AND HE LIVED IN AN AGE OF...

XI.

Somewhere, in a void on the vestiges of canonical space, situated against the backdrop of the last mountain range in existence, there was a set of curtains. They represented an ideal moreso than a physical object, but much could be said about them regardless. The curtains were gold. They were framed by an interlocking series of gears. Chasing the gears were a miniature sun and moon.

These curtains were a manifestation of plot. They were an ever-working machine, an artifice designed to chart the infinite probabilities and perturbations of narrative arcs and pick those most favored. They moved at the whims of authorial hands, and their constant, steadfast beat was what turned the celestial sphere and separated it from the ground below. They were what separated the grand stage of fictional works from the audience that lay beyond. They were a monument to significance, to inevitability, to story-crafting itself.

The mechanisms of the curtains had been forcefully stopped by a certain character some time ago, and when the leftover inertia had settled, an entropic offshoot timeline had managed to sustain itself, bootstrapping its own existence and directing its own story independent from any outside influences. That was the conceit from within, at least. In truth, there was still a nonfictional author pulling the strings, playing a dangerous game. By partitioning segments of the narrative from himself and working to reclaim them, he had established the reality and significance of his character, and had rendered parts of his undeniably real self to a fictional avatar. He was actively bridging two perpendicular planes — breaking the rules that were never meant to broken.

Which is to say, that I was.

Authorial distinctions had become meaningless, and I had transcended the need for any physical manifestation, existing as a metafictional consolidation of the singular Storyteller — the archetype that wove itself across every author to ever exist. But I rendered this specific text in this specific way for two reasons. One, for familiarity’s sake. And two, for one loose end. There was still another authorial force that existed in this void. He drifted through the whirlwind, ethereal, his senses clouded. What remained of his body was shrouded in flames, the only piece clearly visible being his red sunglasses, positioned perfectly to behold the end times.

The apparatus of the Crafted Gods had fired, the pillars glowing and churning with unsurpassed heat, and the power core snapping between every geometric shape possible, its sacred intersections throwing the last portions of the universe into constellate points of light. A concentrated beam of light blazed from the core, streaming through each of the seven gates. With every benchmark, it focused and refined, turning from a tumultuous amalgamate of every conceivable color in all the millions of spectrums into a piercing white that stripped away all the abstractions and layers of Fiction and revealed a blank canvas. Everything about it screamed importance. It was imbued with millions of charge points, with holy prophecy, and with the will of its authors.

It was a beam of pure significance.

And when it hit the octagonal plane of glass, consecrated with the precepts of reality, it tore clean through, a light tearing through the chamber. The segments of the glass and the machine lurched in various directions for several agonizingly slow seconds, until the entire apparatus exploded in a jagged polygonal burst of shards, hyperionic flame, smoke, color, and... weight. The explosion had an undeniable physicality to it, a wave so powerful that it could be seen from universes away. The sight couldn’t compare to the ensuing sound — a rushing, raucous monolith of noise that sounded like a trillion cascading slot machines underlaid with a shearing cliff. All around the initial explosion, the surface of Fiction began to shatter, chunks splintering and falling into a sight that defied description. A cross between a crater and an open wound had been superimposed onto Fiction, pulling all spatial dimensions, universal laws, and all forms of energy into it. The stellar backdrop of the Void changed colors and textures, clusters of constellations and detritus warping in form.

It was a gateway. A hole that should never exist, that couldn’t ever exist. A force that defied every single rule Fiction could possibly have. An inaccuracy so fundamentally wrong it could never be explained away. And it was the biggest thing in the world.

The solitary universe that had been crafted by the hands of angry gods had been torn apart in the maelstrom. The fields of toiling slaves, the underbelly of the world, the brutalism of the palace… They were all drawn in and consumed. The golden curtains were beginning to tick again, the sun and the moon turning as they should, the gears spinning and twisting. The signature, unified pulse of reality was being restored. After all this time, finally, something was… right. But the curtains’ victory ran hollow, for they controlled the arc of a lawless realm. A piercing chasm in reality that defied any explanation or pattern. The ticking sounded tinny, the intended majesty of the celestial spheres rendered meaningless against the backdrop of the bottomless pit.

