Omnia Mutantur

Armed to the teeth! Alarmed as all hell!

Things are crazy... things are crazy!

I don't know if... I can describe...

It's been so long. I was so good, and then I got caught up in other work... and then I got lost. I've died several times! This doesn't undo my actual progress, but if I have not established a bed in a new realm, I resurrect at my last point of origin, no matter how many miles or islands—or continents!—away. Much more than annoying, this has been a nightmare.

And yet so many things have changed! When did they change? It's impossible to say. Some changes, you may understand, creep up on you, or perhaps there are changes to standards of land and life that you are, of yet, largely ignorant. How can you know what you don't know? All these changes are going on without your wherewithal, so that when you do finally encounter them, you can't know the new conditions from whatever or however they presented in earlier iterations.

I hope this is obvious. It should not bear explaining.

Upon Reflection

When the last of the archer-skeletons crumbled and no more Ebonmen gurgled and flitted about, then I stood alone in the desert for a long while.

My sweat chilled me in the morning air, and then the sun soaked into my clothes and warmed me up again. Reflexively, my mind strained to interpret this and translate it into some kind of analogy for my condition. If this labor produced anything, it has since melted like a thin drift of snow and I mayn't record it here.

Tired in my limbs and tired of myself. I stared off into the featureless blue sky, an unending and consistent hue of robin's egg. No birds, no clouds. No squirrels chittered or sprinted up rough bark; no children laughed and shrieked in the distance. Biter slid from my fingers as I stood there unsteadily, entranced with nothingness, in the broad sea of sand.

The Gazing Pool

"Nature, in return for his love, seems
to adopt him as her especial child."

What became of the explosion-cultists?

Were they hoisted on their own petard?

Surely this place could not have been erected by the monsters themselves. Surely not.

With the pyramid temple secured, I returned to Agasado (starting to have second thoughts about this moniker). He had patiently waited for me, milling about in a mildly restive state entirely appropriate to a high-spirited and healthy stallion. I admired his discipline and wondered at his trainer. Myself, I have an affinity with animals, one well documented if I may be completely honest with myself. Documented by no less august a personage than Nathaniel Hawthorne himself, most kindly. But thus it is with the small critters, the chipmunks and little brown birds; to bond with and manage a large creature like a horse, wild and willful, that is an achievement I must respect with some awe. Like I said, I get along with Agasado just fine, but I admire the hand that steadied his nerves and gave him to trust.

My Decision Is Made For Me

Thoreau is cultivating his pigs, to prepare a large to-go lunch.

Diligent Reader, may I address you casually, do you recall the last time I fled a place? Do you remember what was going on when I finally decided it was time to pack up and leave? Let me remind you.

I had been on Ellery Island, you will no doubt remember, when I had been tergiversating over this exact same situation. I was growing weary of the one location and needed to expand and challenge myself, so better to invigorate my faculty with new air and revitalized blood. While I entertained these discussions, the monsters on that patch of land began manifesting an alarming new strategy, taking me completely unawares and nearly terminating my existence once again. (When will be the last time, I wonder?)

The obvious conclusion to be drawn, thus, is that the monsters are somehow attuned to my thoughts. Just as the critters and small birds of Concord had sensed my good nature and befriended me in displays of unity and support to guests, so too do these aberrations of nightmare sniff the changed breeze when my thoughts drift and shift. For no sooner had I merely begun to entertain the possibility of leaving the villagers' cabin than they stepped up their offense. This morning I spotted no fewer than three witches milling about behind my quarters. I pounced upon them easily enough, only to be flanked by Explodicons that emerged from I know not where. While I could knock these back to a safer, more manageable distance, abruptly my vision began to jar and rattle, as a gale of arrows lodged violently into my armor. For as I had descended into the depression behind my cabin to wrangle the Explodicons, no less than a squad of archer-skeletons crested the ridge to pepper me with their volleys.

The Corruption of Society

The author's writing desk, replete with hovering journal and quill.

All right, I want it known that I don't wholly reject technology. I hope I made that clear last time, but just in case there is any room for misunderstanding... I wish to record, in my own hand, that there are allowances to be made. I don't like the concept of energy-slaves, which is essentially what these devices are that we contrive to do our labor for us, but inasmuch as these mechanisms (trains, printing press, Morse's telegraph, &c.) do not exploit sentient beings or animals—who possess their own sentience, I quite assure you, but this is grist for another entry—I suppose I can overlook them to a degree.

I maintain that we should endeavor to enjoy these while maintaining a balance with the natural world: just because we have this miraculous, lightning-fast telegraph, let us not forget how to settle down with our neighbors and share some ripping yarns over a few beers (especially if someone else is paying: beer, like information, wishes to be free). Yes, we may avail ourselves of the "steel-horse" upon its gleaming rails, but let us not lose the appreciation of a restorative autumn's walk from house to neighbor's house, listening to the birds and watching the musquash scamper across the banks of-...

