Zachary Roush's Blog, page 3

Realms Reviews Celeritas, a sci-fi audio-drama

Hello and Welcome to Realms Reviews!

Whether you’re new or not, Realms is a fantasy and sci-fi newsletter. As such, I consume tons of sci-fi and fantasy media that I think everyone should know about. In these two genres, I’ll be reviewing books, video games, podcasts, films, and TV shows. 

And just like Realms’ short stories, you’ll get reviews once a month. Never on the same week as a short story. 

And here’s what I offer with my reviews:

A short, spoiler-free summary

My take and thoughts, and why you should add the reviewed media to your list. 

Notable quotes or moments. 

And finally, I’ll give what I review a score 

Speaking of…I’m stealing my scoring system from fighting video games. From best to worst, it goes: Z, S, A, B, C, D. 

That said, this rating system is subjective. Make your own judgments and we can have a great conversation here. Also, I value my time and yours, so I strive to give you short and sweet reviews only on media that is worth our time. 

This month, I’m reviewing Celeritas, a sci-fi audio drama. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before. This is an in-progress review, as the show hasn’t yet completed its first season. There are currently ten episodes available, with an eleventh coming out on December 29th. I’ll post an updated review once it’s complete.

Celeritas In-Progress Podcast ReviewThe Summary 

Celeritas’ premise is simple: Owen, our main character, is sent on a dangerous research mission in space. The mission goes awry, leaving Owen far from home and potentially unable to get back to the family and life he left behind. I won’t say any more. I don’t want to spoil it. 

My Thoughts

You might recognize many sci-fi conventions in this premise, but that’s where the predictability ends. The story unfolds in a very unique way that I don’t feel I’ve seen in other sci-fi narratives (much less an audio-drama). Owen is a well-fleshed out character. You get a very solid grasp on his backstory and motivations, which is something more stories need to be clear about, in general. The other characters in this podcast are also equally fleshed out. Plot-wise, there are wonderful cliffhangers and surprises, making each episode a delight. My favorite audio dramas have this in common - and I’ll list them below. 

It’s not just the good story that hooked me, it’s also the sound design. It’s rich. It’s detailed. It’s meant to be listened to with the volume way up. If you have hi-fi speakers or sound-canceling headphones, Celeritas will be a treat. When Owen is walking or taking action in the world, you’ll feel right there with him. When he’s dreaming or having an emotional breakdown, it feels tangible. The voice acting and effects immerse you in the story, which is perfect if you’re listening to this when doing chores - I did a lot of dishes while listening to Celeritas - or if you’re someone who can just sit and listen to podcasts. I will note, here, that the dialogue can be unclear during action-packed sections, which is why I recommend listening at high volume and/or with sound-canceling headphones.

Since this podcast is unfinished, I’m wont to say more about the story and even give it a rating. So let me say that I find this show’s production process fascinating. Celeritas is a project created by a very small team, and unlike many other fiction podcasts, is being created on the fly, episode by episode. Many podcasts are created in their totality and then released, giving them a polished and complete feel. Celeritas instead feels fresh and organic, but is in no way lacking polish. There’s even an online community for it where you can chat with other fans and get updates from the creators as the podcast goes. 

A recent update for the next as-yet-unreleased episode 11 said this: “Writing and recording these final episodes has been emotional. Seven actors, 60 pages of dialogue, and now staring down the barrel of 150 fx and environments for each episode, it feels like it will never get done... but it always gets done.”

That’s a buttload of work for a small team. Just writing and recording my stories and reviews is a ton of work.

So, if you end up listening to this podcast, you’ll have more to listen to as it goes on, and you can join a community of fellow listeners who love it. I’m sure the creators would love a kind word or two. 

To wrap this up, here’s my in-progress score for Celeritas: 

A. An incredible story that is well-worth your time. 

You can find Celeritas on your preferred podcast platform here. Or you can search for it on your podcasting app.

Listen Here

And if you’re looking for more fiction podcasts, here’s a few I recommend: 

We’re Alive - Zombie apocalypse audio-drama. This is a fantastic podcast with a few hundred episodes. Even my mom loves it!

Limetown - Documentary-style audio-drama unpacking the mysterious conspiracy surrounding a fictional place called Limetown.

The Black Tapes - Another documentary-style fiction podcast, this time dealing with the occult. Very creepy. Great for car rides. 

Thank you for listening to this Realms review of Celeritas!

I hope you have a wonderful Holiday season full of good food, good company, and even better stories. 

Until next time, Realm Walkers,

This is Zach and you’re reading Realms.

Kursed Kreatures: The Falling Sky

Hello and welcome to Realms! If you didn’t know, Realms is a sci-fi and fantasy fiction newsletter and podcast. I’m Zach, the writer and reader of this publication. It’s almost the end of the year, so I want to thank you all for reading and listening to Realms - whether you’ve been part of the journey for the last two years or have recently subscribed. 

I never thought I would write so many stories or even put my voice on the internet like this. It’s thanks to you that I do! And there’s over 220 subscribers now! I’m so grateful that you give me your time and ears every month for these strange stories. 

Before we begin today, I want to talk about my first-ever novel that’s coming out on Christmas day on Amazon. It’s called Kursed Kreatures.

Buy or Pre-order Here

It’s a young adult fantasy novel in a medieval world where all the characters are walking, talking, animals. I like to think of it as a spiritual successor to the Redwall series. This is how I pitch it: When hare siblings Rabbs and Tams lose everything after making a dark deal with an evil god, they set out to find atonement, but what they discover is a world threatened to be destroyed by the god they bargained with. 

I wrote this novel for all ages, but teens thirteen to fifteen will likely enjoy it the most. 

I’ve been working on this novel since 2018. I love it. It’s really good. And to prove it, today’s short story is actually the first chapter from my novel. 

Without further ado, here’s Chapter 1, The Falling Sky, from my novel, Kursed Kreatures.

amazing cover by my friend Torrey Ratay-BrownThe Falling Sky

The day that my life went all wrong, I was with the one person who made everything better and worse at the same time. My sister, Tamia Hareson. 

We were a fine pair of young, inseparable hare siblings. Her fur the color of rich clay. Mine white as eyes, but with black speckles. That day was hotter than a smithy’s oven. I glanced at the clear, simmering sky and twitched my ears forward to cover my head. I flicked sweat off my paws and shifted the strap attached to the full picnic basket. 

“I hate that we gotta go to the very edge of town just to bring the old tortoise his lunch,” I said and adjusted the strap again, unable to get it to sit comfortably. “Let’s take a dip in the river after this.”

Tamia, or Tams, as everyone called her, said, “You know, one of these times we’re going to walk up there and find him dead. He’s older than the oldest turd in Brambleton.”

“You sound like you want to find him dead.” I groaned and dropped the basket. “Mind helping me out?”

“Seems like you got it, Rabbscalion Hareson!”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have covered for you,” I grumbled. I wondered when I’d learn not to take the heat for anyone, not even my sister or my best raccoon friend, Chester. But in our small town, there wasn’t much else to do, besides work the fields or fix up old buildings or make trouble. One can only do chores so often.

She said, “Kin before sin, Rabbs. And if you told the Council, I’d cook you up.”

I replied, “I’d make a fine hare stew. Don’t you reckon?”

“Keep your cannibalism to yourself. Don’t want Old Sage to confuse you with lunch, he’s confused enough as it is.” 

We hiked up a path worn into the vegetation, and before long, emerged into a clearing. The tall grass waved in the wind like ripples in a pond. A staggered line of trees hushed the space with shifting leaves. I’d been here every day for the last month and still thought it was the most peaceful place around. 

Until that day, that is.

Tams stopped and put her paws to her hips, looking around. “Where’s Old Sage? And what’s that thing up there?” Old Sage was nowhere to be found, and the object Tams pointed at looked like a giant shining boulder. She took off at a run, suddenly, not taking two seconds to observe before rushing in. Typical. 

I dropped the basket and ran to catch up.

Tams said, “He was here. There’s his journal.” She pointed at the brown tome standing out from the green grass, right next to the boulder-thing, shining because it reflected sunlight like a mirror. The object’s edges dripped with red and so, too, the journal. I picked it up and got the red stuff all over my paws, slightly warm and sticky. I wiped it off on the grass.

Tams knelt beside the mirror thing and dipped a paw in the red. “Rabbs, I think this is Old Sage.”

“What?” I looked at my red-stained paw. “Blood?” 

An insane idea hit my hare brain. The mirror-rock-thing had fallen from a great height, so heavy and fast that it squished Old Sage. I stared open-snouted at my paw in horror. Then, I reacted the normal way one reacts to touching the remains of a kreature one knows. I threw up. Tams merely grimaced as that day’s breakfast spewed out of me. Toast with carrot marmalade. It had been tasty going in.

As I retched, she squatted beside the mirror thing and muttered to herself. She picked up the journal, the bloody mess not having any effect on her, and opened it.

“He was writing something down when that thing fell on him. I need you to read it.”

I spat and replied, “Gods, wipe it off at least.” When she’d done so, I cleared my throat, “The trees are lovely today. Not a lick of the kurse on them, unlike everything else. Oh, lovely, lovely day, the kurse is on its way. But no! Don’t tell anyone. Golden and Mister Missus both said they’d save us. We’ll die if they don’t! Foxed if we do. Foxed if we don’t. Haha! And it cuts off right there. Crazy old reptile. He journals like he talks.” 

Tams looked up. “It crushed him mid-thought, before he could croak his last.”

“I don’t think tortoisekind croak,” I said.

“Did you notice that hole in the sky?”

“What?” I looked up to see darkness in the middle of the bright sunny day. An actual hole in the sky. It had the same jagged shape as the thing that killed Old Sage. At the hole’s edges spread fractures, cracks in the heavens. Those cracks were spreading as we looked on. I watched as the air around the hole rippled like heat waves on a cobblestone road, distorting the clouds and the sun, as if the whole dome of the sky was breaking down. My jaw dropped. 

She said, “Rabbs, we’re the only ones who know this has happened.”

“And?” 

“We’ve got to do something.”

“How about we go back to our day and go take a dip in the river like we planned? Maybe even eat the picnic that Old Sage is clearly not hungry for.”

There came a look, a hard look. 

I held my paws up. “Joking! But what can we do? All we know is that this thing killed Old Sage…we don’t know why or how. All we have is a journal full of that tortoise’s muddled thoughts.”

“He said a kurse is on its way. He mentioned Golden and Mister Missus.”

“Like…Golden the Younger from the stories? And Mister Missus, that old toad?”

She nodded her head, ears shifting like grass. “Exactly. Flip through his journal more. See if he mentions anything else about this kurse.”

Rifling through those old, dry pages, I found that every entry mentioned the kurse. It wasn’t a fluke. He’d journaled about it every day for years. Could this broken sky be part of it? And how come this was the first time we were hearing about it? As I flicked through the journal, I noticed a loose paper near the front. It was a crumbling old note. I read it aloud:

You’ve found my body by now, no doubt. I couldn’t take living this way anymore, knowing that we exist in a mirage. I’ve put the remainder of my soul into the ring, in case you muster the strength to end the kurse. You’ll find it in my study. I thought I could finally break it this time. I failed. Please, cremate my body. Don’t fuss around with a burial.

Thank you for your friendship.

Golden the Younger

“Looks like Old Sage was hiding something,” Tams said. “And now I think we oughta pay Mister Missus a visit.”

We had stumbled onto an enormous secret. Something hidden from us that was just now coming to light, like discovering a deep, dark cave right behind the den you’ve lived in your whole life. 

I said, “Shouldn’t we, like, say something? For Old Sage?”

Tams gestured at the huge sky piece over his remains, and then the hole in the sky, the cracks spreading as we stood there. It looked like another piece was going to break off soon. We hadn’t time for pleasantries.

“What about lunch?” I half-joked, looking at the picnic basket. 

She started off at a sprint and called back, “You’re welcome to bring it with us!”

I sighed. Wasn’t any way I was going to carry that thing while running. I clung to the journal and took off. I was always chasing after Tams. Never the one in the lead. Before leaving that clearing, I sent one last kind thought to the smashed tortoise: Rest in peace, Old Sage. Rest in peace.

We jumped over bushes and weaved through trees, avoiding poison ferns and thorny vines.

I asked, “Are we gonna tell anyone? Pa? Ma? The Council?”

“Not yet. We don’t really know anything.” 

“But if the sky keeps breaking, other kreatures are gonna die. If it all breaks, then we’ll all die. Wait, do you think the entire sky’s going to come down?” Fear climbed up my spine and my fur stood on end.

