores deeper philosophical themes.

Sally Port  

Deadline: Always open Genres: Fantasy Fiction wordcount: 1,000-13,000 (sweet spot 6,000-7,000) Pays: .05/word Duotrope acceptance percentage: 10.45%

The mission of Sally Port is very cool: it’s a truly all-ages fantasy magazine, publishing middle grade and young adult work alongside stories intended for adults. Because of that, this isn’t the best market for especially violent or vulgar stories, though they do publish stories that have deep ideas or “grown-up” themes. Speaking of themes, they have those for their issues and you can see the calendar here.

Solarpunk Magazine

Deadline: 7/14 Genres: Solarpunk Fiction wordcount: up to 7,500 (sweet spot 1,500-4,000) Pays: .10/word Duotrope acceptance percentage: 3.03%

This journal is run by Android Press, which is a respected publisher of book-length fiction. As you might guess from the name, the journal is focused on solarpunk, along with adjacent genres like solarpunk horror. They also occasionally have themes, which you can see on the submission guideline site if there are any currently active.

 

The Submission Pit

Deadline: 7/31 Genres: Sci-fi, fantasy, horror Fiction wordcount: up to 10,000 Pays: $100 Duotrope acceptance percentage:  0%

This is another new one, though it’s riffing off an established formula. Similar to the Short Story Substack, The Submission Pit is a Substack-based journal that publishes one short story each month. The focus of this one is exclusively on speculative fiction, though it is tricky to narrow down what they’re looking for much more than that since they are so new.

subTerrain Magazine

Deadline: 8/7 Genres: Literary Fiction wordcount: up to 3,000 Pays: .10/word Duotrope acceptance percentage: 2.7%

Another Canada-based journal, subTerrain Magazine regularly publishes international contributors. Their emphasis is on literary fiction but they also publish work that’s around the fringes of genre, especially stories that have a surreal feel or exist in a slant reality.

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The thing about walking down a street is that you have never had to ask permission to do it. You step out of your house, you turn onto the pavement, and you move through the world as one anonymous body among millions, your face an unremarkable fact that nobody records and nobody keeps. That assumption, ancient and quiet and almost never examined, is the thing a class-action lawsuit filed on 2 June 2026 says Amazon has quietly demolished. The complaint, lodged in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, does not concern a data breach or a leaked database or a rogue employee. It concerns a feature that works exactly as designed. And what it was designed to do, the lawsuit argues, is take a mathematical print of the face of every person who walks past a Ring camera, whether or not that person has ever heard of the feature, whether or not they consented, whether or not they will ever know it happened.

The feature is called Familiar Faces. Amazon's Ring subsidiary announced it in September 2025 and began rolling it out to doorbell owners across the United States on 9 December 2025. The pitch is the kind of mild convenience that has carried surveillance technology into the home for a decade: instead of a generic alert telling you that motion has been detected at your front door, your phone now tells you who is there. You tag the people who come and go, up to fifty of them, and the system learns to recognise them, greeting your partner, your neighbour, your regular delivery driver by name on the screen in your hand.

To do that, the system has to do something more consequential than its marketing suggests. To decide whether the person at the door is the person you tagged, it has to scan the face of everyone who appears in the camera's field of view, extract a faceprint from each one, and compare it against the saved set. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained in a November 2025 analysis written by its staff attorney Mario Trujillo, a faceprint is produced by “taking tiny measurements of your face and converting that into a series of numbers that is saved for later.” That string of numbers, derived from the geometry of a stranger's face, is processed and stored on Amazon's servers. Ring's own support materials describe a retention regime in which unnamed profiles are removed after thirty days without a further sighting and all facial-recognition information is deleted after a hundred and eighty days of no recognition. The lawsuit's contention is brutally simple: every person who walks into frame, the postal worker, the canvasser, the child selling biscuits, the neighbour cutting across the lawn, the stranger merely passing on the pavement, is scanned, measured and stored without ever being asked.

A Plaintiff Who Never Bought the Camera

The man bringing the case is Charles Sigwalt, a Virginia resident who has never owned a Ring device. That detail is the entire architecture of the argument. Sigwalt is not a customer complaining about a product he bought. He is, on his own account, a passer-by, someone whose face was captured and stored while he visited friends and family whose doorbells happened to have Familiar Faces switched on. He represents a proposed nationwide class defined, in the complaint, as everyone in the United States whose facial-recognition data was collected, retained or used by the feature within the relevant statutory period, with a Virginia subclass for residents of his own state. The reporting on the filing describes a class that “could include thousands or millions of people,” and the complaint itself seeks damages exceeding the five-million-dollar threshold that anchors a federal class action of this kind.

The legal theories are an instructive patchwork, because they reveal how poorly the existing law fits the harm. Sigwalt's complaint leans on Virginia consumer-protection law, Virginia's appropriation statute, the Virginia Computer Crimes Act, the common-law tort of intrusion upon seclusion, negligence and unjust enrichment. It also invokes, by way of contrast, the biometric-privacy regimes of the three jurisdictions from which Amazon has conspicuously withheld the feature: Illinois, Texas and Portland, Oregon. That contrast is the rhetorical heart of the case. Familiar Faces is simply not available in those three places, and the complaint argues that this selective deployment proves Amazon “clearly has the ability to follow biometric privacy laws” and chooses, everywhere else, not to. As the filing puts it, the rest of the country does not get the same respect.

It is worth dwelling on how strange this is as a matter of corporate behaviour. A company that genuinely believed its feature was lawful and benign would not need to draw a map of the United States and carve three holes in it. Amazon drew exactly that map. The holes are not random. They correspond precisely to the places where collecting a stranger's faceprint without consent carries a defined, expensive and well-litigated legal penalty. Everywhere the penalty is uncertain, the scanning proceeds. The map is, in effect, a confession rendered in geography: a demonstration that the company knows precisely what consent-based biometric law requires, possesses the technical capacity to comply with it, and has decided that compliance is something it owes only to residents of jurisdictions that thought to legislate.

Why Three Jurisdictions, and Only Three

To understand the map, you have to understand the three laws that drew it, because each represents a different answer to the same question and together they form the entire functioning edifice of American biometric protection.

Illinois passed the Biometric Information Privacy Act in 2008. BIPA is, by some distance, the most consequential privacy statute in the United States, and it owes that status to a single design choice: it gives ordinary people a private right of action. Under BIPA, a private entity may not collect a person's biometric identifier, a faceprint emphatically included, without first informing them in writing, explaining the purpose and duration of the collection, and obtaining written consent. Crucially, an individual whose rights are violated can sue on their own behalf and recover statutory damages, between one thousand and five thousand dollars per violation, without having to prove they suffered any concrete downstream injury. That feature turned BIPA into a machine for accountability. It is why Facebook agreed in 2020 to pay six hundred and fifty million dollars to settle claims that its photo-tagging tool extracted faceprints from Illinois users without consent, a settlement approved by Judge James Donato in the Northern District of California in February 2021 and described at the time as one of the largest privacy settlements in history. Eligible class members received cheques averaging around three hundred and ninety-seven dollars. The number that mattered to every other company watching was the total.

Texas takes a different route to a similar end. Its Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier statute, known as CUBI, also prohibits capturing a person's biometric identifier for a commercial purpose without consent, but it reserves enforcement to the state attorney general rather than to individuals. For years that made CUBI look toothless, a law on the books that nobody enforced. Then the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton began to wield it, and the results were staggering. In May 2025, Texas announced a one-billion-three-hundred-and-seventy-five-million-dollar settlement with Google to resolve allegations that the company had unlawfully collected Texans' biometric data, including face geometry, through products such as Google Photos and the Nest line of cameras, capturing, as the EFF later put it, the face geometry of any Texan who happened to come into view, including non-users. Separately, Meta agreed to pay Texas one billion four hundred million dollars over comparable claims. These are not nuisance settlements. They are among the largest privacy recoveries any government has ever secured, and they were secured under a state law that simply says a company may not take your biometric identity without asking.

Portland, Oregon, supplies the third and most categorical model. In September 2020 the city council voted unanimously to pass what was then the first ordinance in the United States to ban private entities from using facial-recognition technology in places of public accommodation. The ban took effect on 1 January 2021. Portland did not bother with the consent framework at all. It concluded that, in the spaces where members of the public have no real choice about being present, the technology should simply not operate. The ordinance was animated explicitly by concerns about over-surveillance, opacity, and the gender and racial bias documented in facial-recognition systems, and it represents the position that some uses of the technology are not a matter for negotiated consent but a line that should not be crossed.

Three jurisdictions, three philosophies: a private right to sue, an empowered public enforcer, an outright prohibition. What they share is that each one attaches a real and predictable cost to scanning a non-consenting face. Familiar Faces stops at all three borders. Everywhere else in America, the cost is still being litigated, and Amazon has decided to keep scanning until a court tells it the price.

A Company With a Surveillance Record

None of this is happening in a vacuum, and the institutional memory matters, because Ring is not a neutral newcomer stumbling into a privacy question for the first time. It is a company with a documented history of treating the cameras in people's homes as instruments whose reach exceeds their owners' understanding.

In May 2023 the Federal Trade Commission charged Ring with a litany of failures and extracted a settlement requiring it to pay five million eight hundred thousand dollars in consumer refunds. The agency's complaint was lurid. It alleged that Ring had given employees and hundreds of third-party contractors unfettered access to customers' private video feeds, including footage from cameras in bedrooms and children's bedrooms, with the ability to download, view and share those recordings at will. It alleged that lax security allowed hackers to seize control of more than fifty-five thousand US customers' accounts and cameras between early 2019 and 2020. The order forced Ring to build a privacy programme, impose multi-factor authentication, and submit to novel safeguards on human review of video. The episode established a pattern that the Familiar Faces dispute now echoes: a product sold as personal security, operating in practice as something with a far wider and less consensual gaze than its buyers imagined.

Ring's entanglement with policing deepens the picture. For years the company's Neighbors app and its earlier footage-request features functioned as a soft channel through which law-enforcement agencies could solicit video from a vast distributed network of private cameras, a quasi-public surveillance grid assembled from doorbells. In October 2025 Ring announced a partnership with Flock Safety that would let police request footage through Community Requests in the Neighbors app, integrating Ring's cameras into a network already controversial for its automated licence-plate readers. After a public backlash, Ring announced on 12 February 2026 that it was cancelling the Flock partnership following a comprehensive review, saying the integration would require more time and resources than anticipated. The reversal was a pattern in miniature: deploy an expansion of surveillance, weather the criticism, retreat only when the cost becomes visible. Familiar Faces is the same manoeuvre at the scale of the human face itself.

The Warnings That Came First

What distinguishes the Familiar Faces episode from an inadvertent overreach is that the objections were registered, loudly and specifically, before the feature ever shipped. This was not a case of a company surprised by an outcome nobody foresaw. The outcome was foreseen, in writing, by some of the most credible privacy voices in the country, and the feature launched anyway.

The EFF's November 2025 analysis was unambiguous. It walked through the mechanics of how a faceprint is taken and stored, identified the population of non-consenting bystanders the feature would inevitably sweep up, and named the legal precedents, the Google and Facebook settlements, that mapped the exposure with precision. Trujillo's warning went beyond the immediate function to the deeper structural danger: a system built to recognise a friend at the front door, he argued, can be repurposed tomorrow for mass surveillance, because the infrastructure, the cameras, the faceprints, the servers, the matching, is identical regardless of the use to which it is put. The capability is the risk. Once tens of millions of doorbells can extract and compare faceprints, the question of what that capability is pointed at becomes a matter of policy, configuration and corporate discretion rather than engineering.

The political warning was just as explicit. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, a member of the Senate Commerce Committee with a long record of scrutinising Ring, wrote to Amazon's chief executive Andrew Jassy on 31 October 2025, demanding that the company abandon its plan to embed facial recognition in Ring doorbells. In response, Markey's office reported, Amazon revealed something telling: that Ring's privacy protections apply only to device owners, not to the members of the public who appear in front of the cameras. That admission is the whole problem stated in a single sentence. The protections run to the customer. The faces belong to everyone else. When a Super Bowl advertisement showcased the technology in early 2026, Markey wrote again, on 11 February 2026, repeating his call for Amazon to discontinue the feature. The company did not.

This is the sequence that gives the lawsuit its moral force. A regulator-adjacent senator warned. A leading civil-liberties organisation warned. The company's own response confirmed that non-users were unprotected. The relevant precedents were already measured in the billions. And the feature shipped to the rest of the country regardless, with three holes cut neatly out of the map where the law had teeth.

The Asymmetry of Consent

Strip away the legal machinery and what remains is a question about consent that the home-security industry has spent a decade avoiding. The Ring camera is bought, installed and configured by a homeowner for the homeowner's purposes. Every consent that exists in the transaction belongs to that one person. But the camera does not point inward at the person who consented. It points outward, at the street, at the pavement, at the approach to the door, at precisely the space through which other people, who consented to nothing, are obliged to pass.

This is the structural inversion at the centre of the Familiar Faces dispute, and it is what makes the ordinary frameworks of consumer privacy inadequate to it. In the standard model, a user agrees to a product's terms and accepts the trade-offs; if they dislike the bargain, they can decline the product. The delivery driver carrying a parcel up the path has no such option. They cannot read Amazon's terms of service. They cannot toggle a setting. They cannot decline to have their face measured, because declining would mean declining to do their job, or declining to visit their friend, or declining to walk down a public street. Their biometric identity is taken as a condition of their physical presence in the world, and there is no interface through which they could ever have said no.

The numbers turn this from a thought experiment into an infrastructure. Ring is the dominant brand in a market that has saturated American residential life; industry analyses place it at the top of the smart-doorbell category, with millions of active units across US households and smart cameras present in roughly a third of American internet homes. When a single company's outward-facing cameras number in the tens of millions and each one is capable of extracting faceprints, the aggregate is not a collection of private security decisions. It is a distributed biometric sensor network blanketing the residential landscape, assembled house by house, consent by individual consent, into a system that no individual consented to and that surveils, overwhelmingly, people who are not its customers. The lawsuit's phrase for the result, an involuntary biometric database of non-users, is not rhetorical excess. It is an accurate description of what tens of millions of consenting installations produce when their gaze is pooled.

