The gods feed off of our happiness and our misery. We murder a billion animals every day with the main result to us being a lot more cancer and clogged arteries. This is the ultimate cosmic horror. The ultimate illogical action. Hell just for hell's sake.

If you wish to practice necromancy, start by opening a slaughter house. This will win some favor from the gods.

I have traveled all over and found nothing but these little vile creatures. I keep trying to watch the little bipedal reddish black creatures as there is clearly some structure to their actions. They must have some way to communicate. They are about half as tall as me with thin limbs though some are much taller and thicker than others. I watched a group of them ambush a huge boarlike creature, killing it with spears. They clearly can work together. But they mostly seem to just eat each other. I don't know how their numbers sustain. They always run from me, unless there's a lot of them. Then they have tried attacking me. I have grown less afraid of them as one popped up behind me and threw a spear at me and it just bounced off. I have had to kill some as a warning. Throwing them doesn't work great as they bounce right up and come back for more. As I've grown less cautious I have traveled farther and farther. I have found what I'm calling emotion zones. Certain areas that produce different mental feelings. Took a few days to figure it out and I worried for my sanity. But as long as I stay in the cliff cave my mood is fine, more or less. But I have found a place where it's quite hard to not fall asleep. Another where I was filled with rage. Another of melancholy. In a way it's exciting. I have felt this place quite empty. These areas suggest a level of complexity and order.

Yesterday I took two 'Mattios' as I will call them, because they remind me of a hateful short person I had a slight aquaintance to, to the sleep zone. Just held one each by their neck while they waved their arms and hissed and spitted at me. They fell asleep before me and I laid them down and left. The next I came back and found them gone without a trace. Perhaps I will have to try again and see if they do eventually wake up. I suppose I can do such experiments with each zone. Not sure what this will accomplish but it's something to do. And I will keep exploring.

Glass Houses
Freedom? from a bad situation? Night time. Now have magical powers. Running through the night. Where did I come from?
It's dark. Medieval.
Where did I leave?
Have I always been here?
Where do I want to go?
Is there injustice?
Is this just the presentation of magic?
Magic is in the air. All have come out to sing and dance.

The words and actual singing don't matter. But are kind of necessary all the same. Something must be there for them to play off.

You're doing something. Maybe it hardly matters what. But in doing whatever it is you're doing, you come to this place. A place where you must be careful. Where lots of creatures of magic are everywhere. You have to ...avoid them? You are running through the night. Running and running. Creatures occasionally pop out at you through the ...fog? You duck, you swerve. Do you kill them? You kill the skeletons that come for you.

Some things though you just outrun. Some you have to kill. When it's time to sleep, you find a place to hide. You hear them still all around. It's like you have to be quiet with your thoughts while sleeping. You explode out of your sleeping place outpacing the large creature that had settled down nearby. You run some more. You walk. Because you can't run forever. Or can you? You walk but ready to swing your sword at any moment. Ready to run at any moment. And often you have to. It's always night here.

I was a human from earth. I must have died. I was very suddenly sick and then I awake here. All the same body parts of a human but I think freakishly strong and I guess what a human would consider a monster. I have left behind a 3 year old on earth who really needed me. That is driving me crazy. I guess I might never see him again. I don't know. And I had so little time with him. He was my time machine. I couldn't change my past but I could give him the life I should have had. And no, I die when he was only three. What will his life be like now? I try to tell myself it will probably be OK. It looks like he's going to be better looking than me and he's quite intelligent. And any average person or even none at all would be better than the parents I had. He will probably be fine. I tried to fill the first 3 years of his life with happiness. That matters I'm sure, though he may not remember me. I hope to see him again someday.

But except for that extremely important thing I don't mind my situation now, though it could be called hellish. I'm alone. I live in a cliff cave. The only other sentient creatures appear to be entirely evil. I am though incredibly strong compared to them. In fact if 100 ambushed me I might still survive. They are small. They don't have any special weapons. But they have plenty of hate. They like to impale their own kind. Also cannibals. I'm a terrible monster to them I'm sure. No doubt they want me dead. My great worry is that they will destroy my source of food. It may not have occurred to them or possibly they don't even know how. They are quite stupid. They don't even have fire. It is a massive kind of tree. Incredibly beautiful and even has both edible fruit and nuts. I mostly store the nuts and eat the fruit for now. It seems to sustain my huge body and strength.

This world is strangely reddish mostly. A reddish dirt. A reddish fog. I am bone white with skin almost as tough as stone. It yields slightly to the touch and then no more. There is no soft spot anywhere. This world could be seen as a hell. I have no idea what purpose I could possibly serve here and why in the world I am uniquely here, the only of my kind.

I eat fruit. I watch the dark demonic imps down on the red plain. I sing songs to myself trying to remember how they went. And I try to remember the happiness of the past few years.

Now I know there is a life after death for surely I have died. There are "gods". There is magic. And I am stronger than all those around me.

