It's hard to write about the world when everyone agrees things are going to get much worse before long. I'm trying not to lose hope, but I'm faltering fast. I've reached the point where all I'm doing is waiting for the bad things to happen, so I know what I have to deal with. 

    Well, Elon Musk now officially owns Twitter. I don't think he's very happy about that, given his behavior over the past few months. I won't pretend that I have high hopes for Twitter's future, but with any luck the site will fall apart so badly so quickly he'll have no choice but to sell it on to somebody else. 

   My personal plans are to stay until it looks like it isn't safe anymore, then bail. 

A Break in Reality

    "What do you mean there's a break in reality?!" I yell. 

   My assistant shrinks back. "That's what the report says." She tells me. 

   "Get me the Sorcerer, Now." I bark.

   "She's too young." Comes the reply.

   "Between her innocence and Estellia's safety, I choose Estellia. Bring her to me now." I say.

   She scurries off. But she comes back an hour later without the Sorcerer. "She's… busy." is all I can get out of her. I keep pushing, all the way until the end of the week, but I can't get any sense from her. 

 

   "What is your problem James?" Emily asks me late one afternoon. We're at Dream tower for a meeting regarding the rumors swirling about. Right now, that's the last thing on my mind.

    "The problem is that there's a break in reality and I can't get it fixed." I scream. I wish I wasn't required to be restrained, else I'd bang the desk I'm sitting at. It's an old desk, a relic from the days when this tower was first built. Emily looks over at me from a different desk. It's smaller than mine, but much newer, painted with little figures of sprites. A fitting desk for a Fairy princess. 

    "Have you inspected it?" 

    "Of course I did. Do you honestly think I'd be so incompetent as to not have it inspected as soon as possible? Protocol dictates that I make sure it can't spread."

  "Then why can't you fix it?" she asks, sounding annoyed. 

  "Because protocol also dictates that I can't fix it without the Sorcerers help."

  "There are thousands of Sorcerers. Pick one and fill out the paperwork so that this won't be a problem anymore."

  I turn to her. How can you be so stupid, I think. "I can't pick any sorcerer I want to Emily. It needs to be the God of the Sorcerer's realm."

  "The one that died a little over Fifteen years ago? The one that's too young to help you, according to the laws? The one that the Sorcerers have to keep secret until their twenty-first birthday?"

   "This is an emergency." I scream, "I have to get this fixed now."

   "It seems to me that you either have to ask a lesser Nightmare for help or wait another six years. Unless you just want to rip the world apart now and get it over with."

   "I'm not allowed to ask a lesser Nightmare for help, not unless the Humans think that there's a major threat to them."

    "Well why didn't you say so in the first place? Am I not one of the race of Illusionists? I'll whip up a proper emergency and then you'll have what you need to fix this by sundown tomorrow."

   "How?" I ask.

   "If I told you, you'd have to stop me. Just wait until the panic starts, then you can handle the rest."

    Something tells me it won't be as simple as she says it is. But I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try. I look down at my stack of papers for the next agenda item. It's about the human. Of course it's about the human. Things have been so quiet for so long that a human who can hurt us is terrifying. There used to be a lot of them, or at least that's what I've been told. 

   "When are we going to get rid of this human once and for all?" I ask, thinking about my run in with her.

   "In due time. It's not like she's capable of destroying Estellia, after all." Emily says. 

   I wouldn't call this anything close to a professional blog, but it still feels weird to dedicate my life to writing the way that I have. 

The Helper

    I must be the least popular person in the Heartland, human or Nightmare. People like me well enough, but mostly because they respect my mother. A woman who runs the local temple because she stayed when her sisters left, even though she went to University. She praises our town in public, but in private wishes she could have a do-over so she could move to the Monster Capital. Instead she got our family estate, began her own hair salon, and had three children with a man who got her pregnant by accident when she was still going to University. 

    To this day she still isn't married, even though she had me and Dad move in with her when Grandma moved to the city to stay close to my Aunt Abigail. 

   Considering the fact that I'm a bastard, you'd think that I'd find it easy to be evil. I don't. I hate like pranking people, don't like making people angry, and I have a lot of power to use for making charms and spells for people. I don't want to spend my life as a fairy or, gods forbid, a sorcerer, but I wonder if I'll have any say in the matter. I guess I should be grateful I have a demon. 

    

    I spend every afternoon after school working for my mother or one of her colleagues. Since the Heartland is in Monsterland, we naturally have an evil cult that's supposed to be a secret. So of course everyone in town, and a lot of the people outside town, know about it. They don't worship anything, just gather for tea every Sunday and discuss the next human sacrifice they're planning. We're monsters, of course we sacrifice infants. I don't see why humans think it's disturbing for the most evil people in Estellia to kill infants, especially when they don't give them the time of day either. After all, all the infants my mother sacrifices are ethically sourced from our local foster care system. 

   I'm not involved in any of the sacrifices. I don't have any ethical qualms, I just can't stand the sight of blood. I just help with the cleanup and the set up. The rest of the time I'm helping people set up spells, clean their homes, and settle disputes between us and rival cults. Before you ask, no we don’t compete for sacrificial infants. There's way more than enough for everyone. There was a very memorable incident where no one could find any office chairs though. I don't think I'll forget the battle that ensued, no matter how long I'm alive. 

