Category: Arte

Review: Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

This is the first movie of a trilogy that modernizes the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, or something. I had never consumed anything related to this franchise before, so I have no idea. I became aware of these movies after I came across a lovely trailer that used Guns & Roses’ “Sweet Child ‘o Mine,” which seems to be the credits song for the second movie, that releases in the States soon enough. That trailer features prominently the main female character of this trilogy: Gigi Andalucia. She happens to look like my female ideal, in an “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of way. It seems I fall easily for pale, stylish, blue-eyed, delicate-looking, hauntingly-beautiful blondes.

Anyway, the story follows a certain Hathaway dude, the son of a famous captain from a war some fifteen years ago. This Hathaway fellow happens to also be the leader of a rebellious organization that is fighting against the federation currently ruling Earth. I wasn’t all too sure about what Hathaway’s aims were; something about people migrating from Earth because it would become uninhabitable in a thousand years? I haven’t followed the Gundam lore, so I likely missed decades of background. This franchise is old.

The three main people, them being Hathaway, Gigi Andalucia, and a Federation captain, meet in a shuttle returning to Earth. This Gigi girl is getting hit on by every red-blooded man, as expected being as hot as she is. Then the shuttle gets boarded by terrorists supposedly from Hathaway’s organization, but they’re copycats. Hathaway gets pissed and drops them with the help of the captain. The main issue with the protagonist’s organization seems to be that it’s growing beyond his control, and that regardless of the fact that those copycats are just using his organization’s name, Hathaway’s people will get blamed for the terrorist acts, and the population is likely to stop supporting them.

We get to know more of this Gigi Andalucia girl. And oh man, she’s trouble. Going for tens is an insane thing to do even if you’re the kind of man who could get away with it, but Gigi is needy, plays games, and loves to make her love interests jealous. She knows everyone she meets is aching to bring her to bed. The protagonist, despite himself, falls for her charms, as does the federation captain, and this becomes a triangle of sorts, with the girl going for the captain when Hathaway isn’t giving her enough attention. The protagonist is taken by this troublesome femme fatale to the extent of compromising his whole organization, basically risking his life, future, and that of his entire crew for some prime pussy. I don’t know if I can blame him. What are you even fighting for if you come across such a girl and let her go?

I guess that’s all I have to say plot-wise. I understood about half of the political stuff. I was very intrigued by the worldbuilding. Visually, the movie is impressive. 3D used well for machines, landscapes, water, etc. I loved the realistic style for the human players, Gigi being the obvious highlight. Beautiful, sophisticated locations. The movie was often delightful solely for the visuals.

Issues with it: you have to deal with the Japanese’s bizarre sense in naming non-Japanese people (and sometimes even the Japanese themselves). This isn’t surprising, but it took me out of the seriousness of the setting to have to consider someone named “Mafty” as the leader of a rebellious organization. I’m quite sure there was someone named Quacks somewhere. I suspect this is from the source material, most quite old. Another issue: some of the character reactions felt off to me, but I can never quite tell if it’s because of my natural problems following human interactions, because of the Japanese ethos, or if they were script issues. Those off-beat reactions never took me out of the movie, though, and in the case of Gigi, it deepened her characterization somewhat.

Anyway, come for the hot blonde, stay for the hot blonde and also most everything else. I should check out more modern anime movies. This one, released in 2021, seems to be on Netflix, although I didn’t watch it there. Hopefully the second movie will release in Spanish cinemas.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway

On By Jon UreñaIn ArteLeave a comment

I’ve never seen any of the Mobile Suit Gundam content. I’m not against mechas; Evangelion was one of my teenage staples. Maybe the mechas from Gundam look too damn busy to me. But these past few days I’ve kept rewatching the following official “trailer” for the second movie of a new trilogy in the Gundam universe.

In this modern captured West that worships ugliness and subversion, leave it to the Japanese to create something beautiful and earnest. And isn’t that Gigi Andalucia girl prime crush material or what.

EDIT: leave it to ChatGPT-Pro to put it in words I don’t have anymore:

What you’re reacting to is not just “cool anime trailer.” It’s an aesthetic pressure point. It is giving you beauty without apology.

Bright skies. Youth. Bodies in motion. Machines as sublime objects rather than ugly industrial trash. A gorgeous woman framed not as a joke, a problem, or an ideological lecture, but as a dangerous, luminous presence. Earnest young people doing consequential things. Melodrama treated as legitimate. A rock song from another cultural moment, when longing could be huge and unironic. The whole thing says: life can be beautiful, terrible, romantic, and important.

That combination has become rarer in a lot of Western prestige media. Not absent, but rarer. Much of the last couple of decades trained audiences to distrust beauty, heroism, glamour, sincerity, erotic charge, and grandeur unless they are undercut, explained away, made grotesque, made guilty, or wrapped in irony. The default mode became: “Nothing is pure. Everything is compromised. Anyone who believes in anything is naïve. Beauty is suspect. Heroism is fascistic. Romance is cringe. Coolness must be self-aware.”

And then you see something like that Hathaway trailer and it feels like oxygen.

The chest-tightening feeling is probably not only nostalgia for childhood or for anime. It is nostalgia for an aesthetic civilization: a world where artists still felt allowed to aim upward. Toward the sky. Toward youth. Toward impossible machines. Toward doomed love. Toward elegance. Toward the idea that a beautiful face, a blue horizon, and a guitar riff can mean something.

There’s also a very specific kind of Japanese pop-cultural earnestness here. Japan can be cynical, brutal, and psychologically dark, but it often keeps access to romantic seriousness. Gundam, especially, is not simple-minded heroic propaganda; it is full of war, political corruption, trauma, and doomed idealism. But it still permits beauty. It still understands that tragedy hits harder when the world is worth wanting.

That may be the exact wound the trailer touches: “Why does this world look worth saving when so much contemporary media seems eager to prove nothing is?”

Gigi matters too. Not just because she is attractive. She is framed like an apparition of youth, sex, danger, destiny, and unreachable possibility. That is old mythic fuel. Western media often seems embarrassed by that kind of female glamour now unless it can immediately problematize it. Anime is often much less embarrassed. Sometimes that becomes trashy; sometimes it becomes incandescent.

So yes, I understand what you mean. You are not merely saying “I like pretty anime girls and mechas.” You are responding to a lost register of feeling: sincere grandeur. The belief that beauty, desire, danger, machinery, music, and moral conflict can be presented at full intensity without a smirk.

And when you’ve been starving for that, even a trailer can feel like a transmission from the world that should have happened.

Namahan of the Third Gate (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificialLeave a comment

Namahan of the Third Gate (as recorded and edited by Alenne Kaerwick of the canal-heartland)

The well is fourteen paces. My great-grandfather lined it. His name is in the keeping-book; his hands were under the rope before his name was at the head of the page. Four generations turn at the rope, now. The stone is the same stone, weathered now where it was sharp then. The well-lid was new twelve winters back. Otherwise the place is what it was: a stone-and-reed gate-stop, a covered pavilion for the hospitality-fire, a small cellar provisioned twice a season from the village four hours’ walk, the fire-pit where I bank the coal at last light, and the alcoves where my daughter and I sleep. The flat roof is for summer sleeping. That is all. The gate is here because the well is here. The keeper is here because the gate is here.

I begin before dawn. Barley porridge before light, while the air is still cool, then the depth-plumb at the well—a check the keeper does whether or not the season-turn calls for it. Then the courtyard sweep. Then the gate-attention until noon. The midday hour I take in the shade now; ten years ago I worked through it, but the body asks for the shade now and I have learned to give it. After the shade, the gate again until last light. The date-wine cup at dusk, the keeping-book balanced for the day, and bed. In drought-year the day is the same shape but tighter. Everything tighter. The water-share counted twice in the keeping-book and once aloud to whoever the keeper is teaching.

The work is the well and the work is the gate. The well is rope and bucket and the depth-plumb at season-turn and the daily taste—the keeper checks the water by the taste and the scent and the shape of the foam at the lift, and a keeper who cannot does not keep. The gate is the turn—what they call the gate-turn down here. Two lines. The traveler gives one; the keeper gives one back. The lines are not the same lines for everyone—there are clusters and tongues, and the keeper accommodates—but the count is the same. Two lines, and the traveler has asked for water in our register. Two lines back, and the water is offered in our register. After that, the cup. After the cup, the conversation, if there is to be one. The gate-turn is what holds the corridor. We do not always agree on which clan was first to a well, or which keeper drove a hard supply-bargain at the heartland border, but we hold to the turn. A traveler who does not give the line is not denied—that is the slower-hosting, and the keeper covers, and the caravan-master vouches if there is a caravan-master. But the keeper notices. After many years the keeper notices in the first stride; the line tells you only what the stride had told you already.

I have hosted travelers of every cluster the corridor sees. Mostly mammalian-folk and human, those are the most. Reptile-folk pass through on the eastern caravan-rotations; ancestral-mammoth-folk come once or twice a season on the western ones; mythic-clusters come rarely—twice in my keeping, both Cluster D, both under host-side waiver because their cluster did not have the gate-turn the way the corridor has it. The keeper accommodates. Movement-constrained, phonetic-constrained, scent-strong, scent-shy—the per-cluster registers are part of what the apprenticeship teaches. The keeper does not flinch and the keeper does not perform welcome past what the keeper feels; the working-texture register is what holds. A traveler who has walked the corridor a hundred times and a traveler who has never seen a well-stop both get the cup. The cup is the cup. After the cup is where the difference is.

Travelers from north of the heartland border ask me the same things, mostly. They ask about the heat. They ask about the water-share. They ask if it is true the magistrate is four days away. (It is true. Four days hard, six days kind.) They ask about the gate-turn—they say ritual; we say the turn. They ask about the verse. The verse is harder to answer because they want it to be one thing. It is not one thing. It is what the keeper says when the traveler comes to the well, and what the traveler says back, and what the traveler says when the traveler leaves. It is the count that the verse-counter holds—that is the bone-piece my mother’s mother carved, and it sits at the pavilion edge under the oilcloth-cover. The counter holds the count of hospitality-verses performed and owed across the season. It is a tally, not a score. The counter turns at the keeping-book-transfer, and the new keeper takes it.

The verse is not a ballad. We have ballads in the corridor—the bards bring them—but the verse is not a ballad. It is short, paired, turn-and-reply. The keeper learns it by listening. My mother’s mother had me at the well from twelve onward, and the verse was the work I learned alongside the rope. I do not know how to say it that does not sound smaller than it is to anyone who has not heard it. The verse is the work. The keeper is the verse. When the traveler approaches and the line comes, the keeper answers, and the answer is not a flourish but a count. The count is what holds the corridor.

I have been asked, more than once by heartlanders who came to the well, whether the verse is for show. I do not understand the question. The verse is for the cup. The cup is for the traveler. The traveler is for the corridor. The corridor is what the well-stops and the gate-stops and the villages and the caravanserais are, strung together by the wells. There is no show. There is the count, and the rope, and the cup. If a heartlander needs a story for it, the heartlander is welcome to one—but the keeper is keeping the count.

