The paper bag was sitting on the table when the volunteer realized something was wrong. She had spent the afternoon helping distribute groceries at a small community center, checking names against a list and making sure each household received the appropriate supplies. By four o'clock, most people had collected their bags, and the volunteers were preparing to clean the room.

One bag remained.

It belonged to a man named Harold, who had been coming every Wednesday for nearly two years. He was sixty-eight, walked with a cane, and rarely stayed long enough to have a conversation. He usually arrived around three fifteen, thanked whoever helped him, and left through the side entrance.

He had not come that day.

The volunteer, whose name was June, looked at the list again. His name was there. No one had crossed it off.

She asked whether anyone had seen him. Another volunteer mentioned that the pickup hours had changed the previous week. The center had posted the information online and included it in an email announcement.

June knew Harold did not use email.

He had mentioned it once, explaining that he preferred telephone calls because he found computers confusing.

She stood beside the remaining grocery bag and wondered how many other people had missed the announcement.

There was nothing malicious about the change. The volunteers had adjusted their schedule because deliveries were arriving later. They had posted the new hours in the ways they normally communicated.

But the system had assumed that everyone could receive the information in the same way.

Harold had been forgotten without anyone intending to forget him.

I think that happens more often than we realize.

People can disappear from our attention without physically going anywhere. They become unfamiliar with the technology everyone else uses. They cannot attend a meeting at the new time. Their transportation changes, their health becomes unpredictable, or their circumstances no longer fit the assumptions built into an organization's routine.

Sometimes we interpret their absence as a lack of interest.

We tell ourselves they stopped participating.

We rarely consider whether the way we organized things made participation impossible.

The common man can become invisible not because he has stopped mattering, but because the world has stopped making room for him.

That is a serious concern for anyone who wants to follow Jesus Christ.

In Acts 6, the early Christian community encounters a problem involving the daily distribution of food. The Greek-speaking Jewish believers complain that their widows are being overlooked while the Hebrew-speaking believers' widows are receiving care.

The passage does not explain every reason the neglect occurred. We should not invent motives that Scripture does not provide.

But the problem is unmistakable.

People who depended on assistance were not receiving fair treatment.

And the community had to respond.

The apostles brought the believers together and established a way for appropriate people to take responsibility for the work. Seven men were selected and appointed, allowing the practical needs of the community to receive attention while the apostles continued their responsibilities in prayer and teaching.

I find something deeply important in that account.

The church did not solve the problem merely by reminding everyone to be kinder.

It changed the way the responsibility was handled.

The neglected widows were not told that their concerns were unspiritual. They were not asked to be patient indefinitely while the community continued operating as before.

Their needs mattered enough to require action.

That distinction remains important today.

We can sincerely believe in loving our neighbors while maintaining routines that leave some neighbors without help.

We can speak beautifully about Christian compassion while overlooking the practical obstacles that make participation difficult.

A person may be welcome in principle and excluded in practice.

Real love asks us to examine the difference.

June understood that the remaining grocery bag represented more than an administrative inconvenience.

Harold was a real person. He had a home, memories, responsibilities, and private concerns she knew very little about. He was not simply a name appearing on a list.

He might have needed those groceries.

She checked the center's procedures and asked the coordinator whether they could contact him and determine what had happened.

When Harold answered the telephone, he sounded surprised.

He explained that he had come at the usual time, found the doors locked, and assumed the program had ended. He had been too embarrassed to call because he did not want anyone thinking he was complaining.

June explained the schedule change and apologized for the confusion.

Then she asked whether he would like help arranging another pickup.

He said he would.

The conversation lasted less than five minutes.

But it revealed something that the online announcement had not.

Harold had not stopped caring about the program.

The program had changed without reaching him.

I wonder how many ordinary people are experiencing something similar.

A retired worker struggles to complete an application because the process exists only online.

A person with limited mobility stops attending an event because the new meeting space is difficult to access.

Someone who cannot afford reliable transportation misses appointments and is labeled irresponsible.

A family that has been struggling financially begins avoiding gatherings where every activity requires money.

These circumstances are not identical. Each requires its own understanding and responsible response.

But they all challenge us to consider whether the systems we create are serving the people they are supposed to serve.

Jesus repeatedly directed attention toward people whose needs others overlooked.

He did not treat social position as proof of human worth. He challenged religious hypocrisy, listened to those seeking help, and called His followers to love their neighbors.

That love cannot be reduced to warm feelings.

It has practical consequences.

Sometimes loving someone means listening carefully.

Sometimes it means providing appropriate assistance.

And sometimes it means changing a procedure that continues producing unnecessary hardship.

Compassion is not only what we feel when we recognize suffering. It is also what we are willing to do after we understand it.

That does not mean every person can solve every problem.

Resources are limited. Organizations need schedules, rules, and fair processes. Volunteers cannot be expected to remain available at every hour, and people receiving assistance deserve clear information rather than promises that cannot be kept.

Responsible compassion respects those realities.

But it also asks whether a reasonable adjustment could prevent someone from being left behind.

The coordinator at the community center reviewed the situation with the volunteers. They discovered that several regular participants had not received the new schedule.

They decided to contact those participants directly and provide printed notices at the next distribution. They also explored whether an alternative pickup arrangement could be offered when circumstances allowed.

The change required additional planning, but it did not demand an entirely new organization.

It required recognizing that the people using the program had different ways of receiving information.

June did not become a hero by noticing the remaining bag.

She simply paid attention.

And that attention helped the group perform its responsibility more faithfully.

I think there is a lesson here about how we understand importance.

The world often celebrates the person who creates something large, launches an impressive project, or attracts widespread recognition.

Those achievements may deserve appreciation.

But a person who notices that someone has been excluded can also make a meaningful contribution.

A receptionist who explains a confusing process patiently matters.

A supervisor who recognizes that a worker needs an accessible procedure matters.

A neighbor who notices that an older resident has stopped appearing at familiar gatherings matters.

Their actions may never become public stories.

That does not make them insignificant.

The common man's dignity has never depended on whether the world finds his life interesting.

And the dignity of the people he helps does not depend on how grateful, productive, or impressive they appear.

Christian faith calls us to see one another as human beings created in God's image, deserving respect and care.

It also reminds us that our deepest hope rests in Jesus Christ rather than in the approval of the world.

We are called to follow Him through the responsibilities actually placed before us.

Sometimes those responsibilities are large and difficult.

Other times they are as ordinary as asking why a grocery bag remains on a table.

The following Wednesday, Harold arrived shortly after three.

June greeted him and explained where the pickup hours were posted. He thanked her for calling and mentioned that the previous week had been difficult because he had not known what happened to the program.

She listened.

Then she handed him his groceries.

He did not make a speech about how much the conversation meant. He did not announce that his life had been changed.

He simply told her he appreciated being remembered.

June watched him leave through the side entrance, walking carefully with his cane.

The room was still busy, and other people were waiting. She returned to the table and continued helping.

But the experience had changed the way she understood the list in front of her.

Every name belonged to someone.

Every absence might have a reason.

And every person deserved to be treated as more than a problem of scheduling or paperwork.

We cannot remove every difficulty from the world. We cannot anticipate every need or guarantee that no one will ever be overlooked.

But we can become more attentive to the people whose lives intersect with ours.

We can listen when someone explains why a process is not working.

We can question assumptions that exclude people unnecessarily.

And we can remember that the smallest act of responsible care may matter greatly to someone whose life has become difficult.

The common man does not need to become extraordinary before his presence matters.

He matters while he is working.

He matters when he needs assistance.

He matters when he is remembered.

And he matters even when someone has forgotten to look for him.

Jesus Christ calls us to a love that recognizes human dignity and takes it seriously.

Sometimes that love begins with nothing more complicated than noticing who is missing.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

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The Belentine Open Aquarium was not what Henry Patton expected. Back home on Pax Aeterna, the only aquarium he had ever seen was on a school trip and that was a squat gray building full of glass tanks and dim hallways where the kids pressed their noses against the walls. This place didn’t have walls. It sprawled along the harbor in terraces of pale stone, each level stepping down towards the water, and the exhibits were pools and channels open to the sky. The wind carried the smell of brine and warm rock. It was as if the Xalteans had figured out how to weave the entire building into the rock itself. If he didn't know better, Henry would have thought they were on the coast.

“The aquarium is run by the city but funded by House Avernell,” Nish Kevet said on his left. Henry still hadn’t gotten used to how quietly that woman talked. “, and it was made open to the public and also acts as a research center for many types of scientists.”

“So anyone could be here.”

“Anyone,” Her sky blue eyes drifted over the crowd without seeming to move, still looking for any threat. “The High Baron wanted to make sure all were welcome no matter where they were or affiliation. Not all scientists are from our own House, so cooperation in that area is a must.”

Henry kept a pleasant smile on his face. He was wearing the same plain tunic and slacks from the market and the only things marking him as anything other than a tourist were the beacon in his pocket and the fact a very pretty Arch Maid was walking beside him. Nish was in her usual attire: a black choker, a sheer top that hung open in the front and left her chest bare, and a short pleated skirt that swayed with every step. The thin gauntlet with the built-in communicator circled her left forearm and her blond bob stirred in the wind. Like most Xaltean maids, she saw no reason to be self-conscious about it in public and nobody gave her a second look. Henry had mostly stopped giving second looks himself. Mostly.

“You’re worried about the other houses?” he said.

“I am always wary of rival houses, my master. The mistress has entrusted your safety to me today.” She nodded towards the stairs. “So I have made arrangements.”

Curious, Henry followed her as she found a craved path in the rock the was subtle. It seemed to be set aside for staff that worked the aquarium without breaking the natural aesthetic around them. That arrangement turned out to be the wading lagoon.

It sat on the lowest terrace, a broad, shallow pool with water so clear that the sand beneath it looked lit from below. Soft light pulsed in the depths in slow waves of blue and violet. A line of visitors waited at the edge while a young keeper in a salt-stained apron went over the rules with the cheerful cadence of someone who had said them four hundred times already.

“The most important thing is to always remain calm. They will not harm you. No sudden movements, no grabbing, no flash devices. Again, the bluedrifts are completely harmless to people. Their stinging cells only fire for the shuddermites they eat, so if you feel a tickle, that’s just them saying hello.”

Henry couldn’t stop staring. The bluedrifts moved through the pulsing light, translucent bells about the size of dinner plates with ruffled edges of violet and gold and long filaments that shimmered like spun glass. They appeared to have an eye on top in their center mass. They moved slowly like they had nowhere to be.

“Would you like to go in?” Nish asked.

“I'm sorry?”

“The wading pool is set up for people to enter. This area has been secured so you can safely enter.”

Henry looked at the water more excited than he thought he would be.

“You're sure?”

The blond maid gave him a nod and a smile.

Henry grinned at her and rolled his slacks to the knees and wading into water as warm as a bath. Nish followed behind stepping into the water. The only thing she had removed was her gauntlet and left it with the keeper. Her skirt floating up around her hips as the water climbed to her waist, and didn’t seem bothered in the slightest.

For a few minutes, it was perfect. When the young Terran lord held out his hand, a bluedrift hovered a few inches away, its filaments waving like grass in a breeze. It tilted its bell, the violet light inside brightening, and then it drifted off. The “eye” that he thought he saw had turned out to be camouflage, probably to scare predators away. A little girl nearby squealed when one wrapped a filament around her finger.

“Have you been here before?” Henry asked as Nish gently pushed her hands through the water giving a few bluedrifts a current they seemed to enjoy.

“No. I do not get a lot of opportunities to leave the estate and when I do, I prefer to stay.”

“You're a home body.”

The woman looked at him confused for a second. “A what?”

“Someone who is happy to be at home so finds comfort in staying there.”

Nish thought about it for a second and then nodded. “Yes, I am a homebody. Abiva is the adventurer.”

That made sense. The amount of energy the red head Arch Maid of the Estate legion had were enough to power a small city.

Henry saw it first. Two of the creatures appeared to be making their way to the maid, and she hadn't noticed.

“Nish,” Henry said carefully. “Don’t panic, but there’s...”

A filament touched her hip and her eyes went wide. She tried to turn to look, but the creature just floated with her.

“You okay?”

She shook her head slowly as the creature poked around with the other filaments. “I am not very comfortable with animals.”

The bluedrifts slid closer and began to climb rather rapidly up her legs and her hip. Nish gave a squeak as its bell settled against her chest with a happy think, waving it's tendrils around as if smelling. Two of them had decided to take residence on the poor maid's twin peaks.

They sat there and wiggled which was both amusing and horrifying at the same time. Nish looked like she was trying not to hyperventilate and Henry was both trying not to stare where they had rested but also not leave the poor woman to her fate.

“Uh...slenashovi,” the young man said waving to the keeper who came wading over.

“My friend here is having a bit of a problem with some of your bluedrifts.”

The young man saw the escaped jellyfish and swiftly came over gently tugging them off.

“They do get curious and love to perch on high things sometimes,” He said with a laugh. “Sorry for the surprise.”

Nish was already wading out as she tried to brush slime off of her breasts. They got back on dry land and took the nearest offered towel.

Soon, Nish's visage was back behind her sheer top, and she looked a bit more grounded.

“You good?”

“I will live, Master,” Nish said motioning for them to move further away from the tank”, but it has reminded me I am the homebody you have referred to.”

“How about we go take a look at a few things and call it a day?”

Nish did not argue but quickly moved towards the steps and away from her new nemesis.

On a bright afternoon at a primary school in Hertfordshire, a headteacher did something quietly radical. She cancelled the afternoon's lessons, opened the back doors, and told her pupils to go outside and play. What happened next has since been recounted to audiences of thousands as a small parable of a large problem. The children did not scatter into games. They stood in the yard, uncertain what to do with an unstructured hour and an open sky. They could not readily invent their own entertainment. Within minutes, some of them asked to come back inside.

The actress and campaigner Sophie Winkleman told this story at ARC 2026, the London conference convened by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, in a talk provocatively titled “Why AI in the Classroom is a Catastrophe.” The talk circulated widely through the summer. Winkleman used the empty playground as evidence for a claim easy to state and hard to prove: that a childhood saturated in constant, low-level digital stimulation had eroded the very faculty a playground is meant to exercise, the ability to generate one's own amusement out of nothing but time, space and other children.

You can take the anecdote as a moral panic dressed in a good story, or as a genuine warning. Either way, it points at something specific and testable, and it is worth being precise about what that is. The worry is not simply that children spend too long looking at screens, a complaint as old as television. The worry is that a particular category of software design, refined for a decade inside the attention economy and increasingly restricted for use on children in that setting, has migrated into the tools schools use to teach reading, mathematics and languages. The mechanics that regulators have started to treat as harmful when a social platform deploys them to hold a child's gaze are frequently the same mechanics an educational technology company deploys to keep a child inside a maths app. And nobody, at the point these products are bought and installed at scale, is being asked to prove that the second use is meaningfully different from the first.

That is the question worth sitting with. If the engagement machinery that is driving measurable harm in children's social media use is structurally identical to the machinery now embedded in the software schools use to educate, what obligation do schools, regulators and the companies themselves have to distinguish a product designed to teach from a product designed merely to hold attention? And crucially, before these tools reach millions of children, who should carry the burden of proving the difference?

The mechanics that migrated from the casino to the phone

To understand why an educational app and a slot machine can share a family resemblance, you have to understand the small number of design primitives that make modern consumer software compulsive. There are essentially three, and none of them is new. What is new is their precision.

The first is the variable, or unpredictable, reward. The principle comes from operant conditioning research conducted in the mid-twentieth century, which established that a behaviour is reinforced most powerfully not when it is rewarded every time but when it is rewarded unpredictably. A pigeon that receives a food pellet on a random schedule pecks more persistently than one rewarded on a fixed schedule. A slot machine works on exactly this logic, and so does the pull-to-refresh gesture on a social feed, which delivers something interesting often enough, and unpredictably enough, to keep the thumb moving. The design writer and former Google ethicist Tristan Harris popularised the comparison years ago when he described the smartphone as a slot machine in every pocket. Even the market-leading language app Duolingo has been analysed, by designers largely sympathetic to it, as deploying uncertainty deliberately, so that on some questions a user loses a heart and on others does not, an ambiguity described in these analyses as mildly activating in the same way a slot machine is.

