We don’t always know what we’re doing, and that that’s okay; a truer lie was never spoken. The first half was absolutely on point: both individually and at the collective level, people rarely ever knew what they were doing. Life was a hot potato, or perhaps an oiled swine. The lie was in the second half: that not knowing what we were doing was okay. It was not okay, and never would be okay. Civilization itself owed its existence to the fact that not knowing what we were doing wasn’t okay. That was why we grouped together. That was why we worried and wondered. We were haunted by entropy, and every moment of our lives was spent struggling between the passions that kept us holding on and the dispassions that helped us to let go.

That, and screaming.

I’ll admit, destructive rampages were a lot more cathartic when you were a mile tall. Skyscrapers popped up from the mosaic forest below like the proverbial whack-a-mole. I raised them up from the sea-tiled earth with my frustrations and rage. I ripped up spires and swung them around like gnats. I stomped down forests and kicked up mountains and then, bending down, I jammed my fingers into the ground and rolled up and lifted the floor of the world to reveal the darkness that lay beyond. I tore a hole in the world—a bottomless pit—that widened and widened until my visions of gravity won out, and all things fell into the pit’s maw as it grew to infinity. Then I plummeted, and, once again, I was in darkness.

“Mr. Genneth,” Andalon asked, “are you okay?” She was a mote of light in the void. Her brightness rose and fell with her voice’s cadence.

“No,” I huffed, “I’m not.” I took a deep breath, but there was nowhere for it to go.

That was seven hours ago.

Or, well, seven hours in my head. I popped out to check up on my doppelgenneth’s view of things and found that only a couple of minutes had passed since I’d left him in charge to go deal with the Plotskies.

As usual, I’d dealt with my frustrations by escaping into art. Sometimes that meant drinking in an experience; other times, that meant making something with my own two hands. My first world-building experience left a sour taste in my mouth—the taste of failure—so, I tried again, this time without expecting myself to solve any problems other than my own.

The good news was, it was kind of fun. All I needed to do was think intently, and then my will would become reality. The possibilities were as endless as my own imagination. There was freedom in that. I didn’t know what I was doing, but, for once, it was almost okay, because I wasn’t trying to do anything in particular. But then, as I started looking back on what I’d done, I saw my mediocrity for what it was, and a great gray fog swept over my newest world’s callow skies.

We feared death, yes, but our fear of death was nothing compared to our fear of mediocrity. No one sold their soul to the devil for the sake of immortality. They did it to escape mediocrity. Man sought glory, not immortality. If given the choice of an unending life of absolute mediocrity and a brief candle of a life whose brilliance lit the Night, I think most of us would choose the latter. The former would preserve our bodies as a permanent endnote on the pages of eternity. But a brilliant life—with skill, and flair, and poise—that would become the stuff of legends, and with it, the true immortality.

Unfortunately, I’d drawn the short straw. The world I’d made was… very mediocre. My new world was strange, a product of my depression and my indecisiveness. The lack of conviction in my thoughts manifested in the vague, blurry, blobby derpness of everything I’d dreamt up.

This time, instead of a tiled world, this new earth was a knee-high body of fluid—turquoise, because I couldn’t settle on the right shade of blue. It filled the gray expanse from horizon to horizon. The biome, in a word, was clockwood—grandfather and mangrove, respectively. The luxuriant, varnished clocks grew from the endless lagoon in branching, serpentine tangles—the habit of a mangrove forest. The smallest among them would have made for hefty trees out in the real world; the largest had trunks twice the diameter of my house, or more. But where a real mangrove tree would have had knots, nodules, or gnarl-rimmed hollows, the clockwood’s roots, branches, and trunks were adorned with clock faces. They all showed the same time, and made no sound as they counted off the hours.

The clockwoods’ branches bore hanging ornamental pendulums, made from chains of flower petals tie-dyed in violet and yellow. The weights at the pendulums’ ends were gleaming rubies as big as goose’s eggs, yet the pendulums were wholly incorporeal; they passed through all solid matter as they swung. I couldn’t make up my mind as to what the canopy should have looked like, so I let them rise all the way to infinity. It was an arresting sight: swinging pendulums filling the space overhead as the many trunks converged to the vanishing point at the end of the endless sky.

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At first, I’d thought it was kind of neat, but then I realized it was just lazy. I could have added more detail, but I couldn’t make up my mind about what to add, and I’d spend the better part of eternity if I tried to buckle down and force my way through the problem step by step.

I just felt so… detached. Was I really cut out for any of this? How could I fulfill my wyrmly duty of being the afterlife for the ghosts in my mind if I couldn’t help bring them solace, let alone provide them with a decent afterlife.