What the Data Could Become

The defenders of Familiar Faces will say, correctly, that the current use is narrow. The feature tells a homeowner who is at the door. The faceprints of strangers are, by Ring's account, discarded within months if they are not matched. Nobody is being tracked across the city. No central index of every passer-by is being compiled and sold. All of that is, for now, true. And all of it misses the point that the EFF and Markey were pressing, which is not about what the system does today but about what the existence of the system makes possible tomorrow.

Consider the components that Familiar Faces requires in order to function at all. It requires cameras at scale, which now exist. It requires the capacity to extract a faceprint from any face that appears, which is the core function. It requires servers that process and store those faceprints, which Amazon operates. It requires a matching engine that compares a new face against a stored set, which is the whole feature. Every one of these components is precisely what a mass-surveillance system needs. The only thing standing between a doorbell that greets your neighbour by name and a network that can locate a specific individual across tens of millions of cameras is a policy decision about how the matching is scoped, and policy decisions can change. They can change because a company updates its terms. They can change because a government compels access, as Ring's history of police entanglement makes far from hypothetical. They can change because a feature is quietly expanded, the way Familiar Faces itself was added to cameras that buyers had installed for an entirely different purpose.

The relevant precedent here is not a privacy abstraction but the recurring lesson of Ring's own conduct: capabilities built for a benign stated purpose tend to find broader application, and the public usually learns about the broader application after the fact. The cameras were sold for parcel theft and they became a police network. The footage was meant for owners and contractors in Ukraine were watching bedrooms. The faceprints are taken to recognise friends, and the question the lawsuit forces is what guarantees, if any, prevent them from one day being used to recognise anyone. The honest answer, under the current legal regime in forty-seven states and most cities, is almost none. There is no general federal biometric-privacy law. Outside Illinois, Texas, Portland and a handful of states with comprehensive privacy statutes, the meaningful limits on how a stranger's faceprint may be used, by whom, and for how long are whatever a company writes into a policy it can revise at will.

The Limits of Settling After the Fact

It is tempting to read the billion-dollar settlements as evidence that the system works, that companies which over-collect biometric data eventually pay, and that the prospect of paying will deter the next firm. The Familiar Faces case is the strongest available evidence that this reading is wrong, because Amazon launched the feature in full view of those very settlements. Google's one-billion-three-hundred-and-seventy-five-million-dollar payment to Texas and Facebook's six-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar BIPA settlement were not obscure. They were the most prominent biometric-privacy outcomes in the country, and Amazon's own engineers and lawyers plainly knew them well enough to draw the exclusion map. The settlements did not deter the conduct. They merely defined the three zones in which the conduct would be too expensive to attempt.

This is the deep inadequacy of an enforcement model that operates only after the harm, and only where a legislature happened to act in advance. The settlements are vast, but they arrive years after the faceprints were taken, they reach only the jurisdictions with the right statute, and they treat the violation as a cost to be priced rather than a line not to be crossed. For the company, a settlement is a known business expense, payable from the revenue the feature generated in the interim, and discharged without any admission that the underlying conduct was wrong. Google paid Texas its one-and-a-third billion dollars without acknowledging any violation and without being required to change its products. A penalty that can be absorbed, that is confined to a few states, and that need not alter the behaviour going forward is not a constraint on surveillance. It is a tariff on it, and a tariff that most of the country does not even charge.

The reactive model also places the entire burden on the surveilled. To vindicate his rights, a person like Sigwalt must discover that his face was scanned, a thing he was specifically never told, retain lawyers, identify a viable legal theory among the patchwork of state torts and statutes, and litigate against one of the largest companies on earth, all to establish a principle that should never have required litigation: that you may not take a stranger's biometric identity without asking. The default is surveillance, and the only available remedy is an expensive, years-long, after-the-fact lawsuit to claw a fraction of dignity back. Reversing that default is the whole challenge, and it is not primarily a technical one.

What Consent-by-Default Would Actually Require

The question the Familiar Faces case ultimately poses is the one its plaintiff's exclusion-map argument answers by implication: what would it take for the default to be consent rather than surveillance? The Illinois, Texas and Portland carve-outs prove that consent-by-default is achievable, because Amazon already achieves it for tens of millions of people. The task is to make the protection those residents enjoy the floor for everyone, and the components are visible, scattered across the very jurisdictions whose patchwork currently frustrates a coherent answer.

The first requirement is a private right of action grounded in personhood, not purchase. BIPA's defining feature is that the person whose face was taken can sue, and can recover statutory damages without proving a separate downstream loss. That single design choice is what gives the law its bite, because it does not ask the surveilled to quantify a harm that is inherently dignitary, the harm of having your biometric identity seized by a stranger. A federal biometric-privacy law built on that model would do what no settlement can: make the taking itself actionable everywhere, by the people it is taken from, rather than only in the three places that legislated first.

The second requirement is that consent must come from the person whose biometric data is collected, not from the person who bought the device. The entire conceptual error of the current arrangement is that it treats the homeowner's consent as covering the faces the homeowner's camera captures. It does not, and cannot, because those faces belong to other people. A meaningful framework would recognise that the relevant consenting party is the data subject, the person whose face is measured, and that no purchase, no terms of service and no household setting can supply consent on a stranger's behalf. Where obtaining that consent is impossible, as it is for a passer-by on a public pavement, the Portland answer, that the scanning simply should not happen, becomes not an extreme position but the only coherent one.

The third requirement is strict limits on retention and repurposing, written into law rather than policy. The danger of a faceprint database is not exhausted by its first use; it is latent in its existence. A framework adequate to the threat would mandate the minimum retention necessary for any consented function, prohibit the use of biometric data collected for one purpose in the service of another, and bar the kind of capability creep, from recognising a friend to locating a stranger, that the architecture makes trivially easy. It would also confront the policing question directly, foreclosing the quiet conversion of a private camera network into a public surveillance grid that Ring's own history shows is no abstraction.

The fourth requirement is that compliance must not be optional based on geography. The exclusion map is the lawsuit's smoking gun precisely because it demonstrates that selective compliance is a choice. A company able to switch a feature off at the Illinois and Texas borders is able to switch it off everywhere, and a legal regime worth the name would remove the incentive to draw such maps at all by making the strongest available protection national. The current arrangement effectively rewards the country for its legislative gaps, granting Amazon free rein everywhere a state failed to act. A federal floor would convert those gaps from commercial opportunities into the protections they should always have been.

The Street That Used to Be Anonymous

There is a temptation, encountered in every privacy debate of the past two decades, to treat the loss as already complete and the resistance as quaint. The cameras are everywhere; the faceprints are already taken; the database, involuntary or not, already exists. Why fight a war that is over? The answer is that the war is not over, and the exclusion map is the proof. In Illinois, in Texas, in Portland, the war was fought before the technology arrived, and it was won, and the result is that the residents of those places walk past Ring cameras every day without having a faceprint extracted from them. They were not protected by accident. They were protected because a legislature decided, in advance, that a person's biometric identity is not a thing a company may take simply because its camera can see a face.

What the Familiar Faces lawsuit asks the rest of the country to decide is whether that protection is a regional privilege or a human baseline. The stakes are easy to understate, because the immediate harm is invisible. Nobody is arrested. Nobody is denied a loan. A faceprint is taken, stored, and in most cases deleted within months, and the person it was taken from feels nothing and knows nothing. But the absence of a felt injury is exactly what makes the precedent so corrosive. We are being asked to accept, quietly and without ever having been consulted, that the act of walking through public space now generates a biometric record held by a private company, and that the only people exempt are those whose local governments thought to forbid it. The default has shifted from anonymity to identification, and the shift happened not through legislation or public deliberation but through a software update pushed to cameras that people had bought for a different reason.

Charles Sigwalt's lawsuit may succeed or it may fail; the patchwork of Virginia torts it relies on is a fragile substitute for the clean biometric statute the rest of the country lacks. But its central insight does not depend on the verdict. Amazon has already told us, by where it declined to deploy, that consent-based biometric privacy is technically and commercially feasible, that the company can honour it when a law requires, and that it will withhold it wherever a law does not. The only remaining question is who deserves the protection that Illinois, Texas and Portland already guarantee. The honest answer is that a person's face should not be a thing that any company is entitled to measure and keep merely because that person had the temerity to walk down a street. Making that the default, everywhere and for everyone, is the unfinished work the doorbell has forced into view.

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References and Sources

1. Classaction.org, “Ring Lawsuit Claims 'Familiar Faces' Feature Violates Basic Notions of Consumer Privacy”, June 2026. https://www.classaction.org/blog/ring-lawsuit-claims-familiar-faces-feature-violates-basic-notions-of-consumer-privacy
2. Biometric Update, “Amazon Ring sued over facial recognition feature as privacy fight moves to federal court”, June 2026. https://www.biometricupdate.com/202606/amazon-ring-sued-over-facial-recognition-feature-as-privacy-fight-moves-to-federal-court
3. The Register, “Ring gets buzzed by class action for collecting visitors' faces without consent”, 3 June 2026. https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/03/ring_faces_class_action_over_facial_recognition_feature/
4. CBS News, “Amazon faces lawsuit over Ring facial recognition software”, June 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-ring-lawsuit-facial-recognition-familiar-faces/
5. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mario Trujillo, “The Legal Case Against Ring's Face Recognition Feature”, 3 November 2025. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/legal-case-against-rings-face-recognition-feature
6. TechCrunch, “Amazon's Ring rolls out controversial, AI-powered facial-recognition feature to video doorbells”, 9 December 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/09/amazons-ring-rolls-out-controversial-ai-powered-facial-recognition-feature-to-video-doorbells/
7. Office of the Attorney General of Texas, “Attorney General Ken Paxton Secures Historic $1.375 Billion Settlement with Google Related to Texans' Data Privacy Rights”, 9 May 2025. https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-secures-historic-1375-billion-settlement-google-related-texans-data
8. CNBC, “Google to pay Texas $1.4 billion in data privacy settlement”, 9 May 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/09/google-texas-data-privacy-settlement-paxton.html
9. American Bar Association, Business Law Today, “Historic Biometric Privacy Suit Settles for $650 Million”, February 2021. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/business-law-today/2021-february/historic-biometric-privacy-settlement/
10. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Says Ring Employees Illegally Surveilled Customers, Failed to Stop Hackers from Taking Control of Users' Cameras”, 31 May 2023. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/ftc-says-ring-employees-illegally-surveilled-customers-failed-stop-hackers-taking-control-users
11. TechCrunch, “Amazon's Ring to pay $5.8M after staff and contractors caught snooping on customer videos, FTC says”, 31 May 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/31/amazon-ring-ftc-settlement-lax-security/
12. U.S. Senator Ed Markey, “Senator Markey Demands Amazon Abandon Plan to Include Facial Recognition Technology in Ring Doorbells”, 31 October 2025. https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/senator-markey-demands-amazon-abandon-plan-to-include-facial-recognition-technology-in-ring-doorbells
13. U.S. Senator Ed Markey, “Following Dystopian Super Bowl Ad, Markey Again Calls on Amazon to End Facial Recognition Technology in Ring Doorbells”, February 2026. https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/following-dystopian-super-bowl-ad-markey-again-calls-on-amazon-to-end-facial-recognition-technology-in-ring-doorbells
14. CNBC, “Amazon Ring cameras deeper into policing with Flock Safety, Axon deals”, 16 October 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/16/amazon-ring-cameras-surveillance-law-enforcement-crime-police-investigations.html
15. 9to5Mac, “After Ring privacy backlash, company abandons police partnership”, 16 February 2026. https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/16/after-ring-privacy-backlash-company-abandons-plans-for-police-partnership/
16. Portland.gov, “City Council approves ordinances banning use of face recognition technologies by City of Portland bureaus and by private entities in public spaces”, 9 September 2020. https://www.portland.gov/bps/com-tech/smart-city-pdx/news/2020/9/9/city-council-approves-ordinances-banning-use-face
17. Hunton Andrews Kurth, “Portland, Oregon Becomes First Jurisdiction in U.S. to Ban the Commercial Use of Facial Recognition Technology”, September 2020. https://www.hunton.com/privacy-and-information-security-law/portland-oregon-becomes-first-jurisdiction-in-u-s-to-ban-the-commercial-use-of-facial-recognition-technology
18. Hunton Andrews Kurth, “Texas AG Announces $1.375 Billion Settlement with Google for Privacy Violations”, May 2025. https://www.hunton.com/privacy-and-information-security-law/texas-ag-announces-1-375-billion-settlement-with-google-for-privacy-violations
19. Telecompetitor, “Video Doorbell Research: Amazon Ring Tops in Market Share with 16% of Households Opting In”. https://www.telecompetitor.com/video-doorbell-research-amazon-ring-tops-in-market-share-with-16-of-households-opting-in/
20. State of Surveillance, “Ring Now Scans Faces at Your Door. Here's What That Means.”, December 2025. https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/corporate/amazon-ring-familiar-faces-facial-recognition-2025/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Each morning, Enid stepped outside onto her little weathered porch, greeted the dawn with the juncos, finches, and, on fortunate days, a flock of waxwings.

Enid's ample body bore marks: past addictions, a desperate need for approval, and a string of tragedies in her family that she and her sister called the Oser family curse. Those burdens had faded now. When she did laugh, it was because she was caught off guard by someone’s quip, and she would belly laugh, especially if it was absurd or dirty or mean. For example, when reading Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk, she laughed for a solid 10 minutes when she read what nineteenth century Arctic explorers brought with them on their expeditions: “With the two skeletons were some chocolate, some guns, some tea and a great deal of table silver.”

Enid also found solace in shedding things, as if each giveaway erased a little more. And though she had said goodbye to her physical beauty, she kept the holes in her ears for no other reason than she liked colorful stones. If Shakespeare had written about her, he would have said she was as civil as an orange. “The count is neither sad, nor sick, nor merry, nor well.”

Enid liked to walk her dogs on the steep hills of her hometown. It was a maze of nothing interesting, though she liked the changing landscape – mostly roses and sycamores and flowering plants. On a day she walked down a large steep street, she noticed the unusual architecture of a house midway down. Mid-century…or before? No, it must be Art Deco, its top floor curved around to the left, with opaque glass making the same path along the curve. She thought it pretty, and said so to the owner who was standing outside. His dress reminded her of Robin Williams in the movie Insomnia; pressed slacks, shirt, cardigan, like he had been dropped in from the 1950s, his gold-rimmed glasses the size of small apples. They chatted a bit, and he said next time she was around, he would show her inside. Ok, sounds good, she said, a slight horror rising from the hairs on her neck.