The second primitive is the streak, a running count of consecutive days of use that converts a habit into an obligation. The streak weaponises two well-documented quirks of human psychology, loss aversion and the sunk-cost fallacy. Once a user has built a streak of two hundred days, the prospect of losing it looms far larger than any positive reward, and the daily return becomes a defensive manoeuvre against loss rather than a pursuit of benefit. Duolingo's own reported figures make the mechanic's power plain: users who reach a seven-day streak are several times more likely to remain engaged, and the company built an entire secondary feature, the streak freeze, specifically to relieve the anxiety of at-risk users and reduce the rate at which they quit. Designers analysing the app have been candid that its success rests, in their telling, on design rather than on the superiority of its teaching, and that a large share of its revenue is organised around a single streak counter.

The third primitive is the notification, the interruption engineered to pull a user back into an application they had, however briefly, escaped. Notifications are tuned relentlessly. The phrasing, timing and frequency of a prompt are subjected to continuous experimentation, so that a change to a single word or a shift of an hour can be tested on a small cohort and rolled out to everyone if it lifts the numbers. This is not a caricature of how these products are built. It is how they are built, and it is described in these terms in the trade literature that celebrates them.

Set out plainly, the three mechanics form a loop: an unpredictable reward creates the pull, a streak raises the cost of leaving, and a notification supplies the nudge back in. What that loop optimises for is time on the product. That, and not any richer human outcome, is the thing being maximised.

Regulators have noticed. The United Kingdom's Age Appropriate Design Code, the statutory Children's Code enforced by the Information Commissioner's Office and in force since 2021, requires online services likely to be accessed by under-eighteens to avoid using nudge techniques that lead children into choices against their own interests, and asks providers instead to nudge towards wellbeing, including screen breaks. California modelled its own Age-Appropriate Design Code on the British one. The statute asked businesses to assess whether their products used system design features to increase, sustain or extend children's use, naming among them the automatic playing of media, rewards for time spent, and notifications, and it separately prohibited dark patterns that lead a child to take any action the business knows, or has reason to know, is materially detrimental to the child's physical health, mental health or well-being. Rewards for time spent. Notifications. The regulatory language is describing, feature for feature, the standard toolkit of engagement design, and it is describing it as a risk to be assessed and restrained when aimed at children. Turning that description into an enforceable rule has proved harder. Both provisions have been held up in the courts, and in March 2026 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in NetChoice v. Bonta, kept the dark-patterns prohibition blocked on the ground that it is likely void for vagueness. A business, the court reasoned, cannot know in advance what “materially detrimental” or “well-being” require of it when the range of possible harms runs from financial exploitation to lost sleep, distraction or hurt feelings. The regulators can name the mechanics. What they have not yet managed, at least in California, is to draw a line around them that a court will accept, and that difficulty matters for where this argument ends up.

How the same design crossed into the maths lesson

Here is the pivot on which the whole argument turns. Those mechanics did not stay on the social platforms. They crossed, wholesale, into educational software, because the companies building learning apps are drawn from the same talent pool, chase the same metrics and answer to the same kind of investor as the companies building everything else on a child's screen.

Walk through the feature list of a typical classroom learning product and you will find the loop reproduced faithfully. There are points and experience bars that fill towards a level. There are badges unlocked at intervals engineered to arrive just often enough to sustain interest. There are daily streaks with their attendant freezes and repair mechanics. There are leaderboards that convert solitary practice into social competition. There are, above all, notifications, and the design blogs that serve the sector discuss the timing and copy of those notifications with the same clinical attention to retention that you would find in any social app. The trade press for the industry openly frames gamification as a lever to boost engagement and retention, and the primary metric it reports is very often the time a child spends inside the product rather than anything the child has learned.

The defence offered for all this is that engagement is a precondition for learning. A bored child learns nothing, the argument runs, so a tool that holds attention creates the opportunity to teach. There is a grain of truth in it. Attention is necessary for learning. But necessary is not sufficient, and the sleight of hand in the industry's framing is to treat a necessary condition as though it were the outcome itself. A child can be intensely, measurably engaged by a maths app and be learning very little maths, in exactly the way a child can be intensely engaged by a slot-machine mechanic and be learning nothing at all. Engagement measures whether the child keeps tapping. It does not measure whether the child understands. These are different quantities, and the entire difficulty is that the first is trivially easy to measure and the second is genuinely hard.

This is the point Will Ellis of the campaign group Reclaim Childhood sharpened, in words Winkleman quoted from the ARC stage, arguing that engagement mechanics appear in learning apps “because they improve engagement, and engagement is what the business model requires,” not because they improve learning. The phrasing is worth dwelling on, because it identifies the exact place where the incentives fork. A subscription-funded or usage-funded educational product has a commercial interest in engagement that is direct, immediate and easy to measure in a dashboard. Its interest in learning is indirect, deferred and hard to measure at all, surfacing, if it surfaces, in a test score months later that no product analytics team will ever see. When two goals compete and only one of them shows up in the metrics that determine the next funding round, it is not cynical to predict which one wins. It is merely arithmetic.

Why engagement became the metric that ate the classroom

The deeper problem is that engagement optimisation and genuine pedagogy can actively pull in opposite directions, so that the better a product performs on the first, the worse it may be positioned to deliver the second. Consider the psychology of the external reward. A well-established body of research on motivation has repeatedly found that layering extrinsic rewards on top of an activity a child already finds interesting can reduce the child's intrinsic interest in that activity. Pay a child in points and badges for something they were happy to do for its own sake, and you risk teaching them that the thing is only worth doing for the points. For an entertainment product with no ambitions beyond retention, that trade is invisible and irrelevant. For an educational product whose entire justification rests on cultivating a durable disposition to read, to reason, to persist at hard problems, it is close to self-defeating.

There is a further mismatch in what the mechanics reward. Genuine learning frequently requires the opposite of a frictionless, dopamine-steady loop. It requires desirable difficulty, the productive struggle of retrieving a fact you have half-forgotten or wrestling with a problem just beyond your current reach. It requires tolerance of the boredom and frustration that precede mastery. It requires sustained attention held on a single hard thing for long enough to make progress, the precise faculty the Hertfordshire playground exposed as atrophied. Engagement design, by contrast, is built to eliminate friction, to keep the experience buoyant and rewarding and forward-moving, to ensure the child never sits with the discomfort long enough to be tempted to leave. The two philosophies are not merely different. At their extremes they are opposed. A product engineered so that a child never wants to stop is, almost by construction, a product engineered to remove the very resistances against which a mind grows stronger.

None of this proves that every gamified learning app harms every child. But it does establish that engagement and learning are separable, that they can conflict, and that the commercial machinery of the sector is tuned to the one that is easier to sell. That is enough to make the central question urgent rather than academic.

What the evidence actually shows about paper and screens

If the theoretical case is that engagement and learning diverge, the empirical case is that, in the aggregate and on average, screens have so far underdelivered on the outcomes that matter. The evidence is not unanimous and it is not always about engagement mechanics specifically, but it is substantial, and it has been accumulating for longer than this year's headlines suggest.

Begin with the medium itself. In a study published in the Oxford Review of Education in 2018, the University College London education researcher John Jerrim, working with John Micklewright and colleagues, took more than three thousand pupils across Germany, Ireland and Sweden and randomly assigned them to sit identical assessment items either on paper or on a computer screen. Randomisation matters here: because pupils were allocated by chance, the two groups were on average equivalent in ability, so any systematic gap in their scores could be attributed to the medium rather than to the children. The paper group scored roughly twenty points higher on the PISA scale, a gap the authors characterised as equivalent to about six months of additional schooling. The finding is part of a broader literature on what researchers call the mode effect, the tendency for the same knowledge to yield different measured performance depending on whether it is tested on paper or on a screen, an effect large enough in some countries to swing international rankings substantially. Jerrim's work is a caution about assessment as much as instruction. But its core implication is uncomfortable for the screen-first classroom: the digital medium was not neutral. It cost pupils something.

Then consider what happens in the brain during the physical act of learning. Audrey van der Meer, a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has spent two decades comparing the neural signatures of handwriting and typing. In a high-density electroencephalography study published in Frontiers in Psychology, her team fitted participants with nets of well over two hundred sensors and recorded their brain activity as they were prompted, repeatedly, either to write a word by hand or to type it. Writing by hand produced markedly more elaborate patterns of connectivity across the brain, with widespread coordination between regions in frequency bands that van der Meer and her collaborators associate with memory formation and the encoding of new information. Typing did not. Her interpretation is that the precisely controlled movements of forming a letter by hand feed a stream of visual and motor information into the brain that helps knit together the connections underlying learning, and that this stream is largely absent when the same word is produced by tapping identical keys. The sample sizes in this kind of laboratory work are small, and connectivity is not the same thing as a test score, so the finding should be held with appropriate care. But it converges with the behavioural evidence rather than contradicting it, and the direction of travel is consistent: the embodied, effortful, analogue act engages more of the learning brain than its frictionless digital substitute.

Recent reviews of the research literature frame the same tension in their own terms. A scoping review by Urška Žnidarič, Erik Štrumbelj and Octavian Machidon, synthesising 937 papers on the negative effects of digital technology on cognition, found that the harms it could identify ran largely through displacement, the crowding out of other activities, rather than through technology being harmful in itself, and that effects were often moderated by socioeconomic and environmental factors. Its organising conclusion is what the authors call an efficiency-atrophy paradox: digital tools can improve short-term performance while potentially weakening long-term, unassisted cognition. That is the engagement-versus-learning problem restated in cognitive terms. A tool can make today's task go better and leave the mind less able to do it alone tomorrow, and a dashboard measuring today's performance will record only the gain. A second review, a systematisation of knowledge by Supriya Khadka and Sanchari Das covering 111 studies of extended reality in the education of children aged three to eight, found that pedagogy received by far the most scholarly attention, while data security practices received almost none, and children's health and accessibility for disabled children were also thinly covered. Even for children as young as three, the research effort has gone overwhelmingly into whether a technology can teach, and comparatively little into what else it does to the child, and to the child's data, while it is teaching.

That deterioration is not merely theoretical either. It is legible in the international data that governments themselves collect. Sweden's national performance on the PISA assessments fell over the last decade, and in 2022 almost a quarter of fifteen and sixteen-year-olds, 24 per cent, did not reach a basic level of reading comprehension. It was against exactly this backdrop that the country began reconsidering the enthusiasm with which it had digitised its classrooms. Correlation is not cause, and the OECD's education director, Andreas Schleicher, has urged caution about attributing cause and effect; reading declines have many parents. But when a country that went further and faster than almost anyone into one-to-one devices sees its literacy soften and responds by buying paper textbooks again, the sequence is worth taking seriously.

The pushback gathers institutional weight

For years the case against screen-saturated schooling was made largely by individual sceptics, and it was easy to wave away as nostalgia. What changed this year is that the argument acquired institutions, budgets and votes.

The most consequential move came in Los Angeles. The board of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest public school system in the United States, voted unanimously to create and enforce district-wide limits on classroom screen time, the most sweeping such reduction adopted by any major American district, and the policy took effect when the 2026-27 school year opened in August. It is phased. Since August, children from preschool to first grade have had no device time at all, outside narrow exceptions such as mandated assessments and support required for pupils with disabilities. From November, second and third graders are capped at twenty minutes a day and fourth and fifth graders at thirty. Secondary schools follow in January 2027 with weekly caps per subject, an hour a week in each subject in middle school and an hour and a half in high school. Devices no longer go home by default; families must opt in. Student access to YouTube, social media and streaming platforms is blocked unless a teacher approves it. Behind the resolution was Schools Beyond Screens, a national coalition founded by district parents and teachers, whose campaigning the board member Nick Melvoin credited during the meeting. The significance is less in the specific minute-by-minute limits, which are debatable and will be contested, than in the precedent: a flagship district conceded that unrestricted classroom screen time was a problem serious enough to legislate against, rather than a self-evident good to be expanded.

Los Angeles is not alone, and the American movement is broader than any single district. At least six states approved screen-time legislation in 2026. Iowa capped digital instruction from kindergarten to fifth grade at sixty minutes a day, with exceptions for special education, computer science and assessments. Utah directed its state board of education to write grade-specific technology rules, including screen-time limits for the earliest grades and an end to one-device-per-pupil ratios in elementary school. Tennessee requires every district serving kindergarten to fifth grade to adopt a policy minimising unnecessary screen time, and Alabama has set screen-time standards for childcare, prekindergarten and kindergarten. Virginia and Maine went more gently, the first requiring schools to teach pupils about device use and its addictive potential, the second commissioning a study of how much instructional time is spent on school-issued devices. Not every bill succeeded: measures in Missouri and Oklahoma passed their state houses and stalled in the senate. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul has said she is open to limiting screen time for younger pupils, citing concern from parents and educators about the youngest children spending their days on individual laptops and tablets, but has proposed no statewide limit. New York City moved first, announcing in September 2026 a one-year ban on student-facing generative AI from preschool through eighth grade, restrictions on individual devices for the youngest children, and recommended daily caps of thirty minutes for grades three to five and forty-five for middle school. The precise legal force varies from place to place and should not be overstated, but the pattern is unmistakable: a coordinated, bipartisan reappraisal of a decade of classroom digitisation.

Europe has moved in parallel and, in places, further. The regional government of Madrid announced restrictions phasing out individual digital devices across publicly funded early-childhood and primary schools, affecting well over half a million pupils, and pushing one-to-one tablets and laptops out of the education of children up to the age of twelve in favour of shared use under a teacher's supervision, with narrow exceptions for special educational needs and subjects such as coding that inherently require the tools. Sweden, having been among the most aggressively digitised school systems in the world, reversed course under the slogan “från skärm till pärm”, from screen to binder, and by April 2026 had allocated schools more than 2.1 billion kronor in grants for printed textbooks and teacher guides, with a new textbook-based curriculum due in 2028, an explicit response to slipping results. Denmark has earmarked DKK 540 million over the coming decade to put printed books and physical teaching materials back into its classrooms. Taken together, these European commitments run into the hundreds of millions of euros, spent not to add technology but to remove it. That is a remarkable thing for finance ministries to fund, and it signals that the reappraisal has moved from opinion pages into public budgets. Britain, where this essay began, is at an earlier stage. In June 2026 the Department for Education opened a call for evidence on screen use by children aged five to sixteen, with a section devoted specifically to screens in schools, to inform future policy.

The counter-case for the well-designed screen

Honesty requires taking the strongest version of the opposing argument seriously, because it is real and it is not trivial, and a precautionary case that ignores it deserves to lose.

Educational technology, at its best, does things that paper and a single overstretched teacher cannot. For a child with dyslexia, text-to-speech and adjustable typography can be the difference between access to the curriculum and exclusion from it. For a blind child, a screen reader is not a distraction machine but a door. For a child with a physical disability that makes handwriting painful or impossible, a keyboard is a liberation, and the neuroscience celebrating the handwriting brain must not be turned into a cudgel against children for whom the pen was never a neutral option. Assistive technology is one of the genuine triumphs of the digital classroom, and any policy that sweeps it away in a general panic about screens will harm precisely the children with the least margin to spare.

Well-designed software also personalises in ways a class of thirty makes impossible. Adaptive systems that adjust the difficulty of practice to the individual child, that give immediate feedback on a wrong answer rather than making a pupil wait a week for a marked worksheet, that let a fast child accelerate and a struggling child consolidate without public embarrassment, can genuinely differentiate instruction. There is a reasonable evidence base that some carefully built, curriculum-aligned programs, used in moderation for specific purposes, produce real gains, particularly in structured domains such as early numeracy and foundational reading. In under-resourced schools, a device can carry a library, a set of translated materials for a child new to the language of instruction, and a bank of practice a school could never afford to print. To pretend none of this is valuable is to lose the argument on the facts.

And not every engagement mechanic is a slot machine. A progress bar that shows a child how far they have come through a genuinely well-sequenced curriculum is providing meaningful feedback, not manufacturing a compulsion. Immediate confirmation of a correct answer is sound pedagogy with a century of evidence behind it. Some gamification supports learning rather than parasitising it, and the honest position is not that gamified equals harmful but that the category contains both, and that the two are hard to tell apart from the outside. Which is precisely the problem, and precisely why the argument has to move from banning features to allocating proof.

Where the burden of proof belongs

Strip the debate down and it reduces to a single question of institutional design: when a school is deciding whether to install a piece of software on the devices of hundreds of children, who has to demonstrate what, and to whom, before it goes in?

Today the answer, overwhelmingly, is that nobody has to demonstrate very much. A product arrives with impressive engagement statistics, a glossy pilot, testimonials, perhaps a thin white paper of its own commissioning, and the default is deployment. The burden, such as it is, falls on the sceptic. A worried teacher, a dissenting parent, a cautious administrator must assemble the case against, must find the evidence of harm, must argue upstream against a purchase already made and a contract already signed. The product is presumed beneficial until someone can prove it is not, and because proving harm in a diffuse population of children over the timescales on which learning and attention actually develop is extraordinarily difficult, the presumption is nearly impossible to dislodge. The structure of the burden guarantees the outcome.