Lost to Dreaming

The author long ago constructed a fishing-shack on a small island

I have said several times in this journal that I cannot sleep. All the more surprise, then, that I found myself waking up upon the floor of the villagers' cabin. Were there sheep in the area, I should make a bed of their wool... come to think of it, I do know where to locate some, not far from here.

But I slept, I tell you O my reader. I had fallen asleep at some moment last night, and I plunged into a deep slumber. Were this the usual world I was born into and knew all my life, I could reasonably assume I had exhausted myself with all my boating and climbing. Oh yes, yesterday I spent the entire day sailing around Sewall Sea. I had a clear orientation of south, based on the rising and setting of the sun, and my little wooden boat does not seem to drift but sails true, unerringly true. This is the most valuable factor for navigating the ocean in this or any world, a craft that does not list or stray. Due to this, I was able to sail south and, after some hours, catch sight of Ellery Island. My crops and livestock were doing well, but my maps were not in the dwelling-house. It was no trick to sail from there to Bartram Island, of course, and there I found my old maps.

The Heart of a Pig

The map will have to wait! The most exciting development has occurred!

When that it happened I took a moment's whim to settle down to while an hour by fishing, I did this in my usual fashion (lacking pipe or cup of tea, of course): I found a nice slope by the house, I carved a serviceable pole from a stripling and some spider's silk, then seated myself comfortably to cast into the lagoon.

Yet another dreaded sea-temple, uncomfortably near the cabin.

Now, one troubling thing about this atoll is that it is frightfully near another of those underwater temples that blister up occasionally throughout the Sewall Sea. To overreach and strain the analogy, it was not unlike the woman I thought I loved, where at first I took in her comport and façade at face value, believing her to represent herself as I saw her. Call me naïve, yes, but no moral crime was committed by yours truly in assuming people to be representing their truest selves. When in the course of time, as must naturally transpire, one becomes aware of greater depth and dimension to another person—and certainly, no human has ever laid out all their cards upon the table, at first meeting—this manifested in a certain turbulence beneath the placid surface, shall we say. And this is reasonable and acceptable in a beautiful young woman, as it is in any human being; on this I am confident we all may agree. All of us, we have our undercurrents, our riptides, our ebbs and flows. How churlish would it be to permit these within us but little tolerate them in others?

The Journey Worsens

Vast stretch of desert, entirely unfamiliar to the author.

It should surprise no one that I have found the great continent which was my destination. I cannot determine what was my intent to deceive the reader of this journal, in pretending that I was abandoning Ellery island with no specific designs to land. I suppose it was more romantic to sound as though I'd trundled up my essentials into a small wooden tub and flung myself once more into the vagaries of the Great Sewall. No reader can be more disappointed by the mundanity of my itinerary than I am by my flimsy deceit; I think that I do not mistake in this.

That behind us, I have found the southern coast to the lands I knew full well to exist. Where I have gone awry, to the reader's delight, is that I recognize nothing of these lands. According to my map, I should have found enormous, savage snow-capped mountains, down which fearsome rivers of lava ran to most dramatic effect. Spruce carpeted the sides and caves enticed the adventuresome eye, both for ready-made shelter and allure of what prizes they contained.

Nope, couldn't find a shred of this. No mountains, no lava, no spruce. Just a vast desert covered in sand and more sand, with traces of cactus and sugar canes, plus a low and miserly scrub-brush about which there seems no magnificent promise. I skirted the coast, scanning for anything remotely familiar, as disappointment filled up my vessel before catalyzing into dread: if I couldn't recognize the land I expected, flying due north across Sewall Sea, what were my odds of turning southward and drifting to the familiar lands?

How It May Be We Arrived

Sunset over the field of tulips.

Animate flesh-eating corpses aside, skeletons riding giant spiders aside... this island is not a wholly unwelcome experience, I must admit. It's quiet, untamed and natural. All my needs are provided for.

I would rather great tracts of land about me, the better to stretch my legs in a healthful exertion. Half of the island is a sand bar, the other half is good loam for my garden and some several trees. There is also a variety of Dutch tulips, if I'm not mistaken, displaying a palette of gentle hues. Their mere presence is calming and even cheering, but it is of late my practice to perch beside my palisade and watch the sun go down beyond the ocean, aligned with my field of flowers. It truly is a sublime luxury, not gotten with gold or labor—it's simply there. It always was.

It's interesting to note that one end of the island is home to large oak trees, while the other end seems to harbor some thriving birch. I wonder which came here first, and upon what vesper their seeds were borne? Was it the labor of some diligent swallow, to carry the seeds in some desperate pitch across the ocean, to this small speck of an island it could not (outside of unknowable animalistic intuition) have been aware? The coincidences are too great. I reckon it likelier the seeds have simply drifted across the vast, featureless expanse of the ocean and, with decades and decades to play itself out, happened to wander close enough to the soil to take root.