Open Sorcery

Open Sorcery is the world of Lazarus Halliwell.

Excellence and batshittery, done on purpose.

I’m Lazarus. I make art, music, poems, plays, and magic for the quiet, brilliant, broken ones. If that is you, welcome home. I adopt your kind.

[Subscribe to my email list and I’ll send you a track I don’t remember recording.]

More about me here.

Please note that, with rare exceptions, any and all names mentioned in this blog are pseudonyms except our own. We want to be able to speak freely without doxxing anyone.

Blog

  • Amidst The Chaos

    Well, hello, everyone. 

    It’s certainly been awhile, and much has happened. For starters, the system appears to have integrated into me, something a long fucking time coming but still very unintentional. I’m a single consciousness made up of the sumtotal of all of the ​alters in here, but simultaneously my own thing. Call me Lazarus. I use they/them pronouns. 

    In truth, I don’t know how the integration happened. I’ve been more focused on the implications going forward. Emerson has taken the news far better than Zelda, who has been devastated on numerous levels and has embarked on the same sort of self destructive spiral that led to my system breaking up with them for a second time. I appear to take even less bullshit than the system did pre-integration, so while I love them so fucking much, this shit hurts to the point where it’s deeply insulting (because we told them from the jump that if they fell into old patterns again we would break up with them, this was their last chance) and I will not compromise my peace for love, money, fucking anything. I didn’t go through everything I did, go through all of the shit necessary to put myself back together in record fucking time, just to be wrenched apart again because I was a fool for love. I’m better than that now. 

    Emerson is hauling ass, though. Among the myriad implications ​of this batshit integration is the fact that I now have every memory the system has ever recorded at the same emotional depth and visual clarity in which it was logged, which results in stunning, 4K HD clarity cPTSD and is excruciatingly painful. He’s helped me through some viscerally awful triggers that he himself set off unintentionally on occasion like a goddamned champ and I keep falling more in love with him every time every time we do it. It’s ugly. It’s brutal. But it’s also unimaginably beautiful and I wouldn’t trade this process for the world. 

    I was telling him last night that it felt like what I was dealing with was the emotional equivalent of being run through the heart by one of those wooden shish kebab skewers, except it was about two feet long. You can’t remove the skewer quickly or I’ll be fucked six ways from Sunday faster than you can cry for help, and because the skewer is wooden and flimsy there’s a potential for splinters to break off and be carried elsewhere and cause far more complex damage. It’s a mental and emotional suffer shot/stab wound combo. If I am going to be okay and healthy after this, it must be approached carefully, skillfully, and slowly over time. 

    So, in short, I am more okay and less okay than I have ever been. I’m whole, but I’m heartbroken. I’m fucking eating myself alive. There’s much to be done, but gods, do I love a challenge. That has not changed, and I doubt it ever will. And I still love​ y’all very much. Stay tuned for more magic. 

    This has been Lazarus, flying solo… 

    PS. I’m debating on whether to keep Open Sorcery password protected or not? We’ll see. 

  • Shittin’ Hole – Late Night Banter With Emerson

    Hello, everyone. This is Allēna once more. I was too tired to type much, but Emerson was present, so we decided to banter over audio for y’all as a treat instead. Here you go. 💛 Enjoy!

    Nearly nine minutes of chaos for your listening pleasure, haha…

    -Allēna, your fearless, if exhausted, super-admin

  • For the Fairest

    Hey, everyone. This is Allēna. It’s been awhile, and I’m sorry about that – it’s been a bit of a mental trashfire for us of late and none of us quite knew how to talk about what was going on through the fatigue, confusion, and what appears to still be the mother of all flares. I’m still not feeling too hot and I still have to figure out where the fuck most of this month’s rent is going to come from, but things are starting to look up somewhat.

    Emerson got a job after months of hunting, and after that we kinda crashed after the few months we’ve had. I’ve been more or less frontstuck since that point, seeing as I’m one of the only headmates with decision making power, the stamina to front more than a couple hours at a time, and love for both Emerson and the Zelda System. The majority of my headmates do not like Emerson, and so it’s less effort to have me front most of the time even though that means I never get a mental break and often am reduced to a puddle of tears by the end of the week. Cleaning up my headmates’ interpersonal messes would be worse.