The argument of this essay is that the burden is on the wrong shoulders, and that the reason it is on the wrong shoulders is that we have quietly classified educational software as a consumer product rather than as what it functionally is, an intervention imposed on a captive population of children who cannot consent, cannot leave, and cannot tell whether the thing holding their attention is teaching them or merely holding their attention. We do not let food manufacturers put a substance in school lunches on the strength of the fact that children keep eating it. We do not let a pharmaceutical company deploy a treatment across a paediatric population because early users engaged with it enthusiastically. In domains where the subjects are children and the stakes are developmental, we place the burden of proof on the party introducing the intervention, and we ask them to demonstrate benefit, and the absence of harm, before deployment rather than after.

Applied to the classroom, burden-shifting has a concrete shape, and it is more modest than the word precaution sometimes implies. It means that a company selling a product as educational should be required to show that the product produces learning, measured as learning and not as engagement, before it is bought at scale, and to disclose the mechanics it uses to sustain attention so that a purchaser can weigh them. It means that the primary metric a vendor is permitted to advertise to a school should be an outcome, not a retention statistic, because a retention statistic sold as if it were an educational result is close to a category error. It means that a regulator who has already identified, in the Children's Code and in California's attempt to follow it, rewards for time spent and engineered notifications as risks when a social platform aims them at a child, should ask why the identical mechanic earns a pedagogical exemption the instant the same child meets it inside a maths app. If a design pattern is a dark pattern in one context, the context does not launder it. The child's developing brain does not know or care which app store category the software was filed under. California's experience in court is also an argument for this approach over a ban. A prohibition must define in advance which features are “materially detrimental” to a child's “well-being”, and that is exactly where the Ninth Circuit found it too vague to enforce. A requirement that the vendor show its product produces learning asks a narrower question, one that can be answered product by product, by the party holding the data.

Washington has, somewhat unexpectedly, conceded the principle. On 20 August 2026 the US Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague letter, signed by Kirsten Baesler, the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, which K-12 Dive read as the department going to the industry's defence against the screen-time backlash. Its argument was that educational technology should not be judged mainly by how long children spend in front of it, and that recreational and educational technology should not be treated as the same thing. Yet the yardstick it offered in place of minutes is the one this essay has been arguing for. Investments, the letter said, “should be guided by evidence of effectiveness”; states making procurement and renewal decisions should look for products that have run randomised controlled trials and demonstrated positive outcomes; and providers should publish rigorous, independent evaluations of their impact on student learning “whenever feasible”. That is a federal agency endorsing outcome evidence over time on device. It is also, in its own phrasing, a picture of the gap. A letter of guidance binds no one, the decisions remain with states and districts, and “whenever feasible” leaves the vendor to judge when feasibility applies. The market is already reading the signal. In July, Ed Corey, chair of the Torrington school board, told EdWeek Market Brief that companies whose products rely heavily on daily screen time will need to show a “legitimate curriculum use case” backed by research, and a national survey of 600 teachers in May found that 85 per cent believed pupils spend too much class time on screens. The demand for proof is arriving. What has not arrived is any rule that says it must be met before the product goes in.

There is an obvious objection, and it deserves a straight answer. Proving educational benefit is hard, slow and expensive, and a strict evidence bar would slow the sector, entrench incumbents who can afford large trials, and deny some genuinely good tools to the schools that most need them. This is true, and it is the strongest thing that can be said against burden-shifting. But notice that the difficulty of proving benefit is not a neutral fact about the world. It is the very thing that has allowed engagement to stand in for learning for a decade, precisely because engagement is easy to prove and learning is hard, and a regime that rewards whatever is easy to measure will get more of what is easy to measure and less of what matters. The answer to a hard measurement problem is not to abandon the measurement and default to deployment. It is to make the party with the commercial interest, and the resources, and the data, carry the cost of the proof, calibrated sensibly to the risk, with lighter obligations on assistive tools whose benefit is manifest and heavier ones on attention-maximising products aimed at the youngest children. Burden-shifting does not mean banning software. It means the person who profits from the claim has to substantiate the claim.

The precautionary turn and what it asks of everyone

The medicine analogy is imperfect, and it should not be pushed to the point of demanding randomised controlled trials for every worksheet generator. But it captures the essential asymmetry the current arrangement has inverted. When you intervene in the development of a child who cannot consent and cannot exit, and when the potential harm is to faculties, attention, imagination, the capacity for effortful thought, whose damage may not surface for years, you do not get to run the experiment live on the whole population and check the results later. The cost of being wrong is borne by children, irreversibly and at the precise moment their minds are being formed, while the benefit of being right accrues to a firm in the form of engagement it can bank this quarter. That asymmetry is the entire moral case for shifting the burden, and it does not depend on the alarmism of any single conference talk to hold.

Each party in the system has an obligation that follows from this. The companies owe honesty about what their products optimise for, disclosure of the engagement mechanics they embed, and evidence of learning rather than evidence of stickiness, and the better firms should welcome a standard that separates them from competitors selling compulsion in a curricular costume. Regulators owe consistency, and the simplest reform available to them is to stop pretending that a mechanic they have identified as harmful becomes benign on crossing from a social app into an educational one, and to require that products marketed to children as teaching tools clear a bar proportionate to that claim. And schools, which are the point of deployment and therefore the point of leverage, owe their pupils the institutional courage to demand outcomes rather than engagement dashboards, to run their own small comparisons, to keep the paper and the pen and the unstructured hour that the market has no incentive to defend, and to treat any vendor unwilling to be measured on learning as having answered the question by declining to.

The headteacher in Hertfordshire did something the market will never do on its own. She created a condition, an empty playground, an hour without stimulation, in which the absence of the product became visible, and with it the shape of what the product had been quietly displacing. The children's inability to fill that hour is not proof of anything on its own; it is one anecdote, and anecdotes are where inquiries begin, not where they end. But it names the thing at stake with a precision the engagement statistics never will. The question is not whether children are looking at screens. It is whether the screens are teaching them, or merely keeping them, and whether we are willing to make the people who profit from the difference be the ones who prove it. Until that burden moves, the honest description of much of what is installed on the classroom device is not an educational tool that happens to be engaging. It is an engagement machine that happens to be pointed at a child in a school, and the fact that it is pointed at a child in a school is exactly why the proof should come first.

References

1. Winkleman, Sophie. “Why AI in the Classroom is a Catastrophe.” Talk delivered at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) 2026 conference, Olympia, London, June 2026. Video, YouTube (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFp5-i5fzyQ; transcript, The Singju Post: https://singjupost.com/transcript-why-ai-in-the-classroom-is-a-catastrophe-sophie-winkleman/
2. Jerrim, John, John Micklewright, Jörg-Henrik Heine, Christine Salzer and Caroline McKeown. “PISA 2015: how big is the 'mode effect' and what has been done about it?” Oxford Review of Education, vol. 44, no. 4, 2018. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03054985.2018.1430025
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4. Žnidarič, Urška, Erik Štrumbelj and Octavian Machidon. “A Scoping Review of the Negative Effects of Digital Technology on Cognition.” arXiv preprint 2603.10025 [cs.CY], v1 23 February 2026, revised v2 15 August 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10025
5. Khadka, Supriya, and Sanchari Das. “SoK: Understanding the Pedagogical, Health, Ethical, and Privacy Challenges of Extended Reality in Early Childhood Education.” Augmented Humans 2026; arXiv preprint 2602.12749 [cs.HC], 13 February 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12749
6. BBC News. “Back to books: Sweden's schools give up digital learning.” 16 April 2026. Republished by The Star (Kenya): https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/world/2026-04-16-back-to-books-swedens-schools-give-up-digital-learning
7. Cohen, Joshua. “Why Swedish Schools Are Bringing Back Books.” Undark, 1 April 2026. https://undark.org/2026/04/01/sweden-schools-books/
8. EdSource. “Los Angeles Unified to limit screen time for all students, prohibit use among youngest students.” 2026. https://edsource.org/2026/classroom-screen-time-limits-policy/756523
9. K-12 Dive. “Screen time limits coming for LAUSD in the fall.” 2026. https://www.k12dive.com/news/lausd-imposes-screen-time-limits-starting-in-2026-27/818224/
10. Dale, Mariana, and Elly Yu. “LAUSD's youngest students will start a screen-free school year. Here's what parents need to know.” LAist, 30 July 2026. https://laist.com/news/education/lausds-youngest-students-will-start-a-screen-free-school-year-heres-what-parents-need-to-know
11. Patino, Vania. “In a new chapter for classroom learning, LAUSD is welcoming students back with screen time limits.” Spectrum News, 3 August 2026. https://spectrumlocalnews.com/ca/california/education/2026/08/03/screen-time-limits-lausd
12. Stateline. “States move to limit classroom screen time.” 23 July 2026. https://stateline.org/2026/07/23/states-move-to-limit-classroom-screen-time/
13. Rauf, David Saleh. “The Next Challenge for K-12 Ed-Tech: Proving Classroom Screen Time Is Worth It.” EdWeek Market Brief, 10 July 2026. https://marketbrief.edweek.org/regulation-policy/the-next-challenge-for-k-12-ed-tech-proving-classroom-screen-time-is-worth-it/2026/07
14. Gothamist. “Gov. Hochul says she's open to limiting screen time for younger students in NY schools.” https://gothamist.com/news/gov-hochul-says-shes-open-to-limiting-screen-time-for-younger-students-in-ny-schools
15. Ginsburg, Aaron. “NYC announces one-year ban on generative AI for public school students through 8th grade.” 6sqft, 2 September 2026. https://www.6sqft.com/nyc-ai-ban-public-schools/
16. Aleteia. “Madrid schools limit tech use for half a million students.” 4 August 2025. https://aleteia.org/2025/08/04/madrid-schools-limit-tech-use-for-half-a-million-students/
17. The Danish Dream. “Danish Schools Reintroduce Textbooks to Improve Literacy.” https://thedanishdream.com/education-in-denmark/danish-schools-reintroduce-textbooks-to-improve-literacy/
18. Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). “Age appropriate design: a code of practice for online services (the Children's Code),” standard 13, Nudge techniques. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/childrens-information/childrens-code-guidance-and-resources/age-appropriate-design-a-code-of-practice-for-online-services/13-nudge-techniques/
19. Department for Education. “Screen use by children aged 5-16: call for evidence.” Opened 8 June 2026, closed 29 June 2026. https://consult.education.gov.uk/screen-time-policy-team/screen-use-by-children-aged-5-to-16-cal/
20. United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. NetChoice, LLC v. Bonta, No. 25-2366, opinion filed 12 March 2026. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/118216051.html
21. Cooley LLP. “NetChoice v. Bonta: Ninth Circuit Narrows Injunction Against California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act.” 30 March 2026. https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2026/2026-03-30-netchoice-v-bonta-ninth-circuit-narrows-injunction-against-californias-ageappropriate-design-code-act
22. Future of Privacy Forum. “An Analysis of the California Age-Appropriate Design Code.” October 2022. https://fpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/FPF-Policy-Brief-California-Age-Approp-Design-Code-R2.pdf
23. Quartr. “Keeping the Streak Alive: The Story of Duolingo.” https://quartr.com/insights/edge/keeping-the-streak-alive-the-story-of-duolingo
24. THE Journal. “Department of Education Issues New Guidance on Education Technology and Screen Time.” 20 August 2026 (reporting the Dear Colleague letter signed by Kirsten Baesler, Assistant Secretary, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education). https://thejournal.com/articles/2026/08/20/department-of-education-issues-new-guidance-on-education-technology-and-screen-time.aspx
25. Merod, Anna. “Education Department goes to ed tech's defense in new guidance.” K-12 Dive, 20 August 2026. https://www.k12dive.com/news/education-department-goes-to-ed-techs-defense-in-new-guidance/828425/

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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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My name is Aramis, and this is my story.

The universe is vast. The planet is vast. The human intestine is vast – if you are a tiny bacteria lounging around in there. While I have not witnessed any miracles and I do not have tangible proof that there is a deity out there looking over us, I do believe there is something bigger than us out there. Something beyond our comprehension. I believe the various gods humanity has come up with are representations of this and, for practical reasons, we gave them names, faces, and rituals. Because I found it hard to choose one, but felt the belief within me, I choose to worship the sun itself. Each year, I join the sun pilgrimage to the top of Mount Tarasco, the tallest in my country. A symbolic gesture to be closer to the deity, to feel its warmth a little closer and to meditate.

While the vast expanse of a mountaintop fills me with joy, I can say the opposite about dark, crowded places. I have an irrational fear of crowds that manifests at a physical level. The lizard brain goes into fight or flight, and always chooses flight. Put me in the middle of a crowded music festival and I'll quickly seek the edge of the crowd. Trap me on a packed wagon, and I'll get out at the next stop, even if it means I'll be late for work. I often think what may have caused this fear to exist in me, but I cannot come up with a logical answer. Perhaps in early childhood I experienced something that stayed in my subconscious. If that's the case, I do not recall it. And so, I simply do my best to avoid large crowds, especially in enclosed spaces.

I grew up in a family that valued academic prowess above all else. They cared little for athletics, and art was but a hobby to be pursued outside school, never a priority within its own right. Since I could do little about my situation but obey my parents, I ended up spending many hours in classrooms, libraries, and in my room reading books. The sciences did not stick in spite of my father's best efforts, but I did find joy in literature, philosophy and history. Each discipline related to the others, each one revealing to me different facets of the human condition. Novels showed me creativity and the abundance of human emotions and perspectives. Philosophy taught me to be open minded and never accept an idea just because one person says so. Much is debatable and questionable, even the ideas we generally think of as basic truths. History showed me how humans chose to use power, ideas, and creativity in practical ways that shaped future generations. By the end of my schooling, I was an expert in these fields and able to get a good read on people and their intentions even with only basic information in hand. Little did I know reality would soon test those skills, and reality’s harsher than any academic setting.

Given all that I learned about humans, past, present and future, it should come as no surprise that I rejected traditional gender roles for my society. I've faced challenges for this. My own father mocked me if I engaged in hobbies seen as feminine. Peers bullied me for I was not as strong and brave as other boys. Even teachers made jokes on occasion, about boys who did more with their minds than with their muscles. As I got older I learned how to tread carefully when needed, and how to express myself freely when in a supportive environment. It remains a challenge, but not an unsurmountable one. Life is too short to live in fear!

My bookish pursuits, cerebral inclinations, and open minded nature clearly make me a lover more than a fighter. I will fight if I have to, but I will always try to win without violence if possible. As the saying goes, “you catch more flies with honey”. In a pure contest of strength, I'd lose fairly quickly, unless I can outwit my opponent and leverage some form of combat ingenuity or trickery. Spending my younger years in the library did not build me for hand-to-hand combat. I avoid direct conflict, but I can use my skills, charisma, and intellect to achieve bigger goals. If the goal is to win a bar fight, you better find another ally. If the goal is to open diplomatic relations with a neighbouring city-state, I'm your man!

I don't have many friends, but I have a few close ones. My best friend is Portos. We went to school together and remained friends long after. Where other kids seemed distant, Portos welcomed me to his group of friends with open arms right away. That gesture meant a lot to me, and I will never forget his kindness. Even as life took us on different paths, we make time to check on one another, and even reunite the old group once a year. Portos is a cheerful man, who loves food and drink, and doesn't have any concerns with how others see him. While a healthy balanced diet may not be his number one priority, a happy life is. He emanates joy wherever he goes. He is kind to all, even to those who don't really deserve it. He inspires those around him to be better, kinder, and more loving. He's also a great teacher, sharing his knowledge eagerly with any who show curiosity in his areas of expertise.

My family’s focus on academic results did offer me a slight privileged position in life, one that does not attract the attention of the very rich. I didn’t stray much from my family’s history of gainful employment and managed to continue as part of this privileged class after my studies concluded. The good grades paid off and the humanistic nature of my studies allowed me to be persuasive in arguing my case for deserving certain jobs or material opportunities. I currently work at the largest bookstore in the city, and one day I hope to own my own and spread the love of books to others in my community. Since the local school system uses the store for most of their bulk orders, this job pays unusually well for what it is.