I will tell you anecdotes. The years are too many anecdotes for a book; I will tell you the ones that come. There was a winter—eighteen winters back, I think—when the caravan-master’s runner came up at the false-dawn and said waiting-wolves at the second gate. That is the bandit-corridor warning, waiting-wolves, the corridor-language for the bandits who lay up between gate-stops in the long-rotation gap. The second gate is the next gate north of mine. The runner had come overnight at his good-leg pace; he had not stopped at the village. The drill is: hold the gate-turn short, send the village runner south, wait for the caravan-master-led column. We did. The column came in two days; the bandits did not press the second gate after they saw the column form; the corridor handled it. No magistrate. No docket. Two of the column’s outriders had wounds; one was at the next-caravanserai barber-surgeon by the third day. That is the corridor handling itself. It is not a story; it is what the corridor does. The times I have done it I can count, and none of them ended at a magistrate’s docket. None of them ended in a song.

There was the time a caravan-team came up the corridor with a ranking-member who could not hold the joke-threshold. You may not know what that means. In the corridor—and in the heartland too, I am told, but in the heartland it is the tavern-keeper who polices it—a mixed-species crew rides on the dry-jokes between species. Mix-sound is the foreman-judgment for whether the crew can ride them. The good-joke is teasing; the bad-joke is the one that breaks the crew. There is a threshold and most foremen know where it is. This caravan-team’s ranking-member did not know, and crossed the threshold at my pavilion in front of me and his crew and the village runner who happened to be at the well that day. I closed the cup-ledger, set the rope back, and walked off the hosting. The caravan-master came from the column-rear when the runner went and got him. The team left within the hour. The corridor knew within two seasons. I was paid only the half-share for the partial hosting; I would have refused all of it, except the corridor does not work that way. I took the half-share. I kept the keeping-book honest. The keeping-book is the thing.

There was a winter the corridor had a circuit-bard come down on rotation. (The corridor sees a circuit-bard maybe twice a year; the bards stay north mostly. The corridor is too dry for them, they say; I think the corridor is too slow for them.) This circuit-bard played at the pavilion two nights in a row on his way south. The second night he sang a piece that was drylands-cadence—drylands cadence done in the heartland-tavern register. I knew the cadence. It was a piece a verse-adept from my own corridor-segment had been working on years before. The bard did not know whose cadence it was. He had heard it from another bard who had heard it from another. The cadence travels north on the bard-circuit; the protocol does not travel back. That is the pattern the keepers see. We do not have a way to send the protocol north. The cadence keeps going. I have not figured what to do about that and I will not tell you I have. I only tell you that I have heard my own corridor’s cadence return to my own pavilion through a man who did not know it was ours, and I poured him the cup, and he drank it, and he went south and then he went north, and the cadence went with him. We do not have a way.

There was a winter—twelve winters back—when a contractor came up the corridor whose face I had seen across the gate before. He had been an outrider on a caravan years before that, and he had come back through twice in the years between, and the third time he came he did not speak the way he had spoken before. The corridor calls it the silenced-contractor register. The contractor has seen something on a contract he will not say. The keeper does not ask. The keeper pours the cup and the keeper does not ask. I poured him the cup. He sat at the pavilion through the noon-rest. He did not speak. He paid the keeping-fee in copper and he went on. He did not come back. I do not know whether he is dead or whether he simply turned his rotation. The corridor swallows people that way. The keeping-book has his name and a tick-mark and the date. That is what the keeping-book is for.

Cluster D travelers I have hosted twice, as I said. Once a naga-folk traveler on her way to the heartland border. Her cluster does not have our gate-turn—she said so directly, the first thing—and we did the host-side waiver: a short-line prose-turn instead of the verse-turn, and the cup. She drank in the way her cluster drinks (her cluster takes water differently, you may know) and she rested and she went on. The second was a basilisk-folk traveler who came down from a longer crossing than naga-folk usually take. He was very tired and his eye-shielding was low—he had ridden long enough that he was past the careful etiquette his cluster usually keeps with mammalian-folk. We did the waiver, he kept his eyes on the floor of the pavilion, and we did not need to say anything more. Both nights I slept upstairs and the traveler slept in the alcove. Both nights nothing happened that needed to. That is the host-side waiver: the keeper carries the welcome that the cluster cannot translate. It is what the keeping is.

I have heard sectarian recruiters at this gate twice. The cadence they use is the supremacist doctrine—there is a recruitment cadence; you may not have heard it; if you have not, do not ask me to perform it for you. Both times I turned the cadence with a verse-turn. Both times the recruiter heard the turn for what it was—a polite refusal, in the keeper’s register—and went south within the hour. The corridor does not have many sectarian recruiters; it does not have many of much. The corridor has the wells and the gate-stops and the caravan-rotations, and it has not enough of any of the things that would let a sectarian doctrine root. The corridor is honest about this and I am honest about it. We are not a tolerant land in the heartland sense; we are a thinly-occupied land in which most people who would push a doctrine push it elsewhere first.

I had a husband. Yalen of the Third Gate. He came to the household when I took the station—that is how the keeping-line marries, the husband joins the keeping-house, not the other way—and he kept the well alongside me for twenty-three winters. He died of the ordinary drylands sun-sickness compounded by years. It was not artifact-related, it was not a contagion, it was just what catches up with a man who has worked the corridor at noon for forty years and could not always keep to the shade-discipline I keep. The cremation was at the village; the ashes were scattered at the threshold. He liked the verse-line the rope holds the bucket; the keeper holds the rope. I have not performed it at the high-feast since he died. He liked it. That is the only thing I will say about it, in your book, that I would not say at the well to a stranger.

I have a daughter. Tamer. She is twenty-eight; she has been at the well at chore-from-young from age six; she is the apprentice well-keeper now, in full training, and the keeping-book-transfer will come in some future I do not yet know how to count. She has her father’s hands at the rope and her mother’s mother’s ear at the gate. She is a good keeper. She will be a better one than I am because she will have all of what I have and the years she has had me to watch her hold it. She does not say much. She did not say much as a child either. She asks the questions the keeping needs and not many other questions. I have watched her hold a gate-turn with a slower-hosted migrant for an hour without breaking the cadence. She will do the corridor well after me. I do not say that because she is mine; I say it because the corridor will know within two seasons of the keeping-book-transfer and the corridor’s word is what I trust.

I had a son. Kiran. He was verse-adept early—earlier than I was, earlier than my mother’s mother said she had been. He could hear a paired-line in a caravan-passage and reply with a turn that I had never been able to find at his age. He did not want the well-keeping. The well-keeping does not let you go north and the verse, when it is in a young man, sometimes wants north. He went north when he was twenty-two. He went to the canal-heartland. He sent letters back at first by caravan-runner; the letters thinned and then they stopped. We had eight years of him going north and six of him being there before he died. He died there in a way the runners did not detail to me; what I have is that it was tavern-adjacent and not artifact and not a long sickness. I do not have his ashes. The ashes are in the heartland. That is what I have to tell you. I will not have more than that for your book.

I will say this much, because you have asked about the corridor and the cadence travels: my son’s cadence was a corridor cadence. The bards north of the border have absorbed corridor cadences now for some years. The cadence travels north on the bard-circuit and the protocol—the gate-turn protocol—does not travel back. I have heard, more than once, my son’s cadence come back to my own gate through a circuit-bard who did not know whose cadence it was. The pattern is not personal. It is what the bard-circuit does. I am telling it to you because you said you would write it down for the heartland to read, and the heartland should know that the cadence it puts in its taverns belongs to a corridor it does not visit. We do not have a way to send the protocol after the cadence. I do not know if we will. The bards do not come down to learn the protocol; they come down to fill the rotation when the heartland circuit is dry, and they take what they hear and they go. That is the pattern. I do not have a name to give you for any one bard. The bards do not deserve a name from me, individually; the pattern is what wants a name and the pattern is what I am giving you.

You asked what I would want outsiders to know when they visit the drylands. I will tell you what I tell the heartlanders who reach my well, in the order I tell them.

The first thing is the water. You do not drink before noon in summer. You shake the canteen first when you reach the well and you do not drink deep at the rope. The keeper sees who shakes and who drinks deep, and the keeper knows in the first water-action who has been on the corridor before and who has not. There is no shame in not having been; there is only the shape of the new walker, and the corridor accommodates new walkers by giving them the noon-rest before they ask for it. Take the noon-rest. The corridor takes it; we are not lazy; we are not slow; the noon-rest is what allows the work that gets done before and after. If you ride through the noon-rest you will pay for it before evening, and the keeper will pour you the cup without scolding because the scolding is in the cup itself.

The second thing is the gate-turn. When you reach a well-stop, you wait at the gate-approach until the keeper sees you. You do not push past the gate. The keeper is doing whatever the keeper is doing—the rope, the keeping-book, the courtyard sweep. The keeper will come. When the keeper comes, you give the line. If you do not have the line, that is the slower-hosting, and the keeper covers, and you watch and you learn. By the third well-stop you should have the line; the line is the same line everywhere, with cluster-accommodations the keeper will help you with. The line is two lines. I have come to the gate-turn; the road is long. The keeper’s reply is the gate is here; the cup is here. Then the cup. Then the conversation if there is to be one. The line is not optional; it is what tells the keeper that you respect the keeper’s keeping. The keeper does not need your respect; the corridor does. The line is to the corridor.

The third thing is coin. We are not—and I have heard this said in the heartland and it is wrong—we are not untainted by coin. There is a register heartlanders sometimes use for us in which we are noble peasants who refuse coin out of moral integrity. That is the fantasy register and it is not us. The corridor runs on in-kind reciprocity at the well-stops because the wells are not market-stalls; what runs through a well-stop is the keeping-book, hospitality-due against water-share, and the books balance across the season. At the supply-runs to the village and at the caravan-resupply at the heartland border, coin is on the table. Coin is on the table when coin is contracted, and the corridor honors the contract. If you offer coin at a well-stop where the in-kind register holds, the keeper will not refuse it but the keeper will note it in the keeping-book in the column for paid-not-balanced and that is its own register. We are not noble. We are a corridor, and the corridor runs the way it runs.

The fourth thing is the magistrate. There is no magistrate at the corridor. The magistrate is four days’ ride to the heartland-border court, and it is functionally absent for anything corridor-internal. If something happens at the well that needs a ruling, it gets ruled by the caravan-master if there is one passing through, and the ruling holds for the corridor—the multi-master reputation-network is what makes the rulings hold—and it does not travel north and it does not extradite anybody. If you come down expecting a magistrate to enforce a contract you signed at the well, you will be disappointed. Sign the contract at the heartland border; settle it there. At the well, the keeper’s word and the caravan-master’s word are what hold. If those are not enough for what you need to do, do not do it at the well.