She returned days later without the dogs. She didn’t know if it was out of politeness, curiosity, or a strange compulsion – the house wasn’t all that interesting, but maybe there was some history in it. And though her spidey sense was heightened, a certain gullibility remained, an unfounded belief in the goodness of others, even when a familiar dread crept in. She likened this to Charlie Brown repeatedly trying to kick the football Lucy was holding, where hope met inevitable letdown. Like the other day a neighbor she had just met a few moments before asked her to pick up a package (would you be a doll?) that was arriving soon; they would be out of town. Two thoughts were there: that she couldn’t remember the last time she went somewhere, and why the hell was it ok for them to ask.

Enid entered his house and immediately sensed the colors. The home’s interior was painted in Hydrangea blue and a deep brown – stately – quite lovely in fact. The furniture was all curves and all angles and she was struck by the lack of personality in the room, almost as if it was staged. They didn’t talk much as she looked around. George – was it?

After they talked about the furniture, the weather, George asked if she wanted to see downstairs. Enid looked to her right and saw the narrowing staircase leading down and curving to the left. A basement? Immediately her mind went to the front door behind her. Did he lock it? She looked out his window, it was bright out but very dark in the room, the aura not unlike when one is day drinking in a bar.

Sure, lead the way. But instead he held out his left hand and offered to let her go ahead. This she knew was stupid and in a stroke of agency she said, no, I’ll follow you.

And then she thought about death, which she did most days. Death came to see her as the sun would begin to set, settling in her stomach like a tired but insistent weed. Death didn’t used to be there, but he started to land in her body after her brother hung himself from his garage just six years ago, his wife vomiting on the lawn, his son pulling him down, blinded by tears. No matter. This feeling, not the memory, was more interesting. It was just a jumping off point, like the chair.

They wound down the stairs, her marking how steep and narrow the passage was. Not many steps, but precarious.

And then she saw them. The dolls. They were all lined up above a low cabinet, and were the kind one’s aunt would collect – varying sizes of baby dolls, mostly girls. Nearly bald, bodies patchy, cracked and worn, they stared back at her. Why the dolls, she stuttered in what was less of a question and more of a disquieting utterance.

They were my mother’s.

The room got very small. Fog appeared on either side of her peripheral vision, her pupils, pinheads. If she ran up the stairs, he seemed strong enough to pull her back down. If he led the way again, and he got to some door, any door, he could lock it. She stared at the dolls, nearly resigned, then back at George.

There was something about the dolls. Their hair, it seemed wrong, somehow. In the dimly lit room, without her glasses, she thought they had human hair, placed clumsily on their hard plastic heads. And on one doll, the little Latina in a dress covered in cherries, the light was such that she imagined the red fruit was blood. But what struck her most was how unanimated they were, like her, frozen there.

She ran. Just a few steps to the first stair up and she expected him to be on her, but he didn’t make a move from his chair in the corner of the basement. Instead, as she bolted, he eventually rose and slowly followed behind. Calculating, as a lion, she thought in haste.

She reached the landing, tripped on the corner of the Marion Dorn rug, catching herself on flat palms. She leapt up, grabbed the front door knob – it was open. She ran down the small porch stairs and back up the steep street, grateful for how bright the sun shone.

#shortstory

Townes wrote that a man once said to him “I want to be helped, but not at the cost of compulsory association with others seeking help. I know that to be thrown into unavoidable contact with those worse than myself would hopelessly degrade me. I should not be willing to risk that, no matter how much good the treatment might do me.”

As I started to take my addiction seriously, I joined multiple online support groups, attended a few in person, read the proverbial “quit lit.” Another brother, Brian, died when he was hit by a car, in 2002.

The sufferers, I concluded, didn’t want support, we wanted one of three things: someone to see us, a platform for our solipsism, and someone to fix us. Behind every heavy sigh in whatever flavor of group I signed up for there was an addiction to not doing the work, staying stuck. This took the form of either the male comedian, or the man who likes to tell stories about the worst thing they did while drunk, dominating the meeting with their war stories as other men puffed up their chests in solidarity.

Or, the women sat idly by and watched the show, unless they could find a women-only group. “Self-care” is the thru line there, and for those who can afford the higher end of these groups still get the same messaging, just packaged differently. Take care of yourself, set boundaries, keep coming back to this site, buy this book and if you need more support that will be extra. As of late, many doctors have got on board and partnered with these pop-up sites to prescribe Antabuse, Naltrexone, and the other opioid antagonists with little oversight. But if you don’t have access to what you really need, to be seen, understood, you’ll just stop taking the antagonists and keep drinking. Dennis Lehane writes in Shutter Island “…someday, we’ll medicate human experience right out of the human experience.”

The most helpful thing I ever learned would come years later when someone just simply said to me “you are the master of your own ship.” It flipped a switch for me.

But I drank for decades more. My last brother, David, died by hanging in 2019.

I always thought it would be my breasts that would defect first, but it was my heart. After days of abuse, my mouth would open as a hollow, and my heart, fierce but helpless, pumped like a fist against a locked door.

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

…

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

Louise Glück, from the poem “The Wild Iris”

#addictionessay

The Tuesday before she rammed her mini cooper into a house in Mar Vista, California, the actor Anne Heche was co-hosting her podcast Better Together, and in the available (albeit probably bootlegged) recordings of the podcast, you can clearly hear that she is intoxicated and slurring her speech. Usually, I just move on to getting my dopamine hits in other bad news, but this one piqued my interest because she was my age.

I know all too well how days like this go: if you’ve been addicted for a long time, and if you start day-drinking on an empty stomach, you don’t stop at the end of the day. I, too, sans the vodka (my devils were beer and wine), would get started early and it would morph late into the evening, and then to maintain body and mind homeostasis the next day, I would drink to feel normal, and then ethanol’s addictiveness would cause me to drink more. Anne was probably in menopause at the time of her death, and that coupled with the PTSD she suffered from childhood trauma was a poorly mixed cocktail. The night sweats from hormonal changes, drinking, and her more than likely trying to stay relevant in an unforgiving occupation for the aging, would cause anyone to want to heavily dissociate. Ms. Heche more than likely didn’t learn how to self-regulate, and, as Holly Whitaker wrote in Quit Like a Woman, she had to “manage it with a jackhammer at the end of the day.” When she tore down that street, it was a race to get away from herself, knowing full-well she could no longer manage the endless work of being a woman.

The same year we scraped Craig off the tracks, I graduated university and went to Greece with my friend, Loreen. My relentless gym regiment had begun to wane, and I had dabbled a little in cocaine before the trip, but nothing full-blown yet. We had a stopover in England, then we traveled to Athens, ferried to San Torini, to Paros, then Mykonos. As we made our way up the Aegean, the riskier my behavior got. On Paros, I slept with an uncircumcised waiter. Drinking games after hours. Big, big moons. One night, Loreen got frustrated with me and walked back to our hotel in an island blackout. Selfish, I stayed behind and picked up a Greek man.

We walked out on a rocky pier…he tried to seduce me…it gets fuzzy from there. But I’ll never forget a base fear, like if I give in, I’ll be dead. He continued to plead. I stayed and listened. I knew I wouldn’t go with him, but it was at this point I was firmly entrenched in a kind of learned helplessness. I left him at the pier.

Why do we put ourselves in harm’s way?

In Alain de Botton’s May 2016 New York Times article “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” he writes:

“What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign.”

Happily, buzzed, I walked toward that man because I wanted to connect. What started to build was a need to attach, an attachment to men who had…I mean…I wanted inside them. I wanted to be them. Women, too. I didn’t want to be like them, or take on their clothes or affects, it was more physically haunting, like when a bird sticks its beak in your ear and doesn’t bite, but trills. I settled on those who wanted me for use. Me as them, I think, is worth digging into, as I saw something in them that was me, that I wanted back. I lived alongside them, stared at them through mirrors or windows or all the untoward ways we intrude on others. But mostly I sat outside them, crazy to find my way back to anything that looked like me, something I had lost.

#addictionessay

A half mile from home, up in a quiet neighborhood, I sat in my GTI with a bottle of white. It didn’t matter the brand, the complaint was that it was getting warm, and I had to put it down every time a car drove by. It was the first time I had felt the proverbial rock bottom, but my addiction would continue to escalate for another ten years. I had a full-time job, no debt, a clean house. I had ticked the boxes. Hey, Cs get degrees.

That bottle of white wasn’t my first vacation, and my amygdala wanted out before I did, tired of its job. Yet I had submerged a helpful part of me in quicksand and poured rocket fuel down the hole. If you do find yourself in quicksand, lean back, getting out takes a long time. It’s a lot of spiraling, one way or the other, until you loosen quicksand’s hold. The only danger is the incoming tide that never relents, and at its center is overwhelm.

House cleaning got more urgent the worse my habituation. After a multi-day binge, I would get out of bed like I was shot out of a cannon. I moved around the house like I was dodging bullets, running from one end of the house to the other like I was trying to hide. Every lick of clothing was washed and put away. Gone, temporarily, were the shame and night sweats from the sheets. Still legless, I walked the dog, holiday heart pounding and inflammation so extreme it crept into my lower back and strained my lungs. Then I would bathe, wax my upper lip, tear that dead toenail off. If I can just put my house in order, I’ll be in order, too. Exhausted, breathless, and bereft of meaning, I had to sit with myself.

Thomas Roethke writes in his poem “Prognosis,”

The scheme without purpose; pride in a furnished room; The mediocre busy at betraying Themselves, their parlors musty as a funeral home.

Charles B. Towns, who conducted experimentation with cures for alcoholism and drug addiction and drafted drug control legislation in the early 20th century, writes in his 1915 book Habits that Handicap: The Menace of Opium, Alcohol, and Tobacco, and the Remedy, “A far greater number of its victims than the offhand moralist is included to concede have admiral sturdiness of will and dogged persistence.” He continues: “They are alcoholics because with the help of stimulants they have habitually forced themselves to overwork, to bear burdens of responsibility beyond their normal strength, or to overcome physical obstacles, like poor health, eyestrain, and insufficient nourishment. The man who drinks is not necessarily depraved; but under the influence of [a] stimulant he is very likely to drift into associations and environments which will lower his standards until he becomes irresponsible, unadmirable, or even criminal.”

When my late mother was overwhelmed, she would go to a bar. Sometimes, she would abandon dogs we had adopted on the side of a road. Wanting responsibility to be no longer there, abandoning situations where you were always the responsible one, is tricky. You start out in loving service, then it defines you, and then it leads to a loss of self.

I’ve left my family out of this; they are all dead. Sure, there are a few stragglers: a leftover sister, a widowed sister-in-law and her spawn, a Mormon cousin – a love child of my uncle’s. Working through your past is not an archeological dig, nor is it linear, the chaos already in full swing before I got here. One fun tale involved my mother, at the time living in Alaska with five kids on a school bus, punching a middle school kid who was bullying my brother. My father spent his time shooting horse and playing cards with Jimmie Angel. Everyone drank, smoked pot, smoked. Died. I was born when everything had lost its color. I arrived at the wedding only to find out it was one long, drawn out wake.

In early 1994, my brother Craig stepped in front of a train. They say he was already on those tracks, walking his 10-speed, ZZ Top on 11. His pants, I’m sure, were far down below his waistline. As I write this, I see him walking away from me, gait like a quick upright duck. And I still imagine his mangled corpse, bike wrapped around his body in a metal hug, sweat and blood and dirt caking his full Irish beard. Around the train, the dirt is an oxidized orange, the manzanita is sparse. I only imagine this.

There was relief, as I had taught myself to stop loving long before. In 1990, my sister had been found down a mountain in Washington state, holes in her back, stuffed in a sleeping bag that by chance had held out its soft nylon to a tree branch so she could be found. I became addicted to exercise, sometimes spending an hour or more every day at the gym or on epic hikes in sweltering heat, my groin complaining with the arrival of the blue devil (depression).

How did I not see the hole? How long before I stopped seeing the horizon, any horizon? The exercise addiction was the first attempt to escape. My monkey then morphed into a brief love affair with cocaine. Combing for rocks in the shag and playing all-night Tetris in a basement at twenty-eight, I found out quite by accident that I could drink to get to sleep.

#addictionessay

If you saw Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley, or Susan Sontag, author of several essays and books, namely On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others, interviewed side-by-side, you would be struck by how similar they look. Both had wild, thick black hair, and though Highsmith had grey eyes, sometimes described as purple, Sontag’s were dark brown and had a searching quality to them.

In most interviews Highsmith looks uncomfortable, arms crossed. She says interviews bore the author, make the whole thing vulgar. Her second-person use is telling, and though I can’t claim that all high minds speak in this way, keeping the conversation outside oneself is a way of keeping the world at bay, and the inner world protected. Having conversations in one’s head is safer; creativity is a way of dissociating.

With Sontag, her manner is incredulous towards her interviewers, unless it’s someone she respects, such as John Berger. In their sit-down on storytelling from 1983, she appears alert, beyond his equal, so her mannerism is one of playing against a competitor. But as Berger begins to speak, you realize this mannerism could be because he works at being clever, and she’s trying to track him like a cat. He’s obtuse; Sontag is clear.

Both women died in their seventies. Cancer. Long illness. The cost of being wound so tight. It’s not a protective experience – makes one perpetually freaked out, as if you’re going to crawl out of your skin. That monster, unable to express itself fully, makes you ill. You arise exhausted, then begin to quest again. This is a feeling of never being at home.

Do not trust anguish; it is without function. ~Thomas McGrath

#fragments

This is a basic writeup on solar systems. First off I’d like to share my basic mentality on the subject. After the philosophical mentalities we’ll go into common terminology and some components. We’ll end with an example configuration with the majority of the needed components and prices at the time of this writing (2026). This is a reference and basic guide on ideas and principles I wish I knew before getting started. I’d recommend reading a book or three to get further understandings before you get going. If you don’t like reading too much, this document can get you started, but at least read the manuals to the components you buy and follow their instructions.