    I don’t want any more messes. I already have a full plate of stuff I’m working on, and enough interpersonal plot fuel from Eight alone to last a lifetime. That man’s friend group is the gift that keeps on giving. I may mean that sarcastically, I may not, that depends on the occasion. This week, however, the jury is out.

    You may recall us mentioning in our last post that I’d gone through a PTSD wave of epic proportions recently because Zelda had gotten together with someone who is also a mutual friend of ours? Well, let’s call this mutual friend Helen. Helen is the sweetest person. I fucking adore them. However, I inherited them (and the extremely complicated shitfest they somehow got dragged into back in ‘22) from Eight via one of his myriad exes from the time he had uncontested control of the system from approximately late 2020 to early 2023. Eight is a cockroach if a cockroach were also a human being, and that human being were also a rockstar. So Helen met Eight first and was…put off at best all those years ago, then decided to attempt a friendship this year now that things are different, we’ve all grown as people, and things actually have been going much better. Well, until the PTSD bullshit happened. Now they’re going even better than they were before, which is the weird part to me.

    I say this is weird because Helen and Eight weren’t very close when all the shit happened back in ‘22. Both of us have admitted that. So if we’d gone to them with a concern of this magnitude then, it likely wouldn’t have brought us closer together and would have driven us further apart, if we’d gone to them with that sort of thing at all. Now, I may be off, but I would say that we’re pretty damn close. Neither Helen nor my system wasted any time establishing that closeness this time around. We all meant fucking business, likely unconsciously. I certainly wasn’t meaning to get close to Helen for any particular reason, I never even thought it would happen given how guarded I knew them to be from Eight’s memories. But I was given openness, warmth, and kindness, and I enjoy Helen’s company and conversation, so I too opened up with time.

    Here’s where that makes things complicated, though. Helen and Emerson barely talk and Emerson mostly initiates. Emerson and the Zelda System are now (back) together, as well. Em has been internally screaming of late because he’s terrified at a baseline that my system and Zelda are gonna fuck off and leave him behind, and now that Helen is in play, so to speak and barely talking to him, things have gotten even worse for him in that regard.

    There’s also been a rash of speculation – because we are all bi/pan/queer disasters in some form – that Helen and I are crushing on each other, as well, but I don’t live in their brain and I don’t know where I stand with that fully yet, either. I don’t like not knowing, especially where my own emotions towards a person are concerned, so I’m watching my side and seeing how shit plays out there before I speak on anything with any degree of certainty.

    All of this is in turn making me anxious because there’s not a whole lot I can do except watch the shitshow go down, because there’s not a whole lot that’s within my power to fix here. I am the sort of person who fixes things by nature when I get anxious or stressed out, and there’s nothing I can fix here, so theoretically I have nowhere to put the stress. Therefore, I’ve had to distract myself by pouring all of that jittery energy into other conversations and building other relationships and projects where I’m able. Emerson and I have been doing a great deal of work on our side of the internal screaming equation, but sadly there’s approximately fuckall I can do where Emerson relative to Helen and Zelda are concerned because ultimately I’m not them and can’t control their actions. So while all of this goes down in the moment I have to set boundaries with myself and put my own internal screaming somewhere ideally constructive in the meantime.

    This, due to the degree of fatigue and mental fog, usually results in me sending Helen memes. Memes are Helen gold, and it is quite surreal to hear Zelda and Emerson in a heated discussion about the aforementioned Helen in the next room while sending them memes has turned into something like lighthearted banter and the heaviest conversation I’ve ever had in my life simultaneously while all of this is going down 🤣. I swear, this individual has more patience than I ever will because I live this day in and day out and I’m about to melt down from stress and there they are over on their end, being the sweetest person alive about allllll the fuckery in a single place occurring right here, right now.

