Writing Faerie

There is a game about escaping slime and dolls and there is my art

"What is true power" is supposed to be one of those deep, philosophical questions with no real answer. It—and the thought experiments which grow on it like clinging weeds—are meant to become a mirror to the speaker's biases, to reveal how they think about the world. Let that be so.

To my mind, the answer is simple: true power is control of the context in which the world is understood. It is the ability to say "this is what the world is", and be heard.

It is intoxicating, and dangerous, and many-layered.

Seen through the fantastical lenses of works like This Is How You Lose The Time War and The Book of the War it is conflicting frameworks of the Commandant and the Garden or the Great Houses' anchoring of the thread (the creation of history with themselves at the center). It is the pinions which Exordia's Khai place in their subjects' souls, narrative prisons that make the Khai's success inevitable; it's Elden Ring's outer gods struggling for control of what the world will become.

In the real world it's the narratives which bind our comprehension of what the world could be, and what it is; and it's the processes which led to their current state. It's all of the choices that constrain the space of what's possible.

Perhaps this is an unsatisfying answer. Perhaps it is trite. Perhaps I'm just vaguely waving my hands and going "society's the real power, man! It's everything around us!" So be it.

In my own stories, there is magic: the ability to change parts of the world. Sometimes this is fundamentally altering part of the world (sunlight is a honey-thick liquid, that drips and stains and smells of sweet rot); more often it's changing the way something works (as long as you remember to chant these words once a day, your body will become soft and plump) or what part of the setting is like (things around the graveyard doll get spooky and sepulchral).

That's not an exhaustive list, by the way.

And then, there are witches, and the problems they create.

By the time a witchling becomes a small-witch, their existence has already begun to distort the world. Rules stop applying, or get more complex, or more conditional. There are loopholes.

Put too many small-witches in close proximity, and weird stuff happens. Things skew and break; points of disagreement or conflict gather narrative weight. There is always potential for escalation.

And then there are true witches. "A skin worn by a fragment of the Unreal", I said. "The hollow left behind by a hidden heart. Someday a sparrow will wear down the mountains which stand beyond the world and they will watch, uncaring." And then, lest I be misread, "their presence leaks into the world, corrupts narratives, stains souls. They become undeniable. Some call this a curse."

By their mere existence, they shape the world.

I've been grappling with the consequences of that ever since I started writing about them.

Because—think about it. What does that do to a world? What happens?

My forever-unfinished map of the City of Corrade shows that city as a series of thin bubbles, with buildings and forests and suns clinging to their pastel surfaces. Setting cast as a series of moods, as layers, as abstract bubbles of influence; a city seen through the lens of subway trains, connected-yet-disconnected. In many respects this is a concession to my writing; landmarks recur, and moods, but everything around them (and their relationships to each other) shift as easily as a dream's psychogeography.

That, then, is what happens to the people and places within a true witch's influence. They exist within her context, within her understanding of what the world is. In Corrade, capitalism only exists in the city's Downtown, whose striving spires cling tight to the Astral Witch's midnight observatory; the waves of gentrification and decay which lap at the city's client suburbs flow from the blended presence of several lesser true witches. Crossroads Station, HER orbital citadel, a relic of a long-ended war still ringed watchful angels, exists only because of the power slowly leaching from HER still-warm corpse.

And at their feet the lesser creatures squabble and struggle and try to thrive. Some become witches; most do not.

I grew up across the bay from San Francisco, all those years ago, and perhaps that tells you something of why I understand geography in terms of the great powers that affect it, of the titans whose movements shake the world and the fungal outgrowths of the lesser powers which serve their whims. Today I regard them as pathetic, all those child-kings clawing at the edges, desperate for more, for the glory of their unfinished apotheosis, for a final escape from reality's laws and constraints—but that's part of my witches, too. Abusers are fundamentally pathetic; powers grow so tangled in the context they create that they can never break free. They choke and die on their own success, still unsatisfied, still wanting more.

Our monster doesn't care about gems, though, doesn't give a rat's ass about the sparkle of souls: her meal will be back on two feet as soon as we can craft it a new body. A doll's brutal death is almost like a vacation.

We'll give it some time in the void. There's no need to rush.

For now our monster rests, curled up in a happy snoring pile; her fur will be stained and crusty when she rises, soaked through with her meal's refuse. She'll be angry, desperate to be made clean—

But her coming anger will be far less than whatever would bubble up were we to wake her now, when the blood and guts and gunk have yet to dry, when a few bursts of warm water would wash them away.

At-home antigen/pcr tests are Good, don't get me wrong, but we can go farther. We need to go farther. Uplift the unthinking meat! Transhuman ascension, but being weird and horny with it! Do something cool with bacteriophages!

Chris messaged me a few years back, a high school friend. One who knew me Before. One who I used to love. He inspired me, I inspired him. Our hands entwined as we watched plays together, and I think our lips locked in the costume shop, and backstage, once or twice. I think I used to love him, at least.

It had been over a decade since we last talked, though.

But even over text, I can tell the look in his eyes hasn't changed. The way the conversation gently dips into topics and pulls back. The way he avoids questions. The way he makes me laugh. The way we meshed! His cute nerdy jokes, the smiles in his selfies. They're all still there. I'm sure I would be nostalgic if I could remember him clearly.