I ended up world-building for quite a long time. How long, precisely, I wasn’t entirely sure. I’d sort of lost track of time pretty darn quickly—I was that distracted.

Still, I did enough world-building to come away wiser from the experience. I’d made two enlightening discoveries.

Discovery Number One: Yeah, when done with the right tools and an eye for organization, world-building could be really fun!

Discovery Number Two: World-building was horrible. I don’t understand how anyone could ever do it. It was horrible. I was horrible. Everything was horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible! The sheer toil involved made working on my (still-unfinished) Clarinet Sonata seem almost effortless by comparison.

You have to understand, with a piece of music, it was ultimately all about sound. Which chords? Which progressions? Which notes? It was a limited universe of choices.

But this? World-building?

This was madness.

The sheer number of available dimensions of creativity was like catnip for my indecisive soul. Poisoned catnip.

My descent into madness began with a literal descent, when I made the fateful decision to enter Lantor for myself, to build it first hand, rather than from the god’s-eye-view up above. Granted, I could have made myself many miles tall and continued creating that way, wading through Lantor’s oceans like they were the shallow end of a swimming pool, but that would have defeated the purpose of shrinking down to see my world. You see, the reason why I’d decided to shrink myself down to human scale was because of my newfound obsession: my race of anthro-pangolin people.

I would forever rue this day, the day I’d made the off-hand suggestion of adding anthro-pangolins to Lantor.

So, after declaring my pangolin people would exist, the first order of business was building a city for them. I managed to come up with something after about an hour, though Andalon certainly hadn’t enjoyed waiting in silence while I’d been mulling it over.

I named it Nogdu. (Rhymes with dog poo.) Enough ideas had percolated into me while struggling to name the city that I was able to set up quite a few details without too much of a struggle. It lulled me into a comfy place where I thought everything would be easy and straightforward. But that was just what my indecisiveness wanted me to think.

In real life, pangolins were either crepuscular (active at dusk) or outright nocturnal, and they chose to live either up in the trees, or in burrows they dug underground. So, that meant either a tree city or an underground city. Although my first impulse had been to make Nogdu a tree city, I couldn’t escape my hideous conviction that those were overused, so, instead, I went for an underground city. But not “dwarvish” underground—not treasure and mountain-deeps and mines and stone, but dirt, mud, mushrooms, and earthen mounds.

Recalling the earth-mound cities of prehistoric Polovia, I began construction of Nogdu by digging a network of tunnels a couple feet under the earth. I then reinforced these by amassing dirt above them in mounds and domes. Simple right?

Wrong.

I couldn’t cross from one end of a grotto to another without succumbing to the impulse to fiddle with the tunnel network, altering it, expanding it, the works. As for the architecture of the city’s buildings, by some miracle, I managed to settle on kiln-baked mudbrick, but that was as far as I got. I was the tergiversator extraordinaire. constantly vacillating between doing them in the northern Maikokan pueblo style with the structures encrusting on the walls like barnacles, and having them be free-standing, like the ruins of Old Bazkatla—the southern Maikokan style.

So, this was actually more emotional for me than you might gather from these details, and that’s because of the memories it drudged up.

To make a long story short, back when Jules and Rale were still in elementary school, they’d gotten one of those “make a model” projects for the World History unit of their class—the kind of project that really was just an excuse for the parents to compete amongst one another to see who could produce the coolest thing for their kid’s presentation.

Merritt had invited us over for cherry casserole, and we’d happened to watch this amazing documentary about Maikokan architecture through the ages, and, one thing led to another, and with the help of the Elbocks’ kids (then in their first year of high school), it became a big, two-household project and a joy for everyone involved.

Because of this, the frustration I had in working on Nogdu served as a painful, unwanted reminder of just how much I’d lost. My plan to build the city fell apart, just like my life had.

Just like my world had.

