I know because I counted them. It's the only thing I can do now — the only function still running in the locked-up operating system of my brain.
Count.
One. Two. Three.
The Book lies open on the card table, every page the black of a collapsed star, and I stand over it with my bleeding finger pressed against my shirt and I count because counting is what I do when every other process has crashed.
On the eleventh second, the Book begins to write itself.
It starts at the edges.
Thin lines of red — not the red of my blood. Darker, older, the red of something that was blood once and has since become something else — bleeding in from the margins of the void-black pages like capillaries filling up. They branch and fork and curl into shapes that aren't letters, aren't numbers, aren't any symbol system I've encountered in twenty-three years of professionally staring at screens.
They move.
That's the part that makes my knees go strange. They move, swimming through the blackness like bioluminescent things in deep water, forming patterns that dissolve and re-form, a language writing and rewriting itself in real time.
The symbols are—
I lean closer. I can't help it. The patterns are rhythmic. Recursive. They nest inside each other in ways that feel structured, hierarchical, almost like—
Code.
The thought forms and the symbols freeze.
Every one of them. Mid-stroke, mid-curve, suspended in the void like a video paused on a single frame. I hold my breath — not intentionally, just the autonomic response of a body that has decided breathing is a lower priority than whatever this is — and for two seconds the Book is a frozen screen, a hung process, and then the symbols dissolve.
They don't fade.
They retract, pulling back into the void like the book has inhaled them, and the pages are black again. Empty black. Waiting black.
And then, the red begins again.
But this time, I can read it!
The symbols scroll from the top of the left page downward, flowing in neat lines, and they're in English.
Clean, serif English, glowing crimson against the void, scrolling with the steady cadence of a terminal boot log. I read it as it appears, because reading is what you do when text presents itself, even when the text is appearing on a magic book that ate your wine:
╔═════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ ║
║ PRIMORDIAL SCAFFOLD INITIALIZED ║
║ >> Aetheric substrate: ACTIVE ║
║ >> Ontological lattice: CALIBRATED ║
║ >> Mana well depth: ∞ (UNBOUND) ║
║ ║
║ RUNNING DIAGNOSTICS . . . ║
║ >> Soul-link handshake ............ OK ║
║ >> Karmic thread integrity ........ OK ║
║ >> Causal loop stability .......... OK ║
║ >> Temporal anchor ................ SYNCED ║
║ (Local reference: Sol-3, Epoch 5, Cycle 2036) ║
║ >> Dimensional membrane ........... SEALED ║
║ >> Akashic index .................. DAMAGED, REBUILDING ║
║ ║
║ BINDING RITE COMPLETE ║
║ >> Host signature: ACCEPTED ║
║ >> Bloodline: NOVEL (no prior lineage detected; ARCHIVING) ║
║ >> Affinity profile: ANALYTICAL / CREATIVE ║
║ >> Classification: DEMIURGE (Provisional) ║
║ ║
║ LOADING INTERFACE . . . ║
║ >> Translating to host-native semiotic framework ║
║ >> Mapping conceptual overlay to local cognition ║
║ >> Rendering . . . ║
║ ║
╚═════════════════════════════════════════╝
The text holds for a moment, glowing steady, and then scrolls upward and off the page like a departing credits sequence. New text takes its place, centered, larger, pulsing once with a faint luminance before settling:
══════════════════════════════════════════════
PAIRING COMPLETE.
Divine World Creation System
v.7.2.1-α (Demiurge Edition)
Build 441,827,003
? The Architect — All Planes Reserved
…
ACTIVATED.
Welcome, User!
══════════════════════════════════════════════
I stare at it.
"User," I say out loud.
User.
Not "Daniel."
Not "Chosen One."
Not "O Great and Terrible Wizard."
User.
The most generic, unspecial, help-desk-ticket designation in the history of human-computer interaction. I've been soul-linked to some sort of primordial creation engine and it's greeting me like I just logged into Jira!
I don't know if that's reassuring or insulting. I decide it's both.
The text clears. New text appears:
How may I assist you today?
┌───────────────────┐
│ ? CREATE NEW WORLD │
│ ? LOAD SAVED WORLD │
│ ? INVENTORY │
│ │
│ DESTROY WORLD │
│ SAVE WORLD │
│ OPTIONS │
└───────────────────┘
The top three options glow in that steady blood-red.