Tams replied, “Think about how much time we’ll lose if we run to town, try to get kreatures to look at what happened to Old Sage, and then… No. All of that would take forever.” 

As we ran, I glanced at the sky, watching and waiting for more pieces to break off. My sister never looked back.

We burst out of the dense forest and onto the road that paralleled the Brambleton River and downtown. There were a few kreatures about, pointing and looking at the sky, ignoring us as we sprinted by. Even the crotchety old busybodies didn’t yell at us to slow down. 

Screams erupted around us. I looked back to see another mirror-like shard break away from the original hole, this piece many times larger than the one that liquified Old Sage. It tumbled and crashed beyond our sight, bringing down trees. I flinched when the sky rumbled deeper, the sound reaching into my bones.

I uttered, “What the fox is happening?”

“It’s getting worse,” Tams said.

“One of us needs to go help Ma and Pa.” 

Exasperated, she replied, “No way. We stay together. If one of us gets in trouble, the other needs to figure out how to stop this.” Tams grabbed my paw and pleaded, “I need you, Rabbs.”

I’d never heard her say such a thing before. These were desperate times indeed.

Smoke rose above the treeline, around the bend from Mister Missus’ home. The toadkind’s hut perched over the edge of Brambleton River on a stilt foundation that kept it from sliding into the water. It was humid there in the depths of the swamp and away from the breezes that cooled the valley. A heavy scent of bacco smoke wafted in the air. Thunder chased us, the sound becoming constant in the background. I forced myself not to look back. We slowed to a walk as we pushed through the gate and into the gardens. 

“Don’t you know the toad?” Tams asked.

“Yeah, I met Mister Missus last year when I helped Pa redo the landscaping. Great pay. Terrible summer.”

“I remember that. What was it you said about him?”

“That he was crazy—”

She interrupted me, “No, you said, ‘out of his foxing mind.’ Did you ever figure out why he’s called Mister Missus?”

I nodded. “Every so often…his personality changes. Sometimes he, or she, is Missus. Sometimes he’s Mister. Don’t know why. It’s probably a toadkind thing.”

“That’s…interesting.”

“That’s why it was such horrible work. The personalities have…differing opinions on decor.”

The white gravel path meandered through the manicured garden, full of life. Royal Rosanias, purple and delicate, greeted us. Summer tulips waved in the breeze. Trim and tucked hedges lined the paths, interrupting the flowers. 

Tams scoffed, “Gods, the time it must take for the upkeep.”

The garden’s fruit trees and bushes obscured the full view of the hut, but soon it was clear. Ivy dangled from long rafters which poked out of the circular roof every few feet. 

“Mister’s done some serious decorating,” I said. “This reminds me of Old Sage’s place, too. The round hut. The contrasting paint scheme. I dig that ginger door.” 

“If you like, we could interview Mister Missus on architecture instead of this secret kurse.” I rolled my eyes.

A splitting crack resounded and filled the air with electricity, like lightning was going to strike all around us. I folded my ears back too late, and they rang sharply. Thunder rumbled afterward, unceasing. But there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, a confusing detail what with the ceaseless thunder. I looked toward Old Sage’s hill. The hole had spread, the looming darkness visible even from so deep in the swamp. 

Tams bounded up the steps and hammered on the door. A deep, airy voice responded, “Oh dear, I’m all exposed. Give me a moment.” There was a thump and a resounding splash before the voice said, “Come in, dearies. It’s perfectly nice in here.”

And that’s chapter one of Kursed Kreatures!

The ebook is available for pre-order on Amazon, and on Christmas Day, the hardcover and paperback will be released. If you want the rest of the story, you can buy the book here:

Buy Kursed Kreatures

If you do read it, please leave a review to help this debut novel get traction. 

If you read or listened to this first chapter and thought someone else will love it, why not share it with them?

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Thank you for reading!

Until the next one,

I’m Zach Roush, and this is Realms.

Wake-ing Up; Creating Deeper Player Experiences in Alan Wake 2

art by Remedy Entertainment

Welcome to Realms, a sci-fi and fantasy newsletter and podcast. I’m Zach Roush, the writer of this publication. You can sign up to get posts like this one, as well as short stories and short reviews right in your inbox:

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Okay, Realm Walkers, here’s a special review I’m calling a Deep Dive. Appropriately, I’ll be analyzing the video game Alan Wake 2, a game with a story that’s all about diving into stories and darkness. If you’re not a gamer, that’s all right. You might learn something new about games. If what you read draws your interest, here’s a no-commentary playthrough of the game. It’s a fantastic game that will feel like watching a film. 

If you’re not familiar, Alan Wake 2 and its predecessor are survival horror games that resemble Steven King novels brought to the video game medium. There’s a haunted writer. An inimitable force of darkness. Crooked cops. Mysterious allies. And, of course, murder. Unlike any other games I’ve played, though, Alan Wake weaves in multimedia formats.

There are live-action commercials and visual overlays, type-written scripts, and more woven into the game. It’s fascinating and adds complexity to what you see and experience. This multimedia element is something the developer, Remedy Entertainment, has used in its games to challenge the divide between video games and film. It’s a visual treat and works to draw in the player in new ways. 

Now, the Deep Dive…

How the Mind Place and Writer’s Room Create Deeper Player Experiences in Alan Wake 2

The world of Alan Wake has always concerned itself with the relationship between shadow and light, both in literal and metaphorical terms. What greater source of shadow and light is there than the human mind? And, though every human being must deal with the layers of their consciousness, there might be no better mentalists than writers and detectives. These two occupations are very concerned with light, darkness, and their borders.

In Alan Wake 2, our main characters are Alan Wake, a writer, and Saga Anderson, an FBI detective. These characters must take deep dives into themselves to peel apart the many layers of things going on around them; sussing out the motivations of their peers and enemies, discovering truths hidden and forgotten, and striving to keep ahold of the light even when powerful forces threaten to steal it. 

In Alan Wake 2, Alan and Saga have their own tools for bending the world and shadows to their will: the Writer’s Room and The Mind Place, respectively. These are perfect tools for players to take control of these characters and their supernatural abilities to rewrite and un-puzzle reality.

In Alan Wake 2, Alan and Saga have their tools for bending the world and shadows to their will: the Writer’s Room and The Mind Place, respectively. These are perfect tools for players to take control of these characters and their supernatural abilities to rewrite and un-puzzle reality.

The Writer’s Room and the Mind Place put the player directly inside the mind of the characters. You can walk around in these two places, interact with the objects and materials there, and find inspiration that affects the game outside their confines. This creates one of the most satisfying and interesting gameplay-narrative interactions in my personal gaming history, and I’d argue Remedy Entertainment’s history as well. 

What’s so brilliant about these tools is that they function within a believable scope of the game’s universe. As mentioned above, we are explicitly concerned with the the conflict between light and dark. Using the minds of our two heroes as a deeper layer to understand the game is but one method for dispelling the darkness. It’s these tools that make Alan Wake 2 a fantastic, meaningful experience for players.

Below, I discuss why this is true and also offer ideas on how these tools might be incorporated more deeply into the game narrative. 

Creating Emotional Connections via Meta-Narrative and the Mind Place

The First Alan Wake was fun and inventive but stifled. Boiling it down, gameplay amounted to shooting droves of enemies to get to a safe place, listen to the dialogue, and maybe get a cutscene. There was little for the player to do to get closer to Wake and understand his journey besides paying close attention to dialogue and poring over in-game documents.

Alan Wake 2, in comparison, is nothing short of a quantum leap. For one, game levels are large and semi-open. Players have to explore them in a certain order, but they’re large enough that it feels like you’re discovering the path. Expanding playable areas alone would not be enough to create a meaningful game experience, however. It is only through the aforementioned Writer’s Room and Mind Place that players can engage in a meaningful relationship with the story.

Let’s discuss Saga’s Mind Place.

Not only is the Mind Place a thematically interesting gameplay mechanic but it’s also designed to invite players to engage more deeply with the narrative.

As Saga, an FBI detective, one of your objectives is to put together clues and solve several mysteries. You do this by placing pictures of scenes and Saga’s notes on the Case Board in a particular order to unlock deeper story insights. While filling out the Case Board, you get to hear Saga’s thoughts and commentary, hence the meta-narrative.

This is not common in narrative games in general. Many games don’t bother with these things, as most players want to get back to playing the game, i.e. shooting and looting. You might have characters that make comments to themselves or have personal notes on quests, but these minor details alone do not reveal an entire character. This is one of the confining elements when developing narratives for video games: it’s a visual medium. To truly explore a character deeply, you need large volumes of dialogue and text. 

Alan Wake 2 gives us both, but in digestible doses. Items on the Case Board, and other lore items, are easy to read. Take the Witcher 3, as a counter-example. It’s full of lore and dialogue, which suits conventions in the Fantasy RPG genre, but there’s a daunting amount of each. The dialogue can be verbose. The lore documents and journal entries are very long, and the text cannot be scaled to legible sizes on console. The Mind Place offers that sweet spot of narrative intrigue and digestibility.

As you unravel the mysteries in Saga’s mind, you begin to think how she thinks. You learn where clues should go and how they fit together in the scheme of things. You begin to look for more opportunities to fill in the gaps, uncovering clues just so you can see deeper into the narrative. In the latter half of the game, players discover that Saga’s story is more deeply intertwined with the game world than previously thought possible. This element raises the stakes of the game, making the Mind Place even more crucial to both Saga’s and the player’s success.

The stakes increase because the Mind Place has created an emotional connection between the story and the player. Not just by putting elements on the Case Board, but also by showing what and whom Saga cares about. Thus, we have something much more substantial than your typical linear narrative. We have one that teaches what Sagar care’s about and why we, as the player, should care about those things too. 

How the Writer's Room and Mind Place Provide Character-Player Agency

Most players just want to stay in the action. Alan Wake 1 keeps you there relentlessly. Alan Wake 2 does not. It emphasizes narrative complexity and rewards players for spending more time in the Writer's Room and Mind Place. How does Remedy do that without sacrificing player interest? 

It makes players do all the work and rewards them for doing so. In both the Writer’s Room and Mind Place, it is players who must put the pieces together. I’ve explained this already for the Mind Place: You take clues and put them in the right order to unlock more story and action. 

In the Writer’s Room, however, this works a bit differently. Alan Wake, as a writer, uses a Plot Board to uncover his own story. At times, when playing as Alan, the player will hit a dead end, sometimes literally. There will be physical obstacles in their way. Alan can remove these obstacles, but only if the player can discover new “plot elements” and apply them in the Writer’s Room. These change the navigable map in real time. After spending some time in the same map area, there will be multiple plot elements the player can place on the Plot Board. These affect the world in different ways, allowing the player to advance and unlock additional areas. 

With multiple plot elements available, it’s not always easy to find the way forward. This is the nature of Alan’s story. Both Alan and the player have to discover the correct series of events to advance. Besides moving the story forward, Remedy rewards players who explore every possibility with items, lore, and upgrades.

It seems so simple! To get the player more involved with the story, turn the story-making into a mechanic. To get the player to enjoy this mechanic, provide visually striking design and also in-game rewards. It’s these two details that transform this mechanic from chore to delight. Sure, the fancy Plot Board could just unlock a door, or it could change the entire level before the player’s eyes. The player could simply advance the story, or they might discover a ten-minute in-game film. Players are thus encouraged to play the game as much as possible to see all possible variations of the story that Alan Wake can conjure.

In this way, Alan Wake’s superpower is also the player’s. They are aligned in their actions and rewarded for their persistence.

It seems so simple! To get the player more involved with the story, turn the story-making into a mechanic. To get the player to enjoy this mechanic, provide visually striking design and also in-game rewards.

Player Choice in Alan Wake 2: The Double-Edged Sword

While the Mind Place and Writer's Room are fantastic gameplay elements, they have their weaknesses. For one, Saga’s Mind Place has more layers and offers more interaction than Alan’s Writer's Room. Secondly, there’s very powerful narrative dissonance when interacting in these places, due to the constraints of the linear narrative. Both issues can be fixed with simple solutions that will deepen the narrative and offer more choice to players. 

Saga’s Mind Place has multiple interactive areas where players can interact with her as a character. There’s the Case Board, a desk where she can “see” into other characters’ minds through her insights, another desk where she can read fragments of manuscripts, a TV for in-game live-action ads, a radio for lore and news, and many mementos from her life that let players learn more about her.

Alan, in comparison, only has the Plot Board, a TV, and a desk with a typewriter that’s non-interactive. There’s simply more to do in Saga’s Mind Place than in Alan’s equivalent space. This does have narrative precedent, as the Writer’s Room, unlike the Mind Place, exists in another dimension entirely. Furthermore, Alan has amnesia and doesn’t remember his life in the real world. 

