Open Sorcery

Tag: Pennsylvania

  • About Time

    Hey, everyone. It is I, your trusty, if batshit sorcerer guide, Lazarus. I was talking with Lumine about all manner of things both magical and mundane today, and I have decided It is Time to Have Words With Y’all, and by Words I mean poetry, after the grumpiness of yesterday’s post. Y’all deserve bread AND roses, y’know?

    The three pieces I’m about to share make up the backbone of my third poetry collection Singing Molten Gold To the Morning, published at the tail end of 2021 under the name Perzival DHC Dunn-Blackthorne. I’ve noticed some typos in the manuscript, including in the final poem I’m going to share, so I think it may be high time for a reprint once I have the energy.

    A lot of this collection deals with my sense of time. I’ve never had a sense of linear time, and it often slips both backwards and forwards in the form of flashbacks, seizures, dissociation, and straight up visions and premonitions of all kinds. I was medicated for several years in an attempt to get this to stop, as my mother, Hera, thought I was crazy because of the little I told her about my mental health and inner world, but the problem here is that no matter how many meds I was put on, up to and including doses of lithium and other drugs that should have probably killed me, the premonitions never fully stopped and I never fully lost my sense of who I was.

    And I never stopped writing, either. During the roughly 13 years I was medicated and psychologically tortured alone, I produced an enormous body of work across several creative disciplines that I largely kept between myself and my close people. I simply stopped confiding in her about most of what was going on in my life and mind and worked towards building a life of my own.

    Now, I’m on a different medication regimen for the slew of chronic health issues she caused or exacerbated, seeking diagnoses for the rest of them, and have accepted the nonlinear sense of time as… my medicine of sorts, something intrinsically as much a part of me as my neurodivergence, my lack of a gender, or the natural dark brown color of my hair, and will seek medication for it if it starts causing more harm than good. The following poems are meditations on how I experience time, autonomy, and how they are inextricably entwined for me as their own form of magic. Enjoy, let me know your thoughts, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in the comments section 🤣🤌💛

    “one: the end. texas + points east”

    somebody,
    somewhere…
    i remember my heart burning 
    as i longed for the leaves of the east 

    count up all of the hours in the day
    execute plans with no emotion 
    execute emotions like they are enemies
    i am nothing anymore, completely hollow
    such that

    all you see is your reflection 
    it makes no sense to pick up the pieces
    of who i once was
    she was weak and afraid 
    i killed her
    i am electricity
    born from the ashes of my home, 
    my hell
    do not presume you can put a label on me. 

    you will not learn to hate me.
    you will learn to be afraid of me. 
    to drink about me 
    and worship me (posthumously) 
    and eat ash because it’s the closest thing
    to who i was 
    who you thought you had
    who you once were 
    and who you wish you could still find

    i was a child then. 
    i learn things with the wonder i did when i was younger
    you grew up too slowly for your taste 
    i miss the boy you were
    even then 
    even though i was a teacher
    you taught me everything i know
    i was odd and you were even and steady 
    my eccentricity was my salvation 
    and the universe loves irony and wordplay.

    “two: the beginning. chapel hill, north carolina”

    i had a waking dream last night
    someone moved the indigo fabric of spacetime itself
    wrapping themself in inky cloth 
    in chapel hill, north carolina…
    the dream told me it wasn’t time to go there yet 
    i would know when my marching orders come 
    i have not learned enough to be able to see 
    what i am looking for for what it is yet 

    would i see it as a prison now?
    or would i see it as coming home?
    what if i chew through the bars 
    of what i am supposed to love?
    i fell in love with points east before 
    and all signs are pointing to that 
    as my home 

    you may remember me as a season 
    a time of day, a concept -
    i think of you as places i have yet to walk 
    i see beginning as end as beginning 
    i see you as who you are, who you were, 
    and who you will become 
    you are resplendent and sweet and beautiful 
    you are soft and tender and strong 
    you are cosmic in scope and 
    infinitesimally small at once 
    you are that you are.

    “three: the endless cycle. pennsylvania and all it contains”

    i told you once when i was elsewhere that 
    buddhism seemed round 
    you agreed with me, saying it was like a wheel 
    i used to be scared of going forward
    i thought it endless and vast when it is truly 
    cyclical and you can return to where you 
    were as easily as listening to your favorite song
    some revolutions just take longer than others 

    the last watch of the night is deep and rich 
    and sweet like a plum 
    indigo like the deepest sea 
    this is where i make my home 
    i tell my stories after dark 
    comfortable in the space 
    between ending and beginning 
    you remind me of different paths 
    the road not taken
    but all roads lead home 
    some are just longer than others
    more winding -

    and home is where you will find me 
    i’ve burnt and rebuilt so many times 
    i know great and terrible things 
    i’ve asked the void questions 
    and she has answered me. 
    who is out there?
    where are they?
    her answer?
    go back to the end.