~*~

The Gendarmerie… a pain in my scrawny ass. These strict, tough guys in their proper uniforms have not been on my side for as far as I can remember. Officer Bidot especially. I am not trying to piss him off, but I also seem to have a certain bad luck running into him at the worst of times. I’ll be in the park with seemingly nobody around, enjoying the sunset, the accordion player in the distance, and I think to myself “why not add to the relaxing experience a few puffs from my special herb pipe?” Within seconds of lighting the match, Officer Bidot somehow materializes ten meters from me. No young kids in sight, no Moon Monks either (they are much stricter than us sun worshipers), but somehow he feels the need to give me a warning. Lucky for me he can’t arrest me for personal use of herb pipes, but I am sure he is salivating at the chance that he catches me with a larger quantity. He won’t. Sometimes I wonder if he gives me a hard time with the herb pipe in expectation of some sort of bribe. Maybe all he needs is a little extra coin for his Friday night peach schnapps. If I had the certainty this would get him off my back, I’d gladly pay him off.

Well, I shouldn’t worry too much about Bidot. The Ruler Cycle just ended and I am happy to say Lord Urzeus is next in line. A blessing for all intellectuals and lovers of justice and kindness. Urzeus has done wonders in his home city state, and most citizens are excited to see what he will do at the helm on the nation state itself! I think anyone who has corruption in mind better clean up their act. I better not try to bribe Bidot, after all, and he better stop harassing me. I hope him and his buddies get reprimanded for beating up the homeless population!

Above all, I think the Sunny Side Up Society will benefit from a ruler like Urzeus. We’re a group of sun worshipers who also enjoy the health benefits of fancy herbs. But our real calling is helping the less fortunate in any way we can. We won’t go as far as fighting Bidot’s gang, but we’ll be patching up wounds, donating food, spreading education and books to those who cannot afford it, and any other activities we come up with. Once a month, we have a weekend march through the city: the Sunny Steps. Each of us brings a small cart or a large backpack filled with whatever goods we were able to acquire, and we distribute them to the needy. I usually get my hands on books that are not in perfect condition and can’t be sold in the shop, library books at the end of their life or with too many annotations, writing utensils, and of course – and please do not tell Officer Bidot – ample quantities of herb to put some sunny feelings in everyone’s soul.

~*~

It was last month’s Sunny Steps when something bizarre happened. I was handing out used books near an orphanage when a strange girl came up to me to receive a book. At first I did not get a good look at her, busy looking for a book appropriate for a child. But when I handed it to her and looked her in the eye, I was greeted by eyes as yellow as dandelions. Never have I seen such eye colour. I froze, but she simply smiled, thanked me for the book, and walked away. I must have stood there bewildered for several minutes because when I woke up from my trance the kids were all gone, along with half the books. No harm done.

While the yellow eyes are reason enough for my bewilderment, what truly shocked me is a forgotten memory from seven years ago. I was still in school, in a later academic year. Walking home from an evening seminar, I stopped at the night market to grab a bite. The market was unusually busy for a Tuesday, so I ended up in one of the deeper dark alleys in search of a food stall with no lineup. A delicious smell grabbed me by the nostrils at the corner of Rue Fezan and Rue Noir. The stall was run by an old woman who seemed neither particularly happy nor sad to see me there. There was much wisdom in her eyes, and the food looked good. I was starving. I picked one of the sandwiches and got a few coins out to pay. She then offered me a bottle of refreshing juice on the house. As I was very hungry, I sat down on the nearest bench and gulped down the food and the juice. This somehow went to my head, and I had a feeling this juice may have been spiked with something. I fell into a trance, and I remember the old woman laughing at me, a sorrowful laugh, neither mocking nor cruel.

The trance did not last long, the crone was still there, and occasional customers still wandered by. She did not give them juice. She suddenly asked me:

“What did you see?”

I was taken aback, but tried to focus and think about the vivid dream I just had on that bench. I saw a mountain, and gleaming metal rods coming out of deep mines. I saw golden books in the hands of powerful bishops and large numbers of desolate people in long lines. I saw great beasts of metal laying waste to villages.

“Ah yes!” said the crone. “It’s not far off now! The yellow-eyed child shall mark the beginning of the end.”

This memory rested deep in my unconscious mind as I assumed it was all part of the same dream, all a part of that nasty juice she gave me. Until now.

I rushed to the orphanage gate and asked about this child, but nobody has seen the yellow eyes. They also looked at me like I was a little crazy. Disturbed by my encounter, I went home. If this yellow-eyed child is real, how much more of that dream may also come to pass? People will think I am crazy, but I must seek out this child, the mines, this mysterious gleaming metal that seems to bring nothing but danger, death, and destruction.

~*~

The month following my encounter with the crone and the yellow eyed child was spent making preparations for my quest. I started with my immediate sources of knowledge: the book store, the library, the local academic institutions, even churches and other places of worship and knowledge. From high priests to fortune tellers, I roamed the streets in search of clues. My friends wanted to believe me, but I am not sure how many did. Even Portos glanced at me with concern.

I had but given up when help arrived from the unlikeliest of places. I was in the central square attending the inauguration of Lord Urzeus's ascendency to the seat of power, the head of the Long Table in The Cube, a fortified bastion where the most critical branches of power were housed. During his speech, he ensured The Cube will be a lot more open and less secretive than his predecessor kept it, and all are welcome to seek a hearing with those in power. To my surprise, they accepted my application almost immediately and a week later I was in the queue to for my five minutes with Lord Urzeus.

“Lord Urzeus! Thank you for the chance to speak with you directly. It may seem crazy, but I am convinced something dangerous is brewing somewhere in the realm. Do any of the following mean anything to you or the members of the Long Table: luminous metal mined from deep in the mountains, people with unnaturally yellow eyes, books of gold wielded as sources of power by powerful leaders, and great mechanical beasts capable of great destruction?”

The lord's face lost some of its benevolence with each additional item on my list, looking downright grim by the end of it. With a weave of the hand he ordered the guards to usher out the other commoners and shut the doors.

“Aramis! How you came by such knowledge is less concerning to me than the immediate danger of this prophecy. I know nothing of great beasts, but I have heard rumours of a new element discovered in the mountains of Tal-Gareen. As you know, that's not exactly far from here. The ones who discovered it are a powerful cult with chapters in most city states. They call themselves The Pillars of Rebirth. I would not be surprised if they even started spreading their corruption in smaller hamlets too. The properties of this new metal are rumoured to be powerful and even magical, if harnessed correctly. If The Pillars found a way to use this to their advantage, I am not surprised of anything you spoke of just now.”

My heart was relieved to hear Lord Urzeus speak this way, confirming my vision rather than mocking me and throwing me out on my ass. The Pillars are not unknown to me, of course. I came across many references to them, but never in such a tangible and dangerous context. As far as I gathered, they were merely another small religious sect, not all that different from the Sun Worshippers or the Moon Monks or any other such group. The lord continued:

“The yellow eyes are proof enough something is already in motion. We have already spotted occasional manifestations of this trait. Now we have a vague explanation. Aramis! You must travel to the mountains of Tal-Gareen and gather more information. I will send my own men too, but you will be a great asset since you'll attract less attention. For your protection, I'll have one of my officers accompany you. He's a bit rugged around the edges, but he's strong and seems loyal, so he will do just fine as a bodyguard. He will meet you in a week's time outside your dwelling. Be ready for travel! Send what knowledge you gather and my men will do the same. If we are lucky, we will end this before it starts. A few Pillars propagating their beliefs is one thing. Them rising armies and mechanical weapons is a danger to us all. Their new leader, Great Pillar Baraka is a dangerous woman who lost everything three decades ago in the War of Seven. That she has been plotting her revenge upon the realm is of no surprise. Don't be fooled by her charisma! Your empathy will only be rewarded with torture if you fail to embrace the cult's beliefs. Now go! Your 5 minutes are up.”

~*~

To his credit Lord Urzeus did invest time and people into the task at hand. By the time I had to explain my need to take time away from the book store, Sir Wallace, the owner, had already been briefed and compensated for my temporary absence. I informed my Sunny Steps group that I needed to take a journey and will return in a few weeks’ time, so they do not worry. Same goes for family members and close neighbours. I almost thought about informing Officer Bidot from the Gendermerie, just so he can stop trying to find me enjoying my herb pipe in the park, but decided to let him wonder in his thick head what may have happened to me.

The week was up, by bag was packed, and my cover was set: I was a book store representative looking to expand the business in rural areas, on a quest to see what already exists and what the appetite was for a book shop in smaller mountain hamlets. I heard the horse and carriage pull outside my dwelling, so I knew my bodyguard was here to start our journey to the mountains of Tal-Gareen.

“You!”

“You?”

Cruel fate! Any excitement faded from my bones as I opened the door to see none other than Officer Bidot at the helm of the small carriage. He was wearing civilian clothing, but it was obvious he concealed a large dagger under his cloak. He was prepared for the dangers ahead and I quickly realized I was far from prepared for that kind of danger myself.

“I had to leave my wife and 3 young girls behind for you and your so called prophetic visions. Aramis, you herb-loving so-called scholar and intellectual! Ha! How you got Lord Urzeus to support this ridiculous venture is beyond me. Alas, I am a gendarme. I will obey my orders and will set any differences aside... for now. Just don't be an idiot and let me handle any miscreants on the way. Let's find whatever it is you need to find for the lord, get my hefty reward, and get back to my family and regular life.”

“Fine with me, Bidot. Don't worry, you can get back to busting my ass and getting drunk on peach schnapps soon enough.”

“Watch it!” said Bidot with an angry frown.

“See? Doesn't feel good when you're at the receiving end of mockery, does it?”

With a grunt he cracked the whip and the horse started pulling on the main road west, towards the mountains of Tal-Gareen.

Bidot calmed down a bit as the hours and days passed. His tough exterior appeared more and more fake to me, and I started seeing a simple man who missed his wife and children more than anything. Three daughters is a lot of work for just his wife, Nala, to take care of in his absence. He also turned a blind eye to my occasional pipe smoking. We reached a sort of silent mutual understanding for the journey. As the plains turned into hills and the hills turned into mountains, the air got colder. Snow was present on the mountain peaks. The road got harder. Villages and hamlets were harder to come by. We were at the mercy of occasional inns, hermits in mountain cabins, caves, and anything else that could keep us a little warmer at night. Food became a problem too, and we had to ration what we had. Bidot set some traps for wildlife at night, but other than the occasional rabbit or squirrel, he didn't catch much. Exhaustion was quickly settling in.

The scarcity of food was rivalled by the scarcity of information. Three weeks on the road and into the mountains, and not a single sign of mines, luminous metal, cultists, or people with yellow eyes. Only cold, narrow roads, and hunger came in plenty. We had nothing but willpower to push through.

In our third week we came to Bear's Pass. This gave me hope as I knew The Blue Tower, the mountain monastery of the Moon Monks, must be near. Surely, they would grant us refuge, and if we are lucky, help us re-supply. Indeed, in a few hours we happened upon the monastery. The Blue Tower was a lot larger and more crowded than I would have expected. In talking to other travellers and to some of the monks there, I finally made progress. They did know of The Pillars of Rebirth and have seen more cultists than usual in these parts. Compared to a few years ago, they seemed well equipped, and yes, some had unusually yellow eyes, especially among the ones leaving the mountains. A concerning pattern! As for the mines, we were told only cultists or perhaps hunters may know their whereabouts. We decided to stay at the monastery for a few days to rest and gather more information.

On the third day there, I had a hard time sleeping due to loud snoring in the large shared guest sleeping quarter, so I went outside to enjoy my herb pipe in solitude and silence. The air was cold, but refreshing compared to the stuffy quarters and Bidot's smelly socks. After a puff or two, I noticed I was not alone. Another herb enthusiast seemed to have had the same idea as I did. I walked over to the stranger.

“Cold night, isn't it?” I said.

The cloaked figure turned to face me. A woman with yellow eyes! She said:

“Indeed, but it does not bother me.”

I hit the jackpot! This could prove very fruitful for my investigation. I stayed calm and remembered my cover.

“I am a book salesman looking to expand the business across the realm. The mountains are new to me. Any larger hamlets, castles, or monasteries other than this one?” I asked with honest ignorance.

“The deeper you go, the less you will find. Best turn around, city dweller! Nobody needs your books here other than a few monks, perhaps.”

Not ready to accept a dead end so soon, I pushed.

“I'm afraid I cannot go back. I must reach the coast beyond the mountains. The city of Serrenfal is my destination.” I lied.

“Hmm,” she grunted, “I doubt you'll find a warm welcome beyond this point, but if the bandits and wildlife don't kill you, you might catch a break at The Rook – if you're lucky. Many hunters use the dilapidated fortress as shelter. But I doubt they want any books.”

Still no mention of the mines, and a promise of continued hardship on the road.

“Can't say I met anyone with yellow eyes before,” I lied hoping for additional information from this obvious cultist.

“You'll meet more soon. Many, many more,” she said with lightness and joy.

And with that, she left.

My head swimming with all the new information, I sent a messenger crow out to Lord Urzeus. Unable to go to bed, I wandered the halls of the monastery. Many wondrous artefacts lined the main prayer hall. I gazed at them in the pale moonlight and candle light. In a corner, I came upon an old book that looked familiar. Upon closer inspection, I realised it's the original Tome of Eternal Wisdom, a foundational text of the Moon Monks' creed but also a cornerstone of many subsequent works of literature that aimed to unlock the mysteries of life and knowledge. I imagined displaying this in the book store. The crowds it would draw from many realms! The glory bestowed upon myself for bringing such unique artefact to the city's largest book store! Alas, I am no thief. I walked away with a heavy sigh and a mental note to one day ask the head monk to let me study the text in person.

~*~

To my surprise, I encountered the yellow-eyed woman again the next evening. This time she seemed in a chattier mood, but avoided revealing any meaningful information form my quest. Having enjoyed only the company of a grumpy Bidot, I almost forgot the stranger was a cultist. After a few puffs of the herb pipe the evening atmosphere around the hearth felt very relaxed and friendly. As I was walking back from the latrine, the stranger was waiting for me in a concealed alleyway. Stupid of me, I know, but I felt optimistic about my chances and the company of a pretty lady seemed quite good in these cold mountains.

In a split second her friendly smile turns into a feral grimace as she pulls out a dagger!

“It ends here, bookworm! Nobody messes with the Pillars and lives!”

I freeze. I have no combat experience.

Bidot, on the other hand, does. He appears from the shadows and swiftly knocks out the cultist.

“So much for that deep intellect, o wise Aramis!,” he says in a mocking tone, “ha ha ha!”

Embarrassed, I thanked him for saving my life. We tied up the cultist and called the monastery guards to follow their due process with her.

Little did I know this was only the first time on the journey that Officer Bidot would save my life. Our trials were just beginning. The Blue Tower sent us on our way with good supplies to last us a while. Unfortunately, we had to part ways with our small carriage as the terrain became too treacherous for horses. We proceeded on foot, with heavy backpacks.

The next few days were a gruelling trek through the unwelcoming mountains of Tal-Gareen. Deep woods, narrow passes, freezing streams, all sorts of wild life and occasional humans, some just travellers, others hunters. Bandits and cultists were less common, but Bidot's stature kept most of them at bay. He no longer concealed his large dagger, and armed himself with an axe and a short sword too. The monks were kind enough to give me some basic training in using a dagger as well as some milk of the poppy darts which caused enemies to sink into a stupor. I wish I could say we didn't need all these weapons, but we did.

The terrain tested our mental and physical limits. The cold almost killed us at night. The wolves and bears were licking their lips in expectation of fresh meat. Every day I questioned whether this was worth it at all. I longed to be back in the city, working in the book shop, out on Sunny Steps with Portos and the sun worshippers, and enjoying the herb pipe in the park. That life seems almost like a dream, especially when a bandit is trying to choke you while you pray that your bodyguard is still alive to save you. Bidot and I must have aged five years in less than six weeks on the mountain paths. But in spite of it all, we somehow crossed The Six Spires, which means we were past the hardest part of the mountain range. Within a day, we already felt a warmer wind, from the ocean, and reached the tree line shortly after.

~*~

A glimmer of hope: from the base of The Six Spires we could see the rock face of all nearby mountains, and two things caught out eyes. On a smooth cliff in the distance some man-made structures seemed to snake up to a large cavernous opening. The mine!

Not too far from the mine, smoke rose from the forest and we could see ruins of an old fortress near the smoke.

“The Rook!” said I.

“I think we found our cultists,” said Bidot.

From here on, we decided to tread carefully. We avoided the main path and made our way to the mine, planning to get closer at night and see if there were signs of the luminous metal and the cultists.

~*~

Evening fell upon us as we waited hidden near the mine. Both Bidot and I felt somewhat optimistic. It was so close now. All we have to do is confirm the cultists are mining this magical metal, send message to Lord Urzeus, and descend into the valley and towards the coast. From the large city of Serrenfal we'd use the lord's seal to gain access to comfortable travel back home to Kalas, and return as heroes.