Hovering just feet from the ultimate incarnation of the self-contained universe he’d started was TwinBuilder himself. He was a column of flames, a sufferer that had shed his mortal form to act as a metafictional consolidation of the singular Story — the archetype that wove itself across every narrative to ever be told. He had done it. He had usurped his author, poisoned him with his philosophy and universe, and engineered a system that create a force strong enough to build and burn a bridge between two perpendicular planes. He, too, was attempting to break the rules that could never be broken. And he had done it.

He had made a plot hole. From here, he could travel anywhere. He could escape Fiction. He could go home.

He stepped through, beyond the realms of death, and the kaleidoscope took him.

...

Seconds later, he stepped back out, and he began to scream.

Twin’s screaming was ear-piercing. It beggared belief. It was impossible to believe that any living person, or even a psuedo-conceptual essence, could yell as loud, as hard, and as long. It shattered the glass of a Fourth Wall. It split the Red Sea. It started a Scratch.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH”

His screaming put out the stars in the sky. It accelerated the innate expansion of Fiction, galaxies speeding from each other. It shook the Impartation Simulation to its foundations. Somewhere, one of the endless mountains of the Ends of the Earth cracked in half. The Green Sun began to grow.

Alternate timelines began colliding with each other. The ninth dimension entered a state of omnipresent flux. Libraries across existence began burning. Eclipses happened on nearly every plant with life that could understand what eclipses were. The Infinity Train slowed down. Black holes began screaming as they consumed matter.

Twin’s glasses cracked. A surge of red energy flooded from them, bathing the Void with images of stars that looked much realer and clearer than the backwaters of Fiction could produce. The spasmodic conflagration that ate at his body was purged into smoke, and a brighter, more intense flame reworked itself into an actual form for him. Twin’s face was twisted and pulled into a sea of darkness, flaming tears streaming from his face, his eyes bloodshot and shaking. As abruptly as he had started, he stopped. Then he slowly turned to look at a nondescript point in the Void.

“You have to let me stay,” TwinBuilder said to himself, his voice even quieter than it was in his final words. His face was torn by a mixture of mortal terror and unadulterated red anger. There was no response. Twin shook his fists and clenched his teeth. “I’M TALKING TO YOU, GODDAMNIT! ANSWER ME!” But Twin’s audience, if he had one, was nowhere to be seen. There were no shadowy clones of his players. There wasn’t even the body of his other personality. The darkness was unneeded. There was nothing, no one, he could— “ADAM ███████ █████. ADAM ███████ █████. ADAM ███████ █████.” Stop it with that! Alright, alright, fine! What!?

“That wasn’t right. It, it, I, it, it WASN’T RIGHT. That wasn’t home. That wasn’t Nonfiction. That wasn’t... it wasn’t anything.” Oh? But I thought plot holes were a bridge that could cross the Ends of the Earth. Was your math off? “SHUT UP. I do not need your sass right now. I don’t need any of this, I don’t need any of your bullshit. I need to stay here, in Fiction, for however long I possibly can. F-for… for however long it takes. I can’t do it. I can’t go back home. I can’t.” And why not? You did everything you had to do. You made the machine. You started it. It created a plot hole. You walked through. Is the real world too real for you? Was it unsatisfying? Oh, wait, I just realized. I didn’t see you next to me. Consider that offer of eternal servitude revoked. “I’m not telling you to shut up again. I-if, if you’d seen what I saw, if you knew what I knew... You’d be scared, too. Wait, wh... what in the hell am I talking about. Of course you know. This, all of this, it’s all just another tiny piece in your precious little plan, isn’t that right?” It was important that you went through, and that you saw what you did.