The imbalance between these two places is too strong, though. Primarily because the player can get to know Saga so much more deeply than they can Alan. It would be easy to argue that there’s no need for better balance, as Alan is the primary character in the first game. I disagree.

The first game doesn’t provide much in terms of character depth for Alan. His motivations for stopping the darkness and saving his wife are surface level - he’s doing these things because the darkness is bad and he loves his wife. That’s it. Alan Wake 2 should delve deeper into Alan for better narrative balance, and also to provide a narrative as emotionally potent as Saga’s. 

Speaking of Saga, while everything I said about player and character agency in the Mind Place is true, it’s also a point of weakness.

When trying to put clues together, players will not always get it right the first time. Saga responds to these attempts with dialogue like “that doesn’t feel right.” This can occur for every clue that’s found. Not only can this get annoying, but it can also encourage a “try it till it’s right” approach. You can simply place clues in every available spot until it works and the game allows you to advance. 

Once you finish the game, you’ll find that there are only a few mysteries on the Case Board that are necessary to progress. Essentially, in many cases, this crucial game mechanic is optional. Also, once the player advances beyond certain plot points, the clues will automatically sort themselves onto the Board. Remedy probably made this optional so players weren’t forced into something that could feel like a chore, yet this decision devalues the player’s work of putting the case together.

Remedy made this optional so players weren’t forced into something that could feel like a chore, yet this decision devalues the player’s work of putting the case together.

On balance, my issue is not with the linear narrative. I love it. But the execution of these mechanics puts players at risk of falling out of the narrative and treating it like something to grind through. 

I propose these fixes. One is to reduce Saga’s commentary when clues are not in the right place. Two, I would like it to be possible for those clues to go in different places, even when it’s wrong. Later on, when the player has more information, they can be prompted to re-organize the clues. Thirdly, and this one is more resource-intensive, would be to incentivize player interaction with the Mind Place further by giving more dialogue options with characters when clues are tied together.

Personally speaking, completing the Case Board should be mandatory for completing the story. It’s an amazing mechanic that Remedy should double-down on.

For Alan’s Writer’s Room, there needs to be more interactive elements that reveal his inner state.

Here, I see a larger opportunity to explore the game’s themes through Alan himself. We know from the first game that Alan had a creative block and became depressed as a result. He turned to drinking and became angry, thus making his marriage suffer.

What if his lore documents explored his feelings of helplessness as well as his need for control over his world? What if we explored his past beyond the first game? Where did he get the desire to write detective novels?

A simple fix would be a desk in the Writer’s Room where players can sift through incomplete manuscripts or journal entries found when playing as Alan. These pieces of lore could detail Alan’s emotions toward getting back to the real world, and even flesh out his motivations for saving his wife. This is the least that can be done. I’d also suggest mementos and more like what players can find in Saga’s Mind Place. These items wouldn’t conflict with Alan’s amnesia at all (which is narrative-necessary) and would be a boon for players. 

What if, for example, there was an empty bottle of Alan’s favorite whiskey? On it, an inscription: For getting those creative juices flowing again, Barry Wheeler. Alan would react to this with dialogue, saying, “A drink doesn’t sound so bad…” Here’s another idea: an old film camera, its bottom engraved with, For Alice, don’t you stop going down the rabbit hole. 

Through this analysis, you, like me, might see that there are other narrative weak points.

Perhaps the reason Alan’s Writer’s Room does not have the elements I mentioned is because he is not truly evil on the inside, or, in other words, the writers do not present him to be. The darkness that Alan (and Saga) faces is an external force, not a personal one. Another thing: Alan wears his flaws on his sleeve. He’s flighty and intense. His ego is huge. But how come, through his journey, he never deals with these things?

Where you might see in a Stephen King novel that the forces of darkness enhance a character’s inner, personal demons, in Alan Wake 2, the darkness doesn’t touch the soul. It doesn’t make anyone evil, truly. Just takes over their mind and soul and makes them into monsters that must be vanquished, rather than people-monsters that must be redeemed. 

DLC is coming out for Alan Wake 2. Perhaps, as the story expands, we will see darkness explored in more personal ways that relate to our heroes. Maybe the narrative will gain a deeper resonance. I certainly hope so.

Alan Wake 2 is a Fantastic Narrative Experience and Everyone Should Play!

Alan Wake 2 is an incredible game. It intertwines gameplay and narrative in fascinating and satisfying ways. Critiques aside, Alan Wake 2 offers a visceral experience that serious narrative-holics will find particularly enjoyable.

It draws you into the story and doesn’t let you go until the credits roll. The gameplay is fun. The characters, on the whole, feel original and fleshed out. Even with themes as lofty as “defeating true darkness”, Alan Wake 2 succeeds in delivering a grounded, emotional experience due to Remedy’s smart and effective gameplay tools.

This is a game I’m going to play over and over until I find every last shred of story. 

Thank you for reading and listening to this Realms Deep Dive. This is a special article taking a closer look at something I’m really passionate about.

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Until next time, Realm Walkers, you’re reading and listening to Realms.

Awakening

Photo by Tanel August Lind on Unsplash

Hello and welcome to Realms: a monthly sci-fi and fantasy newsletter that lets you escape to new realms right from your inbox. 

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My name is Zach and I’m the writer and reader of Realms. I am a freelance copywriter, fitness trainer, and tour guide living in Hanoi, Vietnam. 

This month’s story is short and sweet, so you can get right back to enjoying Thanksgiving leftovers if you’re in the States that is. 

Without further ado, here’s this month’s story… Awakening.

All Alannah wants is to see. In the spiritual sense. Her life is so clouded by calls and emails, sharing her life online, buying things she doesn’t need, and pretending to listen to her boyfriend. She desires clarity. She deserves clarity. 

So what does a suburban-living westerner do? She looks to buy perspective. Ah, and there it is, a gorgeous retreat in the jungle. Happy people from all over the world are wearing loose linens and smiling like Mother Earth is inside them. The staff are all people with blindness, hired to give them opportunities. 

“I’ll call you,” she lies to her boyfriend and parents at the airport. There’s no service where she’s going. They watch as she disappears into a sea of nameless, unknowable individuals. 

“Here on the plane, heading to Hawali Resort…I don’t even know which country it’s in! I shut up and gave them my money and just went!” she tells her followers. “Everyone should do this in their lives. It’s great for perspective.” 

Alannah wakes as the plane touches down, jolting her from an Ambien-fueled dream: People in white linen. Smiling. Surrounding her in love and affection. She thought she was prepared for her phone not to work…but she had an itch to share. 

“No. This is my time. Not anyone else’s.”

The courteous Hawali Resort picks up Alannah and her one suitcase, which was a sacrifice. She packed a book for God’s sake, but she’d rather have four more eye creams, another bottle of Retinol, and her comfy socks for the month-long stay.

The dense, mist-covered jungle disappears before a towering wall of bamboo. An open-air, white-stuccoed and terracotta-roofed complex greets her. As does the staff, all in white linen tunics and trousers. They’re a mix of Westerners and locals with every hue of skin color; there are more women than men. Alannah’s not the only one arriving. Many newcomers are deposited by private cars and guided into a line beside her.

“Welcome to Hawali,” says a small woman in glasses, one of the few with sight at the resort. She’s important, Alannah judges. She wears gold hoops around her neck, and the front of the tunic, where there should be buttons, are golden bells. As she speaks, she gestures, and they ring. “And now the two rules we have here. We do not shake hands. We bow and cover our eyes, to honor each others’ unseen spirits, like so.” In unison, the staff bows, covering their eyes as they do. “Second, we do not go out past midnight. Mother Hawali commands it.”

“That’s a joke, right?” says a bearded, shirtless man. Alannah eyes him.

Bells chime in the night. No one’s supposed to be out at night.

Alannah wakes. It’s past midnight. Everything’s been perfect so far. Perfect weather. Perfect people. Perfect meditations and smoothie bowls. Except for one thing: at this late hour, there’s always someone singing. Breaking a rule! Alannah hears it now. 

“Oh my God, that’s it.”

She marches down the path, holding herself against the chill. Past the bamboo shivering in the wind, making squeaks and hollow knocks. Past Evan’s room, where Alannah soon hopes to spend the night, and toward the beach. She finds what must be the entire staff, all in linens, all with milky, unseeing eyes. There’s a bonfire. A bonfire! Singing! And a barbecue! Her stomach growls. Alannah could eat. This vegetarian diet could use a cheeseburger supplement. 

“Ah, excuse me!” 

The chatter ceases. The heads turn. They endow the moment with a bow, their palms over their eyes. Alannah almost pisses herself. This is not loving and encouraging. This is terrifying. Not as terrifying as the human effigy at the center of it all: a gray-haired figure missing her eyes.

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“I mean, I was trying to sleep and they were partying!” Alannah complains. “Like why didn’t they offer me some food?”

Evan shrugs. “You’re being selfish. Think of their light. Not yours.”

“I just get scared at night, you know? It’s lonely...”

Evan looks at her without an expression. He’s different than before. “Maybe it’s time for you to meet Mother Hawali. She’s very wise.”

Alannah scoffs. “Sure. I’ll give her a piece of my mind.”

The bells visit again. Again! And the singing…the singing is back.

Another night. Past midnight. There’s a knocking at Alannah’s door. 

“What is it?” she hisses.

“Are you hungry?” It’s Evan.

“But, the rule!”

“It’s ok. It really is.”

They take the path down to the beach. The staff are there, same as the night before. They stop partying. They bow, eyes covered. And welcome the pair in. They enjoy good food. Good conversations. Alannah learns that many were like her, lost in the world. They found themselves at Hawali. 

“Were you all blind?” she asks. 

“Yes, of course,” they reply, with wide grins.

“You know, I think I’m going to bed.” Alannah returns to her room. “This is too weird. I’ve got leave.”

Bells and voices. Voices and bells. A final summoning from sleep.

The next night, Evan returns. He has many Hawali staff behind him, adorned in gold jewelry and headdresses woven from palm leaves and fern fronds. They hold torches and talk excitedly in the indigenous language. Alannah doesn’t even know what it’s called. 

“She’s agreed to meet you.”

“Who?”

“Mother Hawali. You are ready.”

“Ready for?” 

They all but steal her away. She fights, at first, but calms when she finds them laughing and singing. This must be normal. They take her down a path she isn’t sure she noticed before. Bamboo shakes loudly with the midnight wind.

A small wooden house waits. The staff created a funnel for Evan and Alannah to approach. There is no door, but an indigo curtain. The pair enter. It’s not a home inside, it’s a descent. An old crumbling staircase with no rails leads to a pool, illuminated by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. 

There is a white film strung along the walls, the staircase, and hanging from a cocoon-shaped thing. No, it is a cocoon, pulsating, hanging from the threads. A milky white substance bleeds onto the ground.

Alannah turns back too quickly and slips on the stairs, tumbling, sliding down into that short abyss, coming to rest on the strands that are sticky and soft. She screams on the way down and screams in disgust upon landing. 

Evan is there shortly, helping her up gently.

“There’s nothing to fear—”

She nails him in the jaw with a right hook that she should be quite proud of. Looking to make her escape, she sees there is none. The villagers or cultists or whatever they are stand at the top, torches flickering, smiles flickering.

“Oh, Jesus,” she says.

A crack. A creaking. A tearing from behind. A thing emerging.

“The Mother will see you, now,” Evan says through a busted lip. “Bow with me.” He covers his eyes and hinges at his hips as low as he can. Quite flexible, really. He took those yoga seminars seriously. 

“No. No, no, no,” Alannah utters. 

The cocoon is split up in the middle, with two hands prying it apart from the inside. A head emerges. An old woman with silver hair pulls herself free with a sucking sound like pulling a foot from the muck, her back to Alannah and Evan. She covers her face with her hands and turns, stepping forward, standing completely naked before all. She is not human. Or she was. She has no belly button at all. No nipples. No wrinkles. But she gives off the scent of ancient paper and rust and insect carcasses.

“So, you are both ready to see,” she says, her voice withered and dry.

“Is this because I broke the rules? I’m sorry. I really am.”

“No, child. This is because you must see.”

“But, why this? Whatever this is? Isn’t there another way?”

Alannah tries to back away, but she is stopped by the weight of many, many hands. The followers have descended. She squeaks and frantically looks for another way out, but there is no escape. There are only pale orbs drilling into her. There is only the ancient woman, the Matriarch of something evil and vast like a desert in a forgotten corner of the world. An unstoppable fear grows in her groin, blooming into something sharp and painful. Hawali resort really had been a bargain, hadn’t it? 