Once it was dark enough, we started moving in the direction of the mine. As we approached, we saw a couple of cultists heading towards The Rook. Behind them, in a small cart, gleaming metal rods! As I turn to Bidot, I feel a small jab in my leg. Confused, I look down to see a small dart. Before passing out, I see Bidot's smiling face above me.

When I wake up, I am tied to a chair in some ruins. A makeshift hall. Around me, cultists going about their evening jobs. Gleaming metal rods stored for transport in large wooden crates. A cloaked figure approaches me. Yellow eyes. It is the stranger form the monastery!

“Hello again, mr. bookworm! Sold any books on the way here?” the stranger asks mockingly.

My eyes search for Bidot, even though I think optimism is misplaced, and his betrayal is clear.

“Bidot works for us, even if his eyes are not yellow. You know, I have not seen a dumber intellectual my whole life. I am not sure what Urzeus sees in you, but you're lucky he wants you alive. Urzeus... always the optimist. 'The bookworm had visions of our future glory' yada yada yada... How annoying! I confess, that herb you enjoy so much sure gave you some interesting dreams. But dreams are not reality, and the reality is that you're being enlisted into The Pillars of Rebirth. Care to guess who I am?” she asks.

“Great Pillar Baraka,” I respond in a defeated tone.

Slow applause from the cult leader.

“Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner!” she says sarcastically. “Enough chit chat. Bring the book and an amulet!”

In the novels I read and the plays I saw on stage, the hero has a chance to discuss at length with his foe. A deus ex machina intervenes at the last moment. The tables turn. Not for me! Before I have a chance to protest, two cultists hold me still. A third places a coin-sized luminous metal amulet around my neck. Baraka opens a golden book with glowing runes on the pages and starts reciting an incantation.

“Domine metalli, domine lucis, recipe hanc novam animam in aeternum servitium tuum, da ei renascentiam, potentiam aeternam!”

One doesn't often think of being at the receiving end of a cultist ritual. If one does think of it, one may think there is time to fight, to find a loophole, to cut the ropes in time. Reality is much quicker and efficient. It takes but seconds for her to recite the incantation, and once she closes the book with a loud thud, the amulet blazes with light, burns like hell as I cry in pain, and embeds itself into my sternum. A guard splashes water on me to wake me up as I pass out from the pain. As I regain consciousness, something feels off. I see everything in a yellow tint and I know instinctively that my eyes are now yellow.

They cut the ropes and give me water to drink. Baraka puts an arm around my shoulder like an old reassuring friend.

“Welcome to the club, bookworm! Care to guess what your purpose is?”

I can only think of my vision of the bishops holding the golden books. What is strange is that something in me thirsts for the book, craves its secrets, and demands that I bring more souls to the Pillars of Rebirth. I'm too shocked to answer, to shocked to think clearly. I quickly reach for a dagger in Baraka's belt, and she just smiles amused.

“I'll kill myself before I become your slave!” I threaten.

“Try!” says she.

Once again these bursts of bravery only seem to work in the novels and plays. I am unable to even kill a rabbit, let alone take my own life.

“If it makes you feel any better, Urzeus saw some real potential in you. That is why he sent you here. How do you think he accomplished such miracles prior to becoming ruler? Pure genius and perseverance? Don't make me laugh. We've worked together for a long time. Him and I even contributed to the cult's numbers with our flesh and blood. I think you met one of my daughters in Kalas. She's a good little spy!”

“The child with the yellow eyes... You do this ritual on children?”

“Of course not. We're not barbarians! Children born of Pillars have yellow eyes from birth. I guess the books in your shop didn't teach you that.”

She continues to talk to me as I sit there defeated.

“Every day you will feel the calling. We all do. We have all been summoned to usher the new age, a rebirth of civilization. With the power of the gleaming metal, we can shape the world as we see fit. I lost everything in the War of Seven. I was but a child. Evil men destroyed my family, my village, and threw everyone still alive in cages to be used as slaves. I escaped only because I was so malnourished that I was able to squeeze through the bars. So, don't you dare judge me, bookworm! Count your blessings and embrace your new reality as a Pillar of the Word. Study the golden book, copy the golden book, learn the incantations and help us recruit more souls to our ranks. Each soul increases our resonance field, and with more resonance comes more power, and with more power comes the new age!”

Exhausted and overwhelmed, I start sobbing like a helpless child.

“I'll leave you with this: you may feel powerless now, having lost all control of your own life. But ask yourself: what did you really have in life? A cozy spot in a cozy city? A few friends? A few good deeds with your Sunny Steps and Sunny Side Up Society? Are you even that person anymore, after the journey that brought you here? Perhaps it is time to embrace your new role and embrace real power, power to change millions of lives, not just those of a few homeless people. Good night.”

She walks away as one cultist helps me get to my makeshift bed for the night, where I fall into a deep slumber immediately.

~*~

In the morning I joined a group of cultists heading back to Kalas. Still reeling from the experience last night, I was unable to focus on much and mostly let myself be shepherded off to wherever they took me. There was no more immediate danger. I knew the road back was long, so I decided to focus on recovering my strength and mental energy before tackling the complexities of my new reality.

So I focused on the road and its practicalities for a while. We took a roundabout way back. No more treacherous mountain passes. We followed the smoother road through the hills and plains. I have not traveled this regions before, so it was refreshing to see something new and not freeze to death or starve. I saw villages with mixed populations: some with yellow eyes, some without. In many villages there were glowing shrines. On a street corner, a little stone arch no taller than a child, with a small glowing metal artifact bolted in the middle. Simple, easy to replicate. I underestimated the presence of the Pillars as well as their reach. Strange that Kalas was so different. Perhaps they avoided the large centres of power. Perhaps that is where people like me come in, a final stage of the plan. While I was shocked to see the wide spread of the Pillars, something raw in me felt soothed. This feeling was very much at odds with my individualistic perspective on life.

“Great, I’m becoming a mindless grunt like Bidot, finding comfort in the bosom of a cult…” I muttered to myself.

I must confess, seeing the peace and apparent order and cooperation in these villages did make me second guess myself. The long trip back will give me plenty of time to consider my new purpose and the real scope of the Pillars.

Although the journey back seemed to be going well initially, I did realize about three days in that something seemed to follow the group. Sometimes a shadow just outside my field of view. Sometimes footsteps in the dark where there should be none. If it wanted to hurt me, it never succeeded. Too many cultists around me at all times. Nobody with bad intentions – or good ones! – could get close without at least several people taking note. Whatever it was, it stopped pursuing us once we left the hills and the forests. To this day I wonder what it may have been. A guardian? A foe? The grim reaper itself? I will never know.

The road did also take us through another Moon Monk monastery, this one in the last heavily forested stretch of road before reaching the Planes of Mana. Nothing surprises me anymore on this journey, so seeing the monks all had yellow eyes now merely got a half-hearted “huh” out of me. Clearly the Pillars had been hard at work converting not only regular folk, but other groups too. As we stayed the night, I decided to make conversation with a monk, Vadim.

“I only recently… ‘joined’ the Pillars,” said I. “Do the Moon Monk beliefs clash with the Pillars?”

To which I received a typical Moon Monk reply:

“Warm water and cold water is still water. The flow is what is important.”

He smiled and walked away.

I hated how at ease everyone was. How was everyone just accepting this? I was exhausted from fighting this notion in my own head, and from fighting the raw energy emanating form the metal amulet embedded in my sternum. Unfortunately, with this magical metal, reason was insufficient. It worked in powerful ways that resonated on a different level. The brain was powerless against it, and giving in felt like blissful release, like giving up swimming upstream and letting a warm river take you. If what Baraka said about that so-called ‘resonance filed’ was true, and if the number of cultists was any indication of their spread, the field is already incredibly strong and everyone sporting yellow eyes might be feeling the warm current. My will to fight kept dwindling over the few weeks of the journey back. It’s not gone, but it is weak and even if I found a way to fight it, I started wondering why bother? The Pillars of Rebirth had so many numbers, not to mention Lord Urzeus on their side. The war was lost before it even begun.

~*~

Arriving back in Kalas presented its own challenges. Ashamed that I failed my journey and afraid of what my family and friends would say about my yellow eyes, I avoided them for a number of days. When they finally met me, there was fear and sadness in their eyes. They were confused, worried, angry. I omitted some of the more violent detail of the trip, but they still feared what was to come. I was blunt:

“The Pillars are here. It is a matter of time before Kalas follows the faith of the surrounding towns and villages. The only comfort I can offer is that I saw much cooperation between cultists and non-cultists, and I did not think conversion was mandatory, but that there is some appeal that makes any forced push unneeded.”

I told them I was to be a Pillar of the Word, so I myself will be chanting lines from the golden book. While it may sound unreal, the chants and incantations somehow give everyone present a glimpse of what the resonance field feels like. It is beyond rational thought. It is raw emotion that won’t make you ask ‘Why?’ but rather ‘Why not?’”

~*~

And so it all came to pass as I have seen it in the visions. Well… almost! While this glowing metal had immense power, I had yet to see any mechanical monsters destroying villages. The bishops and the books? That was always going to be me. I let the warm flow of the resonance filed emanate through me, and my incantations brought together thousands. At first it felt awkward and clunky, like I was repeating someone else’s work as an impostor. People even threw rotten tomatoes at me. But the more I studied the book, the more I deciphered the runes. I think even Baraka failed to unlock some of the deeper connections. In fact, trying to store the knowledge in a book was only a crude first attempt to harness this new power. A book itself was too primitive and linear for the arcane knowledge within. The true form of this codex is a multi-layered sphere with a core made of the luminous metal that powers an expansion of thin layers, and that allows the Pillar of the Word to overlay the former ‘pages’ in infinite new ways. A magical onion with peels full of runes.

“See, my dear? I told you he was special!” said Urzeus to Baraka when I first demonstrated the new format.

~*~

With the sphere in hand, there really was no stopping the Pillars. I saw entire detachments of soldiers drop their weapons, laugh and hug each other after hearing but one or two verses and feeling the resonance field in their hearts. This was far more powerful than any mechanical monster.

After all I have seen and done, returning to the book store and my old life was no longer something I desired. I craved exploration, I wanted to continue upgrading the sphere and try using it to pacify far away lands ravaged by ongoing hundred-year wars. So I left Kalas two years after my return.

As I finish writing these pages, I am on a ship to the great isle of Eversorrow, a land of long-time grief, conflict, and ruin. It will be my greatest challenge yet! I spent two years in realms neighbouring Kalas, bringing many into the fold of the Pillars of Rebirth. Opponents of the Pillars did eventually find ways to resist, but none creative enough to fully stop the power of the spheres in the hands of talented Pillars of the Word.

If the light we show others is real and they choose it whole-heartedly, are we still the bad guys? Many realms were in shambles. In only a few months of them embracing the Pillars, these regions opened their borders, trading, working with each other like brothers.

There is still a small flicker of my old self within me, but as the wind pushes this ship to Eversorrow, this flicker is fading much like the shadowy figure who stopped pursuing me in the hills.

The end.

Author's note: I wrote this story using the Creation Myths solo journaling RPG by Emma Grier. The prompts provided the framework and inspiration for the story; the characters, narrative, dialogue, and prose are my own.

#story

My name is Aramis, and this is my story.

The universe is vast. The planet is vast. The human intestine is vast – if you are a tiny bacteria lounging around in there. While I have not witnessed any miracles and I do not have tangible proof that there is a deity out there looking over us, I do believe there is something bigger than us out there. Something beyond our comprehension. I believe the various gods humanity has come up with are representations of this and, for practical reasons, we gave them names, faces, and rituals. Because I found it hard to choose one, but felt the belief within me, I choose to worship the sun itself. Each year, I join the sun pilgrimage to the top of Mount Tarasco, the tallest in my country. A symbolic gesture to be closer to the deity, to feel its warmth a little closer and to meditate.

While the vast expanse of a mountaintop fills me with joy, I can say the opposite about dark, crowded places. I have an irrational fear of crowds that manifests at a physical level. The lizard brain goes into fight or flight, and always chooses flight. Put me in the middle of a crowded music festival and I'll quickly seek the edge of the crowd. Trap me on a packed wagon, and I'll get out at the next stop, even if it means I'll be late for work. I often think what may have caused this fear to exist in me, but I cannot come up with a logical answer. Perhaps in early childhood I experienced something that stayed in my subconscious. If that's the case, I do not recall it. And so, I simply do my best to avoid large crowds, especially in enclosed spaces.

I grew up in a family that valued academic prowess above all else. They cared little for athletics, and art was but a hobby to be pursued outside school, never a priority within its own right. Since I could do little about my situation but obey my parents, I ended up spending many hours in classrooms, libraries, and in my room reading books. The sciences did not stick in spite of my father's best efforts, but I did find joy in literature, philosophy and history. Each discipline related to the others, each one revealing to me different facets of the human condition. Novels showed me creativity and the abundance of human emotions and perspectives. Philosophy taught me to be open minded and never accept an idea just because one person says so. Much is debatable and questionable, even the ideas we generally think of as basic truths. History showed me how humans chose to use power, ideas, and creativity in practical ways that shaped future generations. By the end of my schooling, I was an expert in these fields and able to get a good read on people and their intentions even with only basic information in hand. Little did I know reality would soon test those skills, and reality’s harsher than any academic setting.

Given all that I learned about humans, past, present and future, it should come as no surprise that I rejected traditional gender roles for my society. I've faced challenges for this. My own father mocked me if I engaged in hobbies seen as feminine. Peers bullied me for I was not as strong and brave as other boys. Even teachers made jokes on occasion, about boys who did more with their minds than with their muscles. As I got older I learned how to tread carefully when needed, and how to express myself freely when in a supportive environment. It remains a challenge, but not an unsurmountable one. Life is too short to live in fear!

My bookish pursuits, cerebral inclinations, and open minded nature clearly make me a lover more than a fighter. I will fight if I have to, but I will always try to win without violence if possible. As the saying goes, “you catch more flies with honey”. In a pure contest of strength, I'd lose fairly quickly, unless I can outwit my opponent and leverage some form of combat ingenuity or trickery. Spending my younger years in the library did not build me for hand-to-hand combat. I avoid direct conflict, but I can use my skills, charisma, and intellect to achieve bigger goals. If the goal is to win a bar fight, you better find another ally. If the goal is to open diplomatic relations with a neighbouring city-state, I'm your man!

I don't have many friends, but I have a few close ones. My best friend is Portos. We went to school together and remained friends long after. Where other kids seemed distant, Portos welcomed me to his group of friends with open arms right away. That gesture meant a lot to me, and I will never forget his kindness. Even as life took us on different paths, we make time to check on one another, and even reunite the old group once a year. Portos is a cheerful man, who loves food and drink, and doesn't have any concerns with how others see him. While a healthy balanced diet may not be his number one priority, a happy life is. He emanates joy wherever he goes. He is kind to all, even to those who don't really deserve it. He inspires those around him to be better, kinder, and more loving. He's also a great teacher, sharing his knowledge eagerly with any who show curiosity in his areas of expertise.

My family’s focus on academic results did offer me a slight privileged position in life, one that does not attract the attention of the very rich. I didn’t stray much from my family’s history of gainful employment and managed to continue as part of this privileged class after my studies concluded. The good grades paid off and the humanistic nature of my studies allowed me to be persuasive in arguing my case for deserving certain jobs or material opportunities. I currently work at the largest bookstore in the city, and one day I hope to own my own and spread the love of books to others in my community. Since the local school system uses the store for most of their bulk orders, this job pays unusually well for what it is.

~*~

The Gendarmerie… a pain in my scrawny ass. These strict, tough guys in their proper uniforms have not been on my side for as far as I can remember. Officer Bidot especially. I am not trying to piss him off, but I also seem to have a certain bad luck running into him at the worst of times. I’ll be in the park with seemingly nobody around, enjoying the sunset, the accordion player in the distance, and I think to myself “why not add to the relaxing experience a few puffs from my special herb pipe?” Within seconds of lighting the match, Officer Bidot somehow materializes ten meters from me. No young kids in sight, no Moon Monks either (they are much stricter than us sun worshipers), but somehow he feels the need to give me a warning. Lucky for me he can’t arrest me for personal use of herb pipes, but I am sure he is salivating at the chance that he catches me with a larger quantity. He won’t. Sometimes I wonder if he gives me a hard time with the herb pipe in expectation of some sort of bribe. Maybe all he needs is a little extra coin for his Friday night peach schnapps. If I had the certainty this would get him off my back, I’d gladly pay him off.