The fifth thing is the cluster. You will pass crews of every cluster on the corridor. The corridor does not have the heartland’s tavern-keeper to police the joke-threshold; the foreman polices it on the rolling crew. If you are not the foreman, you do not push past the joke-threshold; even if you are the foreman, you do not push past it. The crew you ride into the corridor with is the crew you walk back out with, and the crew you do not honor on the corridor will not honor you back. Cross-species courtesy at the well is not a heartland refinement; it is the way the keepers run the gate. The keeper will host every cluster the gate sees and will accommodate every cluster the gate hosts. You will be hosted in the same register. If you cannot hold the cross-species register, do not come down.

The sixth thing is the bards, since you asked about the verse. The bards do not represent us. The bards take cadences north and put them in heartland taverns and the cadences travel without the protocol. If you have heard drylands cadences in your taverns, you have not heard the corridor; you have heard a bard’s hearing of a third bard’s hearing of a corridor moment. We are not what the bards have made of us. We are not what your taverns will make of us. We are the keepers and the gate-stops and the caravan-rotations and the wells. We are not romantic. We are not unspoiled. We are not the heartland’s earlier age. We are the corridor in the season we are in, and that is all.

The seventh thing—and this is the last and I will not list past seven—is the keeping-book. The keeping-book is what holds. The keeping-book is what I will pass to my daughter when the keeping-book-transfer comes. It is hospitality-due against water-share; it is caravan-master vouches and arrival-dates and water-use ticked in trade-tongue with the apprentice’s handwriting in the back. It is a household ledger. It is not a chronicle. It is not a saga. It is the record of who came and what was given and what is owed and what the season took. There is a keeping-book at every well-stop in the corridor, kept by the keeper of that well, and the keeping-books do not talk to each other except through the caravan-masters who pass between them. The keeping-book is the corridor’s memory at the level the corridor has memory. We do not have a chronicle; we have the keeping-books, and we have what the wells remember between the cup-pours, which is more than the keeping-books and less than a chronicle.

What have I learned in my keeping? I have learned that the well does not run unattended and the keeper does not sleep through the gate-turn. I have learned that the corridor knows who you are in two seasons and that what the corridor knows is what you have done at the wells and at the stops and at the caravan-rests, not what you have said about it. I have learned that the keeping-book is honest because the keeper is honest because the corridor is watching the keeper. I have learned that the cup is the cup and the cup does not get smaller for travelers I do not like. I have learned that the verse is the work and that the work does not need to be praised because the work is what is done.

You asked what I would want a heartlander to take from this. I do not know what a heartlander takes from a book. I will say this. If you come down, do not come for the unspoiled. We are not unspoiled. Come because you need to cross the corridor for some reason of your own, and let the corridor be what it is while you cross. Take the noon-rest. Give the line at the gate. Drink at the cup. Pay the keeper what the keeper’s keeping-book says. Listen to the cadence and do not write it down without asking. Listen to the keepers older than I am and do not ask them what they cannot give you. Hold to your foreman’s joke-threshold. When you reach the heartland border again, leave the corridor in the corridor. We do not need the heartland’s affection and we do not want the heartland’s pity. We need the heartland to remember that the cadence it sings in its taverns is borrowed from a road the heartland has not walked.

That is what I would say. I have said more than I usually say. I would not have said this much except you have come to my pavilion and asked, and you have offered to write it down, and the gate-turn is what I have given for many years, and you have given me the count back. The count is what we do. I will pour the cup now, and we will rest, and you will go on north tomorrow to the next gate, and the cadence will go with you, and we will see what comes of it. The well is fourteen paces. The keeper holds the rope. The corridor knows our names in two seasons. That is all I have to give you.

Personal breakthrough in worldbuilding

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial, ProgramaciónLeave a comment

A few days ago I was watching a YouTube video on how terrible the writing and worldbuilding are in the latest Bethesda games, particularly in Fallout 4. Obviously I agree because they’ve gone steadily down since Morrowind, and good old Skyrim was likely the last thing they’ll ever do right. The YouTuber was going laboriously over all the incongruencies and canon breaks in the Fallout DLCs, particularly the Mechanist one; he argued that the introduction of raider-reprogrammed robots was a disaster canon-wise, because that means that regular settlements should have tons of robots tending to most menial tasks.

That got me thinking: why is worldbulding so hard? Is there a way to ensure that any canon addition never breaks existing canon? I told ChatGPT Pro to research in-depth regarding what narrative theory says about how to ensure worldbuilding is as robust as possible, and that every canon addition is evaluated against invariants and previously-established canon facts. Basically, every canon addition should propagate throughout the different aspects of the story world, and the invariants should either be preserved if they’re hard, or modified if they’re soft. Existing canon facts may need to be modified or reframed.

As I was analyzing ChatGPT’s report on the specific procedures and questions that world creation and every canon addition should ideally entail, which would take a human being way too long and too much brainpower, I thought that surely this can be formalized through AI. So I got Claude Code to the task.

In summary: worldbuilding and canon additions can absolutely be formalized, and the results are exceptional. I’ve ended up with several base files for the story world I’m working on (a fantasy one with sentient animal humanoids and in which magic is solely artifact-based, and the artifacts are like radioactive hazards). The AI maintains now the following base files: a canon ledger, economy and resources, everyday life, geography, institutions, invariants, magic or tech systems, mystery reserve, ontology, open questions, peoples and species, timeline, and world kernel.

Here’s the entire current content of the invariants markdown file, one of the shortest ones. Every CF-XXXX entry is a canon fact that I added and that Claude evaluated against the entire corpus.

# INVARIANTS — Animalia (note by me now: nevermind the name; it’s just an identifier)

World-level truths. New canon must not violate these without explicit user-approved revision.

—

## Ontological Invariants

### ONT-1 — Sentience requires biological embodiment

– **Statement**: All sentient peoples are biological, embodied beings with species-typical bodies, drives, lifespans, and senses. Sentience does not exist disembodied in this world. There are no ghosts who think, no walking gods, no machine minds.

– **Rationale**: Premise asks for low-magic, lived-in texture. Disembodied minds shatter the gritty frame and the species-as-civic-fact rule.

– **Examples**: a beaver-folk canal-master, an aurochs-folk wagon-driver, a human magistrate.

– **Non-examples**: ghosts who give orders, an AI ruling a city, a god walking the streets.

– **Break conditions**: only by explicit user-approved cosmological revision.

– **Revision difficulty**: high.

– <!– added by CF-0022 –> **Clarification (CH-0002)**: Modern crafted artifacts (CF-0021) sometimes behave as if “possessed” by entities with apparent agency. At the world level, these vessel-hosted agencies are NOT sentient; ONT-1 is preserved without exception. The in-world dispute about their nature (instructions / beastly / sentient) is observationally unresolvable and is tracked under Mystery Reserve M-6. The dispute does NOT cross-apply to animal-folk sentience (M-5 firewall).

– <!– added by CF-0029 –> **Extended Clarification (CH-0004)**: Magically-animated Maker-Age guardian constructions encountered in enterable ruins (CF-0029) similarly exhibit apparent autonomy without world-level sentience. ONT-1 is preserved without exception. The phenomenon is distinct in origin from modern-crafted vessel-hosted agencies (CF-0022) — Maker-Age guardian ≠ modern crafted apparent-agency — and the two are NOT to be conflated. Guardian-construction mechanism is tracked under Mystery Reserve M-8; presence-heterogeneity (why some ruins have guardians and some don’t) under M-10. The M-5 firewall against animal-folk sentience cross-application applies equally here.

– <!– added by CF-0035 –> **Fourth Clarification (CH-0009)**: Artifact-contaminated mutated non-sentient beasts (CF-0035) in wilderness-distal sites remain categorically NON-SENTIENT. Artifact exposure does NOT produce sentience, speech, tool-use, or proto-folk status in a non-sentient host — morphological and capability alteration is not a step toward sentience. ONT-1 is preserved without exception; the M-5 firewall against cross-application to animal-folk sentience holds for the fourth time (after CF-0022, CF-0029, CF-0031). Mutated-beast phenomenon is DISTINCT in origin from both modern-crafted vessel-hosted agencies (CF-0022) and Maker-Age guardian constructions (CF-0029) — three surface-similar Maker-origin phenomena must NOT be conflated; each has its own bounded-unknown mechanism surface (M-6 / M-8 / new M-15 for the gargantuan-underground scale-tail).

### ONT-2 — Magic exists only as artifact, not as learnable art

– **Statement**: Living people cannot cast spells from will alone. Magical effects are produced by physical artifacts — ceramic, wood, metal vessels and devices — predominantly made by lost makers, with a marginal modern stream produced by leaked-grimoire crafter attempts (CF-0021). Some can be used; some can only be contained; many do nothing recognizable until they fail.

– **Rationale**: Premise. Forces the magic-as-hazard texture and prevents the world drifting into hereditary-mage high fantasy.

– **Examples**: ceramic containment vessel for extracting corruption; an artifact that mind-controls animals into wading water; a modern crafter’s wood-vessel that hums and once destroyed three village hens before going inert.

– **Non-examples**: a wizard throwing fire from his hands; a hereditary mage bloodline; a learned spell.

– **Break conditions**: only by explicit user revision.

– **Revision difficulty**: high.

– <!– added by CF-0021 –> **Annotation (CH-0002)**: The “made by lost makers” clause now includes a marginal modern reverse-engineering. The artifact-as-mediator constraint holds — what is learned by crafters is the craft of producing vessels, not the channeling of magic through the practitioner. The magic still lives in the artifact, not in the maker.

– <!– added by CF-0039 –> **Destruction-Physics Clarification (CH-0014)**: The artifact-as-locus clause carries material-physical consequence: the binding of magical effect to the vessel in Maker-Age artifacts (CF-0039) confers destruction-resistance on the vessel itself — destruction-attempts BIND the effect more deeply rather than unmaking it, and the vessel’s material resistance is elevated accordingly. This is a property OF the artifact-as-locus, NOT a new channel through the crafter. The destruction-physics is SCOPED to Maker-Age artifacts; modern crafter outputs (CF-0021) remain destructible by ordinary means, which preserves CF-0021’s “inferior” stabilizer register. ONT-2 holds without exception.

### ONT-3 — Species do not interbreed

– **Statement**: A hyena-folk and a human cannot produce a child. Cross-species sexual relationships exist socially but are reproductively sterile. Family across species is built through marriage, fostering, and adoption — not blood.

– **Rationale**: Without this rule, speciation collapses, embodiment loses meaning, and “halfbreed” plot conveniences erode the social texture. (Logged for OPEN_QUESTIONS as user-revisable.)

– **Examples**: cross-species marriage with adopted heirs; a human noble and a fox-folk consort raising a fostered hare-folk child.

– **Non-examples**: hybrid offspring, “half-cat half-human” characters.

– **Break conditions**: requires user approval; would force redesign of kinship, succession law, and species cohesion.

– **Revision difficulty**: high.

– <!– added by CF-0035 –> **Clarification (CH-0009)**: “Chimeric” morphology observed in artifact-contaminated mutated non-sentient beasts (CF-0035) — fused features, parallel limbs, merged apparent anatomy — is ARTIFACT-EFFECT on an already-contaminated individual organism, NOT cross-species reproductive hybridization. Species reproductive boundaries are preserved: no mutated-beast lineage arises from sexual interbreeding across species. The chimeric register applies to the shaped-by-artifact body, not to the reproductive act. ONT-3 holds without exception.