At this point it seems fairly silly to me to go “off-grid” and build a solar system if you do not want to change your lifestyle to some extent. Unless energy prices skyrocket, or you live in an area with very high prices, it does not seem worthwhile to build the massive solar panel arrays and the huge battery banks necessary to supply power to the typical household. The economy of it all just takes too long to pay off, in some cases it cannot pay for itself over time unless you stay tied to the grid as your primary battery bank – which is not off-grid and beyond the scope of this writeup. But if you can alter your lifestyle some and switch some things around you can go off-grid and save a lot of money. I recommend to people to go with 12 or 24 volt systems with 800-1600 watts or so in solar panels. If you can live with this, then you certainly should go off-grid and you will save a lot of money over time. It is so nice being able to produce your own energy with only a 5-20 year bill for new batteries vs a monthly bill to stream power from a third party company. To do such a thing with a relatively low upfront cost is a great thing.

The amount of wattage the solar panels generate depends on the time of day as the sun arcs through the sky, with midday being full strength. Our family is running on a 12V system with just over 1000 watts in solar panels, but our charge controller utilizes only 800 watts. This makes it so we get full strength wattage for more hours of the day which is nice. If you can go with 12V I highly recommend it. With 12V there are countless accessories to attach that are built for RV’s, boats, or cars since many of those run on 12V. With 24V there are also many RV and boat accessories as well, but not as many as you will find with 12V. Another option if you go with 24V is to get a DC-to-DC converter which can change the voltage to whatever you want (depending on the converter). So if you go 24V you can down drop to 12V for all of those neat low-priced attachments anyway, or if you are at 12V you can increase it to 24V or beyond. The converters are typically more efficient than an inverter bumping up to AC (alternate current, what a typical house uses for power) 120V and/or 240V. So consider this as an option if you want to build a very efficient system with minimal loss, which is pretty important with a smaller system like I’m recommending here.

It can still be worthwhile to go off-grid with a 48V system hitting something like 3200-5400 watts (give or take depending on charge controller capacity and your solar array). But your amortization will take quite a bit longer and in some instances it will not pay for itself over time. Today you can even get 72V systems, 600V systems, and beyond that but I do not recommend going this route and will not cover anything that helps you much in that direction. I also do not think it’s all that awesome to connect to the grid with a solar system. To me one of the primary points is to be more self reliant and discontinue your monthly bill. So I’d recommend going to other sources if your desire is to get a lot of panels and hook up to the grid as your battery, that isn’t a terrible idea in the city, but for rural folk I’d recommend pulling the grid plug. I had a friend who ended up spending well over $50,000 for their solar system and were still hooked up to the grid, but their monthly bill was very low, usually $0. This is a writeup to help people disconnect from the grid and live with less power overall to save money and be more self sufficient. Another smart option for those who stay connected to the grid is to just make a simple 12V side system. It will not run your whole house when the power is down but you could have an efficient chest freezer, charge batteries (laptops, power tools, phones, rechargeable lights etc.), run lighting, and more. This makes it so if the grid goes down for an extended time you aren’t completely incapacitated. Although this is not nearly as awesome as going off-grid in my view, it would be an intelligent thing to do for those who cannot take the leap away from the grid.

My wife and I are not experts in this. She mostly avoids it, but likes that I’ve dug in so we can utilize this tech and have some electricity in our life. We wanted to go off-grid for over a decade now but realized how challenging it would be. We had a house that had many high-power consumption appliances and it seemed almost impossible for us to afford the solar system needed to power that. So we started playing around with my father-in-law’s tool “Watts App Pro” to see what each appliance used for power. We started deciding what things we could get rid of and what we could keep. After analyzing all of it we calculated that it would take about an $8,000 to $12,000 system or so to get off-grid and stop our monthly bills. To do that we needed to replace some of the highest power draws. We were planning on getting rid of our electric water heater and switch to wood for winter and propane or oil for summer. We planned on swapping our electric stove for a propane one. Our refrigerator was already super efficient so that could stay. We were also thinking of getting rid of our big gaming computers and switch to laptops. As time went on we had an opportunity to move to a new place and build from scratch. This made it easier to plan from the ground up a more efficient setup. We now have a system that cost about $4,000 because we thought of it from the ground up, instead of adopting it to a house already built for us depending on electricity for so many things.

I’m no electrical expert. I was very nervous about this early on. I was almost ready to just opt into using one of those all-in-one systems that I wouldn’t have to think about. A solar panel, and a box of mystery that you plug the panel into and plug appliances into. But the problem with those is that it’s difficult to swap one component inside that box and they are way overpriced for what you get. Once the battery goes out you often need a new system – seems pretty silly. You may be able to swap batteries with some of them, but the ones I was looking at didn’t have that as an easy option. Note that the all-in-one systems I’m talking about here are not kits with all of the separate components needed. Sometimes those can be a good deal and worthwhile. I’d recommend, even if you are nervous like I was, to build a system from scratch. Don’t buy an all-in-one unit, you will spend more and have less control over it. Sure they are easy but you can figure this out. I did! And it was really a mystery to me until well after I built the system. It was actually running and working well before I learned all that much about it. I’d recommend reading a few books on the subject. I think you would be better off by doing so. I read the books listed at the bottom of this writeup after the system was up and running and I was pretty clueless. Point being, you can do this – but don’t do what I did – become a little more informed with this and read a book or three so you know what you are doing. Even with a 12V system you can hurt yourself or burn down a building. However, if you build the system following sound principles it is extremely safe. If you are going with a very large system it seems best to put the battery bank outside in a small insulated shed. This isn’t a terrible idea even if you go with a small system, so if the worst case happens it won’t burn your house down. I’m not saying this to scare you from switching to solar, just to be cautious. A little precaution can save you a lot of heartache. The grid burns down many houses as well, you aren’t safe just because you don’t go this route. Electricity can get hot and make fires especially when things short out. (Fuses and breakers help prevent this.)

To me the most important thing to those desiring to go off-grid is to prepare for a shift in lifestyle. This shift might be minor for some, and major for others. The most inefficient thing you can do with electricity is convert it into heat. Don’t think of your solar system as a heating system. The more you can avoid it as refrigeration and air conditioning the better as well. But it can do some of that if you find that a necessity. With a more robust solar system it might even be worthwhile to use it for heating and water heating for a dump to utilize excess wattage. But if you can go with a lower watt system you can save a lot of money and still have power to run many things. Our family has no refrigeration at this time. One of the main things I wanted early on was a solar system that can power a refrigerator and chest freezer, but after living without it for a while my wife and I agree those are totally overrated. We thought we had to have it for our cow’s milk, but it turns out that’s the worst thing you can do with raw milk for health benefits (read ‘Milk Into Cheese’ – by David Asher for details on this). We plan to make a root cellar (doubling as a cheese cave) and maybe an ice house someday if that isn’t enough. However right now we are doing fine so we’ll probably skip the ice house. We heat with wood and built with intelligent passive solar design to keep from needing air conditioning. A basic 12V ~800 watt system could easily run an efficient refrigerator, and window A/C unit if that is very important to you. However it could struggle if they aren’t very efficient. A larger 24V ~1600 watt system could run an efficient refrigerator, chest freezer, and a window air conditioner if that is what you care about. However if you can move away from refrigerators and freezers you can downsize your system and save a lot. We preserve a lot of our food with canning. That uses a burst of heat and some jars and then you are done – no more power needed. There are also cellars, fermentation, drying, salting, jellies, and other preservation methods available to store your foods. I think it very reasonable to have one efficient refrigerator for daily use and one efficient chest freezer for storing veggies and/or meats. You can also store a lot of meat through canning; it works especially well with ground meat – that is what we do.

If you can get away from using your solar system as a heat source you can get away with a much cheaper/smaller system. Get a wood, propane, or natural gas cookstove not electric. Skip the microwave (although even a basic 12V system could run one for short periods). Use wood or propane for space heating, not electric. Clothes dryers can use insane amounts of power, don’t bother with those. If you cannot live without one switch over to a propane version. You can dry clothes outside even in freezing winter temps, it just takes longer. I thought that was not true and insane when I first found out – so I tried it. Guess what, it works! My grandparents hung their clothes downstairs, air is an effective dryer and clothes last longer when they aren’t cooked in a dryer. Also consider getting rid of any old power hogs you may have around and upgrade to more efficient versions. Another option is to use a generator to supplement power for any big items you may use infrequently. This is a very common practice in the off-grid world, especially during cloudy weeks. You may want a generator to top off batteries mid winter with long overcast periods to keep your batteries healthy. We don’t need to because we have lowered our power use to a very low level, and you could to, but if you don’t that is an option.

Solar System Terminology With Some Basic Helpful Math Formulas

Ampere (amps): One ampere is equal to one coulomb of electrical charge per second. One coulomb is equal to about 6.241x1018 electrons passing through a single point in the circuit each second. If that is as abstract to you as it is to me then welcome to the party. The basic thing I understand is that amps are a measurement of current. It’s easier to me to think of it as flow. Even though it isn’t really a direct correlation it is similar or a metaphor thinking of it as the flow of water through a pipe (wires). If the pipe is huge a lot of water can flow through (current) even with low pressure (voltage), and it if it very narrow only a small amount can flow at a time. Realize this is not exactly what is going on because physics are very strange, but this concept can help you to make a functional system. The more amps going through the wire, the thicker that wire has to be. If your wire is too narrow it will heat up and can start a fire (larger wires and fuses can fix this potential problem). The higher the amps the shorter you want that wire to be. If you need a very long run of wire it is helpful to increase the voltage and decrease the amperage – that is why AC power became the norm in the economy of the world. With DC typically you have lower voltage and higher amps. With that it is very useful for small scale home and shop situations, but if you want to capitalize with maximum profits from central energy cartels you want to distribute power over long distances. To run long distance you want lower amps and higher volts which favors the AC systems. So when you build your solar system you want to keep the majority of your DC components, especially the high amp ones, as close as possible.

Volts: One volt is the potential difference between two points as one joule of energy is expended per one coulomb of charge moving between them… In other words it is the potential difference across a conductor carrying a constant current of one ampere that dissipates one watt of power… In other words pasture-raised sheep cheeseburgers are equal to the circumference of the yumminess contained outside the realm of possibilities when fluctuated flatulently into the multiverse multiplicated quantumly bounced from point to point and back again. Are you as lost as me? Don’t worry too much because Einstein was as well, and Copernicus never even came close. Functionally, although still more of a metaphor, I like to think of voltage as the pressure or force pushing the electricity through a circuit. If high amps require large pipes (wires) then you can think of the volts as the pump pushing the electricity through the pipes. Realize this is not truly the case, but thinking of it like this you can make your solar system function. The higher the volts the higher the pressure which will lower the amps. It’s sort of like a high pressure washer hose. You can have a lot of power going through a tiny little hose nozzle if the pressure is high enough. If you have a 2” pipe with 200 PSI you can pump about 600 gallons per minute through that. With 1 PSI it takes a 6” pipe to flow about the same amount of water through. Higher amp with lower volts is similar to the large pipe gushing water out with low pressure. Thinking of it like this is helpful in my mind. If you go with a 12V or 24V system you will want to do short runs with thick wires to gush your electricity around. Once you hit your inverter (high pressure pump), you can shrink the wires (although you need very large wires from your battery to your inverter) and use the tiny AC wires with high pressure to power your high 120V appliances. Hopefully that makes enough sense. And even if it doesn’t make sense then go eat a sheep cheeseburger, read your manuals, and you can likely make your solar system function. Or if you are vegan go eat a salad, read your manuals, and you can likely make your solar system function.

Wattage (watts): This is your electrical power, the combination of volts and amps. Watts measure the rate at which electrical energy is used, generated, or transferred per second. One watt is equal to one joule per second and is calculated by multiplying voltage by current (amps). Basically if you are trying to figure out watts you multiply amps and volts. A 12 volt 10 amp charger, appliance, or whatever will be using 120 watts (12 x 10). A 12 volt 2 amp charger or whatever will be using 24 watts (12 x 2). A 120 volt 1 amp charger or whatever will be using 120 watts (120 x 1). A 120 volt 10 amp charger or whatever will be using 1,200 watts (120 x 10). Many appliances, chargers, tools, solar panel and whatever will have a sticker showing either watts, volts, and/or amps used. This is a very important concept that can help you figure out what size of solar system you actually can live with. Related to this is kWh which is kilowatt-hour. This is how your electrical bill will be represented. What this means is 1,000 watts run for one hour. If you have 500 watts running for one hour you will be using 0.5 kWh and if you have 2,000 watts running for one hour you will be using 2 kWh. If you are using 100 watts over 24 hours you will have used 2.4 kWh. Realize that some appliances do not run non-stop. A refrigerator for example runs 20% to 30% of the time, so you would multiply your wattage use by about 0.25 and then multiply it by 24 (hours of the day) to get an estimate of a day’s use. Hope that all makes enough sense. In very hot conditions the refrigerator can run a lot more of the time, which is another thing to consider. Read the books referenced to get more details.

Amp Hour: Batteries for solar are typically labeled in amp hours. Some will be in kWh (Kilowatt hour) and some are labeled with both. To get the kWh from the amp hours simply multiply the voltage rating and the amp hours together. A 12V 200Ah battery can use 1 amp at 12V for 200 hours, or 10 amps at 12V for 20 hours, or 200 amps at 12V for 1 hour. Although your battery discharge rate may not be able to handle 200 amps, but you get the idea. Going with kWh can be easier in some regards because the voltage does not matter. And in a solar system often you will be running things at different voltages. With the above example you would have 2.4kWh (12V x 200Ah) or 2400 watts to use over an hour. So if your laptop used 150 watts and you had it plugged in for two hours you would use 300 watt hours or 0.3kWh bringing your battery bank down to 2.1kWh. In reality you get some loss through all of this, which is especially true when you go through an inverter. We’ll go over the losses in a little more detail later on.

Series: With any circuit you can run things in parallel and series. The most important thing for us to realize is what happens with solar panels and batteries. If you link the panels or batteries together in series you will be increasing the voltage but the amps stay the same. So if you link 6 solar panels together that are 25V and 10A you will have 150V and 10A coming out of that. If you linked together 4 batteries that are 12V and 100Ah you would have a 48V 100Ah battery bank. That battery bank would be a 4.8 kWh bank. In series all of the panels’ or batteries’ voltage will add up but the amps will stay the same. This setup is done by connecting the positive wires to the negative wires of the next panel or battery together in series.

Parallel: So now let’s pretend we went in parallel instead of series with the same system as above. With those 6 solar panels that are 25v and 10A you would have 25v and 60A coming out if linked in parallel. With the 4 batteries at 12V and 100Ah you would have 12V and 400Ah. The battery bank would still be a 4.8kWh bank. That is because your total wattage is still volts x amps which is still the same. In parallel all of the panels’ or batteries’ amperage will add up but the voltage will stay the same. This setup is done by connecting the positive wires to the positive wire/terminal and the negative wires to the negative wire/terminal of the next panel or battery together in parallel.

