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

  • From the Ashes – Shitposting Our Way to Freedom

    Hey, everyone! This is Renn once more, back with more True Life Stories for your reading pleasure. Today’s tale is of our rather dramatic rise from the ashes of trauma and the bullshit we left behind we left behind in Texas. Expect lots of curse words and dark humor, as is our specialty. So if you don’t like curse words and real talk, this isn’t the post or blog for you. And if you want to hear more of our lore/tragic backstory, you should check this post out before reading further.

    If you read this post’s title and thought to yourself “there’s no fucking way a person could shitpost their way to freedom”, bear in mind that we thought there was no fucking way for us to pull it off, either. But buckle up, fuckers, because the tale I’m about to tell is completely true, though it is full of quite a bit of tasty high drama.

    From the Ashes of the SuperWhoLock Trashfire on Tumblr c. 2013-15

    Before I go too much further, I should explain that we’re veterans of the website Tumblr during the days when it was the Wild Wet on there and there was no censorship to speak of. It wasn’t until Yahoo bought it in 2013 that there were any kind of content filters or censorship on the site. Allēna, host of the system during our teens, joined in 2013 at the tender age of 16 or so during the heyday of SuperWhoLock, three fandoms who dominated the conversation at the time she joined and were fucking WILD. Tumblr became more of a cesspool as time went on, but it remained a formative influence on her humor and the way she wrote.

    So when she married our first husband and moved up to Alaska to escape our toxic family and build a better life for herself than the one she’d been born into, she had high hopes. Sadly, these hopes were not to last.

    Restless in the North, 2018-20

    Our first husband, Fang*, was cold, controlling, and almost never around. When he was around, Allēna didn’t enjoy herself. So Lēna and the alters who came after her threw themselves into creative endeavors to keep themselves entertained. However, they struggled to find their creative voices or even projects and communities that they felt encapsulated who they were as people and their values.

    Allēna herself started two blogs, Byzantines and Button Downs and Order and Discord, but felt very limited by the blogging advice she found online. Everything she found said to find a defined niche and write content and posts around that one thing. She couldn’t do that for the life of her. Even as a single alter, she is a multitude of things and struggled in college for that reason, as well. She couldn’t just pick ONE niche.

    Still, Allēna felt compelled to write her blogs, poetry, and later, fiction because she feared that getting her work seen was the only way she would support herself. She was in her early twenties and was already disabled and chronically ill. Fang wanted her to work a traditional job, even going as far as to say the tutoring business she’d started and built up from scratch was merely a “hobby that paid”. She couldn’t, and nearly killed herself trying. She went dormant late into 2019 from stress, grief that Fang wasn’t the man she’d fallen in love with, and severe burnout. Peri, her successor, brought us out of the ashes of our misery in Alaska by returning to her roots.

    From the Ashes and Back Again – Peri’s Tale Begins

    Peri finished work on the first installment of Allēna’s audio drama series The Third Prophecy in early 2020 and self published it. Titled Lavender and Scissors, Allēna got the seed that later turned into the biting dark comedy that Peri ultimately presented to the world from studying the Byzantine Empire in high school and laughing at Tumblr posts.

    Over the course of nearly the next decade, Allēna shaped and re-shaped her idea into a smart, funny, multi-generational epic that drew from the horrors she had experienced, the offbeat comedy that anonymous and often neurodivergent Tumblr users wrote, and watching our father, Xavier*, face death with grace and humor. In other words, she had a lot of experience with both comedy and very bleak situations, seeing as a master at both bleakness and humor raised us.

    It’s also important to mention that Peri began work on a sequel to Lavender, but work on that stalled in February of 2020 after she wrote a scene that hit so close to home that no one could touch it for another four years. That’s probably a good thing, as much of the story predicted the system’s future and much of the world’s for the next half decade. We still struggle to work on that sequel, even though we love the story with everything we have. It simply hits too close to home for a number of reasons. She described working on it like she was being possessed by the play itself – she simply could not stop writing it. The story practically told itself.

    Bedbound (But Not Alone)

    By April of 2020, the COVID lockdowns were in full swing. My system was already full of old pros at social isolation by that point – neither Allēna nor Peri had many friends in Alaska, and the way Fang behaved made it very difficult for either of them to make more. The only friends they had they made online, and many of them were thousands of miles away.

