I've recently rediscovered something I had done a long time ago: modifying pictures from weather and traffic cameras.

Note: I am cautious about the cameras that I choose to use. They have to be cameras that are putting their photographs online, and specifically be in the public domain. Obviously, not all weather camera images are in the public domain. Privately owned cameras, especially the ones use for television broadcasts, are like nonpublic-domain. (Although, I have a doubt that any of them would really care about this as to them these photographs are ephemera with a rather limited usage.)

I go for the ones that I know are from government agencies, especially those owned by NOAA, precisely because the government does not own these images. They are, by definition in the public domain.

One of the easiest things to do with these photos is to use a gradient mask over them to come up with different effects. For example, here's an alternative version of the above photo:

It's obvious that these are the same photo, and yet the effect is quite different because of the details in the two them. The first one clearly shows some clouds along the horizon, and definite blooming coming from the lights. While this second photo makes everything look more isolated. None of the effects from the light bloom, you can't see the clouds along the horizon, and for that matter it's not even all that clear that the horizon is where the lights at the back are.

There's a ton of other things that can be done with these photographs that don't involve using gradients. Take this photo I used in a blog post the other day:

What I did here was to crop the portion I wanted out of a larger photo, rebalanced the colors, adjusted the color temperature, adjust the contrast and brightness, and then added a vignette. None of the changes were too drastic on this photo. My objective was to highlight the ripples in the water (which was appropriate to a portion of the article that had a surfer analogy in it).

These are only a few simple examples of the kinds of things that can be done with public domain photos like these. I've done stuff where I've taken two photos from one camera from different times / conditions, adjusted them a bit, then overlaid them like a double exposure. It can look really cool.

I've also done things where I've hand created multiple masks to go over a photograph, using different colors and different brush textures to make the photograph have an almost alien look to it. And in still other cases, I've made collages from a set of photographs that I hand modified. This allows you to compose something that is new and fits a vision that you have.

So, what's the point to this?

I see a lot of people go to sites like Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, etc. to find images that they can use for various purposes. There is no problem with this, except that these places often intermingle nonpublic-domain photos in with the public domain photos in an attempt to sell them to you. And there is nothing wrong with that ether.

However, there are a few issues (and ones that I have run into before): some photographers will upload the same photograph to multiple sites, and in some cases the licenses may not be the same. And, in at least one case, I had an issue with a platform because I was using a very popular public domain photo. They had issues with it because it turned up in a reverse image search. (I still don't understand that one… It was clearly a public domain image, so they shouldn't have cared… But anyway…)

But, that experience did bring up another thought: don't you want to have something unique representing your work? Maybe you don't have the skill to create a work on your own, but I'm fairly certain you can learn how to do a bunch of image manipulation tricks in whatever software you choose to use. (I use The Gimp, which I know is not everyone's cup of tea, but I've been using it for years at this point.) Isn't a bit more satisfying to say that you did something for yourself? At least you can say it wasn't generated by AI.

In these times when the choices tend to be: public domain photos, stock photos, or AI generated images, I find this to be quite satisfying. The only thing better is if I can use photographs of my own in this process (which I've also done). Above all else, I can say: I did this myself — there was no AI involved. And that means a lot to me.

And here's a final image for good measure:

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Categories: #Photography Tags: #publicdomain, #derrivative, #antiai, #trafficcams, #weathercams License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Photo of a circular pill sorter box against a pale blue background. Photo by Unattributed. License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Sure, I hear you saying: no one wants to get old. But it's a fact of life, we all eventually get old. And we all eventually have to face our mortality. One of my favorite sayings about this is: One Day We'll All Be Skeletons. A perfect thought that encapsulates the fears of mortality, and it was uttered by a six-year-old, in front of his dad, on video, available for the whole world to see. But the father got mileage from it as everyone that saw the video wanted it on a t-shirt. I've got four of them.

What I am actually referring to, quite literally, is the photograph at the top of this post. The dreaded weekly wheel pill sorter. But ironically, it's not because of the pills in the sorter (that is only a small part of it), but what it represents to me symbolically.

So, first, the pills. These are mostly an annoyance. A matter of compensating for a few small genetic defects that run through my family. I tried, really hard, to avoid taking medication for these defects. Alas, time caught up with me, and I had to start on medication for those defects a couple of years ago. But, given that I've known people that started taking these medications 10–20 years younger than me, I think I did okay to make it this far without them.