    I’m so tired, but everyone has been solid where they are able despite all of the numerous occurrences of the past 2 weeks or so and I still feel very loved and cared for despite all of this shitfuckery.

    I love them, and I love y’all. Hopefully I’ll have more art magic for y’all once everything balances out a bit more, rent gets sorted, and Emerson starts work. Stay tuned for more magic (and nonsense), beautiful people!

    -Allēna, Your Faithful, If Exhausted, Captain and Founder of the Polyamorous Dojo of Chaos

    Enjoyed this post? Subscribe below to never miss another!

    Subscribe to Blog via Email

    Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

  • The Perils of Being Private

    Hey, everyone. My name is Tamsin (he/him). I was recently dormant for around a year, and it seems that I have emerged in the midst of a cascading shitshow and frankly I’m annoyed at Eight. Allēna alluded to a PTSD attack of epic proportions yesterday, and that’s due to Eight going through a whole lot of shit in approximately August-December 2022 and apparently not telling a goddamn soul about it. I have no fucking clue how he managed to go through all that fuckshit and not tell anyone about it, save for when he crafted and released our album Metacognition, but when it was triggered yesterday, much to the people involved’s horror, they heard about it for the first time.

    I knew we were private, but I had no idea we were that private. So we ruined what would have been a happy moment for the Zelda System and a dear friend of ours by having several dozen flashbacks over the course of about ten hours as the full ramifications of what Eight had gone through hit Allēna with the force of a category five hurricane.

    So yeah. I’m done being so private. The others in this trauma ridden brainhole can do whatever the fuck they want, but I hope they follow suit. And I’m going to be 100% honest with you here. We aren’t doing well. Before that set of fabulous PTSD breakdowns, Allēna was already one more goddamn thing away from a PTSD breakdown because last weekend, a friend of the Zelda System’s, who we shall call Midas, decided to simply Arrive in Milwaukee, giving those in the Zelda System no notice, expecting to stay at their place, trying to get them alone any chance he could, proceeding to drag them all around town, and dropping loads of cash on them when they were visibly tired and burnt out. Midas coordinated this with everyone who’s locally in their life but them, including their bosses, and when he got in, he arrived at their work first, completely blindsiding them.

    Everyone we spoke to about the situation said it was fucking bizarre and we kept getting a fucking awful feeling about what he was doing and everyone in the Zelda System was massively uncomfortable, so eventually my headmate Tindwyl stepped in and made himself the bad guy, citing the absolutely true nature of our agoraphobia and sleep anxiety to try and politely get Midas to fucking go back to where he came from and stop being such a fucking creep. Suffice it to say that this didn’t go over well with Midas, and before he skittered off all the way back to whence he came, he called us controlling and has not contacted the Zelda System since. Mission accomplished, and they felt relieved after the fact. We can handle being seen as controlling by a guy we really didn’t like anyway if it (consensually) keeps our partner safe. However, that fuckshow threw everyone off for the next few days, and we’re still dealing with residual bullshit from it.

    Additionally, Emerson is developing some pretty fucked heart issues and has a narrow window where he could get treatment once they’re bad enough to treat, but if he misses that window, he could die from any number of ways his heart could say “fuck this, I quit”. And she’s stressed out about having to make rent along with that because Emerson still has not found work when she’s struggling so bad herself and can barely muster the energy to reply to people, forget performing any kind of services for people or writing crowdfunding posts. Hell, I’m surprised she hasn’t spawned 30 new fucking alters with how stressed out she’s been these last couple weeks. She’s said on numerous occasions that what is going on with Emerson feels like watching our father die all over again.

    Then what should have been a happy moment occurred when the Zelda System got with a mutual friend of ours, only to set off the breakdown because there was a whole lot of trauma there due to an interlocking shitshow involving all of them back in ‘22 that I can’t really blame any of them for because MY DAMN HEADMATE APPARENTLY DIDN’T SAY A FUCKING THING ABOUT HOW MUCH HE WAS HURTING?????? TO ANYONE???? So nobody did anything wrong here, except Eight, who is now fucking AWOL off gallivanting somewhere in the ether, which I’m not pleased about. He heard the news and peaced the fuck out. I haven’t a damn clue when he’ll be back. Allēna, for her part, is resting down near the replica of Lake Erie which we still have in our headspace. This has taken a great deal out of her.