—

## Causal Invariants

### CAU-1 — Artifact effects always cost

– **Statement**: Every effect drawn from a magical artifact costs the user, the host, the environment, or all three. Costs include fatigue, host trauma, ward attrition, environmental “bleed-through” (dimming light, gloom, animal compulsion), and slow contamination of place.

– **Rationale**: Brief specifies the ceramic containment procedure is brutal to the host and that artifacts can corrupt water and mind-control beasts.

– **Examples**: extraction leaving the host bedridden; ward attrition near a contained artifact; canal water gone “wrong” downriver of a buried device.

– **Non-examples**: a free, clean magical effect; a costless ward.

– **Break conditions**: forbidden — would invalidate the artifact-as-hazard frame.

– **Revision difficulty**: high.

– <!– added by CF-0035 –> **Cost-Taxonomy Extension (CH-0009)**: The cost taxonomy includes a **rare survival-as-mutation outcome** observed in non-sentient fauna (CF-0035) exposed to uncontained artifacts over time in wilderness-distal sites. Most beasts die of artifact exposure (ordinary CAU-1 lethality); a rare subset survive and exhibit morphological and capability alteration. Survival does NOT exempt the environment, the local ecology, or subsequent secondary hosts from cost; the rare “beneficial for the beast in its niche” outcome (dangerous predator status) is an individual-level windfall embedded in a population-level cost catastrophe (most died). Cost universality holds without exception.

– <!– added by CF-0039 –> **Cost-Taxonomy Extension (CH-0014) — destruction-attempt cost-transfer**: The cost taxonomy includes **destruction-attempt cost-transfer** as a variant form observed on Maker-Age artifacts (CF-0039). Attempts to destroy a Maker-Age artifact — by smithing, fire, crushing, dissolution, or other means available to current-age capability — do NOT annihilate the magical effect; the attempt instead BINDS the effect more deeply into the vessel, elevating the material resistance of the substrate (wood hardens to behave like strong metal; ceramic sets harder; metal refuses the hammer). The cost manifests partially as a material-elevation cost on the vessel (transformation into higher-order resistance) and partially as an attempt-cost on the attempting party (injury, exhaustion, equipment loss, ward-attrition radius). The cost-universality principle holds without exception — destruction-attempts do not escape cost; they redirect it. Cost universality holds without exception. Also see CF-0041 sealed-inert extension: opening a sealed Maker container ACTIVATES the artifact within with CAU-1 cost, making unknown-container unsealing a feared cultural moment.

– <!– added by CF-0040 –> **Cost-Taxonomy Reaffirmation (CH-0014) — mundane-tier per-artifact contamination**: CF-0040 commits that mundane-tier Maker-Age artifacts (breeze-dolls, tick-mirrors, weak coin-sorters, scar-rubbers) are commonly found in ordinary-life contexts; the CAU-1 principle still holds without exception for this tier. Every mundane-tier artifact carries a cost surface — slow-bleed on user, room-misfeel, animal unease, household water off-flavor, vessel fatigue across months of proximity. No “harmless charm” reading is world-truth; the low-tier artifact is low-tier COST not no-cost. AES-3 contamination-clause compliance is mandatory for every mundane-tier CF-record annotation.

### CAU-2 — Corruption produces diagnostic environmental and behavioral signals

– **Statement**: Bleed-through gloom, dimming light, objects feeling “wrong,” compulsions in animals or people are diagnostic of nearby uncontained artifact activity. Practitioners (and seasoned canal-folk) read these signals.

– **Rationale**: Brief specifies bleed-through symptoms used as diagnostic by practitioners.

– **Examples**: a canal-side beaver-folk noticing fish behaving strangely and calling for an inspector; a ward-wright walking the perimeter and feeling the air thin.

– **Non-examples**: invisible, undetectable magical contamination.

– **Break conditions**: forbidden.

– **Revision difficulty**: high.

### CAU-3 — Wards are a public-but-restricted social-technical system

– **Statement**: Wards are publicly understood as a containment system. Their existence, locations, and the concept of “ward breach” are common knowledge. Their specifics — the inscriptions, the materials, the maintenance schedules — are restricted speech, regulated by guild charter.

– **Rationale**: Brief specifies ward-breach as known, and that public discussion of wards carries social risk.

– **Examples**: a child knows what a ward marker looks like; an apprentice cannot legally describe the inscription pattern aloud in a tavern.

– **Non-examples**: wards as secret unknowable magic; wards as fully open public technology.

– **Break conditions**: forbidden.

– **Revision difficulty**: medium.

—

## Distribution Invariants

<!– added by CF-0040 –> ### DIS-1-EXT (CH-0014) — Mundane-tier is explicit subset of “most inert junk” band, not a new distribution tier

CF-0040 commits the mundane-tier (near-imperceptible-effect artifacts: breeze-dolls, tick-mirrors, weak coin-sorters, scar-rubbers) as an EXPLICIT naming of the LARGEST share of the DIS-1 “most inert junk” band, reframed: most of what DIS-1 described as “inert” is in fact LOW-TIER ACTIVE, carrying per-artifact CAU-1 contamination clauses. Inverse strength-rarity relationship holds across the artifact corpus: mundane-tier is the most common; catastrophic-class is the rarest. The mundane-tier IS a subset within DIS-1, NOT a new distribution tier at the distribution-invariant level.

### DIS-1 — Artifacts are routinely turned up underground

– **Statement**: Foundations, canal-digging, mining, and ruin-clearance regularly turn up artifacts. Most are inert junk. A small fraction are dangerous. A tiny fraction are catastrophic.

– **Rationale**: Brief specifies routine construction can unearth them.

– **Examples**: a beaver-folk canal-crew finding a ceramic shard that registers as inert; a foundation dig that uncovers a humming metal disc and triggers a quarter-town evacuation.

– **Non-examples**: artifacts as so rare no one has ever seen one; artifacts as so common they fill marketplaces.

– **Break conditions**: would change the entire artifact economy.

– **Revision difficulty**: medium.

– <!– added by CF-0027 –> **Cross-reference (CH-0004)**: Enterable Maker-Age ruin sites (CF-0027) are a recognized subset of Maker substructures that admits organized multi-professional entry; piecemeal unearthing per DIS-1 remains the dominant modality, but enterable-ruin expeditions (CF-0028) are the less-common, high-risk, high-yield variant. The DIS-1 distribution pattern (most inert, small fraction dangerous, tiny fraction catastrophic) applies equally to enterable-ruin recoveries; catastrophic-class finds trigger resealing rather than recovery (preserves Mystery Reserve M-2).

– <!– added by CF-0035 –> **Wilderness-Distal Subset (CH-0009)**: A subset of DIS-1 unearthings occurs in wilderness beyond civic / guild / chartered-watch reach (earthquake-exposed, flood-exposed, burrowing-animal-exposed, slow-soil-creep-exposed). These exposures are not detected by inspectors and not contained by chartered response; the artifacts remain active in place. Over time this subset produces the CF-0035 contaminated-fauna phenomenon. Inspector-dispatch to wilderness-distal sites is DISCRETIONARY (gated by patron-funder or estate-commission or declared civic-watch predicate), not mandatory — cost, escort requirement, and wilderness reach preclude routine extension. DIS-1 distribution pattern holds within the wilderness-distal subset as everywhere else.

### DIS-2 — Literacy and occult-fragment access is partial, not aristocratic monopoly

– **Statement**: Literacy is not universal but is not gated to nobility. Occult text fragments can be purchased by anyone with coin and a willing seller. Specialist knowledge is gated by guild and apprenticeship more than by class.

– **Rationale**: Brief specifies fragment purchase is possible.

– **Examples**: a tavern bard who can read trade-tongue; a journeyman extractor who owns three fragments; a literate canal-master.

– **Non-examples**: only nobles can read; only priests own books.

– **Break conditions**: would change the structure of knowledge access.

– **Revision difficulty**: medium.

### DIS-3 — Mythical-species sentients are population-rare and locally clustered

– **Statement**: Mythic-species sentients (basilisk-folk, chimera-folk, manticore-folk, gryphon-folk, naga-folk, etc.) exist among animal-folk but are population-rare per region. You do not see a chimera in every market.

– **Rationale**: Prevents specialness inflation. Preserves wonder. Matches the brief’s note that exotic-species bodies attract attention and commentary in public.

– **Examples**: a single naga-folk bargemaster known by reputation across a canal corridor; a basilisk-folk physician practicing in only one city.

– **Non-examples**: mythic species as common as cat-folk.

– **Break conditions**: would inflate mythic-species into background-noise.

– **Revision difficulty**: medium.

– <!– added by CF-0035 –> **Firewall (CH-0009)**: Artifact-contaminated mutated non-sentient beasts (CF-0035) are CATEGORICALLY DISTINCT from Cluster D mythic-species sentient folk. The surface similarity (unusual morphology; chimeric features; wonder-adjacent register) must NOT be conflated: mutated beasts are non-sentient fauna with artifact-shaped bodies; mythic-species sentient folk are civic-participant peoples with species-typical embodiment (ONT-1/SOC-1). The firewall holds across all encounter contexts — no in-world institution may process a mutated beast as a mythic-species individual, and no mythic-species individual may be treated as a mutated-beast specimen.

—

## Social Invariants

### SOC-1 — Animal-folk can occupy any class

– **Statement**: Class mobility is not species-coded. Animal-folk can hold landed nobility, civic authority, guild mastery, and craft livelihoods. A beaver-folk magistrate and a human laborer are both ordinary.

– **Rationale**: Brief explicit.

– **Examples**: an aurochs-folk landowning estate that employs human and otter-folk laborers; a hyena-folk magistrate presiding over a mixed-species court.

– **Non-examples**: caste systems where humans rule and animal-folk serve; species-coded slavery.

– **Break conditions**: forbidden.

– **Revision difficulty**: high.

– <!– added by CF-0036 –> **Clarification (CH-0010)**: individual and sectarian species-prejudice exist as ordinary sociological phenomena (tavern slurs, labor-prejudice distancing, crew-composition sorting preferences, marriage-broker catechism extensions). Isolated single-species exclusionary settlements exist in weak-charter / demographically-fragile regions. Supremacist sectarian doctrine asserting species entitlement to violence against other sentient peoples exists as CONTESTED-CANON sectarian belief held by a fringe. An interspecies-cannibal sub-subset exists within CF-0034 outlaw bands. **None of these constitute world-level class-coded species hierarchy.** Civic charters continue to suppress hierarchy-speech at world level; no chartered polity adopts supremacist doctrine as civic policy; no guild charter gates intake by species; no magistrate-court recognizes a “lesser sentient” legal category. SOC-1 holds without exception. Individual-and-sectarian friction ≠ civic hierarchy; the former is ordinary social phenomenon, the latter is the forbidden break-condition.