Instead, the pill sorter represents is the growing need to rely on medications. Not just the type that compensate for small issues, but the types of medication that keep you alive. The kinds of medications that one should question taking. The question we will all face one day: am I going to be able to live well just by taking this medication? Or, is this medication just prolonging the inevitable? Leaving me to cling to life in a degraded state?

These are complicated questions to answer. And they are doubly complicated to answer if you've had to take care of any loved ones who were dependent on medications. I have, and I honestly questioned if it was worth it.

I am of the opinion that the pharmaceutical industry is too invasive in our lives. They have pushed hard for deregulation, and often bring medications to market for their profitability responsibilities. Look at how many medications come to market only to be pulled within five years because of unknown side effects. My bet is if we hadn't seen this level of deregulation over the last 20–30 years many of those medications wouldn't have been marketed. The harmful side effects would have been found. I'm of the opinion that we need to be extremely cautious when judging the balance between good and harm, especially when it comes to pharmaceuticals.

On the flip side, I have to look at a recently passed family member who was even more anti-pharmaceutical than me. They tried as many suitable homeopathic remedies as they could before seeing a doctor. Don't get me wrong: they weren't stupid about this. They did research, they knew the potential side effects, and risks for any homeopathic course they chose. And yet, they passed about 20 years earlier than I would have guessed. But, it's not clear this was related to their choices in homeopathic treatments as opposed to more established medical treatments.

The pill sorter is serving as a constant reminder of these issues for me. It's reminding me that eventually I will face those same issues, the same choices others I have loved have had to make. For now, though, this pill sorter is just a convenience, allowing me to store my medications in one place, while having a supply of them sitting here at my desk where I take them every morning before starting my work.

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Categories: #Essays Tags: #aging, #medicine, #mortality, #lifequality, #homeopathic, #convenience License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

7 July 2026

When a young hitting prospect is called up to the major leagues for the first time, it is usually expected that he will struggle for at least a few hundred at-bats as he adjusts to Major League pitching. In a game where power is coveted (and handsomely compensated), it can be tempting for him to swing his hardest at almost everything, relying on raw talent and luck without fully realizing that that's what he's doing.

This mindset is easy for pitchers to exploit; they simply throw him less strikes and let him be his own undoing. But, if he's level-headed and motivated, over time he will start to recognize his own weaknesses and work to refine his approach. He will learn that discipline begets results, and discipline comes from honing his eye.

There are many ways he can train this skill, but on a daily basis it often comes down to studying his opponents' tendencies—the unique speed, spin, vertical and horizontal movement, arm angles, and sequencing of their pitches—so that he can lay off of more pitches out of the strike zone and only swing at those in the zone, thereby increasing the likelihood of both quality contact and bases on balls.

This leads to a higher on-base percentage, which is a good indicator that front office executives can project his future value with confidence. Because ultimately baseball is about returning home safely as much and as consistently as possible, and getting on base means you've left but you're on your way back.

The first time I met her, I asked if she missed her husband. After a brief pause, she said “no.” That surprised me, but it was a very reassuring no. She said she loved him and did all she could to care for him while he was alive and healing from his illness.

A few nights ago, she and I were talking in the kitchen. She’d just finished packing for her trip and was leaving the next day. We are both healers, so our conversations usually revolve around healing. She asked me how I learned the healing method I offer. I told her it just came to me. It felt more like remembering how to do it again in this lifetime. That I never learned or studied. She grew curious. I offered her a quick demo of my work. She was delighted.

We cleared some floor space and made it cozy with soft lighting. I brought my speaker and, intuitively, chose a heart chakra frequency track from the many songs on my session playlist. I had her lie down on a yoga mat and sprayed natural jasmine-scented water onto her, knowing she liked the scent.

I got to work. I normally start with the lowest chakra, the root, and slowly move up to the crown, connecting with each energy point and having a silent conversation with it. Unlike most people I’ve worked with, her lower chakras were stable. When I moved up to her heart, I felt warmth in my heart and tears began to flow from my eyes. She was still grieving. Of course she is. Her heart was crying and feeling so many things. Then I moved up to her head. I always make little circles between the brows with my fingers. That’s where babies like to be massaged. When I did that, I felt her inner child yearning to play. It was as if the broken heart and the playful inner child were working together to create healing.

Her daughter had just moved out shortly before I arrived at the house. For the first time, she is enjoying her life as a single woman living on her own. After the session, we reflected. She told me she could cry at any moment from grief. She told me she’s cared for others all her life. I could feel her desire to have fun and to pour into herself.