The bottom three — DESTROY WORLD, SAVE WORLD, OPTIONS — are dimmer. Muted. The visual language is unmistakable: greyed out.
Unavailable. Locked behind a prerequisite I haven't met yet, like premium features on a freemium app.
I'm looking at a menu. A literal menu.
On a magic book.
In my kitchen.
I pull out the chair and sit down, because my legs have made a unilateral decision about load-bearing and I don't have the authority to overrule them.
The stupid card table rocks.
The takeout menu shim does its thing.
I sit in my folding chair and I look at a divine operating system that has booted from a drop of my blood and is now offering me a user interface that looks like it was designed by someone who studied both Ancient Sumerian mysticism and mid-2000s RPG menus and decided to split the difference.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
My brain does the thing it always does when confronted with information that exceeds its processing capacity: it retreats into sarcasm.
Create New World.
Sure. Absolutely! Let me just world-create real quick before I heat up my leftover rice. Should I pencil that in before or after the existential crisis?
Load Saved World.
I haven’t saved any worlds though. I can’t even save myself.
Inventory.
Inventory of what? Seven matches, some sand and ash, a bit of decorative silver, half a bottle of cheap read wine, and a quantity of tap water? That inventory? That's not an inventory, those are garage sale leftovers.
The greyed-out options taunt me from the bottom of the page.
DESTROY WORLD.
Apparently, I can't destroy what I haven't created (thanks goodness!)
SAVE WORLD.
Ha! As if.
OPTIONS.
Presumably locked behind some kind of paywall, the same paywall as everything else in my life.
I sit there. The Book waits patiently.
I get the distinct impression that it would wait for an eternity if it needed to — that it has waited, possibly, for a very long time already, in that dark gap between two shelving units in a library basement and wherever it was before, for someone to come and bleed on it.
Lucky me.
OK, I think.
- Let's be logical about this. Let's trace the execution path.
I bled on Book.
Book activated.
Book is now presenting me with a menu.
The menu has options.
The options suggest capabilities.
The capabilities are, apparently… divine?
…
I'm a forty-seven-year-old part-time library employee with terminal cancer and a twelve-dollar card table and I've been provisionally classified as a Demiurge.
…
Sure.
Why not?
The rational part of my brain is screaming. It's screaming that this is impossible, that I'm hallucinating, that the pancreatic mass must have metastasized to my brain and I'm experiencing a symptom that would probably be very interesting to an oncologist I can't afford.
And maybe that's true. Maybe I'm lying on my air mattress right now, drooling into a pillow, and none of this is actually real.
But the burn on my finger is real. The Book is real. And the menu is waiting.
On impulse, I reach out and touch CREATE NEW WORLD.
My index finger makes contact with the glowing text on the page and—
---
—I'm not in the kitchen anymore.
I'm not anywhere.
I'm floating — that's the only verb that applies, I think — in a space that has no dimensions, no boundaries, no reference points. There is no up. No down. No floor. No ceiling. No walls.
Just Void.
The same void-black as the pages, extending in every direction to an infinity that I can somehow perceive without seeing, the way you perceive the size of a room in the dark.
I panic.
It's not a conscious decision. It's the full mammalian emergency response, every alarm in the primate brain going off at once: Where am I, where is the ground, where is the air, I can't breathe, I'm going to—
Except…
I can breathe.
Or rather — I don't need to.
The realization arrives like a software patch, sliding into my awareness and overwriting the panic with a strange, warm calm. My lungs aren't working. I check — I try to inhale, deliberately, and nothing happens. No air moves. There is no chest expansion. No oxygen.
But there's no distress either.
No burning, no suffocation, no screaming demand from my brainstem for gas exchange. The need simply isn't there. It's been turned off, toggled to false, like a feature flag in a configuration file.
I feel fine.
I float in the void and I don't breathe and I don't die either and the panic recedes like a tide pulling back from a shore, leaving behind a smooth, blank expanse of—
Calm.
The void feels warm.
It is the warmth of your favorite bed where you've been relaxing in for hours.
The warmth of a body next to yours in the dark.
The warmth of the womb.