    I hope you enjoyed this sampler of poetry and I hope you have an amazing day. Stay tuned for more magic, glorious motherfuckers of assorted genders and persuasions. I’ll be around. This has been your esteemed sorcerer, Lazarus, signing off. ✨

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  • Chrysalyzed

    Hi, everyone! I’m sorry for going kinda dark for these past couple days. My brain has been kind of tired from this past week, so I have been resting until I felt up to writing again. I went to Emerson and told him about how bad I felt that I hadn’t been writing due to exhaustion, and he gently reminded me that we had a standing agreement to blog together on Sundays, so a post would happen today, at the very least.

    This is indeed happening as I write this, he is sitting beside me eating some leftover pasta from last night’s dinner and working on a post of his own. I think we may be using the same prompt, in fact. Our mutual prompt question, if we are in fact using the same one, is something to the effect of “what was a time that you learned something about a loved one that changed your perception of them?” I’m sure I’m not quoting the prompt question verbatim, I’m still very tired, but you get the picture.

    There are many occurrences I could think of with others, too many to count. The majority of these were profoundly negative, as well. Both myself and my former headmates have written enough about my tragic fucking backstory for y’all to get the point, I think. So instead of doing that and pointing fingers for the umpteenth time, I want to write about crashing and burning in 2022 like I mentioned in this post. Because ultimately, I am starting to love myself, making myself a loved one by technicality, and this massively changed my perception of my abilities, what a beautiful life looked like, and what sorts of things were possible for me.

    In 2022, I was a dead person walking who didn’t realize it at the time. I was largely bedbound from that bout of COVID the past winter, and had surrounded myself with people who consistently expected more from me than I was able to provide, which just threw me further and further into burnout.

    I had committed fully to polyamory in autumn of 2021 before getting sick for a month, and my polycule was just as messy or even messier than I was. At its largest point, I was dating twenty people simultaneously.

    My mind was shattered from two and a half decades of trauma, I was somewhat openly plural, I was in excruciating mental and emotional pain, and I was in the thick of the final act of the  infamous Operation: Dead Hand, as well, wherein my mother, Hera, was plotting to steal my biological child from both myself and my best friend using Texas’ court system. I couldn’t realistically manage any of it. Despite being surrounded by people who claimed to have my best interests at heart, I had never really felt more alone.

    I did my best to appear to the outside world like I was holding myself together, afraid that Hera would take anything I posted or any information that got back to her through the grapevine and use it against me to further her case and maintain control. I was deeply afraid of vulnerability and betrayal for very good reason. So, with my back against the wall, I tried to carry all of my own stress and terror and that of my polycule alone while asking for as little help as possible.

    All of that came crashing down when one of my partners at the time, Kira, moved in with the partners I was living with at the time, claiming she had nowhere else to go. She was just as cunning a plotter as Hera and myself, and she quickly tried to get her hooks in as many of my partners as she could. By the time I managed to drive her out of town, she had manipulated her way through a solid half of the polycule, which was a staggering feat considering how guarded I was. But she underestimated me, judging me for a helpless, crippled simpleton who had no idea what she was doing, and I got her out of the area in the nick of time.

    However, I was teetering on the edge of a total collapse, and Kiragate, as this roughly month and a half long ordeal came to be called, took any remaining energy out of me. I went on vacation to Binghamton, New York at the end of October, and spent the majority of that trip in a crossfaded stupor. It was nowhere close to my finest hour.

    However, around that time, I had reconnected with an old flame I had met when I first moved to Milwaukee. We’ll call her Leigh. I told her all about what was going on, and she expressed regret that she had left Milwaukee, because then we could have hung out. It turns out that she was living in Madison, about a hour and a half away.

    Leigh and I had parted on strange terms. Her partners had tried to run me out of town the winter prior, and she spun it as though she had had no say in that decision and that they had read our quick closeness as a threat to the power they had been building at her expense, as they had been on the rocks for some time. However, by that point they were out of her life and had fucked all the way off to Denver, Colorado and were doing gods know what out there.

    She was lonely in Madison, and I was still very fond of her and was deeply dissatisfied with the way things were going with the partners I was living with and had been for some time, even before Kiragate.

    Kira had simply taken advantage of the existing problems that were there before she had arrived and in essence held us under occupation and exacerbated them. It’s a tactic as old as time, and she did it masterfully. So I wanted to get the hell out of that shit show, hopefully for good, rest up, and build a better life with Leigh. The original plan was for her to move back out to Milwaukee, but in the interim, she was bound to a lease in Madison, so I was going to split time and we were going to travel back and forth to see each other.