#stories

Freundinnen & Freunde der Weisheit! „Cognitive Shuffling“ (kognitive Neuordnung) ist eine Technik, die helfen kann, schneller einzuschlafen, indem sie das Gehirn gezielt ablenkt. Die Methode wurde von dem kanadischen Kognitionswissenschaftler Luc P. Beaudoin entwickelt und basiert auf der Idee, das Gehirn mit zusammenhangslosen Gedanken zu beschäftigen, um Grübelschleifen zu durchbrechen.

Dabei wird ein zufälliges Wort gewählt und anschliessend eine Liste von weiteren Wörtern erstellt, die mit demselben Anfangsbuchstaben beginnen. Wenn keine passenden Wörter mehr einfallen, geht man zum nächsten Buchstaben des Ausgangswortes über. Das Ziel ist, das Gehirn zu beschäftigen, ohne es zu stark zu aktivieren – ähnlich den wirren Gedankenbildern, die kurz vor dem Einschlafen natürlich auftreten.

Beaudoin entwickelte die Methode ursprünglich, um seine eigene Schlaflosigkeit zu bekämpfen. In einer Studie aus dem Jahr 2016 mit rund 150 Teilnehmern wurde die Methode mit anderen Techniken wie dem Aufschreiben von Sorgen verglichen. Die Ergebnisse zeigten, dass alle Methoden die Schlafqualität verbesserten, doch viele Teilnehmer bewerteten die kognitive Neuordnung als besonders hilfreich und leicht anwendbar. Die Technik wurde durch einen Artikel in Forbes bekannt und fand schnell Verbreitung in sozialen Medien. Schlafexperten wie Dr. Joe Whittington und die Psychologin Shelby Harris bestätigen, dass die Methode für viele Menschen wirksam sein kann, insbesondere als Ergänzung zu etablierten Behandlungsmethoden wie der kognitiven Verhaltenstherapie für Schlafstörungen (CBT-I).

Obwohl die wissenschaftliche Evidenz noch begrenzt ist, sehen Experten keinen Nachteil darin, die Methode auszuprobieren. Falls die Technik nach 20 Minuten keine Wirkung zeigt, wird empfohlen, aufzustehen und einer ruhigen Tätigkeit wie Lesen, Puzzeln oder Dehnen nachzugehen, bevor man es erneut versucht. Harris empfiehlt sogar, kreative Variationen der Methode auszuprobieren, etwa die Vorstellung von Cupcake-Kombinationen. Kognitive Neuordnung könnte somit ein einfacher und effektiver Weg sein, um Grübelgedanken zu unterbrechen und besser zur Ruhe zu kommen.

Denkanstoss zum Wochenbeginn

„Die modernen Sklaven werden nicht mit der Peitsche, sondern mit Terminkalendern angetrieben.“ – Telly Savalas (1922–1994)

ProductivityPorn-Tipp der Woche: Positiv bleiben

Deine Stimmung beeinflusst Deine Produktivität. Positives Denken macht es leichter, sich auf Aufgaben zu konzentrieren und motiviert zu bleiben.

Aus dem Archiv: Besser lernen mit Seneca

Viele von uns haben das Lernen auf eine Weise verinnerlicht, die auf Wiederholung, Auswendiglernen und kurzfristige Leistung abzielt. Wir bereiten uns auf Prüfungen vor, bestehen sie – und vergessen danach vieles wieder. Das Erkennen von Inhalten wird oft mit Verstehen verwechselt, das Reproduzieren mit Wissen. Doch was bedeutet es wirklich, „etwas zu wissen“? Diese Frage beschäftigt mich seit Langem – und besonders eindrücklich beantwortet sie ein römischer Philosoph, der vor rund 2'000 Jahren lebte: Seneca. In seinem 33. Brief an Lucilius formuliert er eine Kritik am oberflächlichen Lernen, die heute aktueller denn je ist.

weiterlesen …

Vielen Dank, dass Du Dir die Zeit genommen hast, diesen Newsletter zu lesen. Ich hoffe, die Inhalte konnten Dich inspirieren und Dir wertvolle Impulse für Dein (digitales) Leben geben. Bleib neugierig und hinterfrage, was Dir begegnet!

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EpicMind – Weisheiten für das digitale Leben „EpicMind“ (kurz für „Epicurean Mindset“) ist mein Blog und Newsletter, der sich den Themen Lernen, Produktivität, Selbstmanagement und Technologie widmet – alles gewürzt mit einer Prise Philosophie.