It's the temperature of absolute safety, of enclosure, of the space before a thought becomes a thing. It feels like… like being inside the Book, I suddenly realize. Like I've passed through the page the way the matches did, the way the water did, and I'm now in the place where those things went.
The repository. The buffer.
And despite everything, some small, exhausted part of me thinks: this is the most comfortable I've been in months.
Then the rest of me catches up and thinks: Great. Wonderful. But how do I get out?
The instant the thought completes — not after, not in response, but simultaneous with the thought, as if the Book is reading my mind in real time — a light appears.
It's a rectangle. About six feet tall, three feet wide, hovering in the void maybe ten paces in front of me. Through it, I can see my kitchen. My cheap card table. My folding chair. The wine bottle. The box of matches. The fluorescent light buzzing its eternal buzz.
A portal.
A door back to the world I came from, rendered in the void like a browser tab I just opened on a whim.
I look at it. I look at the void around me.
The portal waits. The void waits.
It's a system idling, a machine in standby, and it occurs to me that this might be the first time in months that nothing is being asked of me. No shifts to cover, no bills to calculate, no insurance forms to decipher, no divorce papers to sign. Just… a comfortable emptiness. Just warmth. Just the total absence of demand.
I could leave here, I realize. I could float right through that rectangle and land on my kitchen floor and close the Book and put it in a closet and never open it again and go back to my air mattress and my countdown to nonexistence.
Or…
Or, I could see what this function does.
Fuck it. I'm already here.
Might as well make a Universe or something.
The portal closes. Gently — it doesn't slam, doesn't snap at me. It dims and folds and thins until it's a line. Then a point. And then… nothing, as if the system understood that I've made my choice and is tidying up behind me.
Now what?
I try the obvious thing first.
"Help?" I say. Or try to say — there's no air here, so there's no sound, so the word exists only as an intention, a shape my mouth makes in silence.
Nothing happens. No menu appears. No text. No glowing options.
"Manual?" I try. "Instructions? User guide? ReadMe?"
Still nothing. The void is serene and unhelpful.
I try thinking it really hard instead:
Help. Assist. How the fuck do I use this thing?
Nothing.
The void remains the Void. Warm, dark, patient, and completely unresponsive to my requests for documentation. Which, honestly, tracks. The most powerful system I've ever encountered and it ships without a user manual. Just like every other piece of software in history.
I float there for a moment, thinking. The system responded to my thought about leaving — it generated the portal instantly.
But now it's not responding to my requests for help?
Maybe it doesn't have a help function. Maybe it's not that kind of system. Maybe it's not designed to explain.
Maybe… it's only designed to do.
OK then, I think. Create. That's what the menu said, right? Create New World!
And the Void responds!
Two lines of text materialize in front of me, that same blood-red glow, hovering in the darkness at eye level:
? CREATE CUSTOM WORLD
? CREATE USING TEMPLATE
Custom or template.
Freeform or guided.
The eternal choice of every software user since the invention of wizards and dropdown menus: do you want to build it yourself, or do you want to pick from pre-existing options and let the system handle the heavy lifting?
I'm a coder. My instinct says custom.
My instinct also recognizes that I'm currently floating in a non-Euclidean pocket dimension with no manual, no documentation, and no goddamn idea what any of the parameters are. Going custom now would be like opening a blank IDE in a programming language I've never seen and trying to write production code.
Technically possible? Yes.
Advisable? Definitely not.
So, template it is!
I reach toward the second option — the actual reaching is approximate here, since I have no spatial reference, but the system seems to interpret intention rather than precision — and I think-touch the CREATE USING TEMPLATE button.
The text dissolves. New text replaces it:
System Error. Akashic Record Damaged. No existing templates found.
Would you like to reconstruct a new template using assimilated materials?
? YES
? NO
Assimilated materials.
I frown — or perform the cognitive equivalent of frowning, since my face may or may not be functioning normally while in this place.
Assimilated materials? Like what… the things the book consumed? Those are the "assimilated materials"?
Like that match from earlier?
The thought is idle. Reflexive. The mental equivalent of muttering to yourself while reading a confusing error message. I'm not selecting anything. I'm not making a choice. I'm just… thinking, the way a person thinks, freely and without consequence—
Except I'm not a person right now.