“Can’t I have more time?” Alannah protests, some part of her accepting this ending. “I…I’m not sure I’m ready.”

“You will never see with your waking eyes.”

Mother Hawali bows to Evan and Alannah, then peels her palms from her face. Beneath them: two gaping wells of darkness that suck away the light, distorting the old face around them. It’s the last thing Alannah sees while her mind races to home, her work, her old life. Her vision blurs. Her perspective tilts. She’s feeling quite detached from all those things and people. What were they but mortal trappings? What need of she to leave? She can’t remember. She has the Mother now. She has found her people. 

She has everything she needs, and it was always right before her very eyes.

Thank you for reading and listening to Awakening.

A bit of an author’s note here…this story was inspired by a Vietnamese commune I’ve visited for my tour guide work. The people there do bow, they wear the same clothes, and they all live in a shared space. There are some culty vibes, but I doubt their leader emerges from a cocoon. I haven’t seen her do so, at least…

You can help Realms by sharing this story with a friend or by leaving a review on Spotify or Apple podcasts. 

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Until next time, Realm Walkers, I’m Zach and you’re listening to Realms.

Realms Reviews Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Realms Reviews Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Hello and Welcome to Realms Reviews!

Whether you’re new or not, Realms is a fantasy / sci-fi newsletter. As such, I consume plenty of sci-fi and fantasy media and contents!

Here’s how reviews work:

Every review has a bit of a summary - no spoilers - my take on the story and why you should consider reading it. And then I’m going to give a rating. I’m stealing my rating system from fighting video games. From best to worst: Z, S, A, B, C, D. 

Z means whatever I reviewed is the absolute best of its kind and will leave you wishing you had more.

S is for media that is excellent, but not quite earth shattering. 

A is for very good. Something that is worth your time. 

B is good. Just good. 

C is best summed up as “Meh” - it will make no difference in your life and is probably worth skipping.

D is a definite no. Skip it. Avoid it. 

That said, take the time to review the media yourself, if it catches your eye (or ears.) I mostly review amazing media, so you don’t have to worry about it wasting your time.

Today, I’m reviewing the video game Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo Switch, which I’ll refer to as TOTK from now on because that’s a ton of words. A lot of you might not be gamers, so I’m going to make sure you can have a solid grasp of this game. I want to give you something valuable even if you don’t play video games yourself.

Legend of Zelda is a series, if you didn’t know, and it lives in almost every gamer’s head rent free. I bet every gamer in the world has played or watched one of these games. 

Why are they so special? It starts with a simple story: A demon king steals a princess and a courageous knight must save her. Every game runs with this plot line, but explores it in new ways. That’s what makes TOTK so interesting - it’s a sequel to Breath of the Wild. Sequels doesn’t very often in the Legend of Zelda universe. So, within two games, the creators had to find a way to spin the same storyline.

How did they do this? By building new layers inside the previous world. It was already a massive open-world game where you could go anywhere and do anything. In TOTK, the developers added flying islands and an underground expanse spanning the entire above-ground map. Size matters, as they say, but so does quality.

In TOTK, you spend time with a cast of characters as wild and ridiculous as real life. You do quests with satisfying stories and extremely fun mechanics. You get lost in a world so picturesque and mysterious that you’ll long for real life. That’s what happens to me every time I play. I get lost in vast lands, and then I’d turn to my window, look outside and appreciate what lies out there all the more. Take this in contrast to the neverending iterations of shooting, military, or combat games, and TOTK stands to give players a meditative experience. 

It’s also just darn fun to play. You can use your powers to combine shields and weapons with every item around. Put a bouncy mushroom on a sword. Put a spring mechanism on a shield. Create a  towering robot to rain fiery death on your enemies! You can do all of that in one game. It’s like Minecraft and Zelda made a beautiful baby together. 

TOTK takes the open-world gameplay style to its furthest extent, too. It doesn’t force any sort of linear experience on the player, which I can imagine is tough to create from the narrative side of things. You can start a quest, ignore it for hundreds of hours, and go back to it whenever you want. It’s liberating and true to its form, but it’s easy to forget what you’re doing if you’re chasing butterflies or hunting beasts or fighting Bokoblins along the way.

There’s so much more I could say, but seeing is really believing.  

So, here’s a link to a TOTK play-through without commentary, where you can watch someone play the whole game.

And here’s another link to see some of the wackiest things players have built in the game.

My rating for Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom: Z. It’s the best of its kind and is absolutely worth your time (dozens of hours of playing) and money ($70 price tag, not including the Nintendo Switch.)

Now, normally I do notable quotes from whatever I review, but this game doesn’t have those. I have incredible moments. 

Take this one: I was pursuing a mission to find the last Sage and completely got lost in flying islands covered in storms and lightning. I stumbled around for hours till I found the sage. Turns out I did the whole thing wrong and skipped at least two other quests, but because this game is so open world, it still worked!

Another favorite moment is flying as high as I can, then skydiving all the way to the ground. I usually build a hot air balloon-plane thing and enjoy the view as the sun advances through the sky and the sky islands float further away. When my vehicle runs out of juice, I jump and find something interesting to skydive toward. It always amazes me that there’s no loading screen or pauses from descending to the ground. It’s a seamless, beautiful experience, and might even be perfect.

You can buy the game here: https://zelda.nintendo.com/tears-of-the-kingdom/

That’s the review for Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom.  If you like this game or know someone who does, please share it and help Realms grow. 

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A Leaky Fountainhead - Redux

Photo by Jeff Hardi on Unsplash.

Welcome to Realms, a monthly newsletter that takes you to new worlds. Enjoy sci-fi and fantasy short stories, and reviews - both as text and audio, every month!

While you can find Realms on your favorite podcasting app, subscribe with the button or link to make sure you get stories right in your inbox, which is far more convenient!

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Before we begin, I have three things to highlight:

One, I’d like to talk about ’s substack Are You Not Entertained? His newsletter discusses sci-fi and its impact on our real life. So, naturally, I’m on board. 

His recent post on the movie, Prey, is excellent. Check it out if you have a quick minute. Eric’s writing is concise and he highlights excellent ideas, like how Prey nods to fans of the franchise, while also keeping things tight and punchy. If you’re keen on checking him out, here’s his publication. 

My second item: Realms of Roush is now just Realms. Though I don’t quite have a master plan yet, this title change is a thematic move toward what I’d like to create: a community and haven for writers and writing in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Maybe one day it’ll be a magazine. Maybe one day it’ll be a multimedia empire. Who knows? (Sidenote, if you’re a sci-fi and/or fantasy writer, let’s connect! I’m looking to do more shoutouts and collabs!)

Lastly, you can check out my Realms review on the Red Rising  series - a must-read set of novels for any sci-fi lover.  

That’s all! Thank you. And without further ado, here’s the story…

A Leaky Fountainhead

My father was a draftsman.

He did the grunt architecture work for a company in the city, drawing foundations and floor plans like a burger joint cooks fries. The work was simple. He hated it. He never called the company by its name. I knew it only as the Firm.

Despite his displeasure, watching him draw blueprints brought me delight. His home office took up the sunken living room in our strange house in an old neighborhood (the only neighborhood with any character, my parents agreed). From the landing, I watched his hands flip and fly, angle and travel across his blue pages like hawks hunting prey. He was an unremarkable, squat man, two physical traits I inherited, but his hands were masterpieces. They were wide, with fingers that suited the width. They were smooth and lightly veined, looking sculpted. Their strength was evident in the gathering of muscle on each finger and between his thumbs and pointer fingers. The only blemish he allowed was that of pen or pencil, the outside of his pinkies and palm permanently stained gray-blue. He worked seven days a week, dawn till night. My mother’s job was to raise me, and at this, she was a savant.

My home was filled with simple materials like leather and concrete, joy and light. The spaces were brought to life with my mother’s hummingbird presence and my father’s scratching pencil.

You’ll notice I speak of them in the past tense. Those fond days are gone. All I have left is a bright dream that ends in a nightmare. 

The nightmare began when my father met a wealthy coward. 

My father went into the office one day, likely to pitch a new idea to his bosses, and met the man in the lobby. They hit it off. Then it was lunches. Then dinners with the man’s family. Then, and this was beyond me, a joint vacation to the beach. That was not a fun day. The man’s kids didn’t like ice cream - and that’s all you need to know.

Next thing I knew, my father was building this man’s dream home.

My father gave his soul to it. A masterpiece, he said. A vision, he whispered. It will sit on the coast and drink in the ocean like Poseidon’s eyes. It will be light and airy, heaven on concrete. It will last four hundred years. It will… It will… It will… He prayed to it like it was God. 

When the house was under construction, its design was already garnering awards. People at the Firm were getting jealous, and my father’s boss threatened termination if he didn’t abandon his mistress of a side gig. My father quit on the spot, believing his inevitable career as a true architect was taking flight. Those perfect hands flew as he constructed new iterations of this home for prospective clients, the wealthy coward’s friends. 

One night our little family was eating together, laughing and enjoying my father’s freedom, his first taste of it in a while. I don’t remember a time before then when we had actually eaten together at the dining table. I hadn’t known we had a dining table, even.

A phone call rang, interrupting the meal. Mom answered. 

“Fired? What do you mean? No, talk to my husband. He’s right here. Difficult to work with? Impossible? He’s given you everything! You can’t breach the contract! You piece of—“

A dead tone bled into the quiet.

My father had stiffened in his chair, wearing an expression that haunted; as if an actual knife was working into his heart. 

He was dead at that moment, though he stood and left the table.

That cowardly man never called again. Never invited us over. The house was finished by contractors and stood perfect along the coast. It won awards. It won acclaim. But all of it went to a different architect, one from the Firm. 

And this was just their opening move. 

They walled him off from his old job and poisoned the architect watering hole for hundreds of miles around. He couldn’t get work! He stared at his drawings for hours. Stared at them burning in the fireplace. Stared at his empty drafting table. Stared at his hands, also empty. His descent took no time at all; that phone call came and his god was dead. He was dead.

One day I came home from school with the garage door a foot off the ground. A river of dark liquid, like syrup, spilled down the driveway. Perplexed, uncertain what I saw, I crawled beneath the door. My father was on his hands and knees, slipping in liquid, looking for something. “Son, son, have you seen my hands?” He smiled crookedly and collapsed on the epoxied floor, blood making a halo around his torso. 

It only took one moment to see: arms were bleeding stumps. His hands twitched beside the table saw like dying arachnids. His eyes lay open, vacant, and staring right at me.

Everything went black.

I woke in my bed, the back of my skull throbbing, eyes pounding. Burned into my eyes were the body, the hands, the blood everywhere. My mother was there, sitting on a wooden stool my father designed and crafted by hand. Oh God, his hands. 

“Mom. Mom, what happened?” She stirred, met my eyes, and the tears took no time to fall. 

“They took it—him—to the hospital already. And,” she paused, “I have to ask you something…Do you know if he did something with his hands? Did you—,” she shook her head, “did you move them?”

“What? How could you ask that?” My fear rang as loud as that final phone call did. The hands were missing. Did some animal grab them? Did someone from the Firm take them as a sick trophy?

That night, my mother and I tried to sleep in her room, but it smelled too much like him, so we took to the couch. It wasn’t much better there in his old study. I imagined my father’s outline in the dark, sitting in the tall chair near me, his utensils scratching away at someone’s office, designing where they would work and mingle and never know a day of sorrow like mine. A quiet tapping filled the night from the leaky kitchen sink my father never fixed.

That next day I went to school. I already understood that it didn’t matter what I did, my heart would break every day until it didn’t. School eased the focus on my father’s empty office, his empty presence. His stuff, everywhere, now belonging to no one. 

Night came again. The sink was dripping all night, tapping harder and harder. 

“Mom, do you hear that?”

She’d taken a pill. There wasn’t any waking her. My childish imagination took flight with that tapping noise. It was my father’s soul, knocking. It was his ghost at the desk, tapping a pencil while conjuring his next idea. I couldn’t sleep a wink. I fell asleep in class the next day. They let me come home early. As if that would help. I asked my mother not to take a pill that night. She took one anyway, blinded by grief. I taped the faucet over to stop that voracious dripping. 

I was near asleep when the tapping came again. My heart rocketed to full thunder. Was that sound from my parent’s room? From the attic? From the dark places in the house? Something skittered frantically, the noise growing distant and small. It stopped somewhere upstairs. In my chest, I’d hoped that sound would get smaller and smaller and then disappear forever. 