The end result? Nogdu’s streets were a stylistic hodgepodge that felt wronger and wronger every time I looked at it, but I didn’t have the heart to tear it down and start again—I’d already done that, and didn’t want to do it a third time. To make matters worse, the experience wasn’t a complete wash: I did really like the idea I came up with for the city’s light sources: bioluminescent shelf-fungi. These were cultivated by Pangol agronomists, and lit Nogdu a dreamy mix of eerie green and comforting yellow lights.

Yes. Pangol. Unable to come up with a satisfying name for my pangolin people, I forced myself to settle with Pangol as their species-name; plural, Pangoli. Rhymes with goalie.

But my troubles didn’t end there. Oh no.

The problem with world-building is that there’s always another can of wyrms waiting to be opened.

City-building was my first can.

The second can involved tie-ins to the Precursors, because of course, I had to have a tie in.

Maybe it was just a reflection of my mood, but I ended up fixating on the idea that the Precursors had attained a god-like level of civilization, only for them to mysteriously vanish, leaving only the ruins of their bygone glory. In particular, I wanted Lantor to be sprinkled all over with Precursor relics: buildings, machines, tools, magical experiments gone horribly wrong, yadda yadda yadda. They’d cause myriads of mischief, both good and bad.

But how did this connect to the Pangoli, you ask?

Well, I’d gotten it stuck in my head that the idea that Nogdu had a Precursor relic which could produce bionic replacements for body parts. From there, I gave them techomages—basically, electrical engineers who double-majored in sorcery, with a minor in druidism. But this caused a clash of themes.

One of the sad truths of the human imagination is that we are hardwired to think in terms of stereotypes. Straightforward thematic choices (sci-fi sky pirates living on airships in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant; tribal, polar bear shapeshifters in a icy tundra setting struggling under the colonial imperialism of an oppressive, technological regime; biopunk nomads and moisture farmers struggling to survive in an inhospitable desert world, etc.) end up being more memorable, accessible, and enjoyable than deeper, more complex or conceptually diverse creations. We just can’t fit it all in our heads, and when that happens, we, unfortunately, tune out.

On the one hand, I wanted Nogdu to have some of a “secret village of the fairies in the middle of the grove” aesthetic: pristine, eremitic, organic, and fey. But the Precursor relic idea was in conflict with that, as did the cyberpunk influences that it entailed. I wanted anthro-pangolins with tank treads instead of legs, or multi-tool bionic arms that could serve as drills, laser saws and everything in between. Hoping to explain it, I’d tried coming up with some historical figures who’d come back from a quest one day with the Precursor relic in tow, introducing it to Nogdu for the first time, which then caused a schism among the Pangoli, splitting them into factions based on their attitudes toward the Precursor relic and the body augmentations it brought. This led to a flirtation with making family trees, and, from there, one thing led to another, add a dash of forbidden romance, and, well…

Once more, I looked over my shoulder, while baring my naked butt to Andalon.

Yes, I’m aware this probably looks bad, but… I can explain. Just hold on.

“What about this?”

I watched Andalon’s eyes narrow as she intently scrutinized my backside.

Since I wasn’t wearing any clothes at the moment, for both our sakes, I’d edited out both my genitals and my intergluteal cleft for the duration of this, my latest sub-sub-sub-subproject.

Andalon and I were currently in the foyer of one of the free-standing adobe townhouses in the largest of the Nogdu’s many domed grottos. Having been unable to make up my mind about what the furnishings were like, and not wanting to waste any more time sifting through the Creation menu’s randomly generated suggestions, I copy pasted the set-up from my mind-office, reproducing my mahogany desk, manga bookshelves, swiveling recliner, and even the antique ceiling lights inside the mud-brick townhouse’s walls. Andalon sat comfortably in the chair on the “patient” side of my desk, flicking her dainty legs at her nightgown’s dangling hem.

The reason I was naked in front of Andalon, asking for her opinions?

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Human-Pangol hybrids.

