First Reflection:

It could just be an idea. Or a conceit. A concept. A habit. An exercise. A project. A cry for help. Practice. Therapy.

An anxiety being given form so it can be recognized and shelved somewhere.

It's concerned with stories. An attempted demonstration of a flaw somewhere.

We have to assert till the end that it is also the transcribed thoughtwave patterns delivered to an individual, no matter how demonstrably flawed the method is.

There’s no real semblance of a game here. No contest or glory, contrived or otherwise.

We wanted to break a pattern. Feed something into itself. Isolate it over time to render it perfectly alien. Then deliver it back to the world, weaponized with something indigestible, inalterable, to the homogeneous grasp that warps all things.

There’s more than one gravity.

Value itself is gravity.

Consider the dragon’s hoard.

The matter that value operates on is thought. Attention. Our individual thoughts whirl around and fall into familiar orbits: the performer and the audience. The shop and the patron.

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In regards to whatever subversive act was being attempted or described that we receive, I don’t think it can contend with the forces they operate under.

I guess the closest parallel to draw with what a success would have looked like is a black hole. If something is constructed within a set of immutable parameters, then manages to break or surpass those parameters, it cannot properly exist there. It collapses, breaking both itself and the world. And destroys the distinction between them as well.

The break of the pattern just creates a more damaged existence.

We can’t be gods in the world we live in. We can’t manifest our will to correct or create fate.

Glory is a ritual. A prescribed set of actions with a predictable result.

* Liminal Renaissance

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We’re fading in and out now. We’re catching glimpses of grueling travel. Splayed on stretched canvas, being carried.

Trending downward, losing light.

Companions carry you deftly, lightly. We sway but don’t jostle.

The woolings. Fur now matted. Clothing ripped.

We see wounds. Objects pierce their skin. We glimpse around in turn. Each of them with shards of antler protruding from their flesh. A pulsing psychic attention. Sparking motes within drying pastel gray. Grimefoil, even in the blood that dries around their elbows, ribs and under Baskins’ neck.

Whirling shapes with a light no longer familiar. Not a little city now, but a cloud of spinning shapes enshrouding these creatures that carry us so carefully downward.

Fading in and out. But it seems an answer is close.

We go toward the underplate.