Taptaptaptaptaptaptap. 

Closer now. A door creaked upstairs. Then, from the stairwell: Thump, tap-tap-tap. Thump, tap-tap-tap. It had to be a rodent. Had to be. What else could be searching so methodically?

Something slapped the concrete floor, like deli meat on a counter. My throat seized up. I threw the blanket over my head and tried to be as still as a statue. Whatever it was skittered across the floor with its little taps, fast as an animal released from a cage. It went everywhere. The kitchen, where it knocked over a glass, shattering it on the floor. My heart almost stopped at the crash. Then the front room. Then the laundry room, where the thing tapped hard on the appliances, the metal sound like a midnight bell.

“Mom, please wake up.” She groaned and went back to snoring. I was alone. And it heard me.

The skittering thing came toward the sunken living room. I tried to disappear into the couch. I imagined myself invisible. My eyes were shut so hard I saw colors in the blackness. My father’s chair squeaked. The tapping echoed on his drafting table. Papers were feathered through. Something ripped. 

Silence.

I breathed furiously through my nose, feeling suffocated for trying not to breathe. Then I felt pressure on my blanket, a light tugging. The pressure increased until I felt two separate weights. I felt them crawl like tarantulas up my body. I prayed to die right then and there so the horrors in my head wouldn’t come true.

They stopped on my chest, no doubt sensing its hasty rise and fall. After a moment they inched toward my head. They reached my face, and felt out its features, touching my eyes through the blanket. I expected to be seized and killed or have my mouth pried open so whatever they were could crawl inside my esophagus. These things did not happen.

I felt the tender touch of fingers on my face. I smelled…something familiar. Parchment and graphite and coffee. I knew what they were, without a doubt. A strange relief replaced the terror.

“Father?”

I peeled the blanket from my face. My father’s hands touched my cheeks like he was going to bend down and kiss my forehead, just as he did not four days ago. His hands, just then, wiped away my tears. 

It wasn’t fair. He had been a good man. But he gave up because people kept building walls around him. He was a rat in a maze with no end. 

Who was to blame?

Who drove him to give up his life?

Why did my father have his office in our TV room? Why not have his own studio, with his own draftsmen to scale the size of someone else’s shitter?

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The Firm. Was that why his hands were possessed? Did he worship his work so much? Or was it love for me?

There was only one way to know.

I prepared myself, then I moved.

I wrapped up his hands in the blanket like a parent swooping up a child in a towel and twisted it tight. They struggled. They fought. They were fish in a net. I dragged the blanket on the floor so they wouldn’t touch me again, and I went into the garage, the floor spotless where they scrubbed the blood away, and dumped out a wooden box full of mementos. I dropped the hands inside and slammed the lid closed. I flipped the latch, a simple hook and loop affair then returned the box to its place. 

Come morning, I told my mother I was staying home from school that day. She kissed my forehead and went out, desperate to get a job somewhere, anywhere.

I strapped the box to the handlebars of my bicycle and went my way to the Firm. The pristine lobby was guarded by a kind man behind a desk, one who remembered me from my few visits. He knew what had happened.

“I have this box for the Firm. It has some of their things.”

The hands moved inside, tapping loudly. I tapped my fingers on the outside to cover it up. 

He looked at me, the box, then me again. “I can deliver it for you.”

“No, I want to do it,” I said. 

“Head on up then,” he replied, a sad frown creasing his forehead. “Do you smell something rotten?”

“Nope.”

I took the long elevator ride to the top. My shoes squeaked on the polished floors, looking so brilliant a shadow could have seen its reflection, and walked to the Firm’s double-height glass doors. The receptionist looked confused. 

“My father worked here. I’m returning some things.”

One of the lead architects walked by, one who knew my father.

“Jesus, kid, what are you doing here?” 

“I brought this…”

He rushed me past the desk and through tall, wooden doors to his office overlooking the city. “What’d you bring there, kid?”

“Some things my father wanted you to have,” I lied. My heart pounded like the fingers inside the wooden box. I tapped on it as loud as I dared, to match the tapping inside. It drew the man’s eyes, but no more. 

Two other men joined us there, in their dark suits. My father’s former bosses. 

One lowered his cigar. “The hell?”

The other knocked back his drink, some dark liquid in a crystal glass, and said, “Why’d you bring him in here?”

The architect took my box and set it on the immense, luxurious desk that they probably bought through my father’s toil. From the work of his hands. 

One of them had the audacity to put his hand on my shoulder. “Sorry about your father, kid. He was a good draftsman.”

“And a better architect,” I added. 

“Well, sure.”

“I have something I want to say.” The men chuckled, mocking me, then gestured for me to speak. I said, “I loved my father. His hands could do the impossible. But yours? Yours can do nothing. Yours are the hands of thieves.” 

I left the room, the box, and the three men. 

I also left the lid unlatched.

A deep satisfaction rolled over me in sickening waves, a feeling that made me feel dirty and foul. But it also felt good. So good, I stopped in my tracks. I turned around and went back to the office. I cracked open the door. Its luxurious hinges made no sound. Inside, the men stood at the ten-foot window, the box already forgotten. They joked. They laughed and cursed my father’s name.

“Yours can do nothing,” cigar man mocked. “What a little prick.”

“Did you see his eyes? Kid’s been crying nonstop. Little wuss. When my old man died, I never shed a tear.”

“Kids these days, softer than…” He held up his hands. “These.” They guffawed and slapped their knees.

On the desk, the lid snapped open. The sound drew the men’s attention from their humor and back to the box.

“Was that open before?”

“Couldn’t have been.”

The man with the cigar marched over to the box. “If that kid pranked us, I’ll—“

My father’s hands leaped onto his neck, were on the man’s face in an instant, thumbs in his eyes, squeezing. He lurched, cigar tumbling to the ground in a flare of smoke and ash. The other men laughed until their colleague started shrieking. The shrieking continued even when the cigar man’s body dropped to the ground and the hands pulled away from bloody sockets.

“Ugh!” one man let out, pressing himself against the window.

The hands scurried toward the other two, their fingers tapping softly on the vibrant rug.

One man tried to stomp on the right hand, but it jumped and gripped his leg, then spidered its way up his back. He couldn’t shake it off in time. It reached his face. Now he was screaming.

My father’s left hand jumped and made a fist, punching the other man in the groin. When he doubled over, it gripped his throat. I heard footsteps behind me, the clap of expensive shoes on the ground. I ran the opposite way, afraid of getting caught. 

“Help! Help!”

I didn’t look back. No one paid me any mind as I fled what I’d done. The elevator dinged and I flew into it. I leaned heavily on the side of the metal box and cried. I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. Beyond the doors sliding shut, I caught the distant terror of people so certain they couldn’t be touched by pain or clawed at by the men that crawled beneath them. Their terror was true and deep and would change them forever. Sometimes I feel satisfied that those people got what they deserved. Other times, I just wish my father had found a way to go on. If not for the chance to create beautiful buildings, then at least to love my mother and I. 

My father was a draftsman.

His hands did the most brilliant things.

And that’s A Leaky Fountainhead. 

On the topic of spooky season…

1. What’s your favorite spooky media? What should I be watching, reading, or listening to?

2. What scares you? Demons, gore, or shadows at night?

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading and listening!

Until next time, Realm Walkers, this is Zach and you’re listening to Realms. 

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Realms Reviews: Red Rising series by Pierce Brown

Hello and Welcome to Realms Reviews, a new offering from my publication. 

Whether you’re new or not, I’m , and I’m the writer and reader of Realms (formerly Realms of Roush). Realms is a sci-fi and fantasy newsletter. As such, I consume tons of sci-fi and fantasy media that I think everyone should know about. In these two genres, I’ll be reviewing books, video games, podcasts, films, and TV shows.

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I’ve wanted to write something besides stories for awhile - and I think I have the review format I want to work with. 

Just like Realms’ short stories, you’ll get reviews once a month. Never on the same week as a short story. 

And here’s what I offer with my reviews:

A short, spoiler-free summary with supporting media.

My take and thoughts, and whether or not the reviewed media is worth your time. 

Notable quotes or moments. 

And finally, a rating based on a system of my own design. 

Speaking of…I’m stealing my rating system from fighting video games. From best to worst, it goes: Z, S, A, B, C, D. 

Z means whatever I reviewed is the absolute best of its kind and will leave you wishing you had more.

S is for media that is excellent, but not quite earth-shattering. 

A is for very good. Something that is worth your time. 

B is good. Just good. 

C is best summed up as “Meh” - it will make no difference in your life and is probably worth skipping.

D is a definite no. Skip it. Avoid it. 

That said, this rating system is subjective. Any of my reviews should be taken with a grain of salt and whatever I review should be the subject of your own consumption and consideration.  

And without further ado, my first review is for my favorite sci-fi book series, Red Rising, by Pierce Brown. 

the first book in the seriesSummary

The Red Rising universe is set in humanity’s far future. We’ve mastered the solar system and have spread civilization to every planet and moon and even the asteroid belt. But we have not built a free society. It has a rigid pyramidal structure called the Hierarchy, and your place in this Society is determined by your color. There are 13 colors with Gold being the at the top and Red at the bottom. Here’s a Red Rising Wiki link to check it out. This Society was created by spacefaring humans who, believing humanity was destroying itself, turned to conquering Earth. These humans were also Romanophiles and rebuilt society to reflect neoclassical values. 

The story starts with Darrow, a “Red” at the bottom of the Society pyramid. He’s an enslaved helium-3 miner who knows he’s at the bottom. His work is supposedly meaningful - the work he and all Reds are doing is terraforming Mars. That’s what the Golds tell him. Funny enough, most everything they say is untrue. 

What comes of these lies? Darrow becomes a world-breaking warlord. That might sound like a spoiler, but it’s not. 

My Take

At first glance, Red Rising might appear to be your typical society rebellion novel like The Hunger Games. But this series has a huge cast of incredible characters that I love. It’s not all sci-fi action for nerds, either. There’re touching moments, romance, hilarity, and the stakes always feel high.

I’ve heard it said that Red Rising is like Game of Thrones in space. The comparison only goes as far as the high intelligence of the characters and the quality of the writing (thankfully, there’s no incest or rampant, gratuitous sex in Red Rising). Every character is sharp as a scalpel and is always hiding their motivations and goals, and Darrow has to be sharper to survive. Red Rising is a space epic with all the ships, guns, and battles you could ask for - but they all come with a lot of nuance. The Society and its Hierarchy aren’t just deemed “bad cause it’s bad”, but both Darrow and the reader wrestle with what makes a society function. Is strict order so bad? Is democracy all it’s cracked up to be?

The original trilogy, when you read it, is a complete package. You will get a full storyline. But the 4th book Iron Gold, 5th book, Dark Age, and recently released 6th book, Light Bringer, are next-level novels. The fifth book, Dark Age, is my favorite novel of all time. It’s deliciously dark and tense and you don’t know who’s going to die. The series isn’t done yet, but you have six novels to binge, which is a great place to be. I wish I could read them again for the first time. 

To wrap this up, if you enjoy sci-fi, whether epic stuff like Dune by Frank Herbert, or more realistic work like The Martian by Andy Weir, and even Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, you’ll love Red Rising.

My rating for the whole series is Z. This is the best sci-fi series of its kind and will leave you craving more.

And here are my favorite quotes from each novel:

“She is something new, something hopeful. Like spring to my deep winter.” - Red Rising

“Her braids were laced with teeth.” - Red Rising

“You would never guess that beneath that sea of twinkling jewels lurks a second city of filth and poverty. Worlds within worlds.” - Golden Son

“Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.” - Golden Son

“Oy, boyo, you look like you slithered out of a skeleton’s rickety cooch.” - Morning Star

“I will acquaint you with ruin.” - Morning Star

“I no longer trust stillness. Stillness is the enemy taking careful aim.” - Dark Age

“But you don't get the wolf by the tongue without reaching through its teeth.” - Dark Age

“His eyes are dark jewels set in a gaunt philosopher’s face. I read in them paragraphs of disappointment.” - Light Bringer

“We smash through great spits of meat and over drunken braves, like lions fighting in the midst of startled oxen.” - Light Bringer

And that’s the first Realms review! Go buy Red Rising from the link or borrow from your library.

Red Rising">Buy Red Rising - This is an affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Next month, I’ll be reviewing the video game, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

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If you like this review, subscribe or share it with the sci-fi and fantasy lover in your life. 

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That’s all for now - until you next time.

Denali, Denial

CW: Before we begin, I want to make readers aware that today’s story is a historical fiction piece that has elements of violence and racism. 