As I said, my working idea was that, long ago, a Pangol hero had gone on an adventure and brought back the Precursor relic, bringing powerful magitech to his people and triggering sectionalism and war among the Pangoli. After spending a while fiddling with the hero’s life story, the one idea that I felt confident in was that the—as of yet unnamed—Pangol hero had fallen in love with one of his adventure companions, a female human cleric of Insert-Deity-I-Had-Yet-To-Invent-Here, and that, through the relic’s magic, they’d been able to conceive a child together, the first Human-Pangol hybrid—tentative race name: Half-Pangol.

This brings me to my current crisis: for the life of me, I just couldn’t figure out what Half-Pangol looked like, and it was driving me up the wall. The streets of the Great Grotto of Nogdu were filled with examples of my early drafts of the hybrid species’ appearance. Though the army of stoic, un-moving bodies, with their odd, bric-a-brac looks, were a source of great amusement for Andalon, they’d deeply disturbed the handful of living, fully-functional Pangol townsfolk I’d set free in the great Pangol city. As a result, to avoid the dispiriting sight of my own creations cowering in terror at the Half-Pagnol horrors I was drafting up, I’d decided to use myself as the test model, and so, I’d retreated into an unoccupied home and starting changing my appearance, to try out different Half-Pangol looks, assisted by a large mirror and Andalon’s feedback. For something like this, I needed the frankness of a child to help me get out of this rut. At least, I was pretty sure I did.

I turned myself all the way around.

“How does it look?” I asked.

Andalon pursed her lips thoughtfully for a moment, and then tilted her head to the side, bringing her fingers to her mouth in a contemplative gesture. Eventually, she rendered her judgment. “It could be more wyrmeh,” she said.

I ran my clawed fingers through my hair. “What does that even mean, Andalon?” I grunted in frustration, and turned away before she could answer.

Crossing my arms, I looked myself over in the mirror once more, while Andalon resumed amusing herself by spinning the chair’s swiveling seat around and around.

The situation wasn’t completely hopeless. It was a relatively easy decision to give Half-Pangol human faces rather than anthro-pangolin faces. Over time, a couple other variables of the hybrid species’ appearance got pinned down as well. Pangolin scales covered most of my body’s dorsal surfaces, such as the back, the sides of the torso, the tops of my hands and feet, the top and outer sides of my arms, my shoulders, and the front sides of my legs and thighs. I also put scales on my chest and stomach. After several iterations, and spending some time scrutinizing some real pangolins that I conjured into being—much to Andalon’s delight—I’d decided to split the difference keep have thick body hair—like sparse pangolin fur—on the undersides of the legs, and backs of the feet, with patches of unscaled skin on the undersides of the knees. Crotch, chest, inner thighs, underarms, and the side of the arms opposite the elbows—those all got human skin. I’d also put scales on the sides of the neck and head, leaving the front of the neck bare. The ears were also smaller than in humans.

So far so good, right? Sadly, the worst had yet to come: the tail. That was the real troublemaker. I kept adjusting its specifications. Too long? Not long enough? Too thick? Not thick enough? It got so bad that, at one point, I plum lost confidence in my design for purebred Pangoli’s tails, and started messing with those all over again.

Ugh.

I scratched the scaly side of my head with the tip of my prehensile tail while grumbling in irritation.

“Mr. Genneth…” Andalon said, “is something wrong?”

I let my arms go slack at my sides and tail unspool on the floor behind me as I let out a long, haggard sigh.

I turned to face Andalon.

“Yes,” I said, morosely, “something is wrong.” I shook my head. “No, not just something. Someone.” I tapped a claw on my slightly furry chest. “Me.” I hung my head in dejection.

In an attempt to make progress, I’d come up with the “brilliant” idea of jumping to some other task whenever I got stuck with the task at hand. Not only did this stratagem fail to resolve my problems, it made them proliferate. My frustrations bred like rabbits.

Over the past few hours (days? who knows?), the high spirits with which I’d begun my Lantor project had gone away like water at low tide, and like the tide, as my excitement had receded, it had exposed the morass hidden beneath the waters.