I'm a User.
And this is a thought-responsive system.
And I've just had a stray thought about matches in a creation engine that is actively listening to my mind.
The realization hits me about one tenth of a second after the System responds, which is exactly long enough to think oh no and not long enough to do anything about it.
Selection confirmed!
Analyzing . . .
"Wait—"
Concept identified: "Fire Element."
Library entry restored.
Template reconstructed!
"Now, hold on just a minute here! I didn't—"
Commencing creation of world-type:
ELEMENTAL PLANE OF FIRE
. . . Please wait.
I stare at the text. The text glows serenely back at me.
"Huh?" I say, to the Void, with my non-functioning mouth.
Then the full weight of what's happening lands on me like a piano from a cartoon window.
"Shit."
A point of light appears in the distance.
Orange.
Small.
The size of a period at the end of a sentence.
It is faint and far away, like a star seen through atmosphere.
"Shit shit shit—"
It's growing.
Rapidly.
Swelling from pinpoint to marble to basketball to something much, much larger, and it's not a light, I realize now, it's a fire, it's a sphere of fire expanding outward in every direction, and it's getting closer, and the void is getting warmer, and the warm-comfortable-womb feeling is rapidly being replaced by the warm-standing-next-to-an-open-furnace feeling—
The sphere rushes toward me.
Or I rush toward it.
Or the Void contorts and delivers me into the center of a newborn fireball. The exact geometry of it all is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that in the space of about three subjective seconds I went from floating in peaceful darkness to being surrounded on all sides by fire.
Not figurative fire. Not symbolic fire.
Literal Fire.
Actual, roaring, consuming flames — walls of it, pillars of it, an entire world made of it, extending in every direction. A shifting landscape made of pure combustion. The heat is staggering. It hits me like a physical force, pressing against my skin, and suddenly I can feel it — really feel it, the way I felt the match burn my finger — and I open my mouth to scream and no sound comes out because there's still no air here, but there IS fire, fire everywhere, fire in every direction—
A new portal opens.
I don't remember asking for it.
I don't remember thinking about it.
Some built-in safety protocol, or maybe some fundamental survival subroutine deeper than conscious thought must have triggered, because the rectangle of light is suddenly there — my kitchen, my card table — and I don't float through it so much as fall through it, gravity reasserting itself with the vindictive enthusiasm of a physical law that's been temporarily ignored and is now making up for lost time.
I hit the kitchen floor.
I hit it hard — shoulder first, then hip, then the side of my head against the tile — and the impact is real and solid and cold in a way that feels like salvation after the heat.
But I'm still hot! Well, parts of me are still hot.
I can smell it before I feel it — the acrid, unmistakable stench of burning hair and singed cotton — and I roll.
On instinct.
Pure, animal, non-cognitive instinct.
I roll across my kitchen floor, slapping at my arms and my chest and the side of my head, and I'm making sounds now — not words, just sounds, the grunts and yelps of a body doing emergency maintenance on itself — and I roll until I hit the base of the kitchen counter and lie there, breathing hard, staring at the ceiling.
I smell like a campfire.
The Book is on the table above me.
I can't see it from this angle, but I realize I can feel it now.
Its presence.
Its patience.
Its absolute, serene, infuriating indifference to the fact that it just catapulted me into an elemental hellscape because I thought about matches at the wrong time.
I lie on the kitchen floor for a long time. Then I get up. I walk to the bathroom. I turn on the light.
The mirror shows me a man I almost recognize. Same face — older, thinner, more defeated than the version Karen married, but there’s the same basic architecture.
Same brown eyes, same crooked nose, same jaw.
But the hair on the right side of my head has been singed to a frizzy, uneven mess, shortened by maybe two inches, the ends blackened and curled. My eyebrow on that side is half gone. There's a red mark along my right forearm that's going to blister by morning, and the collar of my shirt has a scorch hole the size of a quarter, edged in brown.
I look at myself.
I look at the door to the kitchen, where the Book is waiting.
I look back at myself.
"Well, Daniel," I say to the man in the mirror — the forty-seven-year-old, recently singed, provisionally classified Demiurge. "You wanted something to change, didn’t you?"
My reflection doesn't laugh.
But I think it wants to.