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Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde NotebookLM von Google verwendet. Das Artikel-Bild wurde mit ChatGPT erstellt und anschliessend nachbearbeitet.

Topic #Newsletter

Chapter One

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

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

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

The children fell through light.

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

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

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

Uni bleated softly, trembling against him.

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

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

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

“Everybody stay close,” Hank said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The way back.”

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

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

A sound rose from the woods.

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

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

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

“I’m not letting anything touch Uni.”

Uni pressed her face against his side.

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

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

“To where?” Diana asked.

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

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

Then the air changed.

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

Jesus stood on the white stones behind them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The creatures hissed and lowered themselves to spring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric’s laugh died.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diana’s fingers tightened around the staff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It can hide you,” Jesus said.

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

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

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

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

“Now we’re talking,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am with you,” Jesus said.

“That’s not the same as answering.”

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

Eric groaned. “I was afraid of that.”

A horn sounded from the broken castle on the hill.

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

Venger.

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

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

The word gently curled like an insult.

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

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

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

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

The air tightened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric heard, They already know you are afraid.

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

Presto heard, They laugh because they are right.

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

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

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

Hank gripped the bow, and no arrow came.

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

Jesus turned to Hank. “Tell the truth.”

Hank’s throat tightened. “Now?”

“Now is where truth is needed.”

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

“I don’t know what to do,” Hank said.

The words humiliated him. They also cleared the air.

A golden arrow formed against the string.

Hank stared at it, stunned. Jesus nodded once.

“Leadership begins where pretending ends,” He said.

The creatures lunged from the trees.

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

“Go!” she shouted.

They ran.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She could keep hiding. She could remain untouched.

Instead she moved.

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

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

Bobby stared at her. “You were gone.”

“I was still here,” Sheila said.

Something passed between them that the Realm could not steal.

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

“Take my hand,” she said.

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

“I know,” she said. “Take it anyway.”

He did.

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

Home.

Bobby saw it first. “There!”

They stopped as one body, every breath caught.

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

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

He started toward it.

Uni bleated.

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

The doorway brightened.

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

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

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

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

Uni cried again.

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

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

“Is that really home?” Hank asked Him.

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

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No,” Jesus said. “It is not home.”

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

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

The creatures entered the pass.

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

Above them, Venger’s shadow darkened the stones.

Beside them, Jesus remained.

And the false doorway home began to flicker.

Chapter Two

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

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

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

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

“I can hold them,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

He pulled out a long purple scarf.

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

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

Jesus looked at Eric, and Eric looked away first.

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

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

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

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

“You offer it without love.”

“I offer it quickly.”

“You offer it empty.”

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

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

“Bobby!” Jesus called.

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

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

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

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

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

Bobby nodded once, ashamed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The arrow came brighter than before.

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

Presto stared. “I did that?”

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

“It was a scarf.”

“It became obedience.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can You make it stop?”

“I can lead you through it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hank turned. “Wait. We stay together.”

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

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

Bobby snapped, “Nobody asked you.”

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

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

“Bobby,” Sheila said sharply.

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

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

“You wanted to.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I know,” Jesus said.

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

“I slow everybody down,” he said.

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

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

“Presto!” Hank shouted.

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

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

“Presto,” Jesus said, “look at Me.”

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

“Look at Me.”

“If I lose it, I’m nothing here.”

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

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

Eric whispered, “Presto.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t let go!” Hank yelled.

Presto let go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Venger’s shadow gathered above that mountain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Now you can walk together,” He said.

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

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

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

“So was I,” Presto said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Seen,” He said. “And called.”

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

Chapter Three

The bridge taught them how narrow togetherness could feel.

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

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

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

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

“Don’t look down,” Diana said.

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

The bridge swayed.

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

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

“You’re shaking,” Sheila whispered.

“I’m mad at the bridge.”

“You can’t be mad at a bridge.”

“I can be mad at anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

Eric’s mouth tightened. “Someone should.”

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

“It’s weak here,” she said.

“We can jump it,” Bobby said.

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

Presto’s shoulders sank.

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

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

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

Uni huffed at him.

“She objects too,” Sheila said.

That almost made them smile. Almost.

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

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

Jesus looked up. “Yes.”

“Then why not?”

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

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

“What do you see?” He asked.

