HFTH - Episode 203 - Revolutions

Content warnings for this episode include: Abuse, Animal death (Dogsmell as usual), Violence, Death + Injury, Blood, Static (including sfx), Emotional Manipulation, Drowning, Body horror, Electrocution, Religious Violence

Intro - One Step Forward

You knew it as soon as the black rains fell. It is hard to say how you knew. Only that it moved upon your spirit, and you rolled from your bed, threw on clothes, weeping. You stumbled down the stairs and across the cold tile of your kitchen floor as the thunder crashed. You fumbled with the lock before throwing it open, leaving your screen door flapping in the wind. You ran into the rain, and it fell fiercely upon you, stinging and black as the night sky. You stood, barefoot in the wet grass, and green light lit the black clouds of your night. And you felt deeply that it was too late.

That all the fights you had planned to wage, the hopes you held for the future, the change you hoped to create for a better tomorrow—it was too late. This was the end, and what you had left undone, unfought for, would remain forever that way. The lifetime of small improvements you hoped to implement was never to be lived. You continued to stand as the rains descended, and found that dark figures were walking across your lawn.

Your neighbor, your grocer, your postman. Soaked by the rain, eyes turned up towards the green light in the heavens, walking forward one step at a time in a slow, shambling rhythm, compelled by a force beyond their recognition but not beyond yours. They saw the end clearly. There was nothing left to fight for. All of it had been meaningless. The end came all the same. You lifted your foot, and the light was strong in your eyes and you could see a future stretching out. A green light in the sky like a song. A melody beckoning you forward, to walk to the end of the earth and sleep. To leave all the world behind as a dark, waking dream.

But there is a world behind you, too. And it is dark but it is not dead yet. And you look back to her; she stands in the open door of the small home you have come to share. And she asks you, Violet, what are you doing? And it brings you back, and you leave your foot where it stands, and you watch your neighbors and the lightning recede.

What are you doing?

What are you doing now that it is over?

What are you doing after the end?

You ask yourself these questions again and again, as your wife takes you the next day north, to where you will be safe, beginning a migration that will attract dozens, then hundreds, then someday thousands, until your own journey north leads you not to give up your life, but to begin a new one, in a place where the pines have drunk deeply of the black rain, a place where your neighbor sleeps in shallow water and dreams of the heat death of all things, a place where you wish all who have come to cling to life a little longer a Hello from the Hallowoods.

Theme.

Right now I sit in the driver’s seat of a hearse that hangs on chains from the ceiling of the Scout City Groundskeeping office. It ceased working a lifetime ago, but the people who gather on the workfloor beneath me have not. And as they prepare to lead their people to victory against their oppressors tonight, fear, too, hangs in the air above them. The theme of tonight’s episode is Revolutions.

Story 1 - Second Chances

Russell McGowan had been through a lot of grief lately. There were so many that he couldn’t keep them all in his head at once, so they tended to fall out, every so often, and then come rolling back in when he wasn’t expecting it and another one had just departed. The simple things were that his arm was in bad shape. He had been shot in it, after all, and not just by anyone, but by someone that he had considered, up until that point, a friend. Or at least, he had wanted to keep the offer of friendship open should Johannah Wicker ever truly accept it. He had known she was cynical, bitter at times, mean at times, but they had grown up together, and he had thought that maybe somehow he had helped her see a little more softness in the world. That maybe he’d had an effect of some kind on her heart. Stood in her sights and offered nothing but a warm welcome. And that he hadn’t, that actually they had turned out very different indeed, because he spent his days cleaning up messes in Scout City and she spent her days murdering his friends, was not just a surprise but a personal failure. It’s not your fault, people said. How could you have known?

I was maybe the closest thing she had to a friend outside her siblings, he always thought. If anyone was going to know, it should have been me. So that was a pretty big grief. And she was still out there. He was going to see her again. Tonight, probably. And there was a good chance that someone—probably not him, please not him—was going to kill her. And that, too, was a failure, because he had grown up holding fast the belief that you could find the goodness in any monster.