   The cult members think I'm trying to win over my mother so she'll let me keep more of my power. I let them think that, because it's the only way anyone will ever think I'm capable of doing anything evil. The truth is I'm terrible at making friends and no one wants to hang out with me. I know I could just go home and do homework, but then I'd be bored so I help out instead. When the cult doesn't need me, I help the mayor out. When the mayor runs out of things to do, I look for businesses to help out. I'm always helping other people, so that I'll never need anyone to help me. 

  

    My brother and sister are much better at this then I am. They're much better at channeling power, tormenting others, and holding the crowds attention. My sister even did a skit for the crowd at our temple once. We do that a lot, since the humans have been spreading rumors that our God was reborn in the valley. 

   My mother says they're right. Andrew, my brother, and Jennifer, my sister, both hope that it's true. I know it isn't. I haven't told her, but all of the incidents line up to moments I lost control of my demon. I try to stop them from placating the God, who I know isn't paying attention to us, when I know it's all my fault. I don't seem to be able to win though. 

   "Why do you want us to suffer?" Jenny keeps asking me.

   I don't know what to tell her. I, the eldest daughter, the one who should be powerful enough to inherit the valley when my mother dies or moves away. Instead I'm too weak to control my worst impulses, and I run away from home so much that, as my mother reminds me constantly, I'm doom to awaken our God for real and cause them to rampage and destroy our home. 

   I want to be the one our family can rely on, who can protect our home from anything, but I can't be that person. With each passing day I feel less and less like a person who anyone can depend on at all.

   I need help. 

A Learning Experience

    Every day I spend working on this blog is a learning experience. Yesterday, for example, I ran into a weird glitch where Google flagged my blog as dangerous. I couldn't find anything that could be the issue, but luckily it resolved on its own. The most important thing I learned from this experience is that I really need to brush up on website building, even though I don't feel like the main point of this blog will be to advertise my web design skills. I really need to learn more about what goes on in the back end, so that in case anything does go wrong I know how to fix it.  For now, I'm just grateful that I didn't need to fix anything. 

I Want the Impossible (do-over)

 All I want 
Is to save the world,
To solve the tangled mass
Of issues 
Woven by the greedy,
Thoughtless
And cruel. 

All I want 
Is to matter,
To become someone 
People love
No matter what.

All I want 
Is certainty.

All I see
Is a problem much bigger
Then anyone else sees,
Then anyone is able to acknowledge.

All I see
Is a world based on an idea
That stopped working long ago.

I see a world
Built on a massive problem 
That no one can fix.
A world
That dooms us 
To look down
Into the abyss,
To be swallowed by sadness
And grief. 

All I want
Is to be happy.
All I want
Is the impossible. 

All I want
Is to be free,
Free of a world that
Demands too much
But never gives you anything.

All I want 
Is to be a force
For good so strong
Nobody can stop me 

from getting what I want.

All I want 
Is for people to see
What I really am.
Something that strikes
Fear into everyone's hearts,
Changing who they are forever.

All I want
Is to be unstoppable,
For the ones who claim
That everything exists to serve them
To crumble 
The moment they hear my name. 

All I want
Is to be followed
By those who know me,
Respect me,
Fear me. 

All I want
Is to have more power than
Anyone else has ever had
In the history of our planet.

All I want 
Is to be more powerful
Then the world itself.

All I want 
Is to be heard.
All I want 
Is the impossible.  

    I'm releasing a poem I already released tomorrow. I came up with a bunch of stuff that I wanted to add to it, so I did and then reposted it. It's times like these I'm grateful for not being a professional blogger. 

Our Life's Story

     I've heard it said, time and time again, that someday you'll realize you were only ever meant to be a bit character in someone else's life. As a writer, I have to disagree with that sentiment. You're the protagonist of your story, the one deciding who you were meant to be and what you were meant to do. The issue is that everyone else is also trying to tell their own stories, and the plotlines do always line up. I want to be a famous author, but someone else may not like the future that results. If I buy something at the store, it means that someone else, who may have wanted it even more than I did, won't have it. All of us are shaping, and being shaped by, our world. It's the reason we can't always get what we want.

    But I don't think there's a reason we couldn't all be happy. 

Undoing Mistakes

    They're looking for the lost officers. The ones that were in the van when they tried to take me. The van that rolled over. They're dead, but nobody seems to know that. I can't stand seeing their faces everywhere I go, on building walls and in windows. Their dead, but I wish they weren't. 

   I wonder, if Estellia is connected to the Dreamworld, does that mean that I could undo their deaths? Could I go lucid when I'm awake? I've never tried, no one says it's possible, but then Nightmares want us to think that Lucidity is impossible in general. 

   I focus. In my mind I picture the city just like it is now, but without posters. Their faces aren't anywhere. Because they're not dead.

   I consider removing my face, but then I realize that in order for that to work I would have had to not defeat the Shadow God. That would mean the law against homelessness would still be in effect. I don't want that, and if things get too dicey I can flee to the temple. So I let my face stay. 

   Satisfied with what I see, I open my eyes. To my surprise I see one of the lost officers I killed approaching me. He doesn't seem to recognize me.

  "Move along." He says.