#andy poole

'ere there be monsters!

I died an old man in my bed, surrounded by family, but alone. I knew they loved me, and their tears told me that I would be missed. They held my hand, stroked my cheek, kissed my head, but in the end they failed to touch my heart through the grief. I wasn't ungrateful, don't get me wrong, but in that moment I needed my hand to be held by someone else, my cheek to be stroked with her touch, my head to be kissed by her lips.

My wife past several years before me. I held her hand then, and even the memory of that last linking of our fingers would ease me into the dark, but I couldn't recall the feeling. So as I went falling into the long sleep, I went there in grief and fear and with loneliness like I've never had before.

Now, I don't remember the in between, but we're told that time is infinite and that information can't ever be truly destroyed, just changed, and changed and changed again. The makeup of everything is disassembled and reassembled over and over again, and given enough time, the conditions are just right to assemble that data in a form it's had once before. And wouldn't you know it, after the ending of one universe into the start of another, which sees its end roll into another, over and over again, that information finds its way back into me. Even when a sun burns out, and all things are absorbed by black holes, and the radiation of those celestial giants - gods and devils alike – weakens and the universe becomes uniform and quiet and cold, somehow I wake up with eyes that see, and a mind that thinks. I have thoughts and dreams and desires. I'm hungry for life and wonder and love, and my memory is intact and reaches back far through time beyond record and perception and any obtainable knowledge about it. All we truly know when we regain who we once were, when the form comes again, is that it took a bloody long journey to get there.

A part of all of us were stars and planets and other beings in some other lifetime, and at some point those beings will have the chance to live again during the endless cycle of reality, of change, and those stars and planets and debris out there in universes long gone will find themselves assembled perfectly in a way that had been before. Then whatever piece of information that shared an existence with an entirely different piece of information that made up who you were in the past, will coalesce with those other millions of pieces purely out of the chance given by infinite time, and you will be yourself once more. Information is not destroyed, only changed. They tell us that. And like I said, it'll find its way back to itself. When a person comes back, over and over again, eventually they find their way back to their people too.

I've lived countless lifetimes separated by countless cycles of creation. I've seen the birth of stars, witnessed what is beyond the singularity, and lived peaceful lives without the extraordinary at all, and one time... This time in fact. I've managed to remember how it feels to have her fingers entwined in mine. This time, after all of time, we are together again. I look forward to the next time too, however long that takes.

Well, after some time struggling to make ends meet, my time in comics has come to a close

Aside from maybe some side gigs, simple projects, I'll be out of the long form game for good.

So what's next? A new job, soon hopefully, but I'll also be moving into the TTRPG space with a book that's currently in development.

THE STYMPHALIANS is a Forged in the Dark roleplaying game set in the distant future of humanity, long after the Earth has been abandoned. The players take the role of a squad of mercenaries from a space faring people called The Stymphalians, making planet fall on a war torn world to aid resistance fighters in taking back what is rightfully theirs.

However... Not all is as it seems. As the war progresses, a slumbering force stirs to the turmoil.