    Fang saw us as exclusively his, and would blame us if anyone even looked at us in a way that hinted they wanted us. We know now that what other people do is not our responsibility, but we didn’t know that then. Allēna was stuck and lonely, and Peri even more so. Everything took a turn for the worse when Peri developed crippling, unexplained abdominal pain that was so severe that she could barely stand for more than five minutes without screaming and crying. The isolation would have taken a turn for the worse if Peri had been any less determined than she was.

    Peri realized early on into the lockdowns that she was in a rather unique position. Not only did prolonged social isolation not really faze her – we had spent most of our life alone in some form by that point, anyway – Allēna had tutored exclusively online from the start anyway. When the schools shut down toward the end of the 2019-20 school year, Peri found herself up to her eyes in clients. Not only that, but Fang had fallen into a deep depression at the end of 2019 and lost his job, and so Peri and one of her housemates were the only ones with jobs for months of the lockdowns. Fang no longer had any legitimate say over what she could and couldn’t do with her money.

    In Position

    Tutoring kept her busy, but not quite busy enough. She threw herself deep into writing a novel that many people still consider our masterpiece, The Secret History of Doloras. She started writing it because one of her favorite clients dared her to. We consider it the sort of fantasy novel we’ve always wanted to read, but have never been able to find, so we’re writing it.

    As if that wasn’t enough, she started an accompanying role-play Discord server called Many Worlds that features not just the planet Doloras but every world that we’ve ever made in our stories and began livestreaming and making visual art, as well. All of these projects made her much more confident, and in July of 2020, though she was still in extreme pain and things were still heavily locked down, she appealed to two of her oldest friends and a few family members to help get away from Alaska and Fang. They answered. On July 12, 2020, she left Alaska and returned to Texas, thinking she’d finally risen from the ashes of all her pain and that the worst was over.

    Operation: Dead Hand – Eight’s War (2020-23)

    When Peri returned to Texas, there was a slight problem. Her period was late, and she suspected she was pregnant with Fang’s baby. She thought that that was very unlikely, however, since Fang had said on several occasions that he was sterile due to a genetic illness, so the chances of her being pregnant at all should be slim, right? Turns out she was wrong, and her suspicions were correct. She was indeed pregnant.

    Her mother, who’d always been allergic to human emotion to the point of being extremely abusive and who owned the house where she was living with her paternal grandmother, was already trying to control both of them, and it was about to get much worse for them both. We’ll call her mother Hera. Hera wanted Peri to get back with Fang, and even went so far as to believe his side the story about everything. She also suspected Peri had lied about Fang’s abuse, and began to try everything she could to get the two of them back together, and failing that, Fang full custody of Peri’s child. Peri wanted nothing to do with either of them. Remember: she’d married Fang to get away from Hera and her shitshow of a family. But Peri had no idea what to do and fell into a deep depression.

    When Hera found out that Peri was depressed, she organized an intervention to attempt to seize control of Peri and the fate of her unborn child. Brokenhearted at the blatant betrayal, she consented to go to group therapy to get the family off her ass and went dormant soon afterward. Eight rose from the ashes in the wake of that fuckshow, and quickly put a plan in motion.

    From the Ashes, Back to Where It All Began

    Hera’s betrayal left Eight deeply traumatized and he struggled to feel like he could trust anyone. Yet, he kept meeting people who thought he was fascinating and beautiful and wanted to get to know him better. So he came up with a plan he thought would be foolproof and get people the fuck away from him while further playing into Hera’s belief that he was crazy. He went back to Allēna’s old stomping grounds – Tumblr.

    He began writing short text shitposts and skits similar to what he had seen there. Instead of driving people away, however, his followers turned into fans and became even more intrigued with what the bastard was doing there. Instead of stopping, he decided to continue with it, and he discovered his full influence when he asked his friends and family for help paying some bills he couldn’t cover on his own. His followers gave him far more than what he asked for. People loved him.

    When Hera continued pulling fuckshit, he started talking about everything she had done. His people responded, and they were PISSED. He kept shitposting in the meantime. This tactic terrified Hera, which was exactly where he wanted her, and she stopped trying to fuck with him directly for fear of pissing his army of feral followers off further. With that, he achieved the first stage of a plan he would later call Operation: Dead Hand – clear a path.

