CHAPTER VII

I was roused from my first night’s rest in my Shackleburg dormitory by a knock. Morning had already come and I mumbled requests for patience as I tossed on my robe.

“Goodday, K.K.,” Jasper’s voice reached me through the closed door. “I’ve been asked to fetch you before the rest of these wretches leave a fellow comrade behind to starve while others fill their bellies.”

I opened the door to discover Jasper, along with Monroe and Ianto, and others whose names escape me at the immediate moment, but struck me as the decent sort when we met the day prior. I apologized for making them wait and asked they delay for just a moment longer.

CHAPTER VI

Persistence and acceptance were my only charges. To live as my luxurious birthright invited would be a simple task. I would never struggle, nor want for something soft or warm. At their most dire, my sufferings would be petty fixations.

While those who suffered, struggled, and died in my stead down in those mines—for their fathers were not benefactors of good fortune—destroyed beneath the fixed game of destiny, I contemplated why it was this way. What figure fixed the dice? What god of matter and science constructed such a mean and spiteful reality?

But I looked across Platavilla, her earth chewed and churned, and the men that labored in her wicked name. Never given enough to live. Never enough certainty to push away from the trap built by the man who arrived first.

My father came to this place before the others. With a lick of good fortune, he unearthed the silver vein, but before he did that, he killed the Natives for the land. Many hired hands under his employ died as he hunted for the first lode. Again and again he sinned in the name of his pursuit. Until, success. With his claim staked, Heinrich Keyes brought law to this place, and he called it Platavilla. He forgave himself of the necessary sacrifices in achieving good fortune, as if it were a thing one might forge with a hot enough fire.

CHAPTER V

I have on several occasions thus far in my recitation of how I arrived at Shackleburg described the feelings of certainty—that a compulsory force informed my very being. I am, and must be, defiant of my world, or I shall suffer a non-existence. I do not express this credo as an applicable balm for all terrors plaguing each and every human heart. I know I developed these inclinations from beneath a firm roof, with a full belly, and unburdened by threats against my bodily existence. Furthermore, I will posit once more, I am not a great man. In fact, I am a young fool, even to this day. Nevertheless, I am certain I must carry on as a young fool until I am one no longer. If I do not do this, I am not doing anything at all, and if I do not assert that factual foolishness with certainty, then I shall cease in forward momentum and become that which I imagine most childlike idiots often fear—a wordless, repetitive failure.

Will I shrink, in time? Only if I do not grow up and grow out. That is how one becomes a thing that they once were not. To be a thing we weren’t is the best way to be.

CHAPTER IV

Shackleburg University, located in the town of Shackleburg, Colorado, was established in 1861, a mere thirty years prior to my arrival. That was also the same year the United States Congress officially drew the boundaries for what was then the Colorado territory. Records show the school was initially funded by money from the estate of Cirroc Shackleburg, a secessionist from the Vermont colony, who was killed following the seizure of Fort Ticonderoga in May, 1775.

CHAPTER III

My new guide was a wispy young man. He kept his narrow shoulders thrust back in rigid posture and hands fixed in his trouser pockets. His face was a handsome carving, as if God had taken care to use a particularly sharp tool when knocking his features free from the earth’s clay. Nevertheless, he was tall and appeared healthy, in spite of his arctic complexion, no doubt a symptom of living at such an altitude here at Shackleburg. He reached down at last to take up the other handle on my trunk and carried it with me down a side corridor away from the Clock Tower’s main hall.

CHAPTER II

I awoke to an unfamiliar ceiling. Interpreting the room’s light was a steady task for quite some time and proper shapes only arrived when I found my elbows for support, each entangled with bedsheets of strict cornering and stricter starching. The next task was one of comprehension—iron bars contained my bed. There was no space for me to even swing my legs off the mattress. The cage extended from floor to that unfamiliar ceiling and the gaps between the bars offered only meager gaps in the gridwork for me to tease with my fingers. These caged beds rowed the room like a boardinghouse for birds, terminating at an exit and a desk bathed in morning’s light, behind which sat—

“Hello?” I called, alarmed at my voice’s pathetic first shot at contact. I swallowed my mouth’s remaining dryness and tried again. “Hello, can you hear me?”

CHAPTER I

In a moment of crisis that grips most young men, I found myself speeding away on a morning train after a sleepless and bloody night. This is not meant to sound too dramatic. My father came to me with a broom handle in one hand and a belt in the other, yes, but the resulting donnybrook was two men grabbing and tearing at whatever purchase their overzealous fingers might find, hearts awaiting the first knockdown more than true harm.

The argument began with the ink barely dry on my affirmative invitation to attend university. My father, Heinrich, raised a protest. His given reasons were obvious enough to one such as he—I was his son. His life was a chain-lashed continuation of back-bending labor. He pulled a lode of silver straight from the earth’s veins, then erected a business to extract the stuff, then exacted dominion over the surrounding industries that ran, crawled, swam, and died alongside silver mining. Diligence metamorphosed into obsession. “The mine must survive,” was his repeated credo to me, even as a boy overlooking the hole in the earth he made. “The mine must survive, Keziah.”

Even after six, no, maybe seven thousand years, no science, modern or ancient, can yet explain why the same day kept occurring. Over and over, it was the same day. Everyone immediately understood what was happening. You’d wake up. You’d fix breakfast, or brush your teeth, or roll off your futon, and the day would begin. Calendars always read the same date: May 15. The Earth would spin, and the sun would shine where it could, and then it’d set. You’d finish your day and no matter where you lay down your head, or what you did, you’d end up back in the same place at the day’s beginning.

I wrote a piece on this site a few weeks ago discussing what precisely someone should NOT feel pressure to do during this pandemic. Specifically, whatever you think you OUGHT to do, do literally anything else. This remains a time of troubling introspection, both on an individual and global scale. Did you think you'd do your best work when your brain both cannot tell what tomorrow will bring AND the dread of tomorrow being identical to today?

Hence my advice. Now, I've broken my own rules, as if to prove a point that any intentional thing I try to make while in isolation, alone, with my dog, and possibly suffering from a strain of Coronavirus (not sick enough to get tested, painful enough breathing to know I'm not healthy), will not be GOOD. Or maybe it will, when I look back? They don't have a name for the color of the tint in those glasses yet, but they won't name it after a flower, I can fucking guarantee.

What trash have I made? Well, I'll show you.

FOUR | The Eidolon

It was so obvious. The Author had expected him to try to steal a sun. It was the only object in known reality that could accommodate a tithe of that size. The search for the solution had only been momentary. It was a wonderful coincidence that his brief observation of the murals had spurred him in a timely manner. And he had been able to earn Einie’s commitment to help in the process.

“You’re really a sterling human being, Virgil,” Einie said, following.

“Einie, relax. You’re with me, nothing’s gonna happen. Just come along and for a hot minute and you’ll be back to out-classing your peers’ gentle hum of their mediocrity. I mean, this could be fun, you know? Stealing a sun? Kinda neat, right? All the other critters your age will like hearing that story!”

“They think I’m lazy for faking my work quotas. Because you keep hijacking my time! I’m gonna be older than you before I’m allowed to go to the planet, at this rate.”

“Yeah, well, you can fight me on this, Einie, but maybe choose another hill to die on, if you know what I mean? This isn’t a great conflict, as they say. Not a good use of energy? They want to blow up my body for that exact reason. For not pulling my own. Whatever that means. And anyway, if you are indeed the reincarnation of a trans-galactic despot, you’ll probably know how the machinery you’ll rule over really works. C’mon, I docked the Eidolon over here.”