    So, Leigh came out to visit for awhile, and she quickly began to encourage me to come out to stay with her awhile as I opened up to her more and more about what was going on at home. Finally, after a particularly nasty fight with one of my partners, I packed enough shit to get the fuck out to Madison indefinitely, hopped on a bus with Leigh, and headed out.

    However, before I did that, I sent a quick message to someone who’d been asking for me to find a way to Madison to meet up since earlier that year, another very cunning individual who we shall call Stregobor. He was good at long cons. So good at long cons, in fact, that I didn’t know he was a fellow magic user until I was already dating him. I was equal parts  desperate and charismatic, and Stregobor was a suitor who was one of, as I like to say, my “decisions of all time”. A mistake, in other words.

    I was originally only intending to stay in Madison for a month. However, once I started dating Stregobor and Leigh found out exactly how good I was at saving her ass and meeting new people, that month turned into about two. Stregobor started coming by a lot and Leigh adored him.

    He was also polyamorous, so shortly after we became partners, we added each other to our respective polycule group chats. This turned out to be a mistake on Stregobor’s part. Through his group chat, I met his spouse, who I was initially wary of because of my deep trust issues and agoraphobia. However, this absolute delight of a human being quickly won me over despite my terror, and I adored him. He quickly became one of my best friend. We will call him Peregrinus.

    Now, among Stregobor’s many hobbies, which also included reading excellent dark, urban fantasy books and being both a dungeon master and player for tabletop role playing games, he also enjoyed talking shit about nearly everyone in his life. Peregrinus was not safe from this asshat behavior, and nor was I, I’d come to find out. The only one he didn’t disparage behind closed doors was his sister, and I suppose everyone has to draw a line somewhere. From what I have heard, though, she is worthy of that care.

    Because I had spoken to Stregobor first, the first part of my friendship with Peregrinus was confusing because of all of the utter horseshit Stregobor had been saying. Peregrinus was not how he had been painted at all, and he was in fact made of very strong, upstanding stuff when it came down to the wire. He was funny, sweet, and I adored him.

    We got especially close one night when he was bored at work and invited me to come hang out for the end of his shift. I didn’t do that sort of thing at the time. Not at all. I was terrified of new places and new people, and this was definitely a newish person in a new place. But as soon as I was about to sheepishly refuse, I got the overwhelming sense that I needed to go.

    We were already supposed to hang out later that week, we were going to meet up for coffee. There were firm plans. I liked firm plans. Firm plans were safe. This? This was foolish, reckless, and at this point I was learning that recklessness without some kind of a backup plan or preparation was what kept getting me fucked up in life. But I also knew that I shouldn’t ignore it when I got the overwhelming sense that I was supposed to do something. That was a clear sign that that something, whatever it may be, was important.

    So, wondering if I was crazy the entire damn time, I jumped into the shower, called a Lyft, packed enough energy drinks to stay upright and decently awake, told Leigh I was going out for a bit, and went to Peregrinus’ work. I was so fucking nervous the whole way there, and spent the entire ride debating what I was going to say to him first. I finally settled on a classic one liner – “come here often?” – and swaggered my tired ass into the lobby.

    The conversation was amazing. We talked about so many things for fucking hours. However, after I was able to effortlessly summon a little alter of Peregrinus’ to front after he swore he was not plural, no less, I decided to try something. Peregrinus had an original character that he used to roleplay as from time to time, so I tested a theory I had that he was also an alter.

    I said in the most seductive tone I could muster, “Hi, Michael…” and lo and fucking behold, the bitch himself came straight to front. The first words out of this man’s mouth were “if I could take you home with me tonight, I would.” I was very, very flustered and very full of queer panic. He was such a flirt. I was honestly smitten.

    But the real piece de resistance came at coffee later that week. Michael wanted to front, and front he did. He set everything up so that he guided me down the stairs of this multi-level coffeeshop like a fucking Disney Prince. I was fucking floored. I had died and gone to queer heaven. I was starting to wonder if I had to go back to Milwaukee between Stregobor, Michael, and Peregrinus.

    Leigh and I were on the rocks at this point, and I had no idea that Stregobor was talking shit about me yet. Nor did I really know Peregrinus well enough to determine if what Stregobor was saying about him was accurate, but it made me uncomfortable, so I wanted to observe for longer before making any judgments.

    I started dating Michael after that coffee date, and both he and Stregobor began to gently push me to consider staying out there in Madison with them rather than splitting time as originally planned. I was exhausted, and becoming more so by the day.