    During the next phase, he looked for jobs out of state. He landed one, a sales job in Philadelphia, PA. He still needed help getting there, though. So he reached out to his people for help once more, and they came to his aid. Four days later, he was on a plane to Philadelphia. We were free.

    Conclusion

    Thank you, gentle reader, for reading this far! I know this was a long, winding tale. If you enjoyed this story, give Open Sorcery a follow and join our community of like minded ferals such as yourself!

    As always, stay tuned for more magic.

    -Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies

    *names changed for privacy

  • My World in More Detail

    Hello everyone, and good evening. This post is going to be a bit more about me, my world, the people around me, and my system. My name is Renn, and I am another super-admin alter in the Ashley system. Ellie, who I work closely with, posted last time. She has taken over my mountain of paperwork. I hate paperwork, but I’m good at it. And with an influx of a thousand new alters in a very short time, the stack of paperwork we need to get through is IMMENSE.

    Two words – incident reports. The vast majority of the system hates a single alter named Soryn. He’s an asshole, and we don’t mind what he does as long as he behaves himself. He rarely behaves himself, however and my headmates keep kicking his ass. Every time this happens, there are EVEN more incident reports to do. This post itself may turn into one such report.

    Before I tell you too much more about my world, I need to provide some crucial pieces of context. For starters, my system is polyamorous. We have multiple partners at the same time, and currently we have a good solid baker’s dozen. We live with one of them, our spouse, Emerson* and an ex-partner, Zelda*. As you can guess, that’s complicated. Breakups are complicated enough when it’s two people breaking up, but three? That’s a whole other animal, and that animal is an asshole and a half. The three of us live in Milwaukee, up north in Wisconsin.

    An Expanding World – Bitches With A Backstory

    My system has lived in Wisconsin for about three years and north of the Mason-Dixon for a bit longer than that. We moved out of our birthplace in Texas in July of 2021 and have not set foot in Texas since. This is a good thing. Wisconsin may suck absolute ass, but anywhere is better than Texas, in my opinion. We were born there and wanted to get the fuck OUT from the time we were five. It’s highly unusual for a child that age to want to fuck off from the place they were raised, and we even heard comments about how weird it was growing up.

    Castor, the system’s first host, never, ever got homesick even once, and only got sad upon LEAVING his paternal grandmother’s house in San Antonio, not when his parents dropped him off. Ever. Our brother, on the other hand, was always very sad to see our parents go. Castor gave zero fucks. He thought they were annoying and was glad for a fucking break.

    We’ve often speculated on why we simply could not be bothered with our family of origin, especially since Castor’s lack of regard turned out to be highly justified – many of our family members on our mother’s side are proud bigots and generally not kind people. Could Castor sense that they weren’t quality individuals? Maybe. Equally likely an influence is the stroke we had at eight months old.

    The Brainhole – Gift or Curse?

    In 1998, when we were less than a year old, we had a massive stroke after being on heart-lung bypass for heart failure. For those unfamiliar with what heart-lung bypass is, it’s a machine that essentially breathes for a person, allowing their injured heart and/or lungs to rest. However, one night, there was a sepsis scare, and part of this procedure involves keeping the patient chemically sedated so they don’t have a fucking stroke. Well, as luck would have it, we have always been god-awful at staying down or knowing when to quit. So we fought the motherfucking sedatives, y’know, as one does. According to legend, by the time we were released, we were on enough Versed, Fentanyl, Valium, and straight up motherfucking DOPAMINE and ADRENALINE to knock every full grown male medical professional attendant taking care of us out for an untold number of hours.

    When they discovered that we were awake and had pulled our breathing tube out, they called our parents, who initially thought this was a good thing, as one of our treatment goals was to be able to breathe without the use of a breathing tube. This was ABSOLUTELY NOT a good thing. By morning, when our parents came back up to the hospital, the doctors informed them that we’d had a stroke. A huge one. Preliminary scans of our brain before the swelling went down estimated that we’d lost half of our brain, but as the swelling decreased, doctors found that we were only missing an eighth of it. The stroke took out the majority of our right occipital-parietal lobe and messed with a lot of things. My world was about to get a whole lot weirder.