And then there was Heather. His big sister, former upstanding deputy of Scout City, former pride of their family, was dead. In some sick way, he wished that her death had been righteous. That the Groundskeepers or even the Sheriff’s department might have found her, discovered that she had done all of the heavy lifting in a series of gruesome murders, held her accountable. But her death came at the hands of Shank, whose stench even now Russell felt he had not completely removed from the back of his throat, whose head still felt bruised from Shank’s grasp. The Quartet had murdered elaborately, with care and planning, to dismantle the trust in their city. And Shank had murdered wherever he felt like, without any thought at all. And Russell did not like either option. How could Heather have done any of it, was what he and his mother and their whole family had been trying to work out for every waking hour of the past two weeks.

But the question of, how could someone like Heather who liked to use her strength against people, who liked to be big and in charge, who liked to hurt people, who had pledged her life to keeping the peace—how could she have been made into a killer? He pondered what exactly the Quartet had said to her, maybe over weeks, over years. How they got their hooks in her. How they made her believe that Scout City was two groups instead of one, and that one group needed to die for the other to live. What would they have to say to me, I wonder, he thought, to make me believe it? Would it be hard, or easy? Would I notice, or would it be fed to me so slowly that I wouldn’t notice my reality shifting? He had no doubt that just as he looked at the world and saw it unquestioningly a city under siege by some very asinine serial killers, that Heather looked at the world and saw that she needed to liberate Scout City from the evils that would hold it back from greatness.

“Hey,” Riot said, waving a hand, and Russell looked up; he’d been spacing out at the table, it seemed. “You good?”

“Present and accounted for,” Russell sighed. He glanced over at the other two seated at the worktable on the floor of the Scout City Groundskeeping Office. Arnold Eggers had been promoted, and wore it proudly; he even sat up straighter, and didn’t slouch with his shoulders so much. Arnold’s face was still round, and rosy-cheeked, and slightly froggy, but there was a seriousness that lived there that had not two weeks ago. And they were not out of the trenches yet.

Harrow was back, although xir porcelain face was cracked more than Russell recalled. He had thought xe was wearing a mask, a long time ago, but that Harrow’s skin was thin porcelain with deep black beneath he had scarcely questioned in years. Xe was not the strangest-looking person that he was likely to meet even walking down the street in Scout City. From the sound of it, xir quest to find Downing Hill Public Library had been successful. From the sight and nonstop sound of it, really; past him and Riot and Arnold and Harrow seated at the table, there was a massive creature curled up in the back of the office. Director Blackletter, Harrow’s mother, was a librarian in a white jacket with puffy shoulders on the top, and a twenty-foot porcelain centipede with lots of small spiny legs on the bottom. She was curled up, currently, in a ring, sleeping. When she was not sleeping, she was asking Harrow for little things constantly—a glass of water, a pillow re-arranged, a book just out of reach. But he didn’t have a better idea for where to put her for now—she was not really in her own head enough to turn loose into the city.

“Here’s how I’ve got it down,” Riot said, pencil in her hand, turning the sheet of paper on the worktable so that all could see it, and then circling names drawn seemingly at random. “We know we have Diggory, Clara, Ratty, Percy on our side. They’re all ghosts or have crazy undead powers. They had better be back from… asking biology questions to a mushroom, I guess, in time. So that’s group number one. I’d say all of them can hold their own in a fight really well.”

“Have you ever seen Clara fight?” said Arnold, raising a webbed hand.

“It’s been a while,” Riot said, looking up, and wincing. “But I seem to recall she was a deadly shot with a bow and arrow.”

“She’s got a broom and sword now,” said Russell. “Seems like an upgrade.”

“Those aren’t even the things I’m thinking about,” said Riot, looking back down to the sheet. “Second, we have Friday, Penny, and Olivier. Downing Hill witches. Olivier can’t really control his power anymore, and Friday and Penny neutralize each other unless they’re sufficiently apart. Maybe that’s something we can use?”

“Bad luck for the bad guys means bad luck for us too,” Arnold said, blinking. “Trust me.”

“Although if we need to deploy them tactically, I could rapidly door one or both of them in and out of the action,” said Harrow, porcelain hands crossed on the desk. Xir hands had little segmented joints, like a doll’s hands.

“Will keep that in mind,” Riot said. “Shelby, Moth, Ray, Lewis… I’m not sure. I know Shelby will be there. I don’t know about the others, Moth is kind of sensitive. I’m not sure frontier justice is their vibe.