Guilt. Impotence. Resentment.

Walking over to the swiveling recliner behind my desk, I willed away my half-pangol appearance. Fur, scales, and tail peeled off me like butterflies taking wing. In mere moments, I was myself again—well, my human self—clothes and all.

I groaned in defeat as I sank into the recliner. Leaning forward, I propped my elbows on the top of the desk and clasped my hands on either side of my head.

“What am I doing?” I asked.

“Trying to make the halfy-pangs?” Andalon suggested. She scooted her chair a little closer to the desk, rolling it forward along the smooth, hardened clay floor.

“It was a rhetorical question,” I muttered. “Look at me,” I said, pointing at myself, “I’m in here, trying to play god. No,” I shook my head, “not just trying, I am playing god—and doing a cruddy job at it.”

I was a terrible deity, oscillating between blitheness and indecisive, scatterbrained, incompetence, seemingly at the drop of a hat.

I turned to the side, but then looked askance at Andalon. For good measure, I made the Bond-sign before asking my question.

“How did you do it, Andalon?” I asked.

“Did what?” she asked.

“How did the Godhead make the world? If They could have made our world without evil, why didn’t They? Does evil have to exist in order for there to be free will? Can’t you find a way around that?” I shook my head again. “In here, where I’m god, I can do anything. I can even make triangles with more than three sides. Look!”

Waving my hands, I made several triangles appear, with 4, 5, and 2.7 sides, respectively. They looked awfully strange, but that was beside the point.

Or was it?

I banished them with another wave of my hand.

I crossed my arms on the desk. “Was the Godhead not powerful enough? Was this just the best They could do,” I asked, “and now, all the mistakes are rising to the surface? Maybe the Moonlight Queen weeps not because Her Law is broken, but because Her Law wasn’t good enough to keep itself from breaking. Is that it? Did God fail? Was there a disagreement among the Angels, or something—the Shiny Guys, I mean?”

Lass, I thought, that plural would never feel right.

I let the question hang in the air before continuing. “So, yea,” I said, “I’ve gotten a taste of being god, and… I don’t like it. It’s too much work. I—”

“—Yeah,” Andalon said, “I think there was.” She slowly nodded.

“What?”

She looked me in the eyes. “The Shiny Guys didn’t all do the same thing. Some wanted to talk. Other guys wanted to, uh… leave. But then the darkness came, and it was very scary. Some of the Shiny Guys got hurt,” she added, quietly, lowering her head. “They got hurt real bad.”

A shiver ran down my spine. I couldn’t escape the conviction that I’d just gotten a garbled first-hand account of the battle against the chaos that had come before the creation of the world.

I bit my lip. “What am I doing?” I grunted at myself in disgust. “Here I go again, waxing about theology and my own worries while, out in the Thick World, the world is ending.”

Andalon stared at me. “I…” Her shoulders slumped. “I don’t get it, Mr. Genneth.” She shook her head. “It’s too compylicated for me.”

“Is it?” I asked. I sighed. “Look at me,” I pointed at a wall, “while the real world is ending—the world out there, the one with other people in it, real people, I,” I gestured at myself, “I’m in here, wasting time trying to make a perfect world to prove to myself that God can be good.”

I thumped my fist on the desk.

Andalon flinched.

“No! I’m doing it again!” I cried. Tears gathered at the corners of my eyes. “This is the part where Pel and Jules are supposed to call me up and tell me that I’m trying to run away from my problems by immersing myself in a project, and… you know what? They’re right. I’m scared, and I’m useless when I get scared, because I’m not strong enough to look trouble in the eye. I’m running away from problems, just like I ran away from troubles at home by losing myself in my work.Writing research papers. Spending more time with patients than could be rationally justified. Wasting my time with a Clarinet Sonata that I’ll never finish, because if I can finish it, it means I’ll be able to move past my grief, and I’m not strong enough to do that, so my subconscious keeps self-sabotaging my efforts.”

I wiped away a tear.