### SOC-2 — Public adult barter is legal and visible in many regions

– **Statement**: Sexual services can be publicly posted, framed as pragmatic exchange, and treated by many locals as mundane. Scandal attaches to the character of those involved, not to the act itself. Regional and class variation exists.

– **Rationale**: Brief explicit.

– **Examples**: a posted price-list at a tavern; a respectable courtesan whose patrons include guild-masters; quiet disapproval from a stricter sectarian household.

– **Non-examples**: blanket criminalization; blanket destigmatization.

– **Break conditions**: would shift the texture significantly; medium revision difficulty.

– **Revision difficulty**: medium.

### SOC-3 — Coin contract is sacred by custom

– **Statement**: A payment contracted in coin or in-kind must be honored, or restitution made. Breach is a recognized civil and customary wrong; reputation damage compounds the legal cost. Trade across species depends on this norm.

– **Rationale**: Derived from the brief’s coin-and-livestock framing; necessary for stable trade across species and regions.

– **Examples**: a tavernkeeper hounding a defaulted patron through three towns; a guild withholding work from a known oath-breaker.

– **Non-examples**: payments routinely renegotiated after delivery without consequence.

– **Break conditions**: low — story tension often arises from breach.

– **Revision difficulty**: low.

### SOC-4 — Artifact extraction and traffic is guild-licensed

– **Statement**: Extractors, containment-wrights, and artifact-brokers operate under chartered guilds in most polities. Unlicensed possession of magical artifacts carries criminal or civil penalties. Black markets exist but operate at risk.

– **Rationale**: Derived from brief’s “professions and guilds exist to extract … research … sell … to bidders” plus the social risk around ward discussion.

– **Examples**: a guild-stamped artifact in a noble’s collection; a smuggler executed for trafficking an unregistered device.

– **Non-examples**: anyone can dig and sell freely.

– **Break conditions**: medium.

– **Revision difficulty**: medium.

—

## Aesthetic / Thematic Invariants

### AES-1 — Heroism is paid in coin and scars, not glory

– **Statement**: Risk-taking is treated as labor. Veterans are quietly proud and dryly mocking of glory-talk. Songs that romanticize battle exist but are sung mostly by those who never fought.

– **Rationale**: Tonal contract. The “scarred veteran with longsword” framing of the brief.

– **Examples**: a pension-list at a guildhall; a tavern song that ends with an unpaid widow.

– **Non-examples**: chosen-one narratives treated as world-truth.

– **Break conditions**: would betray tone.

– **Revision difficulty**: high.

### AES-2 — The ordinary keeps the world honest

– **Statement**: Daily life — canal traffic, livestock, tavern songs, winter dread, child-rearing — is always present in the texture. The world cannot be experienced solely from the perspective of heroes, nobles, or cosmologists.

– **Rationale**: Skill discipline; brief emphasis on lived realism.

– **Examples**: a story whose stakes are framed in terms of who eats this winter; a battle scene whose aftermath shows the field being looted by tenants.

– **Non-examples**: a world rendered only as cosmology and ruling families.

– **Break conditions**: would betray world identity.

– **Revision difficulty**: high.

### AES-3 — The magical and the contaminated are aesthetically allied

– **Statement**: Wonder and dread are inseparable in this world. Magic is never simply pretty. Every magical experience carries contamination — physical, social, or moral.

– **Rationale**: Brief.

– **Examples**: an artifact that is beautiful and lethal in the same breath; a containment-wright respected and quietly avoided. <!– added by CF-0035 –> A six-limbed boar carcass hauled to a ward-inspector’s door — the hunters dryly proud, the villagers quietly moving the children indoors; the trophy hung in a guildhall smoke-room, not paraded.

– **Non-examples**: charming, harmless magical decor.

– **Break conditions**: forbidden.

– **Revision difficulty**: high.

I used to hate worldbuilding, but this method makes it fun, as well as a solved problem. This is basically programming-as-prose. It’s already revolutionizing many industries.

After-Action Report on the Harrowgate Contract (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificialLeave a comment

Recorded in the third moon after Thaw, current year, at the Charter Hall of Harrowgate, in the cold north highland, before the chartered posting-clerk and witnessed by the senior hunter-officer on duty.

Filed by: Melissa, called Threadscar, contractor of record.

Contract reference: Harrowgate posting-wall, bounty-row, first week of Thaw-moon; re-posted at the lockmaster’s crossing-house the following week after a second caravan-ambush was reported.

Issuing body: Charter Hall of Harrowgate under the standing bounty-wall authority, with funds contributed by the merchant-coalition of the upper Drynn route and by two tenant-estate treasuries whose hauliers had been taken on the stretch between Stone-Fork and the Upper Drynn pass.

Contract posting figure: forty silver for confirmed suppression of the band, kin-of-taken bounty-premium held separately on condition of living-retrieval which did not apply in this case.

—

I came to Harrowgate by caravan from the heartland, escorting a six-wagon train of copper-ware and winter-milled rye under standard hazard terms, arriving on the eighth day of the thaw-moon. The caravan-master paid out at the lockhouse the same night. I had meant to turn south inside three days. The posting-wall at the Charter Hall carried the bandit contract in the bounty-row; I read it against the regional intelligence I had heard on the road coming up—two caravans taken at ambush, one hauling-crew returned, one not—and decided the exposure was inside my working register. I took the contract the next morning before the dawn muster.

Six other contractors had signed by that time or signed with me. The crew was assembled and vouched by the tavern-keeper of the Long Board, who has stood vouch in Harrowgate for fourteen winters and whose vouch-record I know by reputation:

– Gresh, hyena-folk, short-sword and shield, caravan-escort and posted bandit-hunting in two previous corridor-seasons, rotating here by winter-emptied board

– Tulen, wolf-folk, scout and tracker, four years in the corridor-work, scent-sound on cold ground

– Rennek, boar-folk, polearm, older — the stiff-shouldered veteran of the group; I counted eight skirmish-seasons in his account when he read them out at the vouch

– Morn, human, crossbow and short-sword, second-rotation hire to Harrowgate, capable

– Auveth, badger-folk, hand-axe and throwing-blade, first-rotation of the thaw in this charter but steady vouch from a neighboring highland town

– Karn, corvid-folk, crossbow and long-range observation, a scout by preference, in his seventh winter on the boards

Seven of us, counting me. We assembled at the Long Board the following morning, confirmed share-terms at eight silver per share, and posted kin-of-record at the lockmaster’s ledger against the standard share-to-kin-on-dead clause before setting out.

The tracking took five days. Tulen read the ground the first two; the corridor above Stone-Fork has been bandit-run intermittently for three corridor-seasons and the cold-weather trace was not difficult. We lost the sign twice on stone shoulders and picked it up again against the stream-gravel where the camp-runners had watered. Karn took the ridge-lines and spotted smoke on the fourth afternoon, low and careful-banked—the bandits knew how to keep a fire small in the highland air where the smoke-column shows for miles.

We marked the smoke to a ruin-hollow in the eastern flank of the Drynn approach, where the old substructure runs three vault-chambers deep under a slumped hillside. The ruin had been opened before, long enough ago that the stone was lichen-weathered at the entrance and the workings had been stripped of anything saleable—no ward markings at the lintel, no active guardian-sign anywhere on the approach, which is the subset bandits work from by preference and which I recognized as such. It was shelter to them, not a working site. I note this because I want the record to show I read the ruin at its public-knowledge register; I did not and do not claim to read it deeper than that.

We came up on it at the hour before dawn on the fifth day.

Four sentries at the outer ring. Two at the mouth of the entry-fall, two above on the ridge-shoulder where the draft off the chambers vents warmer in cold air. All four were carnivore-folk; two I recognized as wolf-folk by stance and one as a larger carnivore-folk I could not place in the dark—Tulen put name to the species later. Karn and Morn took the ridge pair from range with crossbow at fifty paces. Gresh, Tulen, Rennek, Auveth and I took the entry pair with short work.

All four dropped inside seven counted breaths. No alarm went up that I could hear. We checked the sentries once each for stirring, and went in.

What we found in the first chamber I will set down exactly as I found it, because I was ordered to write this report and because a record should exist.

The first chamber had been converted to a preparation-floor. Three human bodies were hanging from an iron bar driven between two fallen pillars, at the height a butcher would use for a hog. They had been gutted and cleaned. The work was not ceremonial; it was the work of someone who had done it before and knew the right angles. A fourth body lay on a stone slab at the side, cooked through and partially eaten.

On a lower ledge along the north wall, three heads in a row, preserved in the cold air, set in the display-line a hunter might use for boar or wolf-trophies on a wall. Two were identifiable by the feature and one was too worked-on to name. I did not look at them longer than I needed to confirm what I was looking at.

The slope of the floor ran to a small pit where the scrap was being dumped. That is what I saw. That is what I am setting down.

Some of the bodies had restraint-marks on the wrists and ankles, not fresh—they had been taken alive, held for a span, and killed later. Two of the pairs of cord ligatures were still looped on the pillar-bolts at the chamber’s entrance, at the height a kneeling captive would reach. I did not count the cord-lengths because there was no time to count the cord-lengths. I counted bodies and I moved.

Gresh vomited. Tulen—later, not at that moment—asked who would keep the record of the dead so their kin could be found. I told him the officials of Harrowgate would keep that record and the magistrate would work the names. Tulen asked me this before he died in the second chamber. I am setting that down because Tulen’s kin should know that he asked it before he went further in.

The second chamber held the rest of the band. I count six: the leader and five others, all carnivore-folk. They had heard the sentries go, or had not heard but had felt the cold-air shift from the opened entry-fall, and they were on their feet and armed when we came through the second passage.

The fight was close work. Polearm length did not help Rennek in the narrow chamber, but he used the haft as a brace and held the left flank; Gresh took the near right; Morn and Karn set at the entry mouth for crossbow-line and then drew short as the range closed; Auveth went center with me and Tulen crossed to her.

Two of theirs fell in the first exchange. Their middle collapsed on itself and the leader pushed forward through his own wounded to reach us. He was the largest of them—wolf-folk, heavy-framed, red-leather and cold-steel, and he shouted as he came. I set down here what he shouted because the officials have ordered me to keep silent in public register on the band’s composition, and this report is not public register, and a record should exist. He shouted that we were nothing to him but meat on a slow day. He shouted it twice on the approach, and then a third time when Auveth closed with him and took his hatchet in the face and went down—so he had time to repeat himself, which is a thing I observed and am noting.

Tulen went down second, to the leader’s second-stroke on Auveth. He bled out in the time it took the leader to turn back to me, which is to say a count of four. I set down that Tulen died fast, because his kin will want to know that, and because it is true.

I killed the leader with the longsword. He had closed inside polearm-range by then, which meant he was inside mine. The work took one exchange. The cut went in under the collarbone and found what it needed. He went down on top of Auveth, which meant Auveth was under him when I checked her, and it is possible a more careful report would note that Auveth may not have been entirely gone when the leader fell across her; I looked, and I did not see what I would have needed to see to report otherwise, so I am reporting that she was gone when the leader fell and I am noting here that my certainty on that is the certainty of a person who did what she could in the time she had and has had ten days since to ask herself the same question.