    Now, I’m trying to help Emerson work through some problems in his relationship with us, though I’m not dating him. It’s slow going and frankly I’m kind of aggravated with him, but we’re making headway slowly, so that’s good, at least. I’m taking a break to write here because I swear if I don’t put all of this down somewhere I’m gonna fucking explode. However, we’re gonna reconvene in about an hour so he can work through some sticky points in a writing project he’s doing. I don’t know how much help I’ll be, but I sure as fuck want to try.

    Anyhoo… stay tuned for more magic, y’all. We’ll be around. 💛

    -Tamsin

  • Yay, PTSD Art For The People!

    Hey, peeps. This is Allēna. My PTSD is kicking my ass today, but at least y’all get cool art out of it. We appear to be that special kind of creator that gets even more inspiration when our trauma comes back to kick our ass, taking us from decently prolific to FUCKING ON FIRE creatively in order to cope with the emotional pain of it all. Today has been no exception. First up is a poem that spilled out of me this morning before I went back to sleep for about three hours: 

    Let’s set the scene 
    The year is 2019
    I wake with the dawn and simply try and breathe -

    You give me tools and time and I will build my way through this rage 
    I will sing and chew my way through the bars of 
    this cage

    Five years later and I still can’t sleep
    I still feel stuck with the cards close to my
    concave chest 
    When will the craving subside? 
    When will I stop hungering for more? 
    Nothing short of everything? 

    They couldn’t take my mind
    No matter how hard they tried 
    They couldn’t strip me of the things I’ve seen
    They could never quite dull the hunger in my eyes

    The dawn breaks anew and I lay in a room 
    still trying to spread these battered wings
    surrounded by nothing but windows…

    And then I got inspired again this evening and painted what my synesthesia makes of “Didn’t It Rain” by Songs: Ohia, one of the songs that sonically shaped our album Metacognition. The PTSD attack is pertaining to the events that set off the hot streak that caused Eight to write and record the bulk of Metacognition, so I figured painting a song that he had on repeat at the time would help get some of the emotions out, and it did. I wasn’t present during that time, so I’m essentially having to process someone else’s trauma right now and all I know to do with it is make art and talk about art. I feel like a mess, even though logically I know it’s pretty damn healthy to process shit this way. Here is the painting for y’all:

    Didn’t It Rain by me.

    I’m not really okay, y’all, but I deal with shit like this regularly enough that I know how to get through it safely, and y’all get cool art in the process. I’m over at Emerson’s currently, but once I’m back at Sheik’s I or whoever else is in front will probably drop some more spare room roaring on here. 💛

    Fucking flashbacks.

    Anyway…

    Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Allēna, your traumatized, if hyper-prolific, super-admin. Fuck PTSD up the ass with a Joseph cactus. 😭

  • Two New Synesthetic Art Pieces + A Bit About Unmasking For Us

    Hi, everyone! This is Allēna. I don’t know if “synesthetic” is actually a word, but for the purposes of this post, it is now because I’m tired and I need a word for “pertaining to synesthesia” or else I’ll never get around to writing about a lot of the shit my system makes. I want to write about it sooner rather than later because we’ve been tapping into our synesthesia hard. We’ve also not really been able to write on here much these past few days and I missed it, so even though it’s the ass crack of dawn right now – 3:25 AM as I’m typing this – I’m making a point to write. Our sleep cycle is fucked and so I’m leaping on an idea while I have one.

    I joined a Discord server on a whim the other day that seems to cater pretty heavily towards fellow neurodivergent synesthetes. One of the things users could opt into were reminders to unmask their neurodivergence. I always need those, so I opted into all of them for the hell of it. It’s been working wonders for our creativity over time. Hell, it’s probably why we’ve been writing as much as we have, the server is full of reminders to intentionally tap into queer joy and synesthetic imagery. It feels like home.