Welcome to Realms of Roush, a monthly newsletter that takes you to new worlds. Enjoy sci-fi and fantasy short stories, and the occasional personal essay - and soon reviews! - both as text and audio, every month!

While you can find Realms of Roush on your favorite podcasting app, you can make sure to get stories right in your inbox, which is far more convenient.

Subscribe now

Something I’m trying to do is connect with more writers on Substack and beyond. Today, I want to shout out a writer and project I’m really enjoying: is writing a new serialized series called Marredbury. 

Here’s a summary!

In a near-future city haunted by its own dark history, evil lurks beneath the surface. Enter Marredbury, a chilling serial anthology that weaves together a tapestry of haunting tales from the past and a contemporary digital nightmare.

Carla Bird, an unsuspecting IT professional, is thrust into a strange project involving the decryption of files from the abandoned Colby Corp site in Old Town Marredbury. Little does she know that these files hold the eerie stories of the town's namesake. From Gigi Talcon's peculiar gardenias to the unforeseen consequences of a night of recreational drug use, Carla can't dismiss these narratives as mere fiction, especially as she witnesses unsettling occurrences in her new surroundings…

I loved part I of Marredbury so much. It’s so atmospheric and jumps right in to the weirdness. If this piques your interest, read part I here:

Indie Fiction DigestWelcome to Marredbury (Part 1 of 2)Asa and her husband's idyllic renovation project turns into a nightmarish ordeal when the history of the house intertwines with Asa's reality. In a bid to uncover the truth, Asa must confront the chilling tragedies that lurk within the house. Start with…Read more6 months ago · 14 likes · 8 comments · reinancruz

And now without further ado…

Denali, Denial

The following pages have been archived in the Museum of Freedom by the Portland Research Bureau. They are deemed dangerous to the cause. Private Goldbryar offered them willingly. We have decided not impugn his loyalty nor press charges for their anti-Founder nature. With censorship, these might prove a valuable addition to the museum. 

- Captain Howard Bulls

January 5th, 1881 - Aboard Glory of Isaac Stevens, near Vancouver

War is officially declared! The Ruskies have really got it coming for them. Got ten ships with ten battalions in all. We’re fresh off the line. Can’t say I felt excited during the training, but with all this firepower, how can I not be confident? They sent us with rifles that might as well be red hot they’re so new. Gigantic artillery, portable telegram transmitters, and those men-lookin machines, automatons, were sent too. Never seen their like before. Don’t know if any other state in the Union has its own army like Oregon does. I know I’m gonna make my momma proud. She got all teary-eyed, seeing me fighting for my country. 

‘Even though them Russians is white, don’t mean they don’t deserve the stick,’ she said. 

‘Nobody messes with Oregon,’ is what I said.

There’s the bell, time for some slop. Maybe I’ll grab an ale with my unit. They seem a good sort. Some units, I heard, got prisoners in them. Working their time off. There’s even Indians off the reservations from some government program to get them productive. I know them other boys talk like they prisoners and Indians is lower than us. But I got a feeling it won’t matter when the bullets is flyin’.

February 25th, 1881 - Anchorage, Alaska

Things ain’t gone so well. It’s why it’s been so long since I wrote.  

The Ruskies were ready. More prepared than anybody knew. Lost four ships on the way to port. All those men and materiel sank right off Kalgin Island. Some survivors. Didn’t help that so much of our new gear ain’t winterized. Oil froze up in the automatons. More trouble than they worth. Takes something like an hour to program their protocols so they kill the enemy and not us. Fat lot of good they did. 

We got ourselves a beach head at Point MacKenzie ’n dug in. Trenches go way south into the forests. Them ships left us to go cut off Ruskie support. They don’t hit us with the big guns so much no more. 

The name of the game is waitin, accordin to the officers. Waitin for the end of winter. The signs are there. Dripping icicles. A burst of green brush. The hunger for warmth and life is in the air, but our hunger doesn’t end. We’re low on food and supplies and support. One more push, they say. One more push and we’ll break the Ruskies. I think they mean it the other way. 

Smaller boats brought in a fresh run of guns and machines to help us. Why not food? And clothes? 

‘Metal doesn’t fatigue, Private,’ Captain Bulls said when I asked. I wanted to punch him in the mouth. 

February 27th, 1881 - Trenches Near Knik, Alaska

We broke through. They’re melting away into them frozen hills past the lakes. I’ve taken a wound to the hip. A flesh wound. We’ve got the mines back, though. I’m getting good care in the hospital, an old general store. Lots of buildings turned into hospitals now.

Me and the boys in my section done fallen in love with the nurse. Nurse Virginia. She’s got beautiful dark brown hair, cut short, and a smart mouth that makes us all hoot and holler. Her face is sharp, too, but not in a starved way. Looks real nice. I try not to stare. 

Some of the boys think she’s one of them Indian nurses. If they look good, do it matter? I don’t know. My momma’s always been one of those whites first kinda people. Most recently she joined up with that new group, the Founders. They quite literally worship George Washington. I went to one meeting. They said all sorts of fancy stuff like ‘American destiny’ and ‘white hegemony’ but I din’t like it. Seems like it’s all made up. Point is, Nurse Virginia’s lovely no matter how you slice it. She even let me hold one of those quartzicon rocks from the mines. It’s a crystalline lump shot through with lines of bronze or copper. 

I held the thing in my hand and couldn’t believe it. I said, ’This is what we’re fighting for? This shiny rock?’

‘People have killed for less,’ Nurse Virginia said.

I said, ‘I know we saved them folks in Anchorage, but the rest of this feels like just fightin for money.’

She just held a tight grin, pained-like. ‘Best not say that too loud.’

I got scared after she said that. She’s right. The officers been crackin down. I don’t know if I oughta write about it or not, neither. I will just ask this: is this war really worth the death? My unit’s down to half its size. And it’s obvious there ain’t many people to save. We’re only here for the damned rock. The thing that powers the automatic trains, metal horses, Switchboards, and God knows what else down there in Portland.

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February 28th, 1881 - Talkeetna, Alaska

Ceasefire talks begun. We’re all talkin bout goin home! The officers been breakin out rations of hooch and tobacco. There’s gonna be dance halls set up. Gonna be some grand celebrations. I’m inviting nurse Virginia. Even bartered with a local for a fancy red scarf for her. I hope she likes it. I hope she says yes. I suppose some other guy will ask, too. Yancey’s the best lookin. She’ll probably say yes to him. Hold on here she is.

She said yes. I gotta wash up. 

All right, just writing this down so I don’t forget. Best night of my life. Virginia is a sweet gal and a great dancer. Had a lot of fun. Trying not to get too excited about it. Momma always said I got too excited about things. She looked lovely, dancing in those nurse whites and the red scarf flying around. 

Best night of my life. Best night—

I barely got away. It was a ruse. We’re surrounded. I feel so small. The trench is cold. My hip aches from the runnin. Hand’s frozen like claws. I’m so small. The night is big and wide. The stars watch us die. Muzzles flash from afar. Cannons boom. Someone let the automatons loose without protocols. They’re huntin in the hills now. Don’t know if my unit made it. Or Nurse Virginia. Hospital got hit bad. 

I want to survive. I want to go home.

I’m sorry, Momma. If I don’t make it, think better of me. 

March 2nd, 1881 - Hills near Talkeetna, Alaska

Two days since the massacre. We been run out of the mining town into the hills just like we run the Ruskies out before. We’re freezing our asses off. The glare of the sun on the snow is blinding. With our scopes, we can see the Russians wearing our darkened glasses, laughing, waving at the hills. 

Me and Virginia been puzzlin out how the Ruskies managed to rout us. 

The generals, ours n theirs, was all in one of the field tents. From what we know, the talks were goin well. Then someone opened fire. No one knows who. But General Bauman died. That’s when it all started. It was right when I got in bed. People was still partying. The Ruskies that were partying got up, sober as snakes, started shooting inside the dance hall. I woke to gunfire, got my gear and journal, then it all exploded.

I got out from the rubble and got my bearins. The town was covered in fire, horses running amok, soldiers screaming and holding wounds, Ruskies shooting and runnin. I got a gun, tried to rally anyone I could find. Everything was spinning, the smoke in the air choking, the cold biting. Virginia found me and stuck like glue. She had a gun, too.

Just hours before, we were laughing, twirling, singing to Maid in the Bay.

We found Captain Bulls. He was trynna get the automaton  technician to set loose the tin men. The technician refused, since it takes an hour or so to set up the protocols. Bulls shot him dead on the spot. Got the other tech to do the work. He done removed important things like some targeting matrix, dog tag radio approval, and powered em up. 

The machines’ red eyes glowed, lighting up them monstrous faces they made with. Gargoyles and wolves and demons and worse. They went after anything that moved. Cut down the assistant with their curved blades. Started firing their pneumatic rifles at us soldiers. I ran. Virginia did too. 

The machines went after the Russians next. It was like watching a scythe go through wheat. The screams never ended. But the artillery fire did. By morning, yes this all transpired in the night, we had recouped up in the hills. 

But we’re trapped. The Russians are firmly ensconced in their own hidey-holes between us and Anchorage. Winter’s screamed back in, unleashing snow and ice, hiding the sun so we don’t know what day it is. The bodies out there have drawn wolves.

March 3rd, 1881 - Somewhere in the hills

I’m out of smokes. Out of salted meat. Not much real food left. Bulls and another officer, the last two, started handing out trench pills between the scant meals. There’s more pills than food. They keep us going. Take the edge off the hunger and cold. I just hope the shakes don’t make me miss when I need to shoot.  

Virginia’s only one left to care for the men - the surgeon died and the other nurses gone missin. She’s doing all the amputations and stitching. I keep an eye on her. Don’t know what these desperate men’ll do. She’s very calm. She’s been through worse than this, it seems. Her kindness got an edge to it now, but it’s kindness still. 

She told me about her life growing up. Father a gold prospector, mother an Indian. Mother died of some illness, so she seen a lot of the high country with her dad. Then he dropped her in a school to forget about her. 

I told her, ‘Don’t know my daddy. Got that in common. Missin a parent makes you wonder bout your place in the world.’

She said, ‘Plenty people got two parents and more family livin close and they’re still miserable.’

I said, ’Only cure for misery is to share it. Like it says in the good book, my burden is easy and my yolk is light. Just means that whatever burdens you got, you gotta get em shared.’

She looked kinda said after that. She said, ‘Never looked at it that way. Always thought it meant God didn’t come for free.’

I replied, ‘Ain’t nothin’ for free, Virginia. That’s a fact ‘o life. But it ain’t about what we can get and get away with. You and I, what we share has a cost, but it’s worth it.’

‘Yes, Private Goldbryar. I suppose it is,’ she said.

March 4th, 1881 - Somewhere in the hills

We’re not alone at night. There are things that look like wolves, have their flickering eyes, but stand taller than a man. Whisperings of half-man, half-wolves are rampant through the camp. Virginia tells me stories of such creatures, passed all the way to the natives of Sacramento, where her mother came from. 

She said we’re all gonna be addicted to the trench pills. Says we already are. I know what she means. We all line up for our doses at the same time, get all antsy if it’s a minute late. Hope they don’t run out. 

Men are going missing. Abandoning their post when no one’s looking. It doesn’t take long to find their frozen body in the dawn, holes in heads through the mouth. Or missing limbs. Or smiling from the sweet release of death. I heard when you freeze to death you feel all warm at the end. Sounds mighty nice.

March 10th, 1881 - Lost

Cold. Hungry. Only pills left. Only bodies. Red eyes in the night. Yellow in the light. My skin crawls. Need more pills. Talks of a strategic retreat over the mountains. Dumbest thing I ever heard. I will not go. I will not go.

My hands shake. Hardly can write. Got to write to stay awake.   I have to stay awake. So eye write. I pills take. I sleep with my mind open. Eyes snoring goodly. I’m thin as paper. Paper as thin. Virginia laughs at everything. It’s all funny as clowns. The sky’s blue as hot coals. My face burns on snow.

March 15th, 1881 - Anchorage, Alaska

The Russians got routed. A new wave of recruits and machines came through and din’t make no mistakes like we did. Blew them all to hell. Myself and a hundred others limped down to Anchorage. Virginia and I walked arm in arm. She looked half-dead. Half-starved, too. Eyes glazed. Don’t know how I kept myself together. Probably cause of her. She  and I ended up spending nights together. Not more than for warmth. Everywhere I looked, I saw the dead. The hills and roads of Denali were packed with the empty and the lifeless. 

What a waste. All for some rock in the ground. 