    Things Fall Apart


    From the mental records and memories I have access to, we have a theory that my fellow super-admin Eight joined the system shortly before we had the stroke. Eight’s always been a fighter and is a very old soul with a knack for showing up in the nick of time. He’s widely regarded as a seer and has been prescient from infancy, shaping my world as I know it. He’s fucking STUBBORN and will fight practically to the death to get something he wants. As one of the original members of the system from infancy, he shaped our collective ways of doing things, which our parents very much didn’t like.

    Our mother was very much in favor of doing things HER way. We strongly suspect she’s just as neurodivergent as we are, and she controlled much of our life well into adulthood. She was very cold, manipulative, and after our father died, became an outright villain. Eight is absolutely his father’s child, so is our fellow super-admin, Allēna.

    Lēna takes more after her mother than Eight does. However, she has just enough of our father’s side in her to piss her mother and her family the absolute fuck off. Our mother’s family despises our father’s, so having a child that took after our father was practically unforgivable. Add to this fact that we were medically difficult to take care of and were very finicky and particular as children when they longed for easy-going children (read: children who they could mold into whoever they wanted), and it was a recipe for years of loneliness, abuse, and isolation.

    Want to hear what Lēna had to say about her childhood and growing up? She wrote this song about her mother. Caution: there are more swear words in this song than there probably are in this entire post..

    Turn That Shit Up To 13!

    The only thing that really made my world bearable was our nearly perfect visual and auditory memory and vivid imagination. We could pick up new knowledge quickly and easily (and still can), and we attribute this to the stroke damage, which we call the Brainhole. It occurred in the right occipital-parietal lobe of our brain, which controls sensory processing. As a result, all of our senses are turned up to thirteen and the knob’s broken off.

    Our intuition is supercharged and we can read people like books. We often scare people with how deeply we can read them. We can accurately guess people’s formative traumas because of our pattern recognition, and we don’t mind that it scares the wrong people off. If it scares them out of our life, that’s a pretty good indicator that they have too much to hide and will likely not be honest with us. That isn’t something we tolerate. Go lie to someone else. Not me. There’s no space for anything but honesty in my world.

    My World Nowadays

    Things have been really hard for a long time, but they have been getting better. I’ll probably post more about our Tragic Backstory later on, but I don’t want to drone on in a single post that’s likely well over a thousand words by this point. I really want to write a post about how we got from Texas to Wisconsin and met Zelda and Emerson – because that’s some incredibly spicy drama and intrigue right there. It’s an absolute shitshow and I think you’ll like it. We’re messy bitches, but our people love us FOR that, not in spite of it.

    Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies

    Like what you see here and want to meet people who also enjoy rambles like this? Join our community!

    *names changed for privacy


  • On Social Networks and Being Nicheless

    Hey, everyone! I’m Ellie, one of the super-admin alters in the Ashley system. I had some spare cash and decided that I wanted to start moving away from traditional social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and the like because I really don’t like how they censor the people who use it, nor do I enjoy how their algorithms work. (RIP Instagram and Facebook’s chronological feed.) So I decided to create my own website with a social network attached. My network is called The Secret Sorcerer Society and you can join it here. I may or may not have reinvented MySpace – we’ll see – but I really like it so far. It’s going to need some tweaks before it’s fully functional, but it’s getting there and I think it’s ready for a few founding members to join and test it out.

    I should start putting our albums up on the Society side for your listening pleasure later this afternoon. We have released fifteen whole albums and a handful of extended plays – that we can find! So there should be a whole lot for you to listen to.

    Please don’t expect a lot of content to do with social networking and related things on here. It’s certainly ONE of our interests, but not the only one by far, and not even one of the major ones. We’ve studied social networks for years, but we’ve studied a great deal more for far longer. For one such example, check out our tutoring profile on Wyzant. We’re polymaths collectively and individually and will try and post every day, but we have noooo idea what we’ll cover. That’s part of the fun of it, in my opinion. If you’re neurodivergent, maybe plural yourself, and enjoy some good old fashioned randomness and shenanigans, maybe a little tomfoolery and the word fuck, you’ll be right at home.

    Have a great day!

    -Ellie