Solar String: If you connect four solar panels together in series (increasing the voltage) you are creating a “solar string.” Many systems will have multiple solar strings. They can be anything from 2 panels connected in series or many more.

Solar Array: The solar array is all of your solar panels connected together. Often this is multiple solar strings connected together. If you have two 400W panels connected together in series and then you connect four strings together you would have a 3200W array. The series connections would be increasing the voltage and the strings connected together in parallel would be increasing the amps. For easy math lets pretend those 400W panels are 40V 10A. Each string would be 80V 10A and when you combine all four strings you would have a 80V 40A solar array sitting at 3200W (400 x 8 panels or 80V x 40A = 3200W).

Battery Bank: You can have a solar system with zero or many batteries. Solar systems with no batteries are typically used for things like water pumps into cisterns and pond aerators. For a home or shop operation you would want at least one battery so your system runs smoothly when a cloud passes by and to have some function when the sun goes down. Our solar system only has one 12V 200Ah battery. You want to size the bank to your panels. If your battery bank is too large of a capacity for your solar array your batteries will never fully charge which will shorten the lifespan; lead acid batteries especially should be fully charged very regularly. Our battery bank is 2.4 kWh (12 x 200 = 2400) which tops off very quickly with our 800 watts of power coming from the solar panels. If our batteries were down to 50% it would take about 1.5 hours of direct sun to top them off. People often calculate that they have four to six hours of full sun to base their numbers off of. So we could have as much as a 4.8 kWh battery bank and our panels could top that off every sunny day. With a 1600 watt solar array you could double that to 9.6 kWh. With a 3200 watt solar array you could double that again up to 19.2 kWh battery bank. We’ll go over battery types and some details on them later on. Something for now is that with a lead acid battery bank you may want to double the capacity of what you think you’ll want. This is because you really ought to stay above 50% capacity always with lead acid type batteries. So 50% capacity means your useful kWh is cut in half. With Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries you can deplete down further, it’s recommended to stay above 20% to extend their lifespan but you can go down to 10% or even 0% with some brands without damaging them.

A battery bank can be wired in series which would be wiring positive terminals to negative terminals and negative terminals to positive. That will add your voltage together but your amp hours will stay the same. If you had two 6V 100Ah batteries you could link two of them together in series to give you a 12V system with 100Ah (total 1.2kWh). If you had four 12V 100Ah batteries you could link them all together in series to give you a 48V system with 100Ah (total 4.8kWh).

A battery bank can also be wired in parallel which would be wiring the positive terminals to the positive terminals and the negative terminals to the negative. This will increase the amp hours. So if you had two 6V 100Ah batteries and you linked them in parallel you would still have only 6V but the amp hours would increase to 200 (1.2kWh). This is not a typical voltage for solar home solar systems and wouldn’t work for most charge controllers so you would want to do series instead. If you had four 12V 100Ah batteries you could link them all together in parallel to give you a 12V system with 400Ah (total 4.8kWh). Notice that the kWh stays the same no matter the configuration of series or parallel. So if you have eight 12V 100Ah batteries connected in any configuration you will always end up with a 9.6kWh battery bank.

The solar array idea is also used with batteries. Let’s pretend you have eight total batteries running at 12V 200Ah in this system. Let’s say your charge controller can handle 3200 watts only if you run it at 48V, which is fairly common. So you have four batteries connected in series and all of them are doubled up in parallel. This would give you a 48V 400Ah battery bank with 19.2 kWh of use. If you had a 24V system with the same batteries you would have 24V 800Ah with the same 19.2kWh of battery use. If you had a 12V system with the same batteries you would have 12V 1600Ah with the same 19.2kWh of battery use.

Discharge Rate: Your batteries will have a discharge rate, which is the amount of amps that can continuously leave the battery. Some also have a “surge discharge rate” which can go higher for a short period of time – this helps to start large motors and such. This will either be rated in amps or labeled as the letter C and would be called the C discharge rate. A 200Ah battery that can discharge at 1C would be able to be powering 200amps continuously and be drained to 0 in one hour if used at that rate. If it were a 0.5C discharge rating it could use 100 amps continuously and be drained to 0 capacity in two hours. A 2C discharge rating could use 400 amps and be drained to 0 capacity in 30 minutes – you get the idea I hope. Our battery has a 2,000 five-second amp surge capacity and then 60 amp continuous capacity for discharging, which is decent (and equal to 0.3 C discharge rate). What that means is we can run at 720 watts (60 amps X 12 volts) continually. With many batteries you can double your discharge rate by putting two together in parallel. Check up on your battery details from the manufacturers writings, or sometimes the information is printed right on the battery. When our current battery dies we might switch to a higher discharge rate battery or put two together. It would be nice to have the capacity to run at ~1500 watts for longer durations. With our AGM battery from what I understand is that you physically can run continuously above 60 amps but the higher you go above that the more long term damage you are doing. So if we ran 2,000 watts from our inverter for longer than 5 seconds (the surge period) we would slowly start degrading our battery. If we did this often we would greatly reduce the lifespan. With some batteries it can be much more risky, so check with your battery manufacturer to understand the risks.

Charge Rate: The charge rate is similar but is to charge the battery not discharge it. To follow the same example as above if your 200Ah battery has a 1C charge rate you could charge it with 200 amps continuously and it would charge to 100% from zero in 1 hour. If it had a 0.5C charge rating you could use 100 amps to charge it up to 100% from zero in 2 hours. If it had a 2C charge rating you could use 400 amps and charge it up to 100% from zero in 30 minutes and that would be a very abnormal battery. We can charge our battery with 60 amps continuously which makes it a 0.3C (60 / 200) charge rating. It is pretty normal to have a lower charge rating than discharge rating in a battery, don’t assume they are the same.

Solar System Components

The basic components of most solar systems are these:

• Solar Panels
• Solar Mount
• Charge Controller
• Battery Bank
• Inverter
• Wires
• Fuses

And often for a shop or home system you might want or need these:

• Shunt and Battery Monitor (recommended)
• Combiner Box (often needed, especially for large systems)
• DC to DC converter
• Electrical Distribution Box (Breaker Box)
• Bus Bar (Positive and/or Negative)
• Bolt on Fuse MRBF
• Fuse Block
• Power Pole or similar system

The solar panels are the generator of the system. Basically the sun photons hit the panels and create a chemical reaction which starts the flow of electrons into the circuit. Then the charge controller will send that power from the panels in the correct voltage to the battery bank to keep it healthy increasing the lifespan. From there you can run all sorts of 12V or 24V appliances and do-dads depending on how you configure it. Connected to the battery can also be an inverter which will convert the voltage from 12V, 24V, or 48V into 120V and/or 240V (in the USA) to run any of your regular appliances. All of this requires wires to connect everything together which is a very important part of this system. And it is very intelligent to add some fuses in your system to decrease the risk of fire. There are also other components which may be needed or desired depending on how you build your system. I ended up using a combiner box to maximize our system and add breakers between the panels and charge controller. With the combiner box we were able to use three panels instead of two panels had we linked them in series. With the charge controller you need to stay within the parameters that the manufacture recommends. They will give you a voltage and amperage range, and with our system the voltage was too high with three panels. However the amperage was still fine with three. So we ran three single panels into a combiner box which boosted the amps, but not the volts keeping us within the charge controller ranges. This setup gives us breakers to protect the charge controller and maximizes the potential of our system running at 12V which is awesome. This charge controller can also run at 24V or 48V making it so we could add a lot more panels and batteries if we wanted to go this route. One of the benefits of going with higher voltage is your wire gauge can shrink. The lower the volts the higher the amps and the larger the wire needed. So if you go with 12V like we did, you really want to keep your primary components very close together. If you increase the voltage you can shrink the wires and have longer running wires. These are things to consider while building your system and is elaborated on in the recommended books.

Which type of panels should you get? At this time (2026) the most commonly used new installation uses monocrystalline solar panels. They have become a pretty solid choice for now with a good price point and efficiency of space used to watts produced. In the not too distant future keep your eyes out for perovskite solar panels. As they become more mainstream and the prices drop these might be the next most common panel with higher efficiencies. There are two other types used today which you may want to consider. The flexible panels (thin-film) are pretty good if you are mounting them on an RV or if you want them to be more sturdy against hail damage. However they typically are not built as well, have shorter lifespans, and shorter warranties. Many people have them die out within 10 years or so. So unless you really need it for some specific application I would not recommend them. Monocrystalline can last 30-40 years, and even longer – but the energy produced will slowly decline. The other viable option is the polycrystalline panels, they are a bit less efficient so you will take up more space for the same wattage output. I would only consider them if you get a very good deal, they are typically 15% to 18% efficient compared to 20%-25% with monocrystalline. Heterojunction cells (HJT) are also becoming more common, they are a type of monocrystalline n-type that is often hitting close to 25% efficiency. There are also PERC and solar tiles, search around on the internet for more info if interested. There are more but most of them have much lower efficiencies so they take up a lot of space, which is not too useful to the common DIY off-grid setup. There are other options and reasons to consider but we won’t go into them here.

Keep in mind, it isn’t the best idea to buy solar panels first without knowing your other components. It’s smart to at least theory build your system before buying parts. The charge controller might not function with some panels because of incorrect voltage or amp ranges. And you don’t want to get a battery bank too large where your panels cannot keep them charged up if you are going off-grid. If your battery bank is large enough that you likely cannot keep the batteries topped off during a bout of overcast, you will want a generator to top them off. It is smart to have your system built on paper before buying anything.

With solar panels shipping can really add up. It can potentially save you a good bit finding a good local seller and pick them up yourself. Or driving out to a warehouse if any are somewhat nearby that sell panels. Buying by the pallet can also save money in shipping. Just some things to consider. Also some extended warranties may only apply when installed by certified installers, something to look at when shopping around. There are many mid-range solar panels that can be pretty cheap and are still solid quality that will give you a long lifespan. There are a lot of people and companies that upgrade their solar every 10-15 years and you can buy used panels for very cheap sometimes. This isn’t a terrible idea, you can get 30-40 years or even more from a solar panel. So if you find the right deal just go check them out, if they are physically in good shape take a voltmeter to it and see if it reads close to what’s labeled on the back. It is smart to get all the same age, brand, and type of panel. If you see a stack of them with the top one exposed to the sun, that one is likely worn down more than the others behind it.

Here are a few websites to check out if you want reviews of some solar panel brands:

https://www.smartenergyusa.com/solar-panels/

https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-are-the-best-solar-panels-to-buy-for-your-home

https://scorecard.pvel.com/

online purchasing options:

www.solar-electric.com www.altestore.com www.santansolar.com

https://a1solarstore.com/ www.signaturesolar.com

Which type of solar mount should you get? Typically people do a roof mounting system or a ground mounting system. There is also wall mounting, which is most useful in apartments and such. This is one part of the solar system that people may want to hire out if they are not very strong or skilled with building things. You also need to consider your roof orientation and pitch. Ideal is pointing south (in the northern hemisphere) and angled about the same as your latitude. If you are at 30-degree latitude and you have a nice 30-degree roof pointing south you are in great shape. If your roof is pointing east/west you will lose about 15% efficiency pointing to the west and 20% pointing to the east. If your roof is 45 degrees pointing to the south you will have more solar gain in the winter and less in the summer. Do not put panels on the north side (shade side); it is not worthwhile. Those are some things to think about with roof mounting. You can also get a roof mount with an angle adjustment to get a better angle. We went with a ground pole mount system which cost roughly $1200 all things considered. If you have a lot of space I’d recommend ground mounting. I don’t like drilling holes in my roof! We did do a roof mount for our solar pump pulling water from a nearby spring, but I don’t mind drilling holes in a little garden shed. The roof mounting can be a bit cheaper and faster since the structure is already there. One big perk to me about ground mounting is how much easier it is to clean the panels. In the winter I brush snow off of them and all I need is a shop push broom. My neighbors’ setup is fairly dangerous, walking along an icy platform brushing snow off isn’t my cup of tea. In higher wind areas make sure you get a mounting system with good wind resistance. Our top-of-pole mount kit was rated for about 120 mph wind, which should be plenty. Also we put our system in front of our shop (on the south/sunny side) which protects it from the prevailing winds from the north.

Some mounting options:

https://signaturesolar.com/all-products/mounting-options-hardware/

https://www.solar-electric.com/residential/panel-mounts-trackers.html

https://unistrut.biz/strut-news/supporting-solar-energy-systems-with-unistrut-channel-and-telestrut-tubing/

Which type of charge controller should you get? There are two primary types available and I’d recommend going with the MPPT type, which stands for Maximum Power Point Tracking. You get about 20% less efficiency going with the older PWM type, which sands for Pulse Width Modulation. The MPPT type is somewhat more expensive but they will pay for themselves in power gained. I’d only recommend the old PWM types for very small systems, not for whole house or shop systems. Perhaps for a small shed that you use to pump water and charge power tool batteries it would be fine enough. But if you are making a more robust system that will be used for many applications I would highly recommend paying a little more for the MPPT type. Your charge controller is the brains of the operation. It will be taking the power flowing from the panels and sending that to your batteries. If you go with a very cheap charge controller you may end up paying more in the long run if it isn’t treating your batteries well. The battery bank is often the most expensive part of the solar system, so you want them to be charged correctly. A good charge controller will do that for you and most of them are very simple to install. Just plug the wires in and pick the settings for your battery type. Another thing with MPPT types is they are usually a lot more flexible with what voltage and amps come from your solar panels, with the PWM type you often have to make sure the panels’ voltage is close to what your battery bank voltage is. It is smart to settle on what charge controller you want to get and download the manual to be certain that all the other components you buy will be compatible.

Some of the top recommended brands would be MidNite, Morningstar, and Victron. We got the Morningstar TriStar MPPT-60 and are happy with it. Most people are happy with all three of these brands. You can find much cheaper charge controllers, but you may end up getting a lemon and if it’s too cheap you might really shorten the lifespan of your batteries which isn’t worth it in my view.

https://www.midnitesolar.com/

https://www.morningstarcorp.com/

https://www.victronenergy.com/

Which battery should you get? In my view there are two primary options, two secondary options, and two potential future options to keep an eye on. If you do not want to read much on batteries just read the first two types, those are what I would recommend with the options available right now. I’m going into a bit more detail here because what battery type you pick determines many other aspects of your system. You need to make sure your charge controller can charge the type of battery you pick. Also I think battery technology is pretty neat so I’ve read a lot on it and want to share some useful details with whoever reads this.