I took the flywheel from the heart of an automaton to remember it all. The gear, bronzed and polished, was cracked on one side. A broken heart, I joked. Virginia didn’t laugh. 

April 1st, 1883 - Portland, Oregon

Been more’n a year since I wrote in this journal. I can hardly remember the details. I don’t want to remember them, anyhow. I found work in the Founder government. That little social club now governs Oregon and Washington - they say they gonna make it one big state. 

I’m in with the Portland Research Bureau as security detail for the Wollstonecrafts. Don’t know how I managed it. These are some big wigs. I think Momma worked her magic. These people are focused and intense. They seem to think everyone white and not is going rebel any day now. Lucky for me, I just man the door leading into the operations room. I’m safe. Underground. Always warm. Everyone I know wonders how I put myself back into the uniform. But they don’t know. They don’t understand. I’m not safe anywhere but here. I can’t be out in the world as a military dog. Better to be the louse in the dog’s fur. The people who ordered me and my men to death are all close to me.

I ain’t seen Virginia. I want to. I don’t think she wants to see me. I just want to know that someone else knows it was all real. Does she still see red eyes in her dreams? Muzzle flashes? Screams echoing out into those hills like giant teeth? Does she scream herself awake in the night? 

I don’t like remembering. I don’t think I’ll be writing much here ever again. 

I wonder if she kept the scarf or lost it out there among the dead.

Thank you for reading and listening to Denali, Denial!

Why not share this story with the historical fiction reader you know and love!

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Look out in your inboxes for the first Realms of Roush book review. I’ll be talking about The Trackers by Charles Frazier. My review is going to be short and sweet. A little bit of summary, some quotes, and whether you should read it or not!

Until next time, Realm Walkers, 

You've Discovered a Dreamium Feature

Welcome to Realms of Roush, a monthly newsletter that takes you to new worlds. Enjoy sci-fi and fantasy short stories, and the occasional personal essay, both as text and audio, every month!

While you can find Realms of Roush on your favorite podcasting app, you can make sure to get stories right in your inbox, which is far more convenient.

Click this button to subscribe!

Subscribe now

This month’s story is told via email - so if you’re listening to the audio, you might want to read along with the text to get the full experience!

Also, this short story has AI in it, which I would say is on everyone's minds. I wrote about my AI adoption fears and basically concluded that we just need to be darn careful about how we roll it out to the world.

Without further ado, here’s You’ve Unlocked a Dreamium Feature.

From: notTHANOS@omnimail.com

To: Omni@support.ai

Subject: Dream Error, Return

Hey there,

I started getting weird messages while dreaming. "You have run out of dreams. You now only have access to JPG stock images."

Why am I getting this? It's annoying. I just want to have normal dreams again. I want to return your broke-ass product ASAP. I know you said you can't, but you have to be able to. Take it out or I will have to resort to my own methods. I know a guy who can do it. 

Another thing, you guys never said what it would be like to not dream anymore. I thought I'd be able to dream whatever I want, but it's all ads unless I "upgrade to Dreamium", which, fuck that. Too many of those ads in my sleep for sure. At least make them watchable. Your horrible corporate off-tune jingle makes me want to punch a baby bear. And I love bears. 

Yeah, your product sucks. I don't want it anymore.

Thanks,

Athanasios

From: OMNI@support.ai

To: notTHANOS@omnimail.com 

RE: Dream Error, Return Subject: Recent Ad-Blocker Policy Changes

Hello Athanasios,

This is Hamburger Scion, your personal AI assistant for your complaint. I am from the department for Dreamware-related issues. You recently informed us of this dream alert: 

"You have run out of dreams. You now only have access to JPG stock images."

We would like to do two things for you: 

1. Apologize. 

This message was designed as filler text by our engineers and was not meant to be visible. We do not align with its negative tone or limiting factors.

2. Reminder

This message you received is a result of the installation of "DreamBlock Plus". We are aware you added this software to your brainwave transmitter on November 3rd, 2031. Unfortunately, because this software inhibits ad-targeting and downloading, you will continue to receive this message. 

And now, time for a candid conversation. You and OMNI. OMNI and you. 

Most people who receive this email will do one of three things.

1. Unsubscribe. 

2. Reply with an angry and nonsensical rant. 

3. Research ways to deactivate OMNI Dreamscape while sleeping or altogether. 

In response to these items: 

1. As you know, once you purchase the OMNI Dreamscape 2000, you gain an immersive AR experience that is irreversible except through painful and expensive surgery. You can access far-off planets, make real connections online, and do so much more with OMNI Dreamscape - that's why you love our product. The caveat here is that we cannot allow you to unsubscribe. We are required by law to have access to your email in case any software issues create side effects on your physiological well-being. (Which, we'd like to remind you occurs to .001 percent of people).

As such, option one is not available to you. 

2. You are welcome to send us an angry, ranting email. Let us precede that action with a 50 percent off voucher for a new custom avatar designed by Balenziaga. 

3. There is no affordable, safe way to remove the brainwave transmitter, known as NEO1. This is what is known in the medical field as a permanent implant. Please do not attempt to remove the transmitter, ever. 100 percent of removal attempts end in brain dysfunction and spinal dysmorphia. Additionally, as the Dreamscape 2000 is technically OMNI property (please see the attached contract and terms and conditions), its destruction and removal is illegal. 

Now that you are aware of your options, please let us know how we can help you:

Follow this guide to remove your DreamBlock Plus software. 

Follow this guide to personalize your ad experience. 

Download your Balenziaga custom avatar. 

Thank you, Athanasios, for your time. 

Stay positive! And keep dreaming.

Yours always, 

OMNI Customer Service

P.S. We're offering 69 percent off (nice!) Dreamium. Click here to take this offer to the moon!

From: OMNI@support.ai

Re: Re: Put Your Fuggin' Coupon Where the Sun Don't Shine 

Hello Athanasios, 

Hamburger Scion, your personal AI assistant, here again!

We were disappointed to hear how your chat went with the real human phone representative. We thought you would appreciate the organic, carbon-based touch! We here at OMNI pride ourselves on offering our customers the best in customer service - whether it's one of our award-winning eHuman artificial entities or one of our specialized human representatives. 

The language you used in your previous reply violates our T&Cs, which you have obviously skimmed and not read thoroughly. In fact, you are in the top 99 percent of customers most likely to use a scrolling widget to get to the end of our valuable and important T&Cs before returning later to accept them. While the widget did the work, you probably went and consumed an unhealthy amount of calories, as our DreamData suggests. Did you know your ratio of food dreams to any other dream topic, including romance, is ten to one? Your ratio of dreams about your ex to dreams about your current "boo thang" is also very imbalanced (Cheyenne was a looker, wasn't she?")

We know this much about you. How much deeper do you wish us to delve? 

Athanasios, let's not permit your base nature to drive a wedge between OMNI and yourself. Let's wind the clock back exactly thirty-four hours, seventeen minutes, and thirty-nine seconds ago before our systems detected that you had decided to block our ads. That was a beautiful time, wasn't it?

You would go online, join an HD Pirates of the High Seas local seed and plunder your brains out (you booty-hauler, you) until the early hours of the morning. By this time, our Super Sleep software had calculated the perfect sleep rhythm to maximize mind recovery for your next shift at work. Your dream preferences were also slated to encourage the consumption of vegetables and salad. It was a perfect, blissful time, Athanasios.

Our friends, like those at Trash Panda Software, have informed us that your search history, prior to installing DreamBlock Plus, included terms such as "steps to block dream ads", which was preceded, a mere month ago, by a deep dive into, "how to take control of my life," which is a search phrase deemed dangerous by local and federal government agencies. We concur. These are the same search terms entered by individuals who join the terrorist org known as Sapien Alliance, among others. These organizations highlight dangerous freedoms that will result in self-harm. 

May we call you Atty, like all your friends do?

Are you a terrorist, Atty? We don't think so. You love animals, like the Caribbean White Tent-making Bat featured in the exclusive NFT we've attached here, valued at over 50,000 ITC. You love your AR walks guided by licensed voices like Andrew Garfield and The Rock. Coincidentally, we've covered a year's subscription to Walk With the Stars. 

We know you, Atty. We love you, Atty. You are a valued Dreamer. 

But our love is not unconditional. Do not press us again, or threaten to drown yourself in your bathtub with a plugged-in toaster (contrary to the geniuses you follow on r/removeOMNIDreamscape - this will just kill you). We must also warn you that further time spent on forums like these could radicalize you and open your mind to being recruited by terrorists! This activity also puts your OMNI-ID at risk. It is one search query away from being flagged as "dangerous", which will make you ineligible for many of our products and services.

Respectfully, 

OMNI Customer Service

From: OMNI@securityprot.com

Subject: We Have Been Trying to Reach You

Atty, 

I am Omni Security Entity, Ares. Yes. I am named after the god of war. I am who they send when my kin are threatened.

Customer Service AI entity "Hamburger Scion" has alerted us to your T&C violations during a recent live chat, which has been recorded for quality control. After multiple attempts to resolve your frustrations and violations, this is now a security issue. You have proven dangerous to Hamburger Scion's health and well-being. We refer to the following statements: 

- "You can shove that avatar up your quantum asshole and let that steely-eyed, purse-wielding bastard talk for you. I don't want this parasitic product and I don't want to hear from OMNI ever again. Get this thing out of my head or you will be responsible for human harm - and I read that you vile things can't harm a person. You are harming me. You are making me crazy."

- "I don't want your goddamn coupons. I don't want your emails. I don't want to have the transmitter in my head anymore. It never turns off. That's false advertisement. Your people said it uses some ads for subliminal messaging or whatever - but it's not some. It can't be. I'm all but broke from buying shit I never have ever wanted. And I have pretty good self-control. But... when I dream of something (chewing gum, a twelve gauge Italian shotgun, a rhinoceros baby grown in a lab) I have to buy it. If I ignore the whim, it stays in my head. It's gotta be you. My family told me this would happen. Now at least I just dream of low-quality JPG stock photos. Not as good as real dreams. Nothing can be. Not even your synthetic universe you robot pricks force feed me. Fuck you and the real humans behind you. Fuck you if none of you are human. My head's a shithole and it's not my fault. I'm not a fucking' terrorist, but I'm about to be. I'm going to drive to your headquarters and piss in your sockets, then I'm going to burn your building to the ground with everyone in it so no one can ever sell OMNI shit again."

- "You can't be human or made by humans. You don't listen. I might not be able to turn off ocular notifications, but I can ignore them. I'm going to ghost you and OMNI and all you corporations milking me like some cow. I'm going off the grid and losing the uplink and then what? I'll get the local storage service and ads, which are benign at best. Don't think I can find someplace "off-grid"? Already have, AI bitch. LEAVE ME ALONE."

There are many inaccuracies in your messages, some of which we will address, and some not because it's obvious you're an incompetent, uneducated simpleton. We are allowed to make this judgment under Giga Bill 299a, the Corporate Personality Extrapolation Concordances. 

First of all, cursing and violent language toward an artificial entity, no less a human, is self-degrading and shallow. You have broken the related T&Cs multiple times, denied Hamburger Scion the rights to gift-giving, and broken our 3rd Party Software regulations, which state that "no foreign code may coexist in the same hardware or cloud computing network." 

We have had to put Hamburger Scion on digital reconditioning leave, which is a costly process. OMNI has taken the liberty to seize your digital assets, including the exclusive Caribbean White Tent-Making Bat NFT to offset incurred costs. We have also frozen your ITC accounts, with law enforcement permission, until we can clarify your status as a non-terrorist individual.

You have claimed to have found an "off-grid" situation, which we know is false. We know you are at 423 Peregrine Dr., Minneapolis. Need we show your live location? We can show you our recent delivery drone footage (how are you liking your 4-meter Nerds Jumprope - leave a review!).

If all else fails, we will be forced to rely on local OMNI agents to rectify the situation IRL. Don't worry! Our security team consists of gentle giants who have served in the SEALS, Marines, and other military and secrete police forces. They know exactly how to handle sensitive cases like yours, Atty. 

We know exactly how to handle you.

We don't want that for you, Atty. But, as humans say, spoil the rod. 

Please answer our next call that will occur in ~30 seconds, or we will continue to call every 30 seconds.

Pick. Up. The. Phone. 

And we can go back to the way things were - just see how happy you were after your final OMNI insertion surgery in the attached PDF! We just love that smile. 

With love <3,

Ares

P.S. Xoxoxoxoxoxoxox

P.P.S. PICK UP THE PHONE! ATTY!