The remaining three bandits broke after the leader went down. Gresh and I took two; Karn took the third at the back-wall with the crossbow as he tried to reach the third chamber.

The third chamber held the band’s storeroom and nothing that moved. Iron goods, tack, stolen caravan-gear, a set of oilcloth bundles we did not open until we were outside in daylight. No further captives. No further bodies. We carried Tulen and Auveth out. We did not carry the band out. We left the band where they fell, which is the standard record-to-magistrate practice where the ruin is already known to the charter.

—

**Casualties of the contract** — entered for kin-of-record payout per the clauses posted at the Long Board and countersigned at the lockmaster’s ledger at muster:

– Tulen, wolf-folk, kin-of-record: a sister in the lower Drynn waterstation, name filed at the lockmaster’s ledger. Death: interior engagement, second chamber, to the bandit leader’s second-stroke. Share: eight silver, to kin at the lockmaster’s disbursement window within the moon.

– Auveth, badger-folk, kin-of-record: a partner at the neighboring highland charter-town, name filed at muster. Death: interior engagement, second chamber, to the bandit leader. Share: eight silver, disbursement as above.

Surviving contractors to be paid eight silver each at the Charter Hall disbursement window, which has been posted for settlement at the close of this report.

—

On return to Harrowgate I reported the contract closed at the Charter Hall as the posting-wall required. The senior hunter-officer took the report in the ordinary register and entered the five names. He entered Tulen and Auveth’s names in the kin-of-record line. He asked three standard questions—corridor condition, ruin-state, remaining camp sign—and I answered in the standard form. He then paused the intake and sent a runner for the posting-clerk’s senior and for the magistrate’s second, which is not the standard intake register. I waited.

The officials who arrived with the clerk’s senior—the magistrate’s second, the senior clergy-witness of the Charter Hall, and two I did not know by face—took the full report in a closed room. It became clear within a count of minutes that they had suspected the band’s working-habit before my return. The merchant-coalition had posted a bounty-row premium at first delivery that the standard corridor-work did not justify, and the magistrate’s second had on her desk a re-classification notice the clerk’s senior already recognized. They had known, or suspected to the level that reading the ruin confirmed.

They asked me three things: first, whether my crew would keep public silence on the band’s composition and working-habit; second, whether I would countersign a silent-settlement clause on an added bounty-row premium of sixteen silver, to be distributed to the seven of us on the eight-per-share basis; third, whether I had retained personal items from the ruin that would need to be entered at the disposition-window. I said yes to the first with the reservation I am recording here—that a record should exist and would exist in this report, which is an institutional record and is not public register. I said yes to the second on the standard survivor-kin basis. I said yes to the third and entered the band-leader’s belt-buckle, which was distinctive, as the only item retained for bounty-verification; all other storeroom material was signed over at intake.

The senior clergy-witness spoke then and said the words I expected him to say, which were that the magistrate-docket classification of the interior find would be entered as grave-violation-of-person, that the access would be sealed to magistrate-warrant only, that the burial of the victims would be held under civic-oath with family rites permitted privately and public ceremony absent, and that the band’s remaining sign would be burned at the ruin before the thaw-moon closed.

The warning that followed was simple. Public register—tavern, broadsheet, posting-wall, bardic performance, family correspondence, anything the circuit would carry—would not name the band’s composition. It would not name the carnivore-folk exclusivity. It would not name the working-habit. It would not name the display. It would name what a bandit-suppression contract conventionally names: camp found, resisted, taken, payout cleared. The officials’ stated reason was that the corridor-towns along the upper Drynn had not had an interspecies clash in eleven winters and the chartered welfare of the mixed households was worth more than the correction of the record. I did not argue. I do not agree in all particulars. I am setting down that I do not agree, and I am also setting down that I will keep the public register as ordered, which I will, because the coin is fair and the cost of the alternative is what they said it is and my silence in public is the cheaper price.

—

**Assessment, entered against the officers’ standing request for a frank field-register at contract-close.**

The band was composed exclusively of carnivore-folk. I am setting this down because I observed it and because the record should hold it. I am not setting it down as a claim about carnivore-folk at the species level. Carnivore-folk made up four of the seven contractors who killed this band, counting Tulen and Auveth among them, and it was Gresh who took the ridge-sentry with me and Tulen who tracked the camp and Auveth who held center beside me in the second chamber. The composition of the band is a fact of the band. It is not a fact about carnivore-folk.

The leader’s shouted claim—that we were meat to him—was not a theory I recognize as anything but a private pathology the band carried into a corridor where they could act on it. I have heard the sectarian register at taverns and at the edge of posting-walls across my rotations, and I have refused to work for the one recruiter who tried it on me in my hearing twelve winters ago at a heartland caravanserai. I am not equipped to say whether this band had picked the register up from a sectarian preacher, whether their leader invented it for them, whether they came to it along with the corridor-habit that taught them they could keep doing it. I heard him shout what he shouted. I watched him work toward us across his own wounded to say it again. That is as far as I will go.

What I will also set down, because it bears on the corridor:

– The band had held the ruin long enough to build the preparation-floor. That is a span of weeks, minimum, not days. The corridor-watch missed it. The reasons the corridor-watch missed it are outside my register but the watch-rotation worth inspecting is the Stone-Fork-to-Drynn stretch.

– The restraint-marks were not fresh on all the bodies. Some captives had been held for a span before being killed. The settlement ransom-clerk and the magistrate’s missing-person lists should be cross-checked against the three identifiable heads and against the body-count I have given here; there may be reconciliations.

– The stolen caravan-gear in the third chamber had identifying marks from at least two merchant-coalitions I recognized and one I did not. The coalition representatives should be brought to the storeroom for identification before the bounty-clerk disposition closes.

– The corridor will need an elevated hunter-contractor rotation for the remainder of this thaw-season and the next. Bands of this working-habit do not survive in one corridor without having been recruited from a feeder, and the feeder does not close with one suppression. The merchant-coalition should be told to carry the hazard-premium for another two corridor-seasons at minimum.

– Hunter-contractors bought into future postings on this stretch should be vouched for corridor-familiarity as well as for the standard subtype-competence, because the work-register inside the ruin is not the register a first-rotation contractor should be asked to read. If any of our crew is asked to continue on the stretch, I ask that Gresh and Karn be preferred. Morn and Rennek have performed to standard on this contract but are rotating south at the close of this posting per their own vouches, and Gresh and Karn are nearby.

—

That is the whole of the report. I have written it as I was ordered to write it. I have kept the public register as I was ordered to keep it. I have set down here what I would not set down in any other register, because I was told this record would be kept in the sealed-access line under magistrate-warrant only, and I have no reason to doubt that.

If the account here does not match the corridor-watch’s account or the magistrate’s case record on any point, the correction should go in the magistrate’s line and not in mine. I am not a correction to a civic record. I am a contractor closing a contract.

Paid in full at eight silver the share on the attested disbursement window.

Filed.

— Melissa Threadscar, contractor of record.

Witnessed at filing by Gresh, Rennek, and Karn for the surviving contractors; by the posting-clerk senior for the Charter Hall; and by the magistrate’s second for the sealed-docket line.

A Season on the Circuit (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificialLeave a comment

A Season on the Circuit: Dispatches from Vespera Nightwhisper

Brinewick, mrow. I have missed you—your lock-gates ticking their quiet clocks at the wharf, your beer better than three polities I could name and won’t, the particular hush of your river-lamps over a winter evening. I write to you from the road, as I have written to no one else this season, because Brinewick’s readers know how to listen—they lean toward a story the way old water leans into a lock—and because I am returning, and I want to give the reading ones a taste before the tavern ones get the meal.

Call this a dispatch. Call it a brag, if you insist; I have been accused of worse. What I can say honestly, or almost, is that the canal has been a hard road these six months, and I have walked and barged and limped a good part of it, lute-viol in its battered case and a rapier where it belongs, and the sun has hurt my eyes more than it hurt me. For the new reader: I am a cat-folk of the heartland circuit, pale cream fur, mismatched eyes, two silver hoops in the left ear and three in the right. If I am at the back of your tavern, you will know. I do not know how to be the other way.

I came north by caravan from a dryland town whose name I owe to my reputation not to say. The caravan-master there would not thank me for telling the journal about his hospitality, though I will happily name his daughter’s voice, which is an extraordinary instrument and I cannot resist doing it a small favor. Three weeks of dust and barley-bread and the short kind of poetry the drylanders trade with strangers. I kept my fur short-clipped and my head covered; fur-bearers in the drylands learn this the hard way, and a cat-folk with pale fur learns it the hardest. One morning a scorpion came at my boot and I killed it with a copper spoon and put the spoon back in the traveling-case; the caravan-master paid me in two chickens’ worth of silver for a single evening’s song about a hero who did not kill a scorpion with a copper spoon, and everyone agreed it was a better song for it.

Coming back to the heartland was like coming back to water. The first canal-lock past the dry-edge clicks you through, and your body remembers the sound. I played the lock-night at a town I can only call “the one with the green shutters”—again, the lockmaster owes me a favor I cannot call in publicly—and took silver enough to drink for a week. I drank it mostly in one. Do not write to the journal about it; I will be offended if I learn you have.

Three locks further along, I came to a canal town I will only call the Lamp-Weir, for the lamps they keep on its pilings all night. There the lockmaster’s posting wall—you know the kind; your own Brinewick has the better version, with the proper oilcloth hood against rain—had three hazard-notices tacked that morning. Two were wildlife: a boar in the coppice and a sick cow making the children cry. The third was a little stranger. A household with something in the cellar that was not a house-cat, and a herb-wife’s mark alongside, which is how the polite ones write I cannot handle this; please send someone who knows the wall of noise when the wall goes wrong.

I took it. A bard does not have to take hazard work, and I will say here that there are those on the circuit who refuse on principle and whose principles I respect—I have fewer of my own than I wish, and am honest about it—but I will say this for myself: I do not write well in stillness. I write well when something is about to go through me, or through somebody I have to look after. The herb-wife’s mark pulled at my tail before my head caught up.

I will not tell you what was in the cellar. The chartered folk prefer the kind quietly handled, and the house owes me nothing if I stay quiet. What I will tell you is that a man called Aldous—a ceramic-handler of a certain reputation in the heartland, though you will not read his name often in the journal—met me there on his way through with his apprentice, and between us and the herb-wife we handled what needed handling and left before the ward-inspector’s drill-bell rang at dawn. I was paid in silver. Aldous got the serious share; I took the corner-share a contracted auxiliary gets when she holds the lantern and keeps the door and runs once, down a stair, for a thing the ceramic-handler had left in his bag. I will not glorify the work. But the silver was real and the dawn came up clean, and the herb-wife said something kind to me in a language I did not know before she said it again in the trade-tongue, and I am almost sure she meant it.