There are many brands for batteries out there, and you often get what you pay for. We got a mid-range Renogy AGM battery. I don’t expect it to last as long as the brands listed below. In each battery type I’ll link some solid brand choices for you to consider.

Top choices, I would recommend going with one of these first two primary options: AGM (Absorbent Glass Mat) – This is a sealed lead acid battery and the type of battery we went with.

PRO’s

• Maintenance-free.
• Do pretty well in cold conditions. If you keep them charged up they can handle very low temperatures.
• Medium-high charge and discharge rates.
• Decently long lifespan. You can expect about 3 to 7 years from the typical AGM battery if used properly. The quality of battery and how you treat it can vary the lifespan significantly. There are some higher end batteries you can get closer to 20 years if you do not discharge them very much. This can work if you use the majority of your power while the sun is shining with a trickle of use at night.
• Not too crazy expensive. A 12V 200Ah battery can be from about $300 to $800 depending on quality and brand. The price can stretch outside of this range, but this is common.
• Easier to recycle than lithium in the USA.
• Very little to no off-gassing compared to FLA batteries.

CON’s

• Should not be discharged below 50% capacity, ideally stay much higher than that to really extend the lifespan.
• Heavy.
• When they start to die they can degrade pretty quickly.
• If used heavily and discharged often to 50% capacity you will only get about 500-600 charge cycles. However you can get well over 1,000 charge cycles (some over 2,000) if you do not discharge them below 80%.
• Overcharging can permanently damage the battery. It is important to have a decent charge controller with the correct settings to prevent this.
• Somewhat sensitive to extreme temperatures. The capacity of the battery is lower the colder it gets and it doesn’t like very high temps. Ideally you would want to keep them about 50-70 degrees for maximum lifespan and capacity use. However we have ours in a shop that gets very cold and so far it has held up fine. In extreme low temps it is smart to keep the battery closer to full all the time, the lower the charge the higher risk of damage. For example at -50 degrees if it’s at 30% capacity you will permanently damage it. At -50 degrees and above 90% capacity it should hold up well.

Solid brand options for AGM type batteries:

https://rollsbattery.com/catalog/

https://lifelinebatteries.com/agm-batteries/

https://fullriverbattery.com/

https://www.trojanbattery.com/applications/solar-batteries

https://www.crownbattery.com/renewable-energy-storage

LiFePO4 (Lithium Iron Phosphate) – This type is becoming very popular for many reasons.

PRO’s

• Maintenance-free.
• Very safe compared to the lithium-ion types. I would not recommend lithium-ion batteries for solar, now that LiFePO4 has been refined there is no reason to go back.
• Very long lifespan. A quality LiFePO4 battery should give you 10-15 years if treated well. Typically you can get 2,000 to 8,000 charge cycles. The range is based on how low you discharge the battery before charging again. If you regularly drop it to 0% you’ll get the lower range, if you only go down to 50% you’ll get the higher range.
• You can discharge to 0% without destroying the battery, although to extend the lifespan it is highly recommended to only discharge down to 10% or even 20%. Keeping it above 80% you can get over 10,000 cycles.
• Many have built-in heaters so you can charge them below freezing.
• Much lighter than lead acid types.
• No off-gassing whatsoever.
• High to very high charge and discharge rates.

CON’s

• Higher upfront cost. However if you take into consideration the extended lifespan it can be cheaper in the long run than the other battery types. You can spend roughly $500 for a lower/mid quality to over $1,000 for a high quality LiFePO4 200Ah battery.
• Will be damaged if charging below freezing. If in freezing conditions make sure you get a self heating type or heat the area they are in. Many have a low temp cutoff to protect from damage even if it doesn’t self heat.
• More complicated internal components, if they malfunction your battery can die prematurely.
• Be sure your charge controller can handle this type of battery, many of the older charge controllers aren’t programmed to deal with this type. Some can be reprogrammed and some can use the gel battery setting decently.

Some budget to high end brands to consider:

WattCycle 12V 314AH battery

https://www.eco-worthy.com/collections/12V-24V-batteries

https://www.vatrerpower.com/

https://www.epochbatteries.com/

https://eg4electronics.com/categories/batteries/eg4-ll-12V-400ah-lithium-iron-phosphate-battery/

Secondary choices, still worthwhile in some circumstances.

FLA (Flood Lead Acid) – This was the original standard for solar systems. Many people still go with this. I don’t really recommend this type because of the dangers and regular maintenance. However if you treat them well they will treat you well, there is a reason they are still fairly popular in the off-grid world.

PRO’s

• You can find pretty decent deals on these, sometimes half that of AGM batteries. People often used 6V golf-cart batteries which can have a decent price point. You can expect to pay roughly $200 to $800 for a 12V 200Ah battery depending on quality.
• Good lifespan. You can typically get a longer lifespan out of these than AGM if treated well. Expect 5-7 years on a mid quality battery and up to 15 or even 20 years from high quality “industrial” types.

CON’s

• Should not be discharged below 50% capacity, ideally stay much higher than that to really extend the lifespan.
• Regular maintenance required. You need to open the caps and top off the battery with distilled water. They require this more frequently as they age. They also off-gas explosive and corrosive hydrogen gas. They require venting and cannot be near any flames/sparks. If they explode you can have a nasty acid mess to clean up and potentially hurt people. The corrosion can build up on the terminal ends which will need cleaning now and then.
• You need to “equalize” the battery every 30-90 days (depending on manufacture recommendations) to prevent sulfation (build up of lead sulfate crystals). If you do not do this you will shorten the lifespan. Many good charge controllers can handle this for you automatically so it’s not a huge deal.
• Slower charge rate compared to the other types above.
• Not as resistant to cold as AGM

Solid brand options for lead acid type batteries:

https://rollsbattery.com/catalog/

https://www.trojanbattery.com/applications/solar-batteries

https://www.crownbattery.com/renewable-energy-storage

Gel Deep Cycle Marine – another type of sealed lead acid battery

PRO’s

• Maintenance free.
• Good lifespan. You can typically get double the charge cycles out of these than AGM if treated well. The lifespan can be 5 to 15 years depending on quality and how deep you discharge them.
• Can be discharged well below 50% without permanently damaging them, they recover from a deep discharge much better then AGM and FLA.
• Not too bad on the price. Similar prices to AGM at roughly $350 to $600 for a 200Ah battery.
• Does well in hotter conditions.

CON’s

• More delicate to overcharging especially when cold. You need to make sure your charge controller can work with this type of battery or you can shorten the lifespan.
• Not as tolerant to cold conditions.
• Slower/lower charge rates and discharge rates.

Solid brand options for gel type batteries:

https://rollsbattery.com/catalog/

https://fullriverbattery.com/

https://www.victronenergy.com/batteries

These last two are on-the-horizon choices. The first one is available now but they are newer tech and not quite ready in my view. They have high potential to become a great choice if the kinks are worked out. One I won’t go into but is similar to sodium ion is lithium titanate (LTO). They also have some potential with a very long lifespan, but have similar drawbacks as sodium ion and will likely stay expensive. The last option I’ll dig a little into is likely not to be readily available for some time (after 2030). You will see them in EV’s (electric vehicles) first, it might be a while before they are easy to get and affordable for the off-grid systems. Both of these are something to keep an eye on.

Sodium Ion – There is a lot of hype around this battery and in time might become a winner, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet.

PRO’s

• Sodium is a very abundant element and easier to refine. Once mainstream the costs could very well make it the cheapest battery choice.
• Much more environmentally friendly. Because of the abundance it does not require such destructive mining practices to obtain compared to lithium and lead. This will also be very easy to recycle.
• Safe.
• Some versions are maintenance free.
• Can be discharged down to 20% capacity, nearly as good as LiFeP04 batteries.
• Perform well at low temperatures, down to -50 degrees Celsius.
• Significantly lighter than lead acid batteries for the same energy, but not quite as light as LiFePO4.
• Good lifespan with about 3,000 to 5,000 charge cycles which should give you over 7 to 10 years. The lifespan may significantly increase as they refine the technology with new formulations. Some of the companies working on this tech are claiming 20,000+ charge cycles, which would be revolutionary – especially if they overcome some of the other drawbacks listed next.

CON’s

• Some versions require some maintenance such as periodic cleaning and topping off with distilled water (like FLA batteries).
• Overpriced for their performance right now since it is newer technology. Right now you can find them roughly $600 to $1,000 for a 200 Ah battery.
• Wide range in quality because they are newer tech.
• Currently slower charge and discharge rates
• Many charge controllers cannot charge them because they do not charge the same as the older battery types. If you get one of these make sure your charge controller can work with this type of battery. Some charge controllers can be programmed to custom settings which could be configured to work fine.
• Many inverters won’t work well with them because of the wide voltage curve. This means that you cannot use the full capacity of the battery with most inverters. It may turn out that these will work best with high voltage systems rather than my preferred 12V and 24V.
• At this point the “round trip efficiency” is pretty bad, which means the usable energy is low (60-80%) compared to AGM at 80-90% and LiFePO4 at 95-99%. In effect this means that you will need a 15-39% larger system for the same output.
• Like most new tech early adopters pay too much for mediocre products. In time this could revolutionize the battery industry, but that still seems like a maybe.
• If the battery becomes refined and awesome it is fairly likely that you will not be able to just drop it into your current system, you may need to upgrade some components.

I don’t know of any brands worth recommending, I think they will come soon enough though. Keep your eyes out for CATL, EVE Energy, Sunwoda, Gotion, and Haichen Storage sodium ion batteries; they all seem heavily invested in this technology. Gotion just made some breakthroughs and are partners with Volkswagen which should have batteries available before 2030.

Solid State Lithium Ion or Solid State Sodium Ion – These are actively being worked on but not available yet. Expect to see the solid state lithium ion batteries in EV’s by the year 2030 unless something prevents it. The sodium ion type will likely take a bit longer.

PRO’s

• Solid state batteries will have much higher energy density, safety, lifespan, charge rates, and discharge rates.
• This will likely revolutionize the EV world.

CON’s

• Not available yet.
• Cost will likely be very high.
• This will likely revolutionize the EV world.

What type of inverter should you get? There are two main types of AC inverters for solar systems, pure sine wave and modified sine wave. If you only get one for the whole house get a large pure sine wave type. We have one smaller 300 watt pure sine wave type, a larger 2800 watt pure sine wave plus a 2000 watt modified sine wave. If I did it over again I would have never bought the modified sine wave inverter. We don’t use it. I’ve dug in deeper to the information on these and I would not recommend using one. You will likely shorten the lifespan of most things you plug into a modified sine wave by 20-30%. Sometimes things just die the first time you power up. Things run hotter as well. It’s really not worth risking, it isn’t worth the small savings you get using the cheaper inverter. The grid provides a clean pure sine wave, so that is what most people are used to and what AC equipment is built for.

When you go through an inverter you get some loss in efficiency so in my view it’s ideal to use the inverter as little as possible. If you can put most of your things on a 12V DC circuit you don’t have to always be running your inverter or inverters. With a high quality pure sine wave you can get 85-95% efficiency, some are even higher but that’s not as common. With the modified sine wave inverter you can get 75-90% efficiencies. Our 300 watt pure sine wave inverter is probably closer to 95% efficiency, it doesn’t even have a fan and doesn’t produce much heat. We use the 300 watt inverter to charge laptops and batteries. We use a heavy duty (lower frequency) pure sine wave 12V 2800 watt inverter for power tools, laundry machine, and anything else that needs more than 300 watts. If you are running new equipment and smaller motors you would likely be fine getting a “high frequency” pure sine wave inverter. Those are the most common and work for most applications, they are also lighter weight (20 lbs-) and cost less. Sometimes they make more noise though and can have a shorter lifespan. If you are running large motors it is recommended to go with a “low frequency” inverter. They cost more and are heavy (40 lbs+) but they often last longer, are often quieter, and work better for a wide range of tools and appliances. Some of the larger heavy high frequency inverters function a little more like the low frequency ones and might do a great job on older larger motors and such. Another thing to understand is that with many quality inverters you can wire them together in parallel or series. Doing such will increase your amperage in parallel or voltage in series. This option can be very helpful in a situation where you might need high power output, like a large wood shop.

From your battery to your inverter keep your wire lengths short (under 4ft is ideal) and make sure you use a large gauge wire to the inverter. A 2000 watt inverter can run continuously at 166 amps. With that it’s recommended to have 0 or 00 gauge wires for this on a 12V system. You would also want a 200-250 amp fuse on the positive wire as a protection from fire. The easiest is a marine “bolt on” fuse (MRBF terminal fuse).

Some inverter brands worth looking at:

https://www.midnitesolar.com/

https://www.victronenergy.com/inverters

https://www.morningstarcorp.com/product_category/solar-inverters/

https://www.magnum-dimensions.com/renewable-energy-products/inverter-chargers

Wires and fuses: With 12V systems you will be dealing with large gauge wires and short runs. The lower the amps and higher the volts the thinner the wires and longer runs you can do. Typically you can have thinner longer wires going from your panels to your charge controller, then they will increase in size from charge controller to battery bank. From the battery bank you want large wires to all the components that are higher amps and fuses are highly recommended. Follow the manufacturers recommendation for wire sizes and fuses, if they aren’t included in the instructions you can find the information online for generic sizes for whatever amps and lengths you are doing. You can also use a fuse block to distribute DC power to various appliances or components. Fuses are very important in a solar system. They can protect equipment and prevent fires. If you end up with some faulty equipment or a short (negative and positive wires crossing) that takes place your wires themselves will act as a fuse, and they can heat up to the point of burning up and catching fire. A fuse has a built in weak point that has a lower melt or blow out point than the wire. That makes it so the fuse will melt or break in some way so the circuit will close (be interrupted). This is an essential component to protect everything. For example touching a metal item to both the positive and negative terminals will short your battery out. Do not do this. You can cover the terminal ends with plastic or rubber to help prevent this. If your toaster, or washing machine, or whatever else shorts out and fails in a bad way and you have a fuse in the line the fuse will burn out and prevent any further damage. If you don’t the wires can heat up to the point of sparking, melting, and starting things on fire.