Well, I shouldn’t worry too much about Bidot. The Ruler Cycle just ended and I am happy to say Lord Urzeus is next in line. A blessing for all intellectuals and lovers of justice and kindness. Urzeus has done wonders in his home city state, and most citizens are excited to see what he will do at the helm on the nation state itself! I think anyone who has corruption in mind better clean up their act. I better not try to bribe Bidot, after all, and he better stop harassing me. I hope him and his buddies get reprimanded for beating up the homeless population!

Above all, I think the Sunny Side Up Society will benefit from a ruler like Urzeus. We’re a group of sun worshipers who also enjoy the health benefits of fancy herbs. But our real calling is helping the less fortunate in any way we can. We won’t go as far as fighting Bidot’s gang, but we’ll be patching up wounds, donating food, spreading education and books to those who cannot afford it, and any other activities we come up with. Once a month, we have a weekend march through the city: the Sunny Steps. Each of us brings a small cart or a large backpack filled with whatever goods we were able to acquire, and we distribute them to the needy. I usually get my hands on books that are not in perfect condition and can’t be sold in the shop, library books at the end of their life or with too many annotations, writing utensils, and of course – and please do not tell Officer Bidot – ample quantities of herb to put some sunny feelings in everyone’s soul.

~*~

It was last month’s Sunny Steps when something bizarre happened. I was handing out used books near an orphanage when a strange girl came up to me to receive a book. At first I did not get a good look at her, busy looking for a book appropriate for a child. But when I handed it to her and looked her in the eye, I was greeted by eyes as yellow as dandelions. Never have I seen such eye colour. I froze, but she simply smiled, thanked me for the book, and walked away. I must have stood there bewildered for several minutes because when I woke up from my trance the kids were all gone, along with half the books. No harm done.

While the yellow eyes are reason enough for my bewilderment, what truly shocked me is a forgotten memory from seven years ago. I was still in school, in a later academic year. Walking home from an evening seminar, I stopped at the night market to grab a bite. The market was unusually busy for a Tuesday, so I ended up in one of the deeper dark alleys in search of a food stall with no lineup. A delicious smell grabbed me by the nostrils at the corner of Rue Fezan and Rue Noir. The stall was run by an old woman who seemed neither particularly happy nor sad to see me there. There was much wisdom in her eyes, and the food looked good. I was starving. I picked one of the sandwiches and got a few coins out to pay. She then offered me a bottle of refreshing juice on the house. As I was very hungry, I sat down on the nearest bench and gulped down the food and the juice. This somehow went to my head, and I had a feeling this juice may have been spiked with something. I fell into a trance, and I remember the old woman laughing at me, a sorrowful laugh, neither mocking nor cruel.

The trance did not last long, the crone was still there, and occasional customers still wandered by. She did not give them juice. She suddenly asked me:

“What did you see?”

I was taken aback, but tried to focus and think about the vivid dream I just had on that bench. I saw a mountain, and gleaming metal rods coming out of deep mines. I saw golden books in the hands of powerful bishops and large numbers of desolate people in long lines. I saw great beasts of metal laying waste to villages.

“Ah yes!” said the crone. “It’s not far off now! The yellow-eyed child shall mark the beginning of the end.”

This memory rested deep in my unconscious mind as I assumed it was all part of the same dream, all a part of that nasty juice she gave me. Until now.

I rushed to the orphanage gate and asked about this child, but nobody has seen the yellow eyes. They also looked at me like I was a little crazy. Disturbed by my encounter, I went home. If this yellow-eyed child is real, how much more of that dream may also come to pass? People will think I am crazy, but I must seek out this child, the mines, this mysterious gleaming metal that seems to bring nothing but danger, death, and destruction.

~*~

The month following my encounter with the crone and the yellow eyed child was spent making preparations for my quest. I started with my immediate sources of knowledge: the book store, the library, the local academic institutions, even churches and other places of worship and knowledge. From high priests to fortune tellers, I roamed the streets in search of clues. My friends wanted to believe me, but I am not sure how many did. Even Portos glanced at me with concern.

I had but given up when help arrived from the unlikeliest of places. I was in the central square attending the inauguration of Lord Urzeus's ascendency to the seat of power, the head of the Long Table in The Cube, a fortified bastion where the most critical branches of power were housed. During his speech, he ensured The Cube will be a lot more open and less secretive than his predecessor kept it, and all are welcome to seek a hearing with those in power. To my surprise, they accepted my application almost immediately and a week later I was in the queue to for my five minutes with Lord Urzeus.

“Lord Urzeus! Thank you for the chance to speak with you directly. It may seem crazy, but I am convinced something dangerous is brewing somewhere in the realm. Do any of the following mean anything to you or the members of the Long Table: luminous metal mined from deep in the mountains, people with unnaturally yellow eyes, books of gold wielded as sources of power by powerful leaders, and great mechanical beasts capable of great destruction?”

The lord's face lost some of its benevolence with each additional item on my list, looking downright grim by the end of it. With a weave of the hand he ordered the guards to usher out the other commoners and shut the doors.

“Aramis! How you came by such knowledge is less concerning to me than the immediate danger of this prophecy. I know nothing of great beasts, but I have heard rumours of a new element discovered in the mountains of Tal-Gareen. As you know, that's not exactly far from here. The ones who discovered it are a powerful cult with chapters in most city states. They call themselves The Pillars of Rebirth. I would not be surprised if they even started spreading their corruption in smaller hamlets too. The properties of this new metal are rumoured to be powerful and even magical, if harnessed correctly. If The Pillars found a way to use this to their advantage, I am not surprised of anything you spoke of just now.”

My heart was relieved to hear Lord Urzeus speak this way, confirming my vision rather than mocking me and throwing me out on my ass. The Pillars are not unknown to me, of course. I came across many references to them, but never in such a tangible and dangerous context. As far as I gathered, they were merely another small religious sect, not all that different from the Sun Worshippers or the Moon Monks or any other such group. The lord continued:

“The yellow eyes are proof enough something is already in motion. We have already spotted occasional manifestations of this trait. Now we have a vague explanation. Aramis! You must travel to the mountains of Tal-Gareen and gather more information. I will send my own men too, but you will be a great asset since you'll attract less attention. For your protection, I'll have one of my officers accompany you. He's a bit rugged around the edges, but he's strong and seems loyal, so he will do just fine as a bodyguard. He will meet you in a week's time outside your dwelling. Be ready for travel! Send what knowledge you gather and my men will do the same. If we are lucky, we will end this before it starts. A few Pillars propagating their beliefs is one thing. Them rising armies and mechanical weapons is a danger to us all. Their new leader, Great Pillar Baraka is a dangerous woman who lost everything three decades ago in the War of Seven. That she has been plotting her revenge upon the realm is of no surprise. Don't be fooled by her charisma! Your empathy will only be rewarded with torture if you fail to embrace the cult's beliefs. Now go! Your 5 minutes are up.”

~*~

To his credit Lord Urzeus did invest time and people into the task at hand. By the time I had to explain my need to take time away from the book store, Sir Wallace, the owner, had already been briefed and compensated for my temporary absence. I informed my Sunny Steps group that I needed to take a journey and will return in a few weeks’ time, so they do not worry. Same goes for family members and close neighbours. I almost thought about informing Officer Bidot from the Gendermerie, just so he can stop trying to find me enjoying my herb pipe in the park, but decided to let him wonder in his thick head what may have happened to me.

The week was up, by bag was packed, and my cover was set: I was a book store representative looking to expand the business in rural areas, on a quest to see what already exists and what the appetite was for a book shop in smaller mountain hamlets. I heard the horse and carriage pull outside my dwelling, so I knew my bodyguard was here to start our journey to the mountains of Tal-Gareen.

“You!”

“You?”

Cruel fate! Any excitement faded from my bones as I opened the door to see none other than Officer Bidot at the helm of the small carriage. He was wearing civilian clothing, but it was obvious he concealed a large dagger under his cloak. He was prepared for the dangers ahead and I quickly realized I was far from prepared for that kind of danger myself.

“I had to leave my wife and 3 young girls behind for you and your so called prophetic visions. Aramis, you herb-loving so-called scholar and intellectual! Ha! How you got Lord Urzeus to support this ridiculous venture is beyond me. Alas, I am a gendarme. I will obey my orders and will set any differences aside... for now. Just don't be an idiot and let me handle any miscreants on the way. Let's find whatever it is you need to find for the lord, get my hefty reward, and get back to my family and regular life.”

“Fine with me, Bidot. Don't worry, you can get back to busting my ass and getting drunk on peach schnapps soon enough.”

“Watch it!” said Bidot with an angry frown.

“See? Doesn't feel good when you're at the receiving end of mockery, does it?”

With a grunt he cracked the whip and the horse started pulling on the main road west, towards the mountains of Tal-Gareen.

Bidot calmed down a bit as the hours and days passed. His tough exterior appeared more and more fake to me, and I started seeing a simple man who missed his wife and children more than anything. Three daughters is a lot of work for just his wife, Nala, to take care of in his absence. He also turned a blind eye to my occasional pipe smoking. We reached a sort of silent mutual understanding for the journey. As the plains turned into hills and the hills turned into mountains, the air got colder. Snow was present on the mountain peaks. The road got harder. Villages and hamlets were harder to come by. We were at the mercy of occasional inns, hermits in mountain cabins, caves, and anything else that could keep us a little warmer at night. Food became a problem too, and we had to ration what we had. Bidot set some traps for wildlife at night, but other than the occasional rabbit or squirrel, he didn't catch much. Exhaustion was quickly settling in.

The scarcity of food was rivalled by the scarcity of information. Three weeks on the road and into the mountains, and not a single sign of mines, luminous metal, cultists, or people with yellow eyes. Only cold, narrow roads, and hunger came in plenty. We had nothing but willpower to push through.

In our third week we came to Bear's Pass. This gave me hope as I knew The Blue Tower, the mountain monastery of the Moon Monks, must be near. Surely, they would grant us refuge, and if we are lucky, help us re-supply. Indeed, in a few hours we happened upon the monastery. The Blue Tower was a lot larger and more crowded than I would have expected. In talking to other travellers and to some of the monks there, I finally made progress. They did know of The Pillars of Rebirth and have seen more cultists than usual in these parts. Compared to a few years ago, they seemed well equipped, and yes, some had unusually yellow eyes, especially among the ones leaving the mountains. A concerning pattern! As for the mines, we were told only cultists or perhaps hunters may know their whereabouts. We decided to stay at the monastery for a few days to rest and gather more information.

On the third day there, I had a hard time sleeping due to loud snoring in the large shared guest sleeping quarter, so I went outside to enjoy my herb pipe in solitude and silence. The air was cold, but refreshing compared to the stuffy quarters and Bidot's smelly socks. After a puff or two, I noticed I was not alone. Another herb enthusiast seemed to have had the same idea as I did. I walked over to the stranger.

“Cold night, isn't it?” I said.

The cloaked figure turned to face me. A woman with yellow eyes! She said:

“Indeed, but it does not bother me.”

I hit the jackpot! This could prove very fruitful for my investigation. I stayed calm and remembered my cover.

“I am a book salesman looking to expand the business across the realm. The mountains are new to me. Any larger hamlets, castles, or monasteries other than this one?” I asked with honest ignorance.

“The deeper you go, the less you will find. Best turn around, city dweller! Nobody needs your books here other than a few monks, perhaps.”

Not ready to accept a dead end so soon, I pushed.

“I'm afraid I cannot go back. I must reach the coast beyond the mountains. The city of Serrenfal is my destination.” I lied.

“Hmm,” she grunted, “I doubt you'll find a warm welcome beyond this point, but if the bandits and wildlife don't kill you, you might catch a break at The Rook – if you're lucky. Many hunters use the dilapidated fortress as shelter. But I doubt they want any books.”

Still no mention of the mines, and a promise of continued hardship on the road.

“Can't say I met anyone with yellow eyes before,” I lied hoping for additional information from this obvious cultist.

“You'll meet more soon. Many, many more,” she said with lightness and joy.

And with that, she left.

My head swimming with all the new information, I sent a messenger crow out to Lord Urzeus. Unable to go to bed, I wandered the halls of the monastery. Many wondrous artefacts lined the main prayer hall. I gazed at them in the pale moonlight and candle light. In a corner, I came upon an old book that looked familiar. Upon closer inspection, I realised it's the original Tome of Eternal Wisdom, a foundational text of the Moon Monks' creed but also a cornerstone of many subsequent works of literature that aimed to unlock the mysteries of life and knowledge. I imagined displaying this in the book store. The crowds it would draw from many realms! The glory bestowed upon myself for bringing such unique artefact to the city's largest book store! Alas, I am no thief. I walked away with a heavy sigh and a mental note to one day ask the head monk to let me study the text in person.

~*~

To my surprise, I encountered the yellow-eyed woman again the next evening. This time she seemed in a chattier mood, but avoided revealing any meaningful information form my quest. Having enjoyed only the company of a grumpy Bidot, I almost forgot the stranger was a cultist. After a few puffs of the herb pipe the evening atmosphere around the hearth felt very relaxed and friendly. As I was walking back from the latrine, the stranger was waiting for me in a concealed alleyway. Stupid of me, I know, but I felt optimistic about my chances and the company of a pretty lady seemed quite good in these cold mountains.

In a split second her friendly smile turns into a feral grimace as she pulls out a dagger!

“It ends here, bookworm! Nobody messes with the Pillars and lives!”

I freeze. I have no combat experience.

Bidot, on the other hand, does. He appears from the shadows and swiftly knocks out the cultist.

“So much for that deep intellect, o wise Aramis!,” he says in a mocking tone, “ha ha ha!”

Embarrassed, I thanked him for saving my life. We tied up the cultist and called the monastery guards to follow their due process with her.

Little did I know this was only the first time on the journey that Officer Bidot would save my life. Our trials were just beginning. The Blue Tower sent us on our way with good supplies to last us a while. Unfortunately, we had to part ways with our small carriage as the terrain became too treacherous for horses. We proceeded on foot, with heavy backpacks.

The next few days were a gruelling trek through the unwelcoming mountains of Tal-Gareen. Deep woods, narrow passes, freezing streams, all sorts of wild life and occasional humans, some just travellers, others hunters. Bandits and cultists were less common, but Bidot's stature kept most of them at bay. He no longer concealed his large dagger, and armed himself with an axe and a short sword too. The monks were kind enough to give me some basic training in using a dagger as well as some milk of the poppy darts which caused enemies to sink into a stupor. I wish I could say we didn't need all these weapons, but we did.

The terrain tested our mental and physical limits. The cold almost killed us at night. The wolves and bears were licking their lips in expectation of fresh meat. Every day I questioned whether this was worth it at all. I longed to be back in the city, working in the book shop, out on Sunny Steps with Portos and the sun worshippers, and enjoying the herb pipe in the park. That life seems almost like a dream, especially when a bandit is trying to choke you while you pray that your bodyguard is still alive to save you. Bidot and I must have aged five years in less than six weeks on the mountain paths. But in spite of it all, we somehow crossed The Six Spires, which means we were past the hardest part of the mountain range. Within a day, we already felt a warmer wind, from the ocean, and reached the tree line shortly after.

~*~

A glimmer of hope: from the base of The Six Spires we could see the rock face of all nearby mountains, and two things caught out eyes. On a smooth cliff in the distance some man-made structures seemed to snake up to a large cavernous opening. The mine!

Not too far from the mine, smoke rose from the forest and we could see ruins of an old fortress near the smoke.

“The Rook!” said I.

“I think we found our cultists,” said Bidot.

From here on, we decided to tread carefully. We avoided the main path and made our way to the mine, planning to get closer at night and see if there were signs of the luminous metal and the cultists.

~*~

Evening fell upon us as we waited hidden near the mine. Both Bidot and I felt somewhat optimistic. It was so close now. All we have to do is confirm the cultists are mining this magical metal, send message to Lord Urzeus, and descend into the valley and towards the coast. From the large city of Serrenfal we'd use the lord's seal to gain access to comfortable travel back home to Kalas, and return as heroes.

Once it was dark enough, we started moving in the direction of the mine. As we approached, we saw a couple of cultists heading towards The Rook. Behind them, in a small cart, gleaming metal rods! As I turn to Bidot, I feel a small jab in my leg. Confused, I look down to see a small dart. Before passing out, I see Bidot's smiling face above me.

When I wake up, I am tied to a chair in some ruins. A makeshift hall. Around me, cultists going about their evening jobs. Gleaming metal rods stored for transport in large wooden crates. A cloaked figure approaches me. Yellow eyes. It is the stranger form the monastery!