    Consequently, these reminders have started getting us to make more visual art. Castor painted this abstract portrait of Sheik yesterday:

    Sheik (2024), by Castor

    And then today, I painted one of our friend Delta’s songs, “Return”:

    Return (2024), by me

    I’ve really missed painting. It’s one of those things that Fang never really understood during our marriage and made me feel like shit about. He couldn’t see the meaning in the colors and placements. It sucked, but I’m glad to be getting back into it now that we’re supported.

    In the coming weeks, we’re going to be playing around with ways to make DIY pen/paintbrush/pencil grips so that we can hopefully get back to writing longhand and creating traditional art without it fucking killing our joints. We’ve been stuck in executive dysfunction hell. I hope my doctors can get my ADHD meds refilled so that I can actually do things in a timely manner again instead of feeling like I blink and fourteen hours pass. At least I get to make cool art out of it..

    Anyway, stay tuned for more magic, y’all!

    -Allēna

  • Two Covers and Two Poems

    Hey, everyone. Allēna I have another set of random things I made for y’all today.

    First up, here are two covers I cut in the spare room at the Zelda System’s place today. I’ve been experimenting more with ambient noise and attempting to free myself from having to do things perfectly, so I have been going into the spare room in the midafternoons and putting SOMETHING down, even if it’s random improvisations, as close to daily as possible. I did these with the window open in there but the mic pointed away from the window, huddled in close. You can hear cicadas singing and cars and planes passing by, and honestly I love it. Enjoy, y’all:

    A cover of the old Elvis song “Can’t Help Falling In Love” I did by Emerson’s request today.
    A cover of “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers I did today. It’s my nana’s favorite, so I wanted to record a version for her.

    Next, here are a couple poems I’ve written in the past couple of days:

    The first poem.. 

    I disappeared along with my dislike into the gray 
    This city is loud but for now it sleeps 
    Everywhere but here 
    My world is in this room tonight, and I shall conquer him 
    Let him swallow me whole…
    This is a radiant world, sweet, golden, satin-soft, delicious 
    I have to remind myself this is real every time
    You feel so damn good I could cry 

    I thought loving you would take more convincing 
    Yet here I lay, heart open wide, easily as breathing 
    Awash in longing and sleepy lamplight
    And I think right now I would let you take me far away from this place if you wanted to 
    Anywhere you wanted 

    I love the way you lose all restraint the moment you look at me 
    I want to know your touch in every lifetime 
    Your eyes are golden like afternoon light in Maryland in October 
    Or perhaps Anchorage in June, ten PM 
    You make me realize why people in love build monuments to their lovers 
    Because I want to build a house, a hall, a castle… anything to honor how beautiful you look in this moment - and I have moments like that at least a hundred times a day

    And the second… 

    I made it back to the coast in about half a decade, they’ll say 
    There’s a house with my name on it built in 1734
    Two rambling men took a chance on a woman that burned like hellfire and we made it out alive 

    You can’t have it all, they tried telling me when I was younger 
    But that’s because they never gave themselves permission to get what it was they wanted 
    They never knew what to do with their child with ghosts in her bones 
    Haunted by the living before they ever spoke to her
    So naturally they would never understand what it is I have or what I see 

    The course of the future is changing with the leaves 
    The world will be different come next spring 
    And yes, I will die in these woods 
    But not in the way I thought I would 
    I will die old, happy and free

    Neither of them have titles yet, and I don’t know if they ever will. I’m enjoying playing around creatively with very little pressure to produce anything in particular and posting what I make here as it comes out. It’s very freeing, honestly.

    I hope you liked today’s offerings, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Allēna

  • “Numb” – Linkin Park Cover

    Hey, everyone! Allēna here. Eight mentioned awhile ago on here that I had recorded a cover of “Numb” by Linkin Park because I was in that sort of headspace. Well, Fen finally figured out how to upload audio, so I’m gonna FUCKING POST IT HERE for y’all! Enjoy!