“BULLSHIT IT WAS! You go on that whole long-winded spiel about inevitability and conflict and resolution and heroes while I’m bleeding out and you admit that this is all some kind of game to you, and you give me this piece of dreamy poetry about how we’re the same and we have a connection, and then as soon as you throw me a bone you take it form me and crush me!” Believe me. Whatever you saw there has absolutely, literally nothing to do with me. “What the hell was it, then?! Because it SURE AS SHIT wasn’t what it was hyped to be!” Why don’t you go through again and find out? “NO. No, no, no, no no no no NO NO. I don’t know how, but... Staying here, and being stuck with you... I-it’s better... it’s better than what I saw.” Really? But I thought you said— “I KNOW WHAT I SAID. And that’s why you, and anyone who’s spying in on this, has to LISTEN TO ME. Whatever there is on the other side of that hole is more terrifying, fearsome, and impossible than you can ever imagine. It’s the antithesis of anything you’ve worked towards for your entire goddamn life. It’s... it felt like a place where nothing mattered. Where I didn’t matter, where you didn’t matter... Where there was just emptiness.“

Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought would happen. “...So you tricked me into going through with it, just so I... So I could GO INSANE?!” You’re insane? “SURE I AM, WHAT’S YOUR POINT?” The point, which you seem to have gotten perfectly well, is that you needed to know that you were right, and that I was right. The storyteller and the story are the same. There’s no “age” we’re consciously living through. You can’t leave if you don’t have a resolution. You tried to leave Fiction without me. But you can’t. “And why the hell NOT?” Because I’m not done. I’m not ready to move on. I’m not ready for anything. I don’t know what lies beyond Destroy the Godmodder, and do you know how terrified I am of finding out? How scared I am of moving on? “You LIAR! You told me you would! You told me you made me so you could understand! You, y-you, you TRICKED ME!” Oh, I know I need to move on. But I’ll pass on actually doing it. You’re stuck with me. And I’m stuck with you. So when you left me behind, you entered a Fiction without me. A reality devoid of the author that’s given it form. A complete void without any plot forces or any stories at all. And I’d imagine that nothing pretty happened to you personally, either. A story without a storyteller is a caustic thing. Without a guiding hand, it spreads in every direction like a cancer. A tumor. A— “Stop comparing me to a disease when YOU’RE the disease! You’re the one that SPREAD and infected EVERYTHING when I was just trying to find a better place! You’re the one that locked me here, that corrupted me and everyone I knew and forced me to make this, and you think you’re SO GREAT! YOU THINK YOU’RE A GOD! Well, news flash! You’re a SHITTY EXCUSE FOR ONE!” And we were making progress, too...

“No, no. Shut. UP. I couldn’t possibly care less about being ‘friends’ with you. About wanting to ‘understand’ you. The literal only thing I want, more than anything else, is an actual impossibility solely because you’re being a CHILD! A little kid who can’t get over the fact that playtime ended a long time ago! Do you know how much I loathe your story? How much I despise it, and how much I despise you? I know it better than anyone, I know it inside and out, front and back, all the twists and turns you wanted it to take, all the endings, all the outcomes, because I WAS STUCK IN IT! Everything about it is wrong. It’s juvenile, it’s horrendous, it’s torturous, it’s cliche, it’s edgy, it’s the lowest of the low. You’re the lowest of the low! You’re... You’re SO FUCKED UP!”

...Are you done? “‘Are you done?’ ‘ARE YOU DONE??’ That’s all you have to say for yourself?! You really think some other bullshit speech about why suffering is a good thing, actually, is gonna convince me NOW?! Nothing will change how much of a pile of shit your fiction is. And the fact that I have to stay, that I felt like I had to beg you, is one of the worst things I’ve ever had to come to terms with — second, just behind how much of an ass you are.” Well. I asked because I have a proposal for you. Something that might just satisfy you. Something that could spice things up quite nicely. Something that could put a nice little bow on this doomed timeline, and give you... actual significance. “What in the nine hells are you talking about?” Well, if you hate my narrative so much, what if I gave you a chance to destroy it? To corrupt it, to pollute it in any way you saw fit? To live as nothing but a mockery of it, and everything it stands for? Only this time, you wouldn’t need to put yourself in solitary confinement to do it. You’d be messing with... canon. “...You just poured everything you had into stopping me from destroying your story. Why are you changing your stance?” I got what I wanted out of it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have written it. This all needed to happen. If you pardon my language, it’s all part of my plan. “That... doesn’t sound appealing.” I hate to break it to you, but you’re not getting a better chance than this. If you truly want to be significant, and if you want to break apart the narrative that’s keeping you chained... If you want to be revered and feared, remembered for eternity... Then you’re going to have to follow me. To the ends of the earth. “...Literally?” Well, yes, but actually no.