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

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

Hank nodded. “We’ll listen.”

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

“You’ll get it back,” Sheila said.

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

“Eric.”

“I’m cooperating.”

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

Presto whispered, “Thanks.”

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

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

“Fair.”

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

Diana shifted just in time. “Thank you.”

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

A stone broke loose under Bobby’s foot.

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

Bobby’s foot slipped into open air.

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

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

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

“Why bells?” Eric shouted.

“I don’t know!”

“Use it anyway,” Jesus said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It does,” Jesus said.

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

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

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

Not reflections this time. Possibilities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You offer them a smaller heart.”

“I offer them protection from disappointment.”

“You offer them loneliness.”

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

“Bobby,” Sheila said.

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

“For how long?”

“Forever.”

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

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

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

The garden behind her wall dimmed.

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

“I can’t be strong alone,” she said.

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

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

The applause cut off.

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

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

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

“Yes,” Jesus said.

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

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

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

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

“Then pretend until they are grateful.”

For one tired heartbeat, Hank almost believed him.

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

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

The golden gate went dark.

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

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

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

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

The group began to turn in different directions.

Then Uni stepped into the center of them.

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

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

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

Uni leaned harder against his leg.

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

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

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

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

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

Venger snarled. “Sentiment.”

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

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

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

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

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

Eric swallowed. “Even if together is slower.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Then walk toward ruin,” he said.

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

“The road continues,” He said.

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

Chapter Four

The mountain road did not climb so much as accuse.

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

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

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

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

No one enters whole by leaving the truth outside.

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

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

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

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

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

The mountain shook.

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

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

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

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

Venger appeared before the gate.

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

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

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

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

The word struck them all.

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

“What’s the catch?” Eric asked.

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

Eric did not smile back.

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

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

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

Venger’s face hardened.

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

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

Diana nodded once. “But you can.”

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

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

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

The bow flashed. The first hollow turned gold.

No one mocked him. That mercy almost undid him.

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

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

The shield rang softly. The second hollow turned gold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sixth hollow turned gold.

Only the seventh remained.

Everyone looked at Uni.

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

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

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

The seventh hollow remained dark.

Presto whispered, “What does it want?”

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

The meaning settled slowly, then all at once.

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

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

Bobby wrapped both arms around Uni. “No.”

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

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

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

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

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

He turned to Jesus. “What do we do?”

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

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

“We go together, or we wait together.”

The seventh hollow filled with light.

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

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

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

Then Tiamat descended.

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

Jesus stepped between the children and the dragon.

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

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

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

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

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

“Now!” Hank shouted.

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

Then he smiled through his fear.

“Obedience,” he whispered, and threw it.

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

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

Hank released.

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

His fire went out.

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

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

“You could have gone sooner,” he whispered.

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

The doorway shone brighter.

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

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

Chapter Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You already do that sometimes.”

“Not under oath.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then remember again.”

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

Bobby’s face crumpled. “No.”

Sheila knelt beside him at once. “Bobby.”

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

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

“That’s not fair,” Bobby whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a moment, none of the children spoke.

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

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

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

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

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

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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

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

Augur

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

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

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

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

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

Black Cat Weekly

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

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

Black Fox Literary Magazine

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

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

Body Shots

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

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

Dragon Soul Press

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

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

The First Line Literary Journal

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

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

Fusion Fragment

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

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

Havok

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

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

Image

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

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

Phano

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

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

Sally Port  

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

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

Solarpunk Magazine

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

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

 

The Submission Pit

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

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

subTerrain Magazine

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

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

See similar posts:

#PublishingAdvice #ShortStory #Submissions

 

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

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

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

A Plaintiff Who Never Bought the Camera

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

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

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

Why Three Jurisdictions, and Only Three

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

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

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

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

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

A Company With a Surveillance Record

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

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

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

The Warnings That Came First

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

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

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

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

The Asymmetry of Consent

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

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

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

What the Data Could Become

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

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

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

The Limits of Settling After the Fact

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

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

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

What Consent-by-Default Would Actually Require

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

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

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

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

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

The Street That Used to Be Anonymous

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

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

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

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References and Sources

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

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were my mother’s.

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

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

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

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

#shortstory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

…

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

Louise Glück, from the poem “The Wild Iris”

#addictionessay

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

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

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

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

Why do we put ourselves in harm’s way?

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

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

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

#addictionessay

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

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

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

Thomas Roethke writes in his poem “Prognosis,”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#addictionessay