I didn’t know if the afterlife had a user review option, but, if it did, I could easily imagine the kinds of flames I’d get in the comments:

Dr. Howle made my terrorist daughter hate herself even more, and then turned me into an owlbear. 0/10. Worst eternity ever.

He’s got this weird fixation on Munine cartoons, and also pangolins, for some reason.

Genneth puts on a good enough exterior——his smile is nice and polished——but underneath, he’s just as much of a mess as I am.

I pulled myself away from that line of thought before the density of the bubbles of imaginary reviews popping into place around me spiraled out of control, banishing them with a wave of my hand.

But, yes, pangolins. Pangolins clung to the undersides of the clockwood’s root-branches where they touched closest to the turquoise waters. The pangolins were about the size of lobsters, which put them at the smaller end of their normal size range; I knew this thanks to the wealth of marine biology knowledge present in Ileene’s memories.

Somehow, the mountains I’d rigged up looked even worse than their predecessors. They rose in the fog-shrouded distance looking for all the world like bowls in a kitchen cupboard, stored upside down. Their gently sloped, impossibly smooth sides were dotted with my attempts at dreaming up houses. Those happened to be irregularly clustered cubes whose tops looked like someone had tried to jam them into a pencil sharpener.

I’d also added gryphons; Catamander Brave had them (especially Xicxiss the Wise), so, why not I? They’d started out wonderfully, but then I panicked because I feared I was just copying from memory the ones Mr. Himichi had drawn in his manga, and everything went downhill after that. One of my bad habits was my stubborn insistence on trying to do everything from scratch, and my attempts to make gryphons from first principles ended with my clockwood’s skies being filled with flying bars of carved soap, only instead of looking like gryphons, the car-sized things looked like they’d been eroded by a current, until all but the most general details had been abstracted away.

I found that the more specific my imaginings were, the higher resolution the final product ended up having once it materialized in my mind-world. I could have easily drawn from my now-encyclopedic memory, but I kept on second guessing myself, with the end result being that I turned my left forearm into a bright blue energy chainsaw about two feet wide and five feet long—I’d spent nearly half an hour fudging with the measurements—and then started flying around, slicing many of my creations to ribbons. Making people and houses was especially frustrating; I either had to copy something from memory—in which case, I worried it didn’t feel real—or I had to make them piecemeal, all the way down to choosing the furniture. It was a real hassle, and trying to replicate the streamlined “menu” system Greg had set up in his mind-world ended up becoming a debacle in its own right, ending only when I gave up outright. I had to admit, after what Greg had accomplished, I’d been looking forward to getting to play God.

Nothing like a good old-fashioned power fantasy to escape from the tragedy of human existence, right?

The past few hours had disabused me of my expectations. I think I’d been hoping that, at the very least, I could be a good afterlife-maker, even if I couldn’t bring consolation and healing to the souls that were mine to preside over.

But I was too mediocre even for that. I’d always resented being powerless, yet, with perfect irony, here I was, able to do nearly anything my heart desired, and I was still just as flustered and self-tormented as I was when working on my Clarinet Sonata.

I dissolved my energy chainsaw back into my plain old human arm as I settled onto a nearly horizontal stretch of a clockwood trunk-branch in a landing almost fit for the Angel Himself. I sat down cross-legged on the dark, varnished wood. The fingers on my left hand glowed briefly as the last traces of my energy chainsaw dissolved into motes of light that drifted out of sight.

Looking around, I surveyed my “godly” efforts, begrudgingly copy-pasted from my memories after my attempts to make them from scratch blew up in my face (sometimes literally). The only real upside to this attempt at godhood was that pulling things out of my memories turned out to be relatively easy: I just cut slits in the fabric of space and rummaged around in them, pulling out the memories I desired. Islands of patchy, half-formed buildings were like driftwood, floating in the sky among the floral pendulums and their swaying rubies. And, like driftwood, they were ravaged by cankers and holes, bored into them by incompleteness instead of shipworms. Heggy liked to point out that she was a distant cousin of the guy who’d figured out how to beat the nefarious mollusks at their own game: sheathing the hull of a wooden ship in copper would keep the shipworms from burrowing into the wood.

Heggy…

Folding my legs against myself, I wrapped my arms around my knees and sighed.

Andalon appeared, tugging at my arm, but I waved my hand at her and got her to give me some personal space, which she did by teleporting over to a smaller branch nearby, which was nearly at my eye level. She swung her legs in an adagio tempo as they dangled over the wood’s beveled edge.

“Maybe I should just turn myself in,” I said.