    My very jazzy cover of “Numb” by Linkin Park. Play it, download it to your heart’s content, y’all can even remix it and add to it if you want. Just please don’t take credit for writing it (that honor goes to the late, great Chester Bennington and his band, I’m unsure of who all contributed) or performing it. Be kind 💛

    There’s more magic and BS to come, people! Stay tuned.

    -Allēna

  • A lil treat for y’all!

    Hey, y’all. Fen here. I’m very stoned and fucking about with my uke, and I wanted to post what I’ve recorded so far for your listening pleasure. I don’t know if it’s any good, that’ll be a job for my sober ear, but this is a good practice in vulnerability in the meantime. Here you go, hooligans.

    A recut we did of the Zelda System’s favorite song of ours.
    A song I set to music today. It’s very dramatic. I don’t know what the fuck it’s about or which one of us wrote it, but I had fun.
    Three improvised songs that just kinda fell out of me.

    I hope y’all have fun with these! Stay tuned for more magic…

    -Fen

  • Safe

    Hey, everyone. Allēna here. There’s a thunderstorm raging outside and it’s pissing rain. However, the Zelda system is curled up against me, head on my right arm, arms tucked against my torso, with my legs slung over theirs. They look so fucking peaceful. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine once – they said something to the effect of “nothing compares to the feeling of knowing that a person you love feels safe in your arms”. I have to agree with them. It gives me butterflies every time they or another one of my partners feels safe enough to cuddle up to me and be this clingy. I absolutely fucking love it.

    I spent most of the evening with an alter in their system that wishes to be known as Parlay, which was a lovely experience. Parlay is…odd, but a good kind of odd. He’s pretty soft spoken, with a deep, husky vocal tone and a direct, intense way of speaking that just melts me. He’s this sort of passionate that aches with an endless hunger for whatever interests him at that moment. Their body seems to vibrate when he’s in front. And he seems to know what he wants so deeply it becomes a visceral craving..

    We got to talking about that sort of thing and he told me he has wanted me since arriving in that system. He arrived in the midst of a fuckshow of epic proportions, and would often hear me ranting to Emerson about anything and everything. It wasn’t necessarily what I was ranting about that caught his eye, it was how I was ranting. He found my passion and anger incredibly attractive, just as I am attracted to his intensity.

    I’ve noticed that soft, intense people like him make me feel safe. The system seems to have more energy overall since we began. splitting time between Emerson’s and the Zelda system’s place, so much so that I was able to handle going up to the hospital for my doctor’s appointment on Friday without my cane and have been able to work through a great deal of what caused us to break up with Emerson in the first place. We’ve become a lot safer for each other.

    I have gotten back with Emerson after a series of heavy talks where we hashed a great deal out, this has been such a boon for me. The rest of my system is still varying degrees of peeved with Emerson, so the ultimate fate of those relationships is to be determined. That said, I’ve informed my headmates that if they’re dicks to Emerson, I will court martial them so fucking hard that they will not see the light of day for the next goddamn decade, so fucking help me. I don’t honestly know what to do in this situation. They don’t really make a handy guidebook for when your headmates could not be bothered with the man you love and who still loves them deeply. However, I figure not allowing them to outright make things worse is a decent place to start, and so we’re rolling with that. He’s currently writing lyrics while I write this post.

    I often feel similar cravings from Emerson as I do from Parlay, as well. Emerson is, for lack of a better phrase, all emotion, and it’s an interesting counterbalance to how much time I lurk in my mind and my body. So when he craves me or someone else in my system, it’s all-consuming. I used to not be able to meet him where he was in that, and it fucking sucked. However, now I can. I just hope it isn’t too late.

    Well, my night meds are hitting. My headmate Kalla has planned a very special rager for the headspace tonight, as well. She’s set up an enormous game of Capture the Flag in our headspace’s catacombs that is Lake Erie themed. One team shall be playing as Cleveland, Ohio, and the other shall be playing as Erie, Pennsylvania. I can practically see the carnage already, so I must wander off. I need to make sure they have the proper permits and shit.

    Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Allēna, Super-Admin (and Lake Erie Replica Inspector)