“Hello again, mr. bookworm! Sold any books on the way here?” the stranger asks mockingly.

My eyes search for Bidot, even though I think optimism is misplaced, and his betrayal is clear.

“Bidot works for us, even if his eyes are not yellow. You know, I have not seen a dumber intellectual my whole life. I am not sure what Urzeus sees in you, but you're lucky he wants you alive. Urzeus... always the optimist. 'The bookworm had visions of our future glory' yada yada yada... How annoying! I confess, that herb you enjoy so much sure gave you some interesting dreams. But dreams are not reality, and the reality is that you're being enlisted into The Pillars of Rebirth. Care to guess who I am?” she asks.

“Great Pillar Baraka,” I respond in a defeated tone.

Slow applause from the cult leader.

“Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner!” she says sarcastically. “Enough chit chat. Bring the book and an amulet!”

In the novels I read and the plays I saw on stage, the hero has a chance to discuss at length with his foe. A deus ex machina intervenes at the last moment. The tables turn. Not for me! Before I have a chance to protest, two cultists hold me still. A third places a coin-sized luminous metal amulet around my neck. Baraka opens a golden book with glowing runes on the pages and starts reciting an incantation.

“Domine metalli, domine lucis, recipe hanc novam animam in aeternum servitium tuum, da ei renascentiam, potentiam aeternam!”

One doesn't often think of being at the receiving end of a cultist ritual. If one does think of it, one may think there is time to fight, to find a loophole, to cut the ropes in time. Reality is much quicker and efficient. It takes but seconds for her to recite the incantation, and once she closes the book with a loud thud, the amulet blazes with light, burns like hell as I cry in pain, and embeds itself into my sternum. A guard splashes water on me to wake me up as I pass out from the pain. As I regain consciousness, something feels off. I see everything in a yellow tint and I know instinctively that my eyes are now yellow.

They cut the ropes and give me water to drink. Baraka puts an arm around my shoulder like an old reassuring friend.

“Welcome to the club, bookworm! Care to guess what your purpose is?”

I can only think of my vision of the bishops holding the golden books. What is strange is that something in me thirsts for the book, craves its secrets, and demands that I bring more souls to the Pillars of Rebirth. I'm too shocked to answer, to shocked to think clearly. I quickly reach for a dagger in Baraka's belt, and she just smiles amused.

“I'll kill myself before I become your slave!” I threaten.

“Try!” says she.

Once again these bursts of bravery only seem to work in the novels and plays. I am unable to even kill a rabbit, let alone take my own life.

“If it makes you feel any better, Urzeus saw some real potential in you. That is why he sent you here. How do you think he accomplished such miracles prior to becoming ruler? Pure genius and perseverance? Don't make me laugh. We've worked together for a long time. Him and I even contributed to the cult's numbers with our flesh and blood. I think you met one of my daughters in Kalas. She's a good little spy!”

“The child with the yellow eyes... You do this ritual on children?”

“Of course not. We're not barbarians! Children born of Pillars have yellow eyes from birth. I guess the books in your shop didn't teach you that.”

She continues to talk to me as I sit there defeated.

“Every day you will feel the calling. We all do. We have all been summoned to usher the new age, a rebirth of civilization. With the power of the gleaming metal, we can shape the world as we see fit. I lost everything in the War of Seven. I was but a child. Evil men destroyed my family, my village, and threw everyone still alive in cages to be used as slaves. I escaped only because I was so malnourished that I was able to squeeze through the bars. So, don't you dare judge me, bookworm! Count your blessings and embrace your new reality as a Pillar of the Word. Study the golden book, copy the golden book, learn the incantations and help us recruit more souls to our ranks. Each soul increases our resonance field, and with more resonance comes more power, and with more power comes the new age!”

Exhausted and overwhelmed, I start sobbing like a helpless child.

“I'll leave you with this: you may feel powerless now, having lost all control of your own life. But ask yourself: what did you really have in life? A cozy spot in a cozy city? A few friends? A few good deeds with your Sunny Steps and Sunny Side Up Society? Are you even that person anymore, after the journey that brought you here? Perhaps it is time to embrace your new role and embrace real power, power to change millions of lives, not just those of a few homeless people. Good night.”

She walks away as one cultist helps me get to my makeshift bed for the night, where I fall into a deep slumber immediately.

~*~

In the morning I joined a group of cultists heading back to Kalas. Still reeling from the experience last night, I was unable to focus on much and mostly let myself be shepherded off to wherever they took me. There was no more immediate danger. I knew the road back was long, so I decided to focus on recovering my strength and mental energy before tackling the complexities of my new reality.

So I focused on the road and its practicalities for a while. We took a roundabout way back. No more treacherous mountain passes. We followed the smoother road through the hills and plains. I have not traveled this regions before, so it was refreshing to see something new and not freeze to death or starve. I saw villages with mixed populations: some with yellow eyes, some without. In many villages there were glowing shrines. On a street corner, a little stone arch no taller than a child, with a small glowing metal artifact bolted in the middle. Simple, easy to replicate. I underestimated the presence of the Pillars as well as their reach. Strange that Kalas was so different. Perhaps they avoided the large centres of power. Perhaps that is where people like me come in, a final stage of the plan. While I was shocked to see the wide spread of the Pillars, something raw in me felt soothed. This feeling was very much at odds with my individualistic perspective on life.

“Great, I’m becoming a mindless grunt like Bidot, finding comfort in the bosom of a cult…” I muttered to myself.

I must confess, seeing the peace and apparent order and cooperation in these villages did make me second guess myself. The long trip back will give me plenty of time to consider my new purpose and the real scope of the Pillars.

Although the journey back seemed to be going well initially, I did realize about three days in that something seemed to follow the group. Sometimes a shadow just outside my field of view. Sometimes footsteps in the dark where there should be none. If it wanted to hurt me, it never succeeded. Too many cultists around me at all times. Nobody with bad intentions – or good ones! – could get close without at least several people taking note. Whatever it was, it stopped pursuing us once we left the hills and the forests. To this day I wonder what it may have been. A guardian? A foe? The grim reaper itself? I will never know.

The road did also take us through another Moon Monk monastery, this one in the last heavily forested stretch of road before reaching the Planes of Mana. Nothing surprises me anymore on this journey, so seeing the monks all had yellow eyes now merely got a half-hearted “huh” out of me. Clearly the Pillars had been hard at work converting not only regular folk, but other groups too. As we stayed the night, I decided to make conversation with a monk, Vadim.

“I only recently… ‘joined’ the Pillars,” said I. “Do the Moon Monk beliefs clash with the Pillars?”

To which I received a typical Moon Monk reply:

“Warm water and cold water is still water. The flow is what is important.”

He smiled and walked away.

I hated how at ease everyone was. How was everyone just accepting this? I was exhausted from fighting this notion in my own head, and from fighting the raw energy emanating form the metal amulet embedded in my sternum. Unfortunately, with this magical metal, reason was insufficient. It worked in powerful ways that resonated on a different level. The brain was powerless against it, and giving in felt like blissful release, like giving up swimming upstream and letting a warm river take you. If what Baraka said about that so-called ‘resonance filed’ was true, and if the number of cultists was any indication of their spread, the field is already incredibly strong and everyone sporting yellow eyes might be feeling the warm current. My will to fight kept dwindling over the few weeks of the journey back. It’s not gone, but it is weak and even if I found a way to fight it, I started wondering why bother? The Pillars of Rebirth had so many numbers, not to mention Lord Urzeus on their side. The war was lost before it even begun.

~*~

Arriving back in Kalas presented its own challenges. Ashamed that I failed my journey and afraid of what my family and friends would say about my yellow eyes, I avoided them for a number of days. When they finally met me, there was fear and sadness in their eyes. They were confused, worried, angry. I omitted some of the more violent detail of the trip, but they still feared what was to come. I was blunt:

“The Pillars are here. It is a matter of time before Kalas follows the faith of the surrounding towns and villages. The only comfort I can offer is that I saw much cooperation between cultists and non-cultists, and I did not think conversion was mandatory, but that there is some appeal that makes any forced push unneeded.”

I told them I was to be a Pillar of the Word, so I myself will be chanting lines from the golden book. While it may sound unreal, the chants and incantations somehow give everyone present a glimpse of what the resonance field feels like. It is beyond rational thought. It is raw emotion that won’t make you ask ‘Why?’ but rather ‘Why not?’”

~*~

And so it all came to pass as I have seen it in the visions. Well… almost! While this glowing metal had immense power, I had yet to see any mechanical monsters destroying villages. The bishops and the books? That was always going to be me. I let the warm flow of the resonance filed emanate through me, and my incantations brought together thousands. At first it felt awkward and clunky, like I was repeating someone else’s work as an impostor. People even threw rotten tomatoes at me. But the more I studied the book, the more I deciphered the runes. I think even Baraka failed to unlock some of the deeper connections. In fact, trying to store the knowledge in a book was only a crude first attempt to harness this new power. A book itself was too primitive and linear for the arcane knowledge within. The true form of this codex is a multi-layered sphere with a core made of the luminous metal that powers an expansion of thin layers, and that allows the Pillar of the Word to overlay the former ‘pages’ in infinite new ways. A magical onion with peels full of runes.

“See, my dear? I told you he was special!” said Urzeus to Baraka when I first demonstrated the new format.

~*~

With the sphere in hand, there really was no stopping the Pillars. I saw entire detachments of soldiers drop their weapons, laugh and hug each other after hearing but one or two verses and feeling the resonance field in their hearts. This was far more powerful than any mechanical monster.

After all I have seen and done, returning to the book store and my old life was no longer something I desired. I craved exploration, I wanted to continue upgrading the sphere and try using it to pacify far away lands ravaged by ongoing hundred-year wars. So I left Kalas two years after my return.

As I finish writing these pages, I am on a ship to the great isle of Eversorrow, a land of long-time grief, conflict, and ruin. It will be my greatest challenge yet! I spent two years in realms neighbouring Kalas, bringing many into the fold of the Pillars of Rebirth. Opponents of the Pillars did eventually find ways to resist, but none creative enough to fully stop the power of the spheres in the hands of talented Pillars of the Word.

If the light we show others is real and they choose it whole-heartedly, are we still the bad guys? Many realms were in shambles. In only a few months of them embracing the Pillars, these regions opened their borders, trading, working with each other like brothers.

There is still a small flicker of my old self within me, but as the wind pushes this ship to Eversorrow, this flicker is fading much like the shadowy figure who stopped pursuing me in the hills.

The end.

Author's note: I wrote this story using the Creation Myths solo journaling RPG by Emma Grier. The prompts provided the framework and inspiration for the story; the characters, narrative, dialogue, and prose are my own.

1 October 2026

Spending a lot of time alone with Yenah's grandmother's house while working. Getting up early, having my morning coffee, and sitting down to work each day at the kitchen table. As the sun rises, the tall white satin curtain spanning the length of the living room window starts to glow; one half of the curtain is reinforced by another pink one, so the diffused light that floods into the living room is half pink and half white. It bounces off of the red-orange wood floor, which creates a warm, saturated, matte environment in which highlights and edges are dulled. Magpies like to visit in the morning, and a handful of times I've pulled back the living room curtain to see them jockey for position on a persimmon tree. They're pretty aggressive, hip-checking each other off branches. Only two small horizontally-sliding screened windows in the house open to outside air, and tree branches sprouting vibrant green cross in front of the view out of both, so the feeling is one of life in abundance outside. Plants seem to grow well on the windowsills too.

My days here have been spent mostly in silence, but it's a busy silence. Just down the street is an elementary school, and I hear the rhythmic phases of its days—pale yellow buses snorting to a stop to deliver sleepy children in the morning, high-pitched screams as lunch hour arrives mid-day, and the frenzy of happy squeals and teachers repeatedly saying goodbye (“안녕히 가세요”) as school is let out for the day in the later afternoon. Some intermittent bells and layered chimes of groups of children singing throughout the day as well. On days where I do laundry, the laundry machine sounds like alternating white noise waterfalls and MRI-machine-like hollow knocks. Mosquitos are frequent visitors at this time of year, so a few times a day I'll also hear their sharp whines buzz by my ear (I've killed about thirty of them in the last month). The water here is so, so soft, especially compared to London, and the sinks (one in the bathroom and one in the kitchen) rush when turned on with a dutiful urgency that sounds like a mother shushing a baby. Similar to the Segokcheon Stream down the road from the house that runs all the way to the Han River.

29 September 2026

Spatial-emotional logic(s)

27 September 2026

Have been floating around New York City with my luggage in tow as a I figure out what to do next. My bags are heavy and the subway is small. After a recent ride, I was exiting the station and hoisted one of my big duffels high as I went through the turnstile gate. A man rushed over as if to help me, but he kind of just got in the way and then backpedaled as I passed through. Then he yelled: “I helped you out and you're not going to swipe me in?” In that moment I realized a fundamental difference in the American psyche compared to more collectivist countries like Korea (where I just spent two months). Which is that Americans grow up in a society that teaches them to expect to be thanked or rewarded for helping someone else.

On the Imaginary Rise of “Hot” Performance (or, “Imaginary What Now”?)

There may in the future have been some little interest in learning more precisely what may be imagined(!) as “an imaginary performance collective.” This desire of course will also have been requited by several succinct replies probably more satisfactory in their precision than in their accuracy and scope. But “lol just a shtick” may not be well understood in whatever epoch of our human history that the turkey in question was to have landed (imaginarily!), and its own motto “Join us, or discover yourself” is perhaps not the exquisitely-crafted absurdity its formulators had hoped... but something else entirely.

Tria: It just came out of me. It is comic gold.

Indeed. “Hot” performance is simply interaction with a medium, requiring relatively little agency, and which in point of fact continually reinforces a sort of Pavlovian “freeze” reaction when new or novel stimuli appear (in contrast to “cool” media, which demands considerably more meta-cognitive participation to be experienced). A relevant example of imaginary performance is conceptually easy to describe but quite difficult in its execution, at least in the beginning. It is simply deferring any involvement other than the minimum necessary to see the next thing: no comments, no likes, and (in the best case) forgetting the last image as soon as it is no longer actually visible.

Naturally, this description is misleading (or, “Just fiddle with it; it will come to you”)

Our main concern should be the extent of authentic gas-lighting being done — unknowingly, in all innocence — and how such a course, uninformed by principles and guided by rules of thumb learned across the unmeasurable time units of Time! Itself! could conceivably be more ejoyable than whatever tf is happening here. Therefore, this is not a “imaginary performance how-to”. (And btw, attempting the simplistic procedure limned above may just as well result in the possibility of learning... that that is boring af. And that would be the first lesson, and possibly the easiest one.)

In Summary: * Listening to relaxing music while patiently waiting for the pregame programming for my college football game, and moving into the night meds and prayers part of my evening. Pretty much like last night, heh.

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= 213.41 lbs. * bp= 148/76 (59)

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

Diet: * 05:50 – one banana * 06:45 – ½ roast beef sandwich * 09:00 – snacking on m&m chocolate candies * 11:10 – garden salad * 14:45 – home made meat and vegetable soup, cheesecake for dessert

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:50 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:10 -read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap' * 13:00 – watching an old episode of The Rifleman * 14:15 – watching old episodes of Doctor Who * 14:45 – eating dinner at home with Sylvia * 17:15 – listening to relaxing music

Chess: * 07:55 – moved in all pending CC games

Inbetweeners 40- Xalatra Questline Part 2- The Gutworks

Once the players located Tock-Tock, it led them to a non descript grey wall in an industrial section of Sigil with minimal activity/residents. The wall was once an entrance to the inner workings of Sigil, but was since closed off by the Dabus, as they have the ability to remake the city at will. Tock-Tock is able to undo this with glyphs of reversal, revealing an entrance to the Gutworks.

The Gutworks are a series of bio-mechanical-magical-industrial processes that keep the city running. The first room the Inbetweeners encountered was the Spiracle Engine. This was essentially the recycling/waste processing hub for the city, where anything that goes down the gutters or is thrown out in waste disposal or plumbing is separated. Biological material is sent to be incinerated, water is reclaimed, and metal/other more valuable materials is scrapped and reused. From here the Inbetweeners had three main paths they could follow. Ventilation tunnels, the refuse conveyors or wade through a stream of what is essentially sewage and waste water. They opted to avoid the waste water and explore the refuse conveyors.