See the chart below for some basics on sizing wires on a 12V system. For 24V and 48V look online for more details. The sizes can drop as the voltage increases because the amperage decreases for the same amount of total power/wattage. For more elaborate or higher wattage systems it can be necessary to increase the voltage of the system.

Chart taken from https://powmr.com/blogs/accessories/battery-cable-size-chart go there for more details.

Some optional components might be needed or not depending on different situations. We’ll briefly cover these parts, what they do and why you might want or need them. For convenience I’ll copy the list from above on the optional solar system parts.

• Shunt and Battery Monitor (recommended)
• Combiner Box (often needed, especially for large systems)
• DC to DC converter
• Electrical Distribution Box (Breaker Box)
• Bus Bar (Positive and/or Negative)
• Bolt on Fuse MRBF
• Fuse Block
• Power Pole or similar system

It’s pretty smart to add a shunt and battery monitor to your system. The shunt combined with the battery monitor can give you all sorts of details on your batteries status. It can show you the voltage, the percent of charge, the amps being used, and more. For a super basic setup you may not care to have such information, but for a home or shop that is used regularly it seems pretty essential in my view. But it is optional, you can run a solar system without it and we did for a month or so before installing it.

A Combiner Box is very common and used in most home solar systems. I briefly mentioned above that we ended up using one even though we had a simple 3 panel system. What it does is create a parallel circuit with your solar panels, which will add (or combine) all of the amperage together. When this is done you will need higher gauge wires going out of the combiner box than what is going in. Often what people do is have multiple panels wired together in series increasing the voltage. Then all of those wires will go into the combiner box. With this component you can easily wire together many panels. For an example say you had twelve 300 watt panels in your array, for easy math let’s say they are 30V 10A. Say you wired them together in sets of three in each row in series, giving you 90V 10A. Then you took those four strings and wired them into your combiner box. Out of the combiner box you would have 90V 40A giving you a total of 3600W to wire into your charge controller.

A DC to DC converter is something I do not have but might get someday. They are very useful and sometimes are built into higher quality AC inverters. What it basically does is take your DC voltage and convert it to whatever voltage you want. So if you have a 48V system and you desire to run 12V or 24V components you can do such a thing. Or if you have a 12V system and you want to run a 90V motor you could do that. Some can do a wide range of voltage settings and some are built to only do a single step (such as 12V to 24V only). I’ve thought of many reasons to have one of these but I don’t really need it yet so I’ve put it off. Just want you to know it’s out there and might be useful for you.

You may need an AC Electrical Distribution Box (Breaker Box) for your inverter. Some inverters have outlets built into them, some you can wire directly to outlets and such, and others need a breaker panel of sorts – especially larger inverters. You can buy pre-wired distribution boxes at various online stores. If you are more skilled it doesn’t seem too bad to wire one yourself, but we went with a prebuilt one to make it easier and we aren’t putting in much wiring. If you need a lot of wiring, such as if you want outlets in every room of your house and many appliances you will likely want to build one from scratch or have an electrician do this step for you. If you only need 2-4 or so outlets a prebuilt box would be an easier path and potentially cheaper. This particular device I’ve had a hard time finding outside Ebay and Amazon.

Power Distribution Breaker Box 120V

And another one

To make all your wiring more neat and clean you can add a Bus Bar. This can be used on the positive side and the negative side of your battery wiring. Some are built with both positive and negative to the same bar. This is especially nice to have the more wiring you have. With elaborate wiring setups it becomes nearly impossible to put it all on your battery terminals. With this you will have your battery wire going to the busbar, and then you wire into the busbar instead of to the battery terminal. Even with smaller systems it is nice to have things more tidy with these contraptions. We have one for our grounding as well, it was getting very messy – these can also save in overall wire lengths.

Bus Bars – red – black – white

Fuse Block. There are many fuse blocks or fuse distribution boxes built for boats and RV’s that are nice for 12V and 24V systems. We have one for expansion with 6 fuses that can go up to 100 amps combined. This is nice for wiring lights, phone chargers, laptop chargers for cars, and much more.

Distribution blocks (I’d recommend one with fuses)

Another very useful tool is the Power Pole, SB50/SB90, XT60/XT90 connectors, Daier rocker switches, and more. These are a few systems built for boats, RV’s, robotics, RC’s, and car audio that are very useful for the home and shop. In my view people are limiting themselves somewhat by just thinking of a home solar system as a typical 120V/240V (USA) inverter driven system. There are so many things that can hook into a 12V or 24V system thanks to all those boat and RV folks out there. We have a power pole since it was gifted to us by a couple who used it in their RV years back. All you need to do is add the power pole adapters to the end of your wires, it’s fairly easy. It’s helpful to watch a video or look up tutorials on how to add the clip to your wires, but once you get it down it’s pretty simple. Once you have them attached you can plug them in and out onto your power pole box. With this simple device you can have many things that you can swap around or keep some of them permanently plugged in if you desire. Something nice about these is they have a built in fuse for each line as a nice protection. The SB50 (50amp), SB90 (90amp), XT60 (60amp) and XT90 (90amp) plugs are useful for quickly connecting and disconnecting different medium amp devices. The SB50/90 are easier to connect and disconnect so if you plan on swapping things around with those consider that. If you are dealing with moisture at all the XT60/90 connectors seem a bit tighter and might help with that. Daier builds various “rocker switch panels” that you can connect various DC powered items with little on/off switches on a single panel. As you look around you will find all sorts of innovative and useful tools for the DC side of your solar system.

Daier switch panels and more

How to install Powerpole connectors

Powerpole connectors and more

Anderson Power SB connectors

XT60/90 information

Victron Lynx DC Distribution Systems

Example solar systems

Lastly I want to go over an example of a solar system you could do. Like mentioned above I’d recommend changing your lifestyle and decreasing your overall need for electricity so you can go with the more simple 12V or 24V system. The cost can get pretty high with a larger battery bank and 48V system. The more robust you go the less worthwhile it is to go off-grid. If you want to stay grid tied it isn’t a terrible idea to just make a basic 12V system with one or two batteries in your garage or shop as an emergency backup system. But it is much cooler to drop the power bill and get off-grid. We have zero monthly bills in our life right now and it is wonderful, join the party!

Note that with many of the components listed here you can find a good or even great deal on these gently used. I’d recommend going with solid name brand components and avoid the cheapest components out there if you want it to last. I will list what we have in our system here with a few alternate options as well. You can also look back at previous segments to think about more options.

Here is our 12V 800 watt system:

Solar Panels: Panels vary a bit in quality and price; we bought three 340 watt Suniva OPT340-72-4-100 panels for about $740 total locally. They aren’t great but good enough for the price. Expect to pay $600-$1,500 for similar or somewhat better panels.

Single Pole Mount: Mount kit, schedule 40 steel 4” and 3” poles, and cement all totaled ~$1,200

This is the mount brand we did https://tamaracksolar.com/products/pole-mounting-system/top-of-pole-portrait/

Here is the mount kit we went with https://www.ecodirect.com/Tamarack-Solar-UNI-PGRM-3P1-47-Top-of-Pole-Mount-p/tamarack-uni-pgrm-3p1-47.htm

There are many variations https://www.ecodirect.com/Tamarack-Solar-Top-of-Pole-Mounts-s/1008.htm

• Contact local plumbing supply stores for the schedule 40 or schedule 80 pipe. We ended up buying local 20’ lengths cut to size and kept the leftover pipe for less than it would be buying online with shipping costs.
• Make sure you buy an appropriate mounting kit for your size of panel.

Combiner Box: we bought a mid-grade PowGrow 4 string combiner box ~$150

• This brand can be found on Ebay and Amazon and it works fine enough.
• If you are putting together a much larger array go with a better brand like Midnite Solar.

Charge Controller: Morningstar Tristar MPPT TS-60M ~$800

• Note that this is a great expandable charge controller. It can work with 12V, 24V, or 48V. We got the older model for a significantly lower price but I’ll list current easy-to-find new price here. This one is not the easiest if you plan on going with LiFePO4 batteries because you will have to reprogram it. I have not done it, but it shouldn’t be too challenging with their software linking to a Windows computer. It comes pre-programmed for many other lead acid battery types. If you plan on going with LiFePO4 batteries keep that in mind, it’s recommended to look into this in advance.
• Victron has lower cost options worth considering if you want to save money, or look at used charge controllers.

Battery: Renogy 200Ah AGM battery ~$400

https://www.renogy.com/pages/deep-cycle-agm-battery-12-volt-200ah-rng-batt-agm12-200-html

• You may want to upgrade to a higher quality battery for a longer lifespan.
• You would need a larger battery bank than we have if you wanted to run a refrigerator and/or chest freezer. With 800 watts you could have a battery bank as large as 400 amp hours of usable power or 4.8kWh. This would be four 200Ah AGM batteries or two 200Ah LiFePO4 batteries. With ours we could run an efficient dorm fridge or tiny travel cooler with a freezer compartment, but we’d want to double or more our battery bank for an efficient full size version.

Battery monitor and shunt: Our charge controller came with this as a combo. You can buy one separate from various brands for ~$60-$200.

Powerpole: Ours came free from our neighbor, but they are roughly $80. You will want a distribution box or hub, connectors, and crimping tool. This is optional but useful.

Wires: Many of ours were salvaged from neighbors, if you buy them all new expect to pay roughly $600. The price can vary quite a bit depending on many factors. Napa Auto is a good place to buy large gauge wires with battery terminal ends attached and heat shrink wrapped made to whatever length you need. Keep your high amp wires as short as possible.

• You’ll also likely want a solar MC4 crimping tool kit to extend your solar panel wires to your charge controller or combiner box. (Something like this)

https://www.bougerv.com/products/mc4-crimping-tool-kit

MRBF battery terminal fuse block (bolt on): ~$70

• You will want to use this from your battery terminal to your inverter. We use a double pole version with one going to our 2800W inverter (300A fuse) and one going to our 300W inverter (50A fuse). You want to size your fuses at 25% or more the continuous watt rating expected. So take the amps expected and multiply by 1.25 for your minimum fuse size. Example 2800W inverter / 12V battery = 233A x 1.25 = 291.7 or ~300A. So a 300-350A fuse would be appropriate to put on as your fuse.
• Example double pole fuse bar: https://www.donrowe.com/dc-fb-2-double-pole-fuse-bar-p/dc-fb-2.htm
• Example of the fuse type: https://www.donrowe.com/mrbf-300-300-amp-terminal-fuse-p/mrbf-300.htm

Inverter #1: Morningstar 300 watt ~$300

https://www.morningstarcorp.com/products/suresine-classic/

• We bought one used for just over $100.

Inverter #2: Outback Power VFXR2812A ~$600

https://outbackpower.com/product/fxr-vfxr-series/

• This company has lost their main engineers and has been going downhill. As far as I can tell these inverters have been discontinued, but you can still find them at a great price and it is worth getting but don’t expect warranty fulfillment. An equivalent alternative can cost over $2,000. If you don’t need a lot of power or the “low frequency” type of power you can save a lot with something like this: Victron Phoenix Inverter 12/1200 (~$300).

https://signaturesolar.com/victron-phoenix-inverter-12-1200-ve-direct-1200va-output-12Vdc-input-120Vac-output/

• The reason we have two inverters is because the 300W one is very efficient and was cheap. We typically never turn off the 300W inverter because it draws so little power when not in use. The 2800W inverter makes an annoying buzz and draws more power, we only turn it on when we need it. If you always need your inverter on you may want it in an area where you will not hear it.

Electrical Box: ~$120

• Something like this https://www.ebay.com/itm/306760198147?_trksid=p2332490.c101224.m-1

Total system cost ~$5,000 – $6,500 (higher price is with two batteries and higher price on everything.)

If you look around for deals, wait for sales, buy some things gently used, buy discontinued items, scrounge around for some parts, and use only one battery like we do you can do this for closer to $4,000. There are countless extras you will likely be adding to your particular system. The cost can easily go up depending on what you do and what you add.

What you could expect to run with this: Laptops, recharging power tools, washing machine, propane dryer, efficient refrigerator or chest freezer, smaller efficient A/C unit, and many other things. If you were trying to run all of these things at once you will run into problems. You would need to prioritize and conserve with this system but it really can do a lot.

Concluding remarks on this system we use: We enjoy this solar system build and are very happy with it. Of course you can always use more power, but I think it very worthwhile to adapt to a modest system. If you had a very low power bill of only $65 a month it would only take about 8 years to pay this system off entirely with the price point of $6,500. The average household power bill in the USA is closer to $142. So if you could adjust your lifestyle and switch to something like this it would take less than 4 years to pay off. And that would shorten further if you’re system was closer to $5,000 or $4,000. If your power bill is the average $142 per month, you could spend about $17,000 on a solar system and if you went off-grid it would pay for itself in ten years – not too shabby. Another thing to consider with going small and modest with your system – we also save a lot more overall because we aren’t buying lots of things that use electricity. We don’t have a dishwasher, dryer, multiple refrigerators and freezers, air-conditioner, heat pump, television, and countless other electrical devises. So we save money on multiple fronts because of this lifestyle.

I hope you gained something from this writeup if you were able to get through it all. If this helps even one person go off-grid it was worth the time it took to put this together in my view.

And of course there are many more options out there. You certainly don’t have to go with the same brands and equipment I list here, just giving you a starting place with some decent equipment for you to consider on your journey to disconnect from the grid if that is your desire. Some of the newer systems are 72V or even much higher, but I’m not as interested in this personally so I won’t give you many of the details. I don’t care to try and teach what I don’t know or care to know. In my view I don’t see myself going beyond a 24V system for anything I’d care to do. For a group project with a community use workshop of sorts that needs higher power I’d prefer to stick with 48V or lower. If there were any tools or equipment that needed more than what this could provide and it was only run from time to time perhaps a generator could be used. If the costs get too high and the grid is nearby it might just be smarter to use that. But I believe most situations it can be cheaper to go solar for your electric needs. Switch to wood, propane, or diesel for the bulk of your heating and heavy burst mechanical needs.

The End

Download the PDF version of this write up by clicking on this sentence.

Additional resources:

Here are a few books I found helpful. They are in order of my favorite to least favorite, but I found them all helpful with useful information.

Mobile Solar Power Made Easy! – by William Prowse IV

• Note you can now download his book for free if you submit your email address at https://www.mobile-solarpower.com/the-book.html

Off Grid Solar Power Simplified – by Nick Seghers

Solar & 12 Volt Power for beginners – by George Eccleston

Here are a couple pretty interesting and fun books on related subjects but not about solar systems.