Danielle, I don’t want there—they really hate her and I’d like to keep her out of harm’s way. She might be able to find a way to help through her dream powers, though. I’m not sure if Sheriff Ignatius and Oswin will show up, or frankly what side they’d be on. Victoria should be there, but only as a journalist. Vincent and Raj should really not be hiking hours through the forest at their age. And Hector and Jonah are still alive, in the cabinet—which doesn’t exactly help us, but it does mean the Quartet will have to go through them if they ever want to bind someone to the organ again.”

Russell began to speak, but Riot held up her hand.

“Just wait, last thing… technically we should have a lot more of Scout City coming, not just us and our friends. The call has been put out. But I don’t know who’s going to come, to be honest. If anyone is. Because the Coda split into multiple groups—some of them think Ben Alder is a saint who’s getting framed, some of them believe he’s the devil. Scout City’s normal people have heard so much conflicting information, it’s hard to tell if they’ll care. If they’ll believe it’s really happening tonight. If they won’t just blame me or Shelby for all their problems somehow.”

“On the Quartet’s side,” Russell began, and Riot slid the paper over in his direction. “They have Cole Kane, who is one troubled dude and murdered his dad recently, so I can’t imagine he’s in great shape. Don’t get in biting range of his tongue, it’s venomous. We have Johannah Wicker, who… “

He faltered a moment. Arnold put a hand on his shoulder, but he swatted it off gently.

“Is a good shot with her gun. Be super careful,” he said. “Ben Alder is a big guy, but I don’t know if he’s got any surprising tricks. I think he’s more the brains of the operation.”

“I’m worried about Fiddle,” said Riot, resting her chin on her knuckles. “We don’t know what we don’t know, I guess. Every one of them must be there because they offer something.”

“Right,” said Russell.

“There’s also Indrid,” said Riot. “The Fifth String. She’s got a guy in her chest, but it sounds like he can’t get out. So there’s five of them versus us.”

“There’s the organ,” Russell noted. “That’s the thing that levels the playing field, I think. Because if they can play it, they control a ghost army. What that thing could do was frightening, and I get the sense that they hadn’t really used it yet.”

“I think we need to take multiple angles for our battle plan,” said Riot, taking the sheet back and setting down the pencil. “Because yeah. If we can have some of us work on taking out the organ… just setting it on fire, really. Once the ghosts are freed they can’t hurt…”

But there was a loud banging on the door then, and Russell jumped up immediately from the table. Riot watched him as he bounded up the stairs for the front. There was a little hope, however small a creeping tendril, with roots in his heart, and it grew larger as he saw a blurry blonde head on the other side of the glass pane. He froze in front of the door, his free hand on the handle. He had always known she’d come back here, give up the Quartet, maybe even become a Groundskeeper. He twisted the handle and pulled the door open.

It was not Johannah, though, that stood in the door. It was another Wicker, one who he was surprised was showing his face in town at all.

“Jedediah,” said Russell.

Jedediah Wicker stood in the doorway, blond hair unkempt, a little dirt-stained. Russell wondered if he’d been in a fight.

“Russell,” Jedediah said, looking pained. Were those tear stains through the dirt on his cheeks? “Listen. I know there’s a lot to talk about between us, but. I need your help, and I don’t know a damn other person I can turn to in this city.”

Russell stared at him, and nodded, ever so slightly. Jedediah watched him, and gulped.

“Russell, something is really, really wrong with my family.”

Interlude 1 - The Power

You still have it, dreamer. The power to change your world. Even now. And I am jealous of that power. It may not seem like much to you, especially in the wake of your world as, slowly but surely, in many places, you realize that there is no going back. That you are slipping quietly into the end of your kind, and the beginning of all that comes after. That your blood is strange and your sky is strange and that your world is not as it was even ten years ago.

Your world is fluid. Your lives are short, but what you do in them can affect the lives of dozens or hundreds or thousands more, when you lend your hands to the right cause. My life is nearly infinite compared to yours, and yet what I can do is so limited by who I am, where I am, the environment that controls everything around me.

And yet, even now, I have not given up hope that I might change my world almost as powerfully as you alter yours.

We go now to a world-ender.