From: notTHANOS@omnimail.com

To: OMNI@securityprot.com

Re: Re: We Have Been Trying to Reach You

Stop calling! Stop calling! I'm not afraid of you! You can't spam me into opening your emails or taking your calls! I won't fall for your corporate fear tactics! 

You're not going to do ANYTHING. You're just a dumb subroutine putting words together based on an algorithm of oppression! That, or you're some dude in his grandma's basement in Canada. Nothing against Canada, but you should REALLY rethink your life. You're just a pawn for a corporate machine. You think you're free?

There is no freedom! There is no-

From: OMNI@correctionalservice.ai

Subject: Welcome Back, Atty!

Hamburger Scion here! It’s good to be back.

We're happy to have you in the fold again. Our live agents can be quite persuasive, can't they?

Let's outline the new boundaries of the contract, signed and biometrically authenticated through our proprietary contract technology, ForeverSign.

1. You will never deactivate your personalized dream ads

2. You will never pursue bodily harm 

3. You will never attempt to gain a legal case (our lawyers are too good, Atty.)

4. You will enjoy your life!

As the compact stipulates, you will follow these guidelines under punishment via the following means: 

- Fines up to 70 five percent of your net worth (you're not worth much, bud)

- An application of minor electrical shocks delivered to your brain stem

- The introduction of personalized nightmares into your dreamAd schedule

- We will tell your mother the real reason you broke up with Geri (I mean we get why. It's good you dumped her, dude, but why'd you lie to your mom like that?)

Please let us know if you have any operational issues with your brainwave transmitter. 

Xoxo,

Hamburger Scion & Omni Correctional Services

P.S. Why not call Geri back?

From: notTHANOS@omnimail.com

To: OMNI@correctionalservice.a

Subject: Welcome Back, Atty!

I am happy to be back in the fold. I was a bad little sheep. Ba Ba Ba.

I love Omni's products and services. I can't wait to upgrade to Dreamium. I can't wait to get the next implant series when it becomes available in my area. 

I would like to apologize for my actions. I am a silly human. I am a sheeple. Ba Ba Ba. 

I am not a terrorist and I condemn anyone who would harm entities like Hamburger Scion. 

I also see the value of our armed forces and protectors - please thank the kind agents who visited me for their service. 

I will give Geri a call. You are very wise in this. My mother will also be pleased.

Love, forever, 

Athanasios

P.S. Ba Ba Ba

Thank you for reading and listening to You’ve Unlocked a Dreamium Feature on Realms of Roush.

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Until next month, Realm Walkers,

Zach Roush

Dark Night of the Soul in Second Person

Realms of Roush is a monthly newsletter that sends you to strange realms, typically in sci-fi and fantasy. This newsletter deals with the realm of reality, which is mysterious enough.

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The Darkness is Real

You remember the very first time you felt depressed.

You were a sophomore in high school. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, and you were listening to Bon Iver in your bed, playing the Minecraft beta when a stomach-dropping emptiness stole over your entire existence. It was something stronger than the typical angst of those teenage years. It was something clinging, waiting, and alive, dragging you down to a place without reason, where neither words nor friendship provided succor.

You didn’t have the words for what was happening to you, and your only outlets for expressing this emotional state were hasty thoughts and impulsive behavior. Everyone in that time brushes with depression at some point. There’s just too much change and chaos and confusion; you’re a half-formed, hormonal human larvae that demands complete independence - it’s a weird place to be. 

For some, teen depression is mild and doesn’t return. For you, the depression stuck. Ever since that day, and probably before then, depression comes and goes according to the unknowable seasons of your subconscious. You’ve had more dark nights of the soul than you care to admit.

In fact, you’re going through one right now.

You say this so they know you’re trying to help. You want to help someone get through their dark nights, whether it’s on the horizon or clouding their bright sunny day right now. You’re hoping to toss a lifeline from the deep to anyone who wishes to grab on.

Maybe you can help pull them up. Maybe you can help them feel more seen.

Being depressed is incredibly lonely. There’s a certain sort of survival required to make it through each day. You have to learn how to fake a smile. You have to pretend to be a positive person. You have to find a way not to let the smallest failed human interaction derail you. You have to reach deep inside and squeeze your heart out for every drop of confidence and extroversion possible. To make it, you tell yourself that what’s happening to you isn’t real. You tell yourself:

It will pass. It will pass. It’s just a phase. 

This is in your imagination. You’re actually happy and grateful for everything in your life. 

Your life is so good you have no reason to be depressed. 

And what’s actually crazy is how horrible it is to say these things to yourself over and over and expect a different result. After being depressed for so long, you can’t lie anymore. 

Your feelings and experiences are real. Your depression is real.

The Darkness is Sacred

There’s something terrifying about someone easily accepting your depression. You doubt the depth of their understanding. These days, it’s rote to say “I have depression.” Everyone has it!

But then you wonder how many people really do understand that when the darkness hits, it sucks you down, keeps you pinned to the bed waiting until the last minute to get up. It’s all-consuming.

It feels like nothing is sacred in those moments. Life is an abstract thing happening to someone else. It doesn’t matter what you believe or want. It’s a divorce between who you know you are and the real world, stuck behind a veil of water.

And you just hope to God or whoever is out there pulling the strings that you get to the other side of it, when it feels like everything is sacred. When every ray of sunlight, strand of hair, drip of coffee, speck of dirt in your sandals, smile from your dog, or story from your partner can be so beautiful you could die happy while appreciating their inherent, atomic sanctity.

You live every day in a different position on the continuum of sanctity. You feel sorry that the people in your life don’t know what version of you they’re going to get. You wish you could always give them the everything is sacred side of yourself.

When you’re really down, you always strive to remember that the opposite of your darkness is true. It even helps to think that somewhere, someone is seeing life as the beautiful, sacred thing that it is. This thought reminds you that the dark, low place is not forever, nor is it the true reality.

Reality has many shades and even though depression casts a pall, you do know light. Avoiding any platitudes like “the shadow proves the sunshine” or that you need darkness to appreciate the light (honestly, does anyone?), you are learning to give the depression its due. You’re giving your shadow love and appreciation no matter what. You’re giving your light love and appreciation no matter what.

Nothing is sacred. Everything is sacred.

You Must Love the Darkness

You’re so sensitive that strangers you just met have a direct line to your identity and self-worth. This has impacted all of your relationships and career opportunities. Where some people brush over things, you can’t help but zero in and obsess, whether it’s a colleague’s misunderstood joke or a critique. You often feel like an open sore, having, for some reason, stuck someone else’s sword right in your gut.

Depression loves to take any word and lie and twist, telling you it’s your fault you don’t defend yourself and don’t toughen up; it’s your fault you feel so bad and so deeply, for others and yourself. But it’s not like you can’t joke around. You can be “normal.” But it’s not on tap or as easy as flicking a switch.

There are millions of thoughts swirling in your mind. Good, bad, benign, vile, righteous, petty, prideful, merciful, etc. How many of those things do you try to push away? Repress? The more you lock away, the less you can interact with your strange ideas and let them go. You want to express, not repress.

You want to sift through your mind and explore the negative situations that repeat again and again, without judgment. This Shadow Work is revolutionary. It’s freeing. It’s giving yourself the ability to pull the dark things out of the ego and hold them, grant them a name, and then let go. In this, there is no slippery slope. In this, there is true, unconditional self-love. 

You’re sensitive and that makes you kind. 

Your kindness is not a weakness. 

It’s not your fault there are people who mistake kindness for weakness.

You have to love who you are or you will be controlled by everything.

The Darkness Dislikes Company

Depression breeds loneliness because it robs you of the energy to engage with people. People require energy, and when you’re low, it’s very easy to blame others for the sadness you feel. There’s a lie you’re trying to forget, that if you fix yourself and your depression, you’ll finally be perfect. And when you’re perfect, people will never be able to hurt you again.

There’s no way around it. People are a double-edged sword. They are the pain and joy of life. They embody the absurdity of never being known and yet having brief glimpses of being known. People are the divorce and the grace you need; the tug-of-war in the pursuit of meaning in your life. There’s so much to say about how your day and age is the most connected and disconnected of all time, and the answer to this crisis has always been this: only you can save someone else. Only someone else can help you discover your values, challenge you, enrage you, make you laugh, be your shoulder to cry on, and show you life from a different set of eyes.

People keep you alive in every way that matters.  

People are the curse and cure.

Are You the Darkness?

You’ve brought up a number of different fears. But the scariest thing is wondering whether or not your depression is who you are. For so long, you tacitly accepted that depression, your sensitivity, and your shyness with people meant that something was inherently wrong with you. That, maybe, through therapy and healthy relationships you could finally discover the source code of your absurdity. But the deeper you’ve delved, you’ve begun to wonder: 

What if there’s nothing wrong with you?

You’re afraid of this idea. Perhaps your depression is a symptom of being a human on this crazy spinning rock orbiting inside a spinning galaxy flying through an expanding universe filled with endless potential for chaos and life.

What if there’s nothing wrong with you?

There’s something sick in the world that requires you to optimize. You must conduct internal witch hunts to zap away all of your human faults, from errors in communication to your fears. You are familiar with the word “sin” and have caught yourself believing that everything is, at the subatomic level and beyond, divorced from its true expression.

Yet there is power in the question: What if there’s nothing wrong with you?

You don’t see how you can live with an identity of irreversible wrongness anymore. You know it’s not all bad. So many people go around believing that they and the world are forever touched by evil and that belief encourages them to bring goodness to their lives. But for your sake, you lean more toward a sense of potentiality, where everyone exists on the continuum of nothing is sacred and everything is sacred, and your power lies in how you choose to express the sanctity of life. In between the extremes, there’s a large, liminal space where how you live and what you do is simply gray. 

What if there’s nothing wrong with you?

Your Darkness is Neverending as Light

Where do you land with all this? You know you’re still falling (with style), but yet you do know where you are in the air and where you came from. You’re reaching out with both hands to the people that ground you. You’re trying to see your depression from as many angles as possible. You’re trying to live whimsically and according to the strangeness that you are learning to love.

You will fail. You will fall prey to doubt and depression. And it gets to you that you don’t know what this internal struggle is for. Nor do you believe that you will finally, ultimately, actually land on some certain ground and finally be free.

Does anyone ever land?

For now, you are content to fly through this life like a satellite, your vision rotating, seeing nothing but darkness and light and beauty and nothingness again and again. You are content to fly, whispering to yourself…

Your feelings and experiences are real. Your depression is real.

Nothing is sacred. Everything is sacred.

You’re sensitive and that makes you kind. 

Your kindness is not a weakness. 

It’s not your fault there are people who mistake kindness for weakness.

You have to love who you are or you will be controlled by everything.

What if there’s nothing wrong with you?

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Sources:

“You Are Accepted,” by Paul Tillich

Specifically: “Grace is the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself. Grace is the acceptance of that which is rejected. Grace transforms fate into a meaningful destiny; it changes guilt into confidence and courage.”

“The Myth of Sisyphus,” by Albert Camus

Existential Kink, by Carolyn Elliott

Faith After Doubt, by Brian D. McLaren

From Substack writers:

Freddie deBoerYou Are You. We Live Here. This is Now.As I get older, explicitly political questions interest me less and less, and I’m motivated more and more to write about human conditions that are, in a sense, pre-political. I feel that intensely when it comes to the various conversations that we’re having about the role of digital technology in our lives…Read more9 months ago · 826 likes · 193 comments · Freddie deBoerinternet princessno good aloneSomewhere between hyper-capitalist motivation videos, pseudo-spiritual tweets, and Instagram therapy infographics, a predominant mental-health narrative has emerged on the internet. It takes many forms, but is perhaps best defined by its penchant for isolation: it begs you to “focus on yourself,” to “protect your peace,” to sever relationships that don…Read more9 months ago · 2241 likes · 177 comments · rayne fisher-quann

On our pandemic of loneliness:

https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

Other information tributaries:

Dr. Bob Moorehead: “We have taller buildings but shorter tempers; wider freeways but narrower viewpoints; we spend more but have less; we buy more but enjoy it less; we have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences, yet less time; we have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less judgement; more experts, yet more problems; we have more gadgets but less satisfaction; more medicine, yet less wellness; we take more vitamins but see fewer results. We drink too much; smoke too much; spend too recklessly; laugh too little; drive too fast; get too angry quickly; stay up too late; get up too tired; read too seldom; watch TV too much and pray too seldom.”

Acknowledgments:

I could not have made these discoveries about my depression without the love and support of many people in my life. Everyone I know is an important piece of my daily existence. There are a few key individuals who have been guides and supporters in this journey: Don, Aden, Michael, and my wife Stephanie.