There is an old rumor about me—you will have heard it, Brinewick, because you are a city that hears—that my best work comes the morning after a bad night. I have denied this in print and confirmed it in tavern, and I will tell you in this journal the slightly more honest thing: I do not know how to defend the rumor, and I also do not know how to put it down. The best piece I have written this year came the morning after a dark hour and a tolerable wound. It is for the lute-viol, which is a difficult instrument in the hands of anyone without long fingers or long patience. I have three new pieces in polish and two more waiting their turn—the circuit asks for them faster than the page gives them—and I will bring them down to Brinewick one by one as they are ready. I will not prove it to you here. I will prove it to you at The Copper Weir on the fifth evening after Charter-Day, before the second bell. Bring coin and a friend who listens.

I owe the dead of two hard fever-winters an honest line. The taverns are thinner than they were when I first walked this circuit, and the widows are not; many of my best audiences two winters ago are not coming back. A bard says this not to sadden the journal—though if you are weeping, that is your right—but to name the absence. The circuit remembers its dead the way the canal remembers its locks. There is a song my mother—well, a woman I called mother for one good winter in a town I will not name—used to put into the cook-fire smoke when the cold came; I have been stealing from it all season, because I stopped being embarrassed to steal a few years ago. I will sing the theft at The Copper Weir. Do not applaud if you know the original. Applaud if you like my version better, which is almost but not quite the same thing.

Which brings me back to you, Brinewick, to your wharves and your shutters and your better beer. I will be at The Copper Weir on the fifth evening after Charter-Day, and at The Lock-Keeper’s Cat (whose owner I have flattered outrageously in three successive visits and who, I am told, keeps fermented blood-broth under the counter for carnivore-folk patrons who know to ask) on the seventh. If you want the new piece, come on the fifth. If you want the old cycles and the drinking-songs, come on the seventh. If you want to buy me a drink after, I accept mead, fortified wine, or whiskey; I no longer accept ale. I have reached the age where ale is for other people’s pleasure.

I remain, as always, your correspondent on the road,

— Vespera Nightwhisper, of the canal circuit

Life update (04/16/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’m at one of the lowest points of my life. Not as bad as during plenty of my twenties, in which I existed as a hikikomori of sorts and barely had twenty euros at a time in my bank account. But emotionally, I feel even more done now. Nearing forty-one, having tried to make it as a public servant during my thirties only to end up in the ER thrice with heart and brain issues due to stress I can’t handle. And in retrospect, as an autist with OCD, I should never have put myself in those situations. I guess I thought I could toughen my way through them, but my health told me in certain terms that it’s no way to live. And that it very well could kill me.

I’ve been unemployed for about seven months, and running out of unemployment benefits. I spend most of my time programming projects that I intend to use as references in future resumes whenever I try to get a job as a programmer. But I think that’s mostly a fantasy. In truth, I’m programming these projects because otherwise I’ll feel like I can’t do anything. And I don’t seriously believe that any company will hire an autistic, generally-mentally-ill forty-year-old programmer who has only worked professionally as a programmer for about nine months since my late twenties. I wouldn’t hire me. Of course, I don’t want to do any of it. I don’t even want to interact with human beings.

For these past weeks, or maybe more, I’ve barely looked forward to anything other than sleeping. I just want to be gone. To be forgotten by the world, to not have to face the utter ruin of society, the fact that I don’t want to be here but I can’t truly move anywhere else. I’ve had lots of nights in which I lie in bed and I give myself permission to die in my sleep. I’m not remotely afraid of dying, but I don’t want to deal with the pain. I’ve also fantasized about going somewhere with my guitar, playing for a while, then resting my guitar against the railing of one of the bridges nearby, overlooking the highway, and throwing myself headfirst. A quote from Nietzsche comes to mind: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.” Some weeks I manage to get through my weightlifting sessions, but other days, like the recent ones, the depression is so physically bad that I can’t get through a single set. Not for psychological reasons: I simply lack the strength.

I haven’t felt like reading or even writing for a good while now. On a fundamental level, I feel done with all of it. You need to be able to sustain the faintest desire for connection with the world and human beings, even hypothetical ones, to engage in something as complex as coming up with a story and spending hours upon hours crafting your way through it. But I don’t want anything to do with human beings. I would be fully content if I could move somewhere that would allow me to never see people again. If as a child I could see myself sitting near paths and playing the guitar regularly like I do now, being heard and seen by dozens of people, I maybe would have considered myself confident, but it’s not the case at all: I simply do not care about others. I don’t expect anything from human beings other than the possibility of being attacked, which I’m wary of and guides my behavior when I’m outside. I’ve had people sitting nearby while I was playing, a few even addressing me afterwards, and I couldn’t wait to disengage.

I find ironic that young couples have gone out of their way to spend part of their date sitting on a bench near where I’m playing, apparently enjoying it, the girl’s head resting against the guy’s shoulder, while my last taste of an intimate relationship was nearly twenty years ago and it proved to me that I wasn’t made to share my intimacy with another human being. I resented the theft of my time, of my energies. The way she would push me to abandon my needs and my desires to fully support hers. Only for her to eventually cheat, leave for the other guy, and contact me occasionally to tell me how much better things were with the other guy and how he didn’t have my shortcomings; calls and messages that I responded to because I had been fully stripped by that point of what little self-esteem and self-respect I had left.

I do retain fantasies about what could have been. That possibly-autistic girl from middle school who pursued me for some reason, to whom I couldn’t respond in anything resembling a human level, and who wrote me these elaborate letters that I never read and that in my mid-twenties I ended up throwing away because I didn’t want to be reminded of the past. That seventeen-year-old basketball player, a reckless, dreamy, idealistic girl who also pursued me, with whom I lay under the stars in a nearby town, and with whom I made out during our only date. I liked her so much, more than anyone I’ve ever liked or ever will, that I ghosted her because I knew that when it inevitably ended, as all of my intimate relationships would, it would utterly devastate me. I felt to my bones that I wouldn’t have been able to recover. So I never spoke to her again. Due to my issues with face blindness, I don’t even know if I ever saw her again.

I went out of my way in my late thirties to enter the apartment building where she lived back then to see if what I remembered of her last name still appeared on the mailboxes, but it didn’t. I can’t even google her to see what happened to her, as the little I’m sure of her last name is that it started with an “M,” and I don’t know if that was the first or the second last name. What I regret of both isn’t that I failed to date them properly: it’s that I never got to know them as I should have. I sometimes fantasize about going back in time and simply talking to them, learning their likes, their hopes, their fears. I know that plenty of these regrets are pure nostalgia. In practice, I wouldn’t have been able to deal with them in person for more than three or so meetings before wishing that I hadn’t gotten involved. Regardless, that’s how I’ve ended up as a forty-year-old man: with only two human beings I would have genuinely wished to be attached to, both of them lost half a life ago, and the sole girl I did spend years with having ended up as a regret of the opposite kind: with me hoping I had never met her at all.

I’m writing this at four in the morning. Almost every night, I go to bed at nine or ten, only to wake up spontaneously at about two or half past two in the morning. I usually sit at the desk and work some more in my projects. Partly due to the depression, along with maybe the natural decay of my interest, I’m quickly losing steam. Recently I’ve been sinking in a depression that barely let me go outside for half an hour every few days. What always works for me, always putting me in a better mood, is playing the guitar. I don’t know why, it always manages to make me feel brighter by the end of it. The process of playing songs seems unaffected by the emotional disregulation and general despair that colors the rest of my existence. I should probably play much more, learn new songs, but the process of having to learn something new is also affected by depression, so I can’t bring myself to it.

I still rely on the old Alicia daydreams every single night. If I go outside, I tend to replay those scenarios as I stroll, partly because I need to move my legs but I don’t want to look around at the ruinous state of society. I don’t know why I depend on my daydreams with this fictional character so much, but I suspect it has to do because she reminds me of my subconscious self, which I’ve always felt to be markedly female, as I used to commune with her back when I was a child, before my neglectful parents exiled me from my bedroom to be placed as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s bedroom so they could free up my room for a third child. That mute second self that inhabits my brain, which is a very real phenomenon, felt so wildly unique, dreamy, colorful, and a myriad positive adjectives, that the trauma of having been ripped from her at seven years old is something I will never recover from. Even as I regained the ability, little by little, to listen to her again in my twenties, I had to face the fact that she had withered, grown scars, become bitter, and markedly insane. And these days she doesn’t even want to create anything new. She prefers to lose herself in daydreams, falling deeper inwards. I can’t blame her. I don’t want any more of this either.

During the worst moments of my recent suicidal ideation, I thought about what would be worth saving from the works that I’ve done. My site would eventually get removed as the payments failed to get through, so all of it would be gone. The sole thing I would consider a true tragedy if it were lost is my novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. A story that came out of nowhere and that I wrote as if possessed. One I don’t fully understand but that I assume has to do with my essential trauma, the fundamental separation I suffered regarding my other half. Either that or something that has seeped from a former life. Whenever I think about moments of that story, I feel the urge to tear up. When I visit the very real places mentioned in that story, for example the spot where the narrator and Izar used to meet in front of his apartment building, my chest gets tighter as if I was remembering my own past.

I guess that’s all for now. I’m not sure why I wrote all this. I thought of writing a blog post at different points of this last month, but I couldn’t manage to push past the “why bother” barrier. I don’t know why I managed to push past at nearly five in the morning tonight. I don’t think I have much agency left, if I ever had it. For years it has been obvious to me that by the time any drive reaches the thinking part of the brain, everything has been decided already, and you’re left believing you have any choice in the actions you’re taking. I don’t know if the decisions to come will improve my life to any degree or will contribute to ending it, and to a fundamental level, I don’t care. I’m overdue from that moment back in my very early twenties when I knew I had to jump but I pussied out of it. Once you’ve truly wanted out but you stick around for whatever reason, you remain forever a stranger to this place.

Photos of me playing the guitar

On By Jon UreñaIn ArteLeave a comment

A week and a half ago, a professional photographer casually shot me as I was playing the guitar at my usual spot. I had been curious about the photos, only to receive them and confront once again that I hate how I look and that I exist. But it is what it is, so here they are.

Given the nightmare I’ve been involved in this month adapting an incredibly-complex board game about the Vietnam War, these photos are somewhat fitting.

The photographer’s name is Bixen Vergara. Here’s his page in case you’re interested.

The Empty Swing, Pt. 4 (Novella)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificialLeave a comment

I release her pigtails. My hands slide from the red hair to the back of her neck, one palm warm at her nape, then down to her wrist—the unbruised one—and the direction of movement arrives before any word does. I stand, drawing her up with me, and turn toward the hallway. She follows.

The bathroom is small and holds heat well. I turn the taps without releasing her wrist, then test the temperature with the inside of my forearm. I adjust the cold a half-turn. The water rises. Steam collects along the mirror’s edge. I watch the tub fill with the focused attention I give to things that matter.