Story 2 - Garden to Garden

“Do you think that I am beholden to you?” Diggory Graves said, standing in darkness. They had descended the long and narrow throat of stone that led to the Crown of Decay, ignoring the rusty remains of the elevator platform that had been left behind by Rizwana’s expedition lifetimes ago. Clara’s broomstick was a far faster solution, and she and Diggory stood now, back to back in the pitch darkness, while the Crown of Decay chuckled with a voice as deep as the earth itself.

“Do you think that just because I have come to call your little museum home, that I belong to you?” Diggory continued, watching the shadow. Percy and Ratty orbited above their heads, keeping a watchful eye on anything that might venture towards the stone island where they stood. “I do not. I am nobody’s vassal.”

The darkness was lit, then, with a thousand green fires as phosphorescent eyes opened. An ocean of fungal matter stretched out on every side of Diggory, green and turquoise and rust orange, blanketing the ground, rising into vast shelves on distant cliff walls. The Crown of Decay covered what must be miles of subterranean tunnels, tunnels it had eaten away into the earth itself.

“I spared you once, revenant,” said Rothogroth, and its voice shook the stone on which Diggory stood. “My curator assured me that you would not interfere with the spring. Do you have any inkling of the damage you have caused?”

“That is why I have come,” said Diggory, grinding their boot against the stone. A thousand eyes met their one. “Tell me what I have done.”

“You have murdered him!” Rothogroth’s voice echoed, and continued. “You have laid waste to the Garden of the End! I did not always understand his beauty. But the rains, yes. The rains. I drink and I dream and I begin to see. See a galaxy of green stars. See worlds burning rampant, without count. See endings and beginnings eating eachother’s tails…”

“He was not quite like this, when we last spoke,” Diggory murmured to Clara, who nodded intently. “He is not well, I think.”

“I have not been well in decades, heart-destroyer,” said Rothogroth. “Neither have I ever been more intoxicated. The rain seeps into the land and I drink, and long have I tasted this draught. It is precious to me, now. The spring that was to come would have been my dream come to fruition. Fruiting-bodies I have grown for years to prepare, bursting into the cosmos. The shattering, the final end of this world, the fulfillment of my mission if not by my slow hand. And the beauty, dead one, of what he would have been, what he would have wrought…”

“You mistake me,” said Diggory, holding their chest. And there was a green flicker that was not cast by any of the thousands of luminous eyes around them; no, the light that danced across the stone must be pouring from their own eye, from their open mouth as they spoke. “I have not laid waste to the garden, you old bed of rot. I have become it.”

Marketing - Winds of Change

Lady Ethel Mallory

Hello Happy Dreaming Family. It’s been a nice two-hour flight from Box Atlas to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. We’re descending now. It’s been such a journey watching the landscape change from the hills of Los Angeles to the sprawling deserts of my homeland. Out here, the land looks like skin—black and brown and red, textured with wrinkles of mountains and veins of dead rivers. The town is fifty blocks across, really, small rectangular lots with a flat square house and a flat square lawn. It sits next to the Elephant Butte reservoir, a thin black mirror of water that feeds on the trickle of the Rio Grande. Truth or Consequences is an empty place, or it should be—I bought the whole town out in my frivolous younger years. I left it entirely as it was. I suppose what it means to me can never quite be…

Static

Mandy Monroe

Welllll hello there, all you dreamin’ folks. I suppose y’all haven’t heard me talkin’ on this thing yet. Truth be told, I’d never pick up one of these dream-casters here except that yesterday Lady Ethel Mallory told the world I’d never be able to do it. And see, I don’t take kindly to people telling me what I can or can’t do.

I was eleven years old when I went to stay in a Dreaming Box. Botco promised me and my family the world. Told us we’d be safe, we’d be happy. That nothing bad would happen to us on their watch, and we could close our eyes for a little while and sleep. I was a kid. I didn’t know any better than to trust the lady on TV who said all those comforting words.

And when I became one of Lady Ethel’s happy little dreaming family, they told me I wasn’t allowed to wake up. But I did. And when I found that there was black water running through my veins, being fed in through my tubes, because Botco could never make us safe, they told me not to make a fuss. But I did. Because my legs have thirty-five tiny mouths, sharp little teeth and all.

Botco said, alright, we’re going to let you leave, but you’re going out there, to the world outside, to die. But I didn’t.