    One day, I finally had enough. One of my partners, whom we shall call Sol, had been bitterly heartbroken over my ex best friend, who was also dating her. I didn’t want to get more involved in the drama than I already had been, as I had seen this coming since March of 2022, warned him about it, he didn’t listen, and shit had begun to spiral from there on out on top of all the other shit I had been dealing with.

    I didn’t like what either of them were doing to each other, nor did I like what my so called best friend was doing to me, so I decided to throw my weight behind  neither side and let the chips fall where they may and attend to my life closer to home, as all of this was happening states away.

    After I broke things off with Leigh, the polycule schismed and broke roughly in half, with the half that Leigh and Sol had bonded with going with her and the other half staying with me. Leigh kicked me out afterwards, understandably, leaving Stregobor, Peregrinus, and myself to urgently gather my shit and scramble for a Plan B, as none of us wanted me to go back to Milwaukee by that point. Stregobor had his best friend/hired gun of sorts scoop me up and deliver me to the hotel where he was working under the table for the next week to regroup and figure things out, and off I went.

    It was during that regrouping phase that I opened up more to Stregobor about what had happened both during Kiragate and what was going on and with Operation: Dead Hand. The masterful ending move of Dead Hand was actually his idea – write to Hera’s lawyer and tell her that I want to sign away rights to my child so that Hera can adopt him like she was claiming she wanted to, because we knew something Hera wanted nobody to know.

    She was planning on giving my child to a family she knew in Utah that nobody in her family knew or trusted because her husband had threatened to leave her if she planned on raising my child. The lawyer would be handed a win on a silver platter, take the deal and run, and Hera’s family would crucify her for even attempting such things because they were already attached to my child and had been from birth. The family would eat itself and I would be free to go.

    We hashed that out, got some good rest for once, and made an interim plan going forward. When we came back to Madison, I took up temporary residence at Peregrinus’ apartment, where I started work on finding a permanent place to live via connections I had made through another of Stregobor’s partners. However, during that time, I bore witness to how badly Peregrinus was being treated by his other partner at the time, a man who we will call Ladron. Ladron was a walking bag of insecurities and wrath who was a lowlife with nothing to offer and knew it.

    These insecurities mostly came out in the form of rages, but occasionally came out in the form of tearful emotional manipulation. This was a man who knew he wasn’t shit and I watched Peregrinus take the brunt of his issues. However, I knew I would have to tread carefully if I wanted to get Peregrinus out, as past experience showed that speaking up about it forcefully from the jump in front of Ladron would only end in more pain for all of us. I needed to get to safety first, at the very least.

    I found a room in a place nearby, moved in, and started befriending my housemates, who felt safe for once. I felt safe. But then, around Peregrinus’ birthday, we found out that my housemate had given us COVID. So Peregrinus had to shelter in place at my apartment for a couple weeks and found that he felt much safer with me than at his place.

    It was during that quarantine period that I first witnessed Stregobor talking shit about me, and after all of the nonsense with the schism and watching Peregrinus taking Ladron’s hits over and over and then by contrast, Michael, Peregrinus, and my kind housemates treating me exceptionally well, I decided I had yet again had enough. I fucking deserved better. So did Peregrinus. So I officially asked him to stay and live with me. By some miracle, we made it happen. We were both safe. Peregrinus and I ended up breaking things off with Stregobor, and I didn’t have to go to Milwaukee after all.

    I stayed in Madison for another four months or so. Peregrinus noticed my exhaustion and started gently, yet firmly telling me to rest and handle more things. It was a swift kick to the ‘nads to all I had ever known, and it was brutally emotionally and mentally painful.

    My body had started to collapse so thoroughly from the stress of everything I’ve written about here that I had become for all intents and purposes allergic to sunlight and incredibly intolerant to heat. I firmly believe I was dying, and I very likely was. However, Peregrinus was a stubborn little ram, and stepped the fuck up.

    He didn’t stop, either. He nursed me back to health and in many ways, brought me back to life. I saved him, and in return, he saved me. Later, from that same plural system, Emerson emerged. He has the same indefatigable iron will, and we still take care of each other. He tells me to sit the fuck down when I need it, and vice versa.

    I still work fucking hard for my people, I just don’t do it to my detriment anymore, and I value my time, energy and life enough to not write myself out of the equation anymore. I am learning to truly love myself and love my life for the first time, disabilities and limitations and all, and I couldn’t have done it without all the bullshit I alchemized along the way.

    I think that’s enough for tonight. Stay tuned for more magic, dear people. I love y’all, and I hope you love yourselves, too, as best you can.

    -Lazarus, Master of Bullshit, Sorcery, and Ceremonies

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    Fediverse Reactions

  • 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)

  • 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