“You know, all this time, while I’ve been fiddling with Lantor, part of me’s been thinking: what if I just stay in here for the rest of my life?”

I really had been thinking about it. I’d had the thoughts on the back-burner. In that respect, I ought to have been thankful for my frustrations; they kept me from making the plunge.

“I could live out an eternity in here,” I said, “a trillion lifetimes, in between two ticks of a second.” I scoffed in self-loathing. “Maybe, by then I’ll have finally lost my mind. I won’t need to worry about Hell or the dead or multiple fudging Angels if I was too crazy to form a coherent thought.” I shuddered.

I looked Andalon in the eyes. “I want to do something meaningful, Andalon. Something important. But, now… everything’s falling apart. Who cares about what I create if only the dead will be left to enjoy it, and even then, only if I can keep Hell from ripping them away and distorting them into demons? How can I hope to do good and make a difference if I can’t even make myself happy?”

I paused.

“I don’t get it. Mr. Genneth,” Andalon said, shaking her head in dismay. “You were so happy before, and now, you’re…” Her words trailed off.

“I’m scared, Andalon. I’m terrified. Just when I thought I finally understood what was going on, it turns out Angel is Angels! What else have we gotten wrong?”

“I thought you said you believed in Andalon,” she said.

Angel’s Breath, I thought.

I made the Bond-sign, lowering my head in shame. “I do, Andalon, I do. That’s why I’m scared.” My voice broke. “I don’t want to fail you, but… I’m scared that I will. If divinity itself isn’t strong enough and united enough to defeat the darkness, what the heck can I do?” I raised my head enough to look her in the eyes. “Maybe you were right,” I added. “Maybe all we can do is run.”

There was a long quiet before I next spoke.

“Andalon,” I said, in a hushed voice, “I know I’ve asked you this before, but I’m going to ask you again: are you sure that I’m ready for this? Are you sure I’m cut out for these responsibilities?”

She tilted her head to the side. “I dunno,” she said, dolefully.

My head hung even lower.

“But…” she continued.

I raised my head. We locked eyes.

“…you can try, That’s all you can do,” she said. “That’s all Andalon can do, too. It’s all Amplersandalon can do. It’s all anybody can do.”

I exhaled.

“I’m scared to go back out there, Andalon. What if I just make things worse? What if the streak of successes I’ve had with these last few souls was just dumb luck? What if—”

“—You keep trying,” Andalon said. “That’s what I do.”

I managed to tense my quivering lips into a smile. “I think I’ve had enough of a break.” I gulped. “I need to get back to work. I need to rejoin my colleagues.” I shook my head slightly. “It’s not fair to them for me to be in here in a safe-house tucked away in the moments in between their thoughts. I’m still scared though. Still scared.” I smiled slightly. Very, very slightly. “I guess that’s how I know I’m not running away this time.”

“I’m scared too,” Andalon said. She walked around my desk, toward me, and then leaned into my side. “But,” she said, “when I’m with you, Mr. Genneth, it’s not as bad.”

I shivered at her touch, trying not to cry, and doing a bad job of it.

I took several deep breaths, and fidgeted with my bow-tie. “I think I’m ready to go back to the Thick World now,” I said. “But, Andalon?”

She looked up at me. “Yeah?”

“Promise to stay with me. I… I feel better when you’re around. I don’t want to be alone.”

Nodding, she snuggled against me. “Andalon promises.”

Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and focused, and when I opened them, the world was real once more.

I was back in my half-transformed body, sitting on a stool in Ward 13. And, wouldn’t you know it, I had the worst possible timing.

Polyphonic screams shot across the room. Out of the corner of my eyes, through one of the windows, there came a great flash of light, like a second Sun.

Andalon shrieked at the top of her lungs. “Mr. Genneth! It hurts! It hurts!”

The little blue-haired spirit girl trembled like she was being boiled alive as an explosion rumbled in the distance, followed by an even larger burst, even further away.

I walked up to the windows, and then gasped as I saw a mushroom cloud, rising high.