DIY Lithium Batteries: How To Build Your Own Battery Packs – by Micah Toll

• You can build your own battery banks for solar systems and for many other applications. This book is pretty great in my view. I hope someday to start playing around with this but I have so many other things I’m working on at the moment.

The Ultimate Do-It-Yourself Ebike Guide – by Micah Toll

• Here is a review with more info https://turbobobbicycleblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/the-ultimate-do-it-yourself-e-bike-guide-by-micah-toll-book-review/

And here are multiple sources of solar panel and/or battery diagrams, just in case any link dies or different explanations resonate more than another:

https://www.altestore.com/pages/schematics-wiring-solar-panels-and-batteries-in-series-and-parallel

https://www.solarray.com/TechGuides/WireDiagrams_T.php

https://www.renogy.com/blogs/learn-center/learn-series-and-parallel

https://www.solartap.com/blogs/diy-solar/solar-panel-wiring-diagram

https://windandsolar.com/blogs/wiring-diagrams/parallel-wiring-for-battery-banks

https://windandsolar.com/blogs/wiring-diagrams/battery-wiring-diagrams

If you have questions or need help this forum is active and great. The community is mostly kind and there are many very knowledgeable people willing to help. If you are building your own system and want some tips or assistance this is a great resource.

diysolarforum.com/

Solar system components can be bought at many shops, of course Ebay and Amazon have many parts. However a lot of the kits and solar equipment in general from those sites are not that great. Another thing to consider is that Amazon doesn’t really need our business, they account for about 40% of all online retail sales. If we want to keep options available It might be smart to use some of the other suppliers out there. Here are some solar suppliers that seem worthwhile.

https://signaturesolar.com/

https://www.solarpanelstore.com/

https://www.altestore.com/

https://ressupply.com/

In Summary: * A pretty productive Sunday winds down. A fair amount of mowing, trimming, and hauling branches in the back yard, a side yard and the front yard. And two loads of laundry washed and dried. That laundry still needs to be folded and put away; I'll take care of that after I've showered my old self. Then all that remains is the night prayers before a good night's sleep.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 228.07 lbs. * bp= 132/79 (78)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:10 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich * 09:00 – cookies and cold milk * 11:45 – 3 boiled eggs * 13:20 – 1 pb&j sandwich

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:40 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 04:50 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 12:00 – started following a full day of baseball on MLB Star Spangled Sunday. * 13:45 – start my weekly laundry * 17:50 – yard tools put away, two loads of launfry wahed and dried

Chess: * 18:10 – moved in all pending CC games

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

For beasts to and from Lines of paint for people Followed in peace To the Irving family Day by day And in face Liberal abandon And as we are,- The admonished France will forgive you For whatever it was But in focus And because we fly These are the Baptists of the Earth And never more For the Englishman Two nights of liberty be And to the list of probability Gives me jitters This Stalin clause And nights of carrefour To the sysyphean code That lights will abide And men do appear As we came and prayed And so the night went And so as we Men of high stand And history commend The eruptions of labour To vape on this land A custom sea But there was a buffer And in this bitter place We ceased unto view For ecriture and ivory And tailing refute That we had rights And offer the same to many And shores of the everman To provide sympathy and protect And happy on medication As we seize the medical dough And worry Of these devices And how they got lot But with modest emplore The Navy will make a few And fight right in For the impossible in me This is the realm Of sympathy hereafter Bright enough to pause Without poking the poor As Ron could unite And beginning to understand- forthwith Deems for Hashmatullah A prayer for my best friend And finishing first In this double-cathedral And plying favours For the infotube In rise to the altar Speak Chalice And change and courage And they day as our night The purgatory of souls When and life In the aftermath And Nirvana- which exists as it has But fighting to against The argyle in simple view A religious Catholic Studied and studying For the peace in respect Of our Maliseet code Riding nation to nation And back to our forest In time together, our home And Sundays they come To steal us our war Forever in Peter And peace And Christ between embers The empathy in fire And then to able for By respective abandon If only our debt And seeing you here Giving peace And dust of the aftermath And if reconciliation they come By the airfield of Rome And hugging her The Church in they And undone as your labour But Olivet And the Earth became The bitter sin Of the first word After man And caress And knowing remark Substitute For Heavengod He would say: I am And disgracing the known Married kids And processions For the deeply possessed But iron war And its people No peace- but the Sun And never shall walk To the symptoms- of AI And the aftermark With high regret As a substitution And conflagrations became To the loading booth And the nightsrest When labouring few In The Eucharist For life and our hand To the Cross and peruse That our glory in soul That Jesus is Lord Whether atoms emplore All the fires- that may be And become A sympathy in breath.

This is a little bit of a different post than usual I guess, mostly because I know that I kind of want to vent but I also think maybe I shouldn’t. Not because there’s anything wrong with venting, but maybe it’s a more value for me to try to just acknowledge and look at this thought for what it is. This topic was spurred on from several different things, but the most concrete example I have is thinking about a random relationship reel I saw about a girl having something go wrong in the kitchen and getting incredibly overwhelmed, and her partner stepped up and helped regulate her and take care of it. There was a relationship counselor talking about it, and a lot of the comments were praising his emotional intelligence and how supportive he was, and they pointed out how he started to try to solve the problem first by asking about what happened and then caught himself and started to emotionally listen first and support in that way. I think I’m good at this in the sense that I typically will emotionally reassure first, and it’s not a conscious thing. It’s an automatic incentive for me, and I am happy with that. But at the same time I felt a little bit of disgust towards her. And it’s not really towards her, but more towards the shutting down at something like that, and the partner being praised for emotionally regulating her in that instance. And no one was talking about how she should be able to regulate herself and handle situations like that without shutting down. And I understand that my frustration is not towards her, but rather towards the expectation that I have towards myself that I am supposed to be self-sufficient in those ways. It’s not OK for me to shut down in situations like that, because that relies on someone else to be able to take care of me in that situation, and let alone a relationship, it’s not like a person like that will always be there. And I wonder how you are supposed to survive like that, because what I have learned is you need to be able to take care of yourself. But at the same time I think about how no one was saying that stuff towards her. I think a separate topic to think about how it would’ve gone if it was a man in that situation, but I digress. I think a meaningful thing to recognize is I think the ability to trust and depend on someone else that is a pretty meaningful indicator of safety potentially. And I don’t know if I’m capable of that right now. It’s a terrifying thing too have some kind of a need or something like that where you rely on someone else, not in a like sigma male way, but rather I feel like that’s just a recipe for depending on a relationship which makes it a necessity rather than a choice. And I think that is a festering ground for unhealthy traits. But I can’t help but think about how maybe I should be able to let my guard down past what is natural sometimes. I think I’ve just put a lot of emphasis into being emotionally self-sufficient, with inclusion of my therapy of course. And then it kind of feels unfair, that I emotionally regulate someone else but it’s not something that they can necessarily provide to me. And it just feels unfair. And I hope things are equitable, but I struggle to think about things that I individually struggle with that I can realistically expect someone else to account for. And it sucks because I end up getting put in this situation where it feels like even if it is a net positive to my life, I might just be getting a bit of the short stick. And I think it’s hard to view it in this way, because it feels very much like suffering from success. And the issue with that is it’s not that I think I am so incredibly above “good”, but I’d rather think that a lot of people are not necessarily in a good spot in life. And so it benefits me to continue to improve myself in these ways, and I know that right now this is very much seeming like I’m saying I’m perfect or close to that, but I absolutely know that’s not at all true. If that was true, I wouldn’t be complaining so much. I also wouldn’t be benefiting as much as I do from therapy, which is an indication of the room that I have to grow. But I guess it’s just kind of scary, and I think dating apps are only going to exacerbate that which scares me, because I want to be happy. Shocker.

The day started exactly how you’d expect. badly. so todays topic is work, because thats all my life consists of nowadays. it was painfully boring. boring enough you would start counting random objects just to convince yourself time is actually moving. eventually i managed to get myself into a bit of trouble, and somehow it ended with my nose bleeding. nothing exciting or worth telling, just one more inconvenience to add to the collection. so yes, objectively speaking, today was awful, oddly enough. non of that is what im thinking about now, not work, not the blood or the headache. she texted me. well technically, she deleted a message of 3. for a few seconds, though, i saw it” “i miss you too.” then it disappeared before i could even process it, and maybe she didnt mean to send it or she changed her mind, or maybe it was a mistake, regretting it the second she pressed send, and well i dont know, i dont think i even care. for those few seconds, i was happier than ive been in a long time. its almost humiliating how four words from one person can completely erase an entire miserable day. i smiled like an idiot over a message that doesnt even exist anymore, it felt like being drugged. like someone switched my brain off and replaced it with pure relief. i dont think i’ve ever stopped to appreciate how terrifying that is. i didnt have the courage to say much afterwards. i replied dryly, as if i was not sitting there with a hundred different things running through my head. if im being honest, i always knew they were your favorite. the ponies. i wasnt trying to impress you when i sent them, i’ve been planning that for a while. they were supposed to be your fourth of july flowers. i have an entire note about every flower you love, and another one about every flower you dont. hydrangeas or peonies instead of tulips. it wasnt even difficult to remember. i forget what i ate yesterday. i forget conversations. ill probably forget half of what happened this week. but every single time i see peonies, lily of the valley, you’ll be the first thing that comes to mind. i dont think thats ever going away, ill walk past them twenty years from now and still think of you before i think of the flower itself.

I didn’t have the guts to tell her any of that, not because I don’t have the courage, but because i dont know if id be speaking to someone who still wants to hear it, so ill leave it here instead, where it cant make things awkward and nobody can interrupt me. words have to end up somewhere otherwise they stay inside your chest long enough to convince you they’re part of your lungs.

Sincerely, Ahmed

Achtung – Infos zur Website: 3. Juli

Heute habe ich mit Imke kurz darüber gesprochen, dass nächste Woche für unser Team die letzte Arbeitswoche vor den Ferien sein wird. Das bedeutet natürlich, dass noch viele Dinge fertiggestellt werden müssen. Da ich in letzter Zeit so viel Zeit mit Schreiben, Reportagen und anderen gemeinsamen Aufgaben verbracht habe – und ehrlich gesagt auch, weil mir das einfach interessanter erschien –, habe ich die Webseiten unserer Partnertheater bisher viel zu wenig angeschaut. Wieder einmal eine Aufgabe, die ich vor mir hergeschoben habe! Jetzt müssen meine Kollegin und ich uns beeilen und bis nächste Woche alles vorbereiten. Dann haben wir nämlich einen Termin mit den Leuten, die die Website unseres Projekts gestalten.

Eigentlich macht es mich ein bisschen traurig, dass ich nach einer Woche alleine arbeiten muss, während meine Kolleginnen im Urlaub sind. Ich kann mir diese Zeit ohne sie noch gar nicht vorstellen! Worauf ich außerdem noch achten muss, ist unser Hotel. Das Internet ist dort wirklich sehr langsam. Darüber müssen wir unbedingt noch sprechen, denn wir müssen unsere Videos bearbeiten und dafür brauchen wir eine stabile Internetverbindung, um größere Dateien hoch- und herunterzuladen. Da ich das Testen von Webseiten ehrlich gesagt ziemlich langweilig finde, werde ich darüber heute nicht viele Details schreiben.

Stattdessen möchte ich noch eine wichtige kulinarische – und natürlich deutsche – Entdeckung vorstellen: Käsespätzle! Dieses Gericht habe ich in einem Restaurant neben dem Bahnhof Karlshorst entdeckt. Unser Freund erzählte uns, dass dort Menschen arbeiten, die aus unterschiedlichen Gründen Schwierigkeiten im Leben hatten oder haben.

Das Essen dort ist allerdings wirklich sehr lecker und gleichzeitig ziemlich günstig. Außerdem sind alle unglaublich freundlich und die Portionen sind mehr als großzügig. Mit Mindaugas wurde es natürlich wieder etwas kompliziert, denn er wollte unbedingt ein Schnitzel bestellen. Eigentlich waren wir schon einmal mit meinen Freunden dort. Damals haben allerdings sie alles für uns bestellt – und es gab überhaupt keine Schwierigkeiten. Diesmal musste ich das Schnitzel selbst bestellen. Der Kellner zählte mir bestimmt sieben oder acht Varianten auf – irgendetwas wie „Münchner“, „Hawaii“, „Berliner“, „scharf“, „klassisch“ und noch viele andere. Da ich keine Ahnung hatte, welche Variante Mindaugas beim letzten Mal gegessen hatte, entschied ich mich nach kurzem Überlegen einfach für die Münchner Variante. Für mich selbst bestellte ich natürlich Käsespätzle. Wie ich inzwischen herausgefunden habe, bekommt man dieses Gericht sogar in manchen Einkaufszentren. Offenbar gehört es wirklich zu den deutschen Lieblingsgerichten – und mir schmeckt es ebenfalls ausgezeichnet! Bevor ich nach Hause fahre, werde ich auf jeden Fall noch einmal Käsespätzle kaufen und mitnehmen.

Ich hoffe außerdem, dass ich sie irgendwann auch selbst kochen werde. Dafür brauche ich allerdings zuerst ein wirklich gutes Rezept. Ich glaube, dafür frage ich lieber meine deutschen Kolleginnen und Kollegen – schließlich soll das Rezept auch wirklich authentisch sein!

5 July 2026

Airframe (working title): an opening coinciding with a slamming, a gust of fresh air and momentum, light clipping edges, more delimitation but with less information. In the body of work that is coming together—there are probably five or six paintings contending right now—this one is the most pared back (and maybe the most sure of itself as a result). But it's hard to know if I trust it or not yet. Which is usually a sign that it's doing something. Anyway, this one comes on the heels of seeing Picabia at Hauser & Wirth today, which was actually a bit underwhelming (curation kind of one-note) but nevertheless left me with swirling impressions of bold line and calculated overlay. Have also been on a Richard Hamilton kick, and his Five Tyres Remoulded (1971) portfolio seems to be stuck in my mind; a manual on spatial exploration and contradiction and somehow transcending intention while declaring it. And so I came to a painting of a funneling of action, a hollowing of a vessel, a tidal force bottlenecked into a tiny collision under an intimate architecture. Looking ahead, I now see a small square of a day that looms large, its origami structure gradually unfolding.