But I am alone. Surrounded only by creatures as different from me as they could possibly be.

I doubt my sanity. Maybe I am a lone crazed hermit. How could it be that I alone am so different?

I found myself laying on the ground looking up at the roof of a cave. Not far to my left there was light from the sunlite world. I was close enough to the entrance that it wasn't really dark. It was slightly cool.

I realized that the sensation of my body was somehow very different. I was almost afraid to understand how but eventually as I became more awake I flexed my hands. There are things we don't notice about how our body feels until it's no longer there to feel. The stretch of my tendons and skin was absent. That stretch I think is a large part of how you tell how your hands are positioned. It was gone yet I could still tell how my hands were and when I was moving them.

In position did anything feel like it was stretching. I could hold any position without any effort. And again, you don't realize the difference here between the usual very very slight effort that one normally feels and no effort at all until you experience it.




Absolutely nothing but a skeleton. No muscle. No sinew. This filled me with terror. Was the afterlife that of a rotting corpse? Yet I could move. I could lift my hands despite no biceps. I could sit up despite no stomach muscles. I dared not feel for eyes. But I could see. I realized I had no tongue. No lips. And this especially distressed me. I could not speak.

But I felt something. Something beyond that of a skeleton. And though I had no lungs I felt some kind of ebb and flow like that of breath. I tried to concentrate on it. It reminded me of the ocean. Something vast and eternal.

I tried to control it and found I couldn't.

o tongue. No lips.And I could feel myself in some sense. I felt something beyond my skeleton.

But having no tongue. No lips. with a bone white ultra tough skin. So tough and hard I thought at first I might be an exoskeleton like an insect or crab. But when I flex my muscles they move beneath my skin. Seemingly very large and strong. My muscles seem are different but they ultimately protrude more than they did in my previous life.


So I capture one. I hide behind some rocks and it runs by coming or going from some errand that I cannot discern. When it's ten feet away I jump up. It sees me and runs. But it hits its top speed in a second. I just keep going faster and faster and snatch it up. It's more a problem of stopping my bulk and changing directions. Takes a second or two. It tries to bite during this time and I see it can't even bite through my tough skin. I think I could crush it with one hand. I take it back to my cave in the cliff and put it in a hole from which it appears it cannot escape. There it scowls at me with a look intelligent malevolence.

"Can you speak?" I rumble in my extremely deep voice. No response. Continues to stare with a look of hatred.

"I'm sorry that I have captured you. I will let you go once we have spoken some. I must know, why are your kind so mean to one another? Why do you torture and eat each other?" I continues to just state with hatred. I think I may start to get annoyed about that.

I throw fruit and edible flowers in the pit. It ignores them. For three days it eats nothing and just states hate. I wonder if it's a carnivore. I will not kill for it.

Here in my cliff care my mood swings greatly from day to day. I watch these little bipedal black creatures do horrible things to one another on the plain and I see how precarious my position is. The trees I eat fruit from barely can support me. I only get liquid from the fruit and it seems to never rain. They must get water from underground I assume. I hope.

I am completely alone.

But my existence has continued after death. And I must admit being the only one like me strangely has made my happy. In life I recall that when young it made me happy that I was different. But that quickly got old. I wonder if this is the same. The only difference being I'm seemingly a lot more different. In life I worried about being fired. Now I worry about a mob of these black creatures attacking me. Not terribly different.

I decide to capture a second black creature and see close up how it interacts with it's fellow. I decide to call them imps. The capture goes just like the first. The new imps look at each other with suspicion for a moment but then both just return to looking at me.

Did the tunnel to Morgantown in 99 minutes and 30 seconds. First time in top gear. Thinking to maybe just go to Star City though. Which would make it 26 miles. Just a hybrid almost mountain bike.

No soreness at all. The lack of eccentric motion is nice. Doesn't wear me out as much and definitely is better for tennis.

The Land Across by Gene Wolfe.
Guy goes to some dictatorial slavic country to write a travel book and gets his passport taken away from him and forced to live with a couple as a "prisoner". Every woman in the book is decent looking and sleeps with him, which is a sort of fantasy fiction. Too much intrigue to bother trying to follow. Really not possible to follow actually. Was interesting enough to keep my attention but not a great writing by any means. Not his best book. So much of what Wolfe writes is a bit overly whimsical. Like there are no rules to world. Things just randomly wander off in directions at a moments notice.

But at least it had a plot. Borges just goes on a bit longwinded without a plot at all. Here and there Wolfe has written some excellent stuff.

Tlon, Uqbar... by Borges. Went on a bit much about the philosophy of this imaginary world. It could be said it's far less true of Borges than others but it's still true that you have an idea and you pad it severely. And in this case with spin-offs from useless establishment philosophy. Or not. It may be going over my head.

The idea of the fictitious creation affecting our own world is a nice idea I've very much had on my own. If only I believed it.