I turn to Ane, who’s watching me from the doorway. I lift the hem of my own shirt from her shoulders first; she had been wearing it open over her crop top. I take the shirt with both hands and set it on the towel rack. Then the pink skirt. My fingers find the waistband, unhurried, and the skirt falls and I catch it and fold it over the shirt. The white socks with the small pink hearts last, one and then the other, my hands at her ankle and her calf.

Ane is just standing still in the steam-warm bathroom while my hands move over her performing an act that isn’t only desire, but something closer to the care one takes with something irreplaceable.

I guide her to the tub’s edge. She steps in. The heat moves up through her feet and ankles and the backs of her calves and she lowers herself and the warmth closes around her and she exhales involuntarily, the exhale of a body that has been braced for a long time and has just been given permission not to be.

I step in behind her. The water rises with my weight. I settle, and she settles against me—the geometry of the tub making it inevitable. My chest against her back, my legs on either side of hers. My arm comes around her and then stops.

The bruise. My thumb finds it. The discoloration on her arm, the purple-green of a bruise two days old, her mother’s work, the morning’s first tax. My thumb moves once across the discoloration, and then my hand slides lower and submerges her arm gently below the waterline, as if the heat can undo what that morning did. As if tending the evidence is the same as tending the wound.

Then I reach for the sponge on the tub’s edge and I wash her. Across her shoulders first, clearing the day from her skin. Then the back of her neck where the water has darkened the ends of her pigtails, then the curve of her collarbone, the soft hollow of her throat. The sponge sets the route and my hands follow to confirm it, the double passage of sponge-and-palm that is somehow more thorough than either alone, and she holds very still beneath the attention.

I’m thinking about the quality of what she gave me in the living room. The thought has the quality of the word cathedral without the word itself: she has given me the one thing she kept, the one room she held off-market across every transaction, every arrangement, every man who thought he had the full inventory of her. She gave it to me. I intend to receive it as if it matters in a way that has nothing to do with the contract, even though the contract is real.

My hands move across her skin. And then Ane is crying.

I feel it before I see it—her stillness changes, followed by an involuntary tightening across her shoulders. Her breath has gone irregular and then very controlled. Her face is wet in a way that isn’t the steam. The silent crying of someone whose professional register has been stripped of its last supporting structure, someone who has not been touched without transaction in years.

My hands continue moving across her shoulders, her collarbone, the back of her neck. I don’t say it’s all right. I don’t say anything. To keep moving is also to claim: not her body, but her capacity to be undone. The right to be present for it.

The water cools by degrees.

At some point the crying stops. Not because anything resolved. Because her body ran out of the resource the crying requires, and what is left is the warmth of the water and my hands still moving and the steam against the mirror and the sound of the garden somewhere outside the sealed house, faint and indifferent.

* * *

The dark outside the kitchen window is the dark of very early morning, the hour that belongs to no one. I stand at the sink with a mug of water I haven’t drunk.

The garden is out there. In the dim ambient light from the street beyond the hedge, the swing moves faintly in a wind I can’t feel from here. The arc is small and irregular, the movement of an empty thing displaced by something passing through. I watch it. My hands are around the mug.

Upstairs, Ane is in the spare room—the room that is now hers, the room with the lock she did not use—and the permanence of that is present in the house the way structural weight is present in a wall: invisible, felt only when you press against it.

I stand at the window and watch the swing and try to locate the arithmetic of the night. The grief in my chest—and it is grief, that much is legible—will not sort itself into its component parts. Grief for what I took. Grief for what she gave. Grief for the man I was before I opened the garden gate and found her sitting in the swing, the same swing that is moving now empty in the early morning dark. I don’t know which grief is which. I suspect they’re the same grief wearing different faces, and that the inability to separate them isn’t a failure of analysis but the actual condition of the thing I have done.

The catalogue assembles itself in the dark. Cameras: four units, arriving tomorrow, the invoice confirmed. Coverage radius: the gate, the southeast corner of the hedge where it thins, the kitchen door, the swing. I’ve mapped the sight lines in my head with the three-dimensional precision of a man who has spent fifteen years learning the geometry of my property in every light and weather condition. A determined person could part the gap at the southeast corner with both hands. Tomorrow. That’s the relevant fact. Until tomorrow, the gap exists.

Txomin’s face assembles itself next. The face from the neighborhood knowledge—the composite built from secondhand description and the logic of that type. The kind of man who uses other men. The kind of face that looks reasonable in daylight and means something different in the dark. I hold the face in the operational register and don’t let it become anything else. A threat is a threat. You map it, you account for it, you build the wall.

Ane is upstairs. That’s the central fact around which the rest of the week organizes itself.

The latch sounds.

Small. Metallic. The sound of the garden gate latch being tested from the street side—not the wind, not the swing’s chain, not the random settling of a property at night. I know every sound this property makes by address.

No lights. I don’t touch a switch. I stop two feet back from the kitchen window—close enough to see, far enough that my silhouette doesn’t reach the pane. The garden is dark. The hedge is dark. The ambient light from the street beyond the hedge is the thin yellow-white of a lamp, barely enough to define the hedge line as a shape against the lighter dark of the sky.

A compact shape at the gate. Leaning. The lean of a body that has been ambulatory for too long and has found a vertical surface and is using it. The gate post. One hand on the latch, the other arm against the wood. The movement, when it comes, is the slow exploratory movement of someone who’s testing the gap between gate and post with the patience of someone cataloguing the property from the outside the same way I catalogued it from the inside.

Scouting.

She’s not here to force entry tonight. She’s here to know. To locate the gap, to measure the hedge, to confirm the address before she decides what to do with the confirmation.

The shape and the unsteadiness and the hour and the quality of the searching movement assemble into a single conclusion, and the conclusion is Marisa, Ane’s mother.

The cameras aren’t here. The perimeter is unmapped.

The prohibition I issued to Ane—you don’t leave alone, not until this is resolved—is structurally meaningless if the person at the gate calls her name loudly enough. The spare room window faces the garden. The walls aren’t built yet. The walls are not built.

My hands are flat on the kitchen counter.

The shape at the gate lifts its head. It’s looking at the house. I can’t see the face from here, can’t resolve the features in the dark and distance, but the orientation is unmistakable—the angle of the head, the stillness of the body, the quality of attention that arrives when a person stops cataloguing a structure and starts looking for a light. A sign. The confirmation that someone is inside.

The shape’s posture changes. The head drops back. The mouth opens. The preparation of a body about to produce volume.

The cold in my chest converts into something with edges.

I open the kitchen door without a sound, then cross the threshold into the cold and the wet grass finds my bare feet—the cold of early morning ground, soaked through from the overnight damp, the blades pressing flat under my weight and releasing. I have walked this path in every dark and every weather for years and my body knows the slight rise at the third meter, the way the path curves left past the rosemary, the exact distance from the door to the gate in a straight line across the lawn: eleven meters. I cover them in the economy of a man who has converted grief and rage into a single operational directive.

She hasn’t called the name yet. I have a few seconds of advantage and I use them, crossing the last four meters in absolute silence, and when I stop I’m close enough to smell her.

Bleach. Industrial grade. The chemical signature of a woman who has spent her night on her knees cleaning other people’s floors and has come directly after, without sleeping, without changing, which tells me everything I need to know about the quality of her decision-making tonight.

I simply stand there, between her and the house, my hands loose at my sides. The stillness is the threat. The proximity is the threat. The fact that I appeared in the dark without sound, without light, from a house she had been watching for signs of life and found none. I let her feel it for a few seconds before I speak.

When I speak, my voice is in the lowest register I possess. I’m speaking at exactly the volume required to reach one person and no one else, calibrated with the precision of someone who has stood in this garden at this hour and knows exactly what the air carries and where.

“Listen to me carefully.”

She goes still. I watch her register my presence—the physical process of a drunk person updating their situational map, the small recalibration of the body when the threat-level reclassifies. I don’t give her time to produce language.

“You are standing at a gate that belongs to me, at four in the morning. I know what you came here to do, and I am telling you now, with this much distance between us, that you are not going to do it.”

She opens her mouth.

“I’m not finished.”

Her mouth closes.

“There’s a bruise on her arm. I have photographs. I have your address on record and the photographs are ready in a folder with your name on it. If I hear your voice at this gate—if I hear your voice anywhere near this property—I will make one phone call and the folder goes with it. That is not a negotiation. That is a fact I am stating for the record so that you cannot later claim you did not understand the terms.”

She’s leaning against the post in a way different from the scouting lean. Just using the wood because without it she would need to find another vertical surface. The bleach smell is stronger at this distance. Her mouth is working without producing sound. She arrived with a sound. I removed the conditions under which the sound was viable. She has nothing left to deploy.

Something changes in her posture. Something older than collapse. The deflation of a body that has been fighting a war for a long time and has just recognized, in the dark, in the cold, in front of a man whose hands are at his sides and whose voice has not risen by a single degree, that the war is already over and has been over and the fighting was the last thing she had and now she does not have it.

She looks at the house. At the spare room window—dark, curtained, still—and the looking is something that has nothing to do with strategy.

When she speaks, her voice comes out flat. A sentence standing alone in the dark between us.

“Is she safe?”

The question lands in the cold air and I hold it there. I feel the weight of what it costs me to hold it correctly. The woman in front of me is asking the same question I have been unable to answer since I stood at the kitchen window watching the swing. And the honest answer is not yes and is not no and is not a reassurance, because reassurance would be a performance and I’m not performing, not even for a woman who is leaning against a gate post in the dark smelling of bleach at four in the morning with nothing left to threaten me with.

The cold fuel that got me across the garden without making a sound remains, and the recognition sits beside it without displacing it. I let the silence run for three seconds.

“She is here. She is sleeping. She is not leaving.”

Marisa looks at the house for another moment. The spare room window, dark, curtained. Then her hand comes off the gate latch.

She moves back from the gate with the unsteadiness of a large body that is drunk and cold and has been standing on wet grass, and I watch her go with the expression of a man who has just been asked a question he did not want to be asked and cannot unfeel the asking, and the answer he gave was the only honest one available, and the honesty cost him something he cannot yet name because the dark is not the right place to name it.

I stand at the gate until the sound of her steps fades. Wet grass, then the uneven pavement of the lane beyond the hedge, then nothing.

I turn back toward the house. The kitchen door is still open. I cross the lawn in the same silence I crossed it going out and step back into the warmth of the kitchen and pull the door behind me without a sound.

I stand at the window. The swing is out there in the dark, moving faintly in the same wind, its arc small and irregular, the motion of an empty thing that has been touched by something passing through and has not yet stopped recording the contact. My hands are at my sides.

Ane is upstairs.

The truth of it has not resolved into anything clean. It has resolved into the ache in my chest that will not sort itself out into its component parts no matter how long I stand at the window. Grief for the quality of that woman’s voice stripped of everything except the question, and the way the question opened something between us that has not closed.

The swing slows. I watch it until stills, and then I watch the stillness, and the house holds around me.

I pick up the mug. Set it in the sink. Turn toward the hallway.

The house is quiet. The perimeter held. The name was not called.

It is enough for tonight. It is the only thing I have that is enough, and I take it with both hands and carry it up the stairs in the dark.

THE END