The Refuse Conveyor, as it was titled, was actually fairly dangerous. If a player without flight doesn't balance on it properly, they can fall through and get caught in the gears, taking 8d6 damage every turn until they can either free themselves or have someone free them. There are also black puddings present under the conveyor, feeding on whatever comes through that serve as an everpresent threat. One the Inbetweeners passed through this section they reached the Sorting/Processing center. Here they encountered Giant Scrap-Eater Termites. Creatures of my own invention, these large beasts sort through the materials on the conveyer belt, consuming any metal that comes through with a special type of acid that breaks it down so that they can consume it. Once the Giant Scrap-Eater Termites consume their fill of metal, they move over to another chamber where they regurgitate it so that it may be reused in other structures within Sigil. Any organic material like wood, paper, excrement, etc is left on the conveyer as it is sent to the Organics Digester.

The Inbetweeners managed to capture a Giant Scrap-Eater Termite. Using a combination of Thogg's animal handling abilities and Rotlog, the half-orc druids magical abilities, the party was able to tame and take control of one which Rotlog could then summon. He would actually use this as a sort of animal servant for the remainder of the campaign. It's high HP (85) and acid abilities made it quite useful. Letting him pull of this shenanigan was little outside of the rules, but I allowed it because rule of cool. Later on, as the group became more established in Sigil, we assumed he could summon more of these creatures from the Gutworks as needed.

From the sorting room the characters made it to the Organics Digester, which was the first boss fight in the Gutworks. This massive creature does not move, but instead can pull creatures towards it with its peristaltic pull. Once creatures are in range, it can swallow them and dissolve them in its potent digestive acids. For particularly nimble or strong creatures that it can't pull in, it had a potent acid spray which deals 10d8 damage to those it hits. The Organics Digester is a semi-sentient biological machine whose purpose is to break down any of the organic materials that come from the Refuse Conveyer. I envisioned hundreds of such creatures throughout the bowels of Sigil, this was just one of them. I gave it an antimagic field to prevent spells from neutralizing it. I figured this worked diagetically because the digester would need to be protected from dangerous magical items or creatures that somehow ended up on the conveyor.

The Inbetweeners were almost killed by the Organics Digester, but the players who passed their checks to avoid getting pulled in were able to rescue the others and escape into the Ventilation Tunnels. These massive tunnels cycle air throughout Sigil. They are patrolled by Pipebound Hounds, large mechanical constructs, between the size of a very large dog and a small horse. They navigate the tunnels via echolocation and travel in groups of three to five, hunting down anything else living in the tunnels and removing any obstructions. Basically, if the tunnels aren't clear, the Pipebound Hounds will discover the obstruction and rectify it, regardless of what it is. They are pretty sturdy in fights, each one sporting 105 hitpoints and have vibrating claws that deal 17 damage per claw and can deafen an opponent. The Inbetweeners fought off a few of these and made it to their den, where the next boss fight of the Gutworks was located: The Pipebound Alpha Hound, which is much larger, and has roughly twice the hit points and damage output, with several special abilities and legendary actions that make it much more dangerous. The players were able to destroy the hounds and their alpha. The chamber where the Pipebound Hounds made their nest had many of the items that previously obstructed the tunnels. The hounds seemed to bring it back here to store, almost by instinct. Most of it was refuse, like broken barrels, carriages, nets, etc. However, some of it was valuable.

After searching, the players found a sack of silverware (from a thief who must have gotten swept up into the Gutworks), Gloves of Greasewalk, a wand of counterspell, and most importantly, the deed to a defunct zoo in Sigil. This abandon Zoo would later become the nesting grounds for the Beeple Queen when the group relocates her hive and the fledgling Harmonium to Sigil. From here, the players were able to cut across to the lift to reach the lower levels of Sigil. In this moment I realized my failure as a DM, I once again designed a dungeon where the players were able to bypass the majority of the content I prepared. So, technically this is the end of this leg of the quest, but let's review some of the treats I had in store that they summarily ignored:

The Cistern Flow/Sewage Rapids/Reclamation Vortex- Basically an escalating series of environmental hazards involving rapids of sewage from Sigil. In retrospect, I should've realized the players wouldn't wade through poo if they could avoid it.

Amicus the Vuplin- They discover the ghost of a courier who drowned after Dabus knocked him down a storm drain while street sweeping. I planned on playing him as a very friendly, marginally helpful ghost. He would have led the players to the Gristle Rest if they hadn't been there already.

Gristle Rest- This was supposed to be a lynchpin of this part of the dungeon. There were three different ways to end up there, and the players somehow found the one path that avoided it entirely. An absolutely putrid tavern/flop house run by a Night Hag. This investigated the idea... who would willingly live in the Gutworks? An environment that probably smells horrific, and everything in it is designed to break you down into raw materials. The answer— those who have nowhere else to go. There were mercenaries who escaped the Faction War and would foreshadow Vecna's cult deeper underground. People dying of a plague that would eventually be made into stew and served to the rest of the patrons. The entire establishment was covered in mold, and some of this mold itself was sentient. The mold colonies actually had the most information on Xalatra and if the players discovered they could communicate with it telepathically and either rizzed up the mold or offered something, could get a direction she headed in.

The food available was particularly fun. The common patrons could order sewage stew... sewage that has been heated up enough to kill... most of the bacteria while leaving the protein intact. Warp rat skewers, whiskey that is just engine coolant, and fermented fungus wine. All things that are available locally. If the players showed wealth and wanted a real meal, the Night Hag has a halfling tied up in the pantry that she would cook up. There were endless fun roleplaying options I could improv on as a DM, but unfortunately the players skipped it entirely. The campaign is almost over, but I think I may recycle this for another one.

In addition to the aforementioned, there was also a biomechanical nervous system that is part of Sigil's power grid. It would have been an environmental hazard puzzle for the players to rigure out. An abandon war machine construct would have also attacked the players. However they skipped all that.

Once they reached the lift to the lower levels, they discover a glyph left by Xalatra that will cast prismatic spray on them if activated. I forget if the players tripped it or found a way to avoid it. The lift itself is used by Dabus to head to the lower levels, which is where we will go with the players in the next post!

I'm charging my larger clippers. It's been almost two years since I completely shaved my head. I've gotten into a habit of doing it every two or three. I'd probably keep it shaved did my vanity not stop me from doing so. I also tug on my hair as a stem, so being able to tangle my fingers in it helps.

I don't know. I'm tired. Not caving to social expectation is positive for self-improvement, but I do hesitate. From a sensory standpoint, I can't stand having hair. From a feminine standpoint, I'd say it's pretty impossible for me to hide my femininity. From an accepted standpoint, I know that in spite of what's been told to me by multiple persons over time, the result is always similar.

Being aware of that means I must ask myself if I'm subconsciously demonstrating a test. I don't think that I am. However, a straight woman who does not have cancer, but is walking around with a shaved head is a societal test whether intended or not. I should probably just do it and then tend with whatever outcomes come with it. Including my own.

I think that I'm aware that I tend to make this choice when I'm in the process of accepting something I see before it's actually happened. That does not bring me comfort. At the same time, I am not sure that the kind of comfort I need or seek actually is available in the world. Perhaps I am just tired of asking for it.

I cried the first time I cut my very long hair off at eighteen. It was a shock and I had always been complimented on the wealth of fine blond tendrils. I cried again many years later when I took my ex's clippers to my hair because a beautician had badly burnt my scalp. Again and again, I've shaved my head. I cried happy tears a few years ago because it was a choice. My choice.

I don't know if I will cry if I do it this time. What am I shedding with this exhaustion? Is my why an action or an excuse? Will I regret or celebrate it? I do not know the answers. I think that is the only reason I really hesitate. I also am unsure if I still care. That bothers me.

The thing is, from an outsider perspective I can acknowledge that I am what is considered physically attractive. Especially if I choose to play it up. I never saw myself that way growing up, so I don't really think of myself in that manner now, but I'd also be blind to deny it. Full lips, large almond blue green eyes, high cheekbones, prominent cupid's bow, hourglass figure. I'm aware that I check the boxes. I'm also aware that while I want the person I'm with to find me physically attractive, it's probably the last thing I want them to notice.

I know. I know.

I wonder if part of what I'm currently going through is subconsciously pushing me towards wanting to visually detract from my femininity. I don't think so, but I also can't deny it a possibility. The irony, of course, is that it absolutely doesn't work. I think I'm just exhausted of needing to be someone I'm not. Perhaps I've fooled myself into ever knowing who I am to begin with.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Chisom is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured on Omenana, Apex, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, Mythaxis, ZamaShorts, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestors’s Gift” won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest, longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Awards, and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.

1) Which Nigerian city do you live in, and what is it like?

I live in Lagos and it’s quite an interesting city. It wants to be everything at the same time, so it has its hands in many places. Some parts of the city are quite urban and there are houses in estates that run into millions of dollars, but there are also shantytowns with houses built from corrugated sheets. Also, there are churches in almost every street corner, but someone can pick your pocket right in front of one if you’re not careful. Lol. It’s a jack of all trades and master of many.

2) I know relatively little about African science fiction, but I get the impression that Nigeria has a particularly lively and growing SF scene. Would you agree? If so, what do you think accounts for this growth, and how does the Nigerian scene compare with those in other African countries?

I agree with you that it has a growing speculative fiction scene, “growing” being the key word. Most people who come to literature and writing in these parts usually do so through the literary fiction and (more recently) romance route. Nigerian writers have broken a lot of ground in those areas so they’re the most popular. Genre fiction over here is still picking up steam and trying to catch up. Longtime torch bearers like Nnedi Okorafor, Wole Talabi, Tade Thompson, and others, have helped spread the word through their extensive works, but a new crop of writers are finding their voices too and doing magic. Look out for the works of folks like Pemi Aguda, Uchechukwu Nwaka, Plangdi Neple, Somto Ihezue, Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Gabrielle Emem Harry, amongst many others, and you’ll see exactly why the genre is on the rise here. I think some other things that are also driving this growth are social media, genre literary magazines, and the prospect of writers getting paid for their works. Social media has helped us find outlets willing to platform our writings, and the knowledge that we can earn something from that is enough to keep some of us writing. I think something similar too is happening across other African countries. These little fires are spreading everywhere.

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From Across Time (2024)

A woman discovers a hidden message from a time-traveling lover who erased their love story to save it. No one remembers it, no proof remains except a video, and she decides to build a time machine to find her.

3) In your story From Across Time, the heroine Adaeze experiences the emotional consequences of a relationship she cannot remember. What interested you in exploring the emotional impact of a relationship that only one person bears memory of?

The thing that got me thinking about this story, like I usually say, was a short story by Vajra Chandrasekera titled Peristalsis. In the story, he used a concept that involved the two main characters watching a movie of themselves on TV. They hadn’t seen this movie before and thus didn’t know how it was going to play out, so they were keen on following it. The story moved between the characters in the real world and the version of themselves in the screen, and this interesting technique got me thinking: What if one character was on the other side and was trying desperately to communicate with the other who didn’t remember them again? Then, because I love exploring themes around time travel, I asked, again, what if they were distances from each other in time?

4) Is the woman in the video being selfless by preserving the memory of their love, or selfish by forcing Adaeze to live with a loss she would otherwise never have known?

I think it’s a bit of both. She feels terrible for taking away the memories of their beautiful relationship from Adaeze, so she wants to make up for that by telling her about it. In this way, we can say that she’s selfish. She’s inflicting memories on someone who would have otherwise lived her life perfectly without them, just to assuage her guilt. But she’s also giving Adaeze a gift, one Adaeze herself isn’t sure she’d have given back if the option presented itself, because that information is precious to her.

5)The ending suggests that the heroine values knowing the truth over the comfort of blissful ignorance. Was that an important theme you wanted to explore?

Not really. That ending just came to me as I was drawing close to completing the story and it just felt like the most natural place to leave things off.

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Prerequisites for the creation of a possible world (2025)

When a futuristic simulated World's Fair unexpectedly begins to malfunction, an undercover employee must navigate the collapsing digital past while a major technological crisis threatens the entire enterprise.

6) What interests you about the futures people imagined in the past, especially those that never came true?

The present we are living now is largely as a result of the imaginings and postulations of people who lived in the past. Someone imagined humans flying like birds through the air and got to work on the idea, and today the skies are filled with airplanes. Someone once imagined communicating with someone else far away from them wirelessly, and so they began to manipulate radio waves. Today, we have cell phones. Things we have now began from past predictions, and so will things in the future. But there are also tons of things people thought about that never came to fruition; technologies (flying cars come to mind, at least for now), societies, and all. I like to think about them too, and that’s how I came to the idea of the story.

7) Why is belief in a prediction one of the four prerequisites for recreating a possible world? What role does belief play in this process?

Because I believe that the level of conviction a creator has in their idea, amongst other things, contributes greatly to whether the idea would eventually be brought to fruition. In the story, a giant AI simulator builds photorealistic worlds that people from different planets can come and take tours in. These worlds are the imaginations of earth people from the distant past. They’re predictions of how things would look like, but were ultimately wrong about. So these future people in the story then use this AI to create that world just to connect with the people of old. But the AI can only proceed to create such a world if there was sufficient evidence that the people who predicted them believed in them completely, even though it never came to pass. It’s one of the prerequisites that the AI demands, because without that, it doesn’t think that world would be believable after building it.

To the Death (2023)

A man's feud with his sister's abusive police boyfriend moves into their dreams, where the officer tries to kill him every night.

8) Your story To the Death suggests that understanding someone's deepest fears can be a powerful way to defeat them. Do you think this kind of psychological insight is a form of power?

I think so. Think of the ways big tech companies go to lengths to obtain private data of their customers. The way they use that information to eventually force their users to stay glued to their platform like zombies, eventually divulging more data. This isn’t exactly what happens in the story, but it’s a version of it. The protagonist used information gathering to access his adversary’s weaknesses, and used that in a spiritual warfare against him.

9) When the protagonist and the policeman fight in their dreams, are they experiencing lucid dreams? I've had a few myself, and I find the experience fascinating.

Would have been interesting too if they were lucid, but I just wanted to set these dreams in the actual dream realm to add to the spookiness of the story. I don’t know how well I achieved that eerie feel though. I just hope readers find the story interesting enough.

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10) To conclude, what are you currently working on?

At this moment, I’m writing a story for the volume 2 of the Applied African Speculative Fiction anthology. It’s a collaborative project between speculative fiction writers and experts in different fields. So I’ll be working with a renowned expert to deliver a scientifically accurate and grounded story. On the longer term, I’m still hoping to put together my short story collection. Hopefully I manage to achieve that in the nearest future.

#shortinterviews #umeh #nigeria

Earlier this year the commenting system I had been using died without notice. Alas, all the comments were lost to the void. Since then I hadn't really had the time to look into finding a suitable replacement.

Two days ago, by good luck and fortune, I had noticed a nicely integrated commenting system on the Vorpal Mace blog. Imagine my joy as I learned that yes, it is compatible with my platform! Two days later, and it is fully integrated.

You have in essence two options for commenting:

• Without an account. You simply put in your name and email. That's it.
• With an account. You register your name, email, and homepage (optional). This allows you to always comment with the same profile, plus you can upload an avatar as well. Use postimages to upload your avatar and then use direct link in your profile
• In both cases you will receive notifications from comments@attronarch.com so make sure to check your spam folder and to whitelist the address.

Markdown is supported so you can use bold, italics, and lists in the comments. Moderation is on, and I have to manually approve each comment. You can give it a try, right below the post.

With gratitude to Edeldhur, Charlie Brawn, and kublaibenzine for testing the system before going live.

#Blogging

Je n’aime pas l’idée de partager des banalités ici.

Tout l’intérêt est dans le partage d’une expérience et d’une vision propre à moi-même.

Parfois, j’ai du mal à « ranger » certaines émotions. Une image qui me passe par la tête et il y a ensuite un enchaînement de fragilités qui me sautent à la figure.

Mais ça, en une fraction de seconde.

On a tellement pris l’habitude de faire les choses pour remplir « notre mission » qu’on en oublie de s’arrêter, de se regarder, de s’évaluer de façon bienveillante.

Alors quand les choses vacillent, tout chavire. Le navire est inondé et coule.

Je suis toujours sur le fil.

Il faut peut être que je fasse le choix de retirer à nouveau des choses de ma vie. Mais c’est difficile, je ne suis pas sur les réseaux, et constamment, j’avance vers la personne que je veux être.

En tout cas, c’est la sensation que j’ai aujourd’hui.

Tout a été dit.

Mais à mon tour maintenant d’essayer de partager mes valeurs. Ce sont les choses qui comptent, peut-être les seules choses ?

arbre obstiné vers la lumière de toute la force de ses branches son tronc soulève les ténèbres

nichées d'écorce et d'oiseaux dispersées dans les rameaux

espoir d'un chant de brindilles qui vibreront doucement dans le vent le plus violent

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photo by @arcturus@pixelfed.social