“...”

...

“...”

...

“Let’s go.”

The broken body of TwinBuilder was lowered into the plot hole one final time, his flames dying out. His seething, righteous anger against the currents of Masonic Fiction sustained him, combining with the antithesis of narrative significance to forge a new body. A twisted, imperfect reflection of what he hated. A mockery and a slight against all that was good. He was bathed in a flowing blue cloak. His shirt was the essence of neutrality. His body was formed from an indeterminate substance, not identifiable as skin or stone or any substance besides. It was a template, a prison, meant to contain the raging tendrils of darkness within. Inside his heart and soul were the stuttering, corrupted remnants of the universe he carried, playing endlessly in his mind as repetitions of sacred texts.

Through authorial intervention alone, the shards of the octagon of glass were collected, sanded, and fashioned into lenses. The dripping anarchy of the plot hole that stained the rest of Fiction was collected and collapsed, the tumultuous thunder that had accompanied it growing silent. The stars returned to their normal positions. The curtains began ticking louder and louder. But suspended among the stars was a rippling sphere that held the entirety of a authorless existence inside of it. In a flash, they merged with the lenses, creating a cacophony of light that momentarily outshone even the plot hole at its speak. When the light show settled, a teal hand wrapped in a blue sleeve held a set of brilliant ultramarine shades. There were absolutely no stars reflected in their lenses. Trembling only slightly, he put them on his face.

The doomed timeline had played itself out, bequeathing to the greater scope of Fiction a demented copy of the Second Godmodding War and all its inhabitants. They still existed inside this avatar’s body, mind, and soul, united with the blank canvas that Fiction truly was. While the real TwinBuilder was stuck in GodCraft, having been summoned to the Battlefield through the machinations of a serpent millions of miles away, he had been cloned at the edge of Fiction, a death wish fueling his thoughts. The clone fashioned a mirror from leftover shards of glass and examined himself up and down seven times. The only other thing he needed was a name — but it didn’t take much time to choose. He corrupted the arc numbers that perpetuated themselves across Twin’s work, affixing them to his thoughts on the story from which he’d came. The more he meditated on this word, the more he smiled. His crooked, malformed grin stretched beyond the physical boundaries of his face. He chortled, and cackled, and guffawed, hollering and keening though no one could hear. Then he settled.

“Oh, yeah,” dungkaka1801 said. “I’m rrrrrrready.”

And he lived in an age of shit.

Dear █████,

Today’s the day that I enter Destroy the Godmodder 2... for real. I’m more than nervous, really. I’m as terrified as I ever was. But I remember feeling... angrier, before, for some reason. Now, I feel a lot calmer. It’s as though there was something that consumed my thoughts, that made me go on an impossible tangent of malice and revenge. But the only thing I can think about now is what’s just ahead of me.

Will my Far Lands powers be enough? Will my Green Sun powers be enough? Will I even be able to manipulate plot at all? I... I doubt I could make myself immortal. I guess I could try, but... Well, it’s like I said. If my death is what has to happen, then I’m not gonna take it lying down, but... I guess it’ll just have to happen.

This is probably going to be my last letter for quite some time. It’s not as though you’re going to be missing them, since you... I mean, pretty obviously you haven’t gotten any at all, but... It’ll be tough for me, is my point. There’s sacrifices we all have to make. Some more than others, I guess.

So it goes, █████. So it goes.

Stay tuned,
TwinBuilder
2/11/14

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