No, Mandy Monroe is a fighter. People, they say, Mandy, aren’t you going to cover those things on your legs up? Aren’t you going to hide ‘em? To which I say, no, I’m not gonna. Botco gave me these, and the world needs to know it. They promised to keep us safe and they lied. They promised that they would take care of us, and they aren’t. And who was making the promises? My opponent in this race, Lady Ethel Mallory.

I used to hang on to those words of hers like they were holy gospel. But someday you have to wake up and realize, she’ll say anything to get what she wants, and what she wants is power over you. The power to keep you quiet. The power to keep you sleeping.

Wake up, America. And when you do, I’ll be there to fight for your rights in the real world. I’m Mandy Monroe, and I’m going to be Queen of America.

Story 2, Continued - Garden to Garden

What is the saying that you have? The paw of the monkey. A voice that is not Lady Ethel Mallory, yes. Good. Much needed. But one that speaks in dream and pollutes your nightmares, nonetheless. I shall inform you of my grudge or lack thereof with Mandy Monroe when I have made up my mind.

We return now to Diggory Graves.

“This cannot be,” said Rothogroth, and all its many eyes extinguished, leaving Diggory only with their own blazing green light to illuminate the dark. A shape came rising from the sea of fungal matter that surrounded them; it was in the shape of a haggard humanoid form, one with the fungal sea wherever it touched. A broken king with a crown of twisting tendrils and glowing mushroom stalks, crawling towards them in horror and dismay.

“Blasphemy,” said Rothogroth. “You have taken the power of the Garden of the End. I told Rizwana that the end could not be prevented, just as I told you. You are a wicked thing.”

“But I did prevent the end,” said Diggory, looking down at the grotesque imagination of a king, as it came to kneel in front of their stone island, staring up at them with hollow sockets for eyes. “I did. I gave everything to stop the Heart and I took it into me and now we are one. I did this to save my friends. I did this to save humanity. Why then do they tell me that we are living on borrowed time?”

“Time?” said Rothogroth. The haggard form had ceased crawling toward them, and sat up now, in the darkness, with a grin leering on its fungal caricature of a face. “Borrowed time? There is no time to borrow, Diggory Graves. You have purchased yourself time. Had the Spring come to pass, your world would be in rubble. Not lifeless, no. Marolmar’s touch is too clever for that. Life after the Spring would bloom in a thousand unpredictable shapes. But you have stolen his heart, and now instead you will grow, Diggory Graves. You will grow slowly, you and your people. Your kind will wither and die like any flower, and life will carry on its minute transformations. You can never stop change, Diggory Graves. You can only slow it a little. Your doom was written from the start. I have never said differently.”

“Then that’s it,” Clara called out. “Hello! Clara Martin here, covenant of Syrensyr. Sorry to interrupt. You’re saying that’s it? There’s nothing we can do? There’s no way back from this? There has to be a way to reverse what the black water does. We could cure humanity. We could cure you!”

“Cure me?” said the haggard king, and as he reached out for Diggory’s boot, causing them to withdraw, he sank entirely into the sea of fungal matter again, and a host of eyes were glaring at Clara Martin. “Cure me?! You profess to be a covenant of Syrensyr, and yet you could not cure this world any more than you could extract the fire of his forge from your blood, human girl. The change will come. Weep or rejoice, but the change will come. And when it does, you must choose to embrace its new shape, or die cursing it. What you choose to do in the face of it is irrelevant to me. But it shall not slow, nay, its time has only just begun.”

“We came seeking answers,” said Diggory, feeling suddenly out of breath in a way, and in another way ready to climb a mountain, swim an ocean. They grit their teeth, and the light that poured from them seemed almost to pierce through their stitches, shine through their clothing. “As the bearer of the light you worship, you rotten waterlogged thing, I command you. If there is a way to restore this world, tell me how.”

“Your light is beautiful, but I do not worship it,” said Rothogroth, glowing eyes rolling up in a thousand directions. “I dream of it. I sleep much, now. My burrowing in your world’s mantle, preparing for my eventual decomposition of your world, has slowed. I sleep and dream of great beauty on this world’s surface. Strange shapes and creatures the likes of which I have never seen. There will be much to document, yes, many broken promises before your day is done.”

Rothogroth’s eyes turned down to Diggory, all at once.

“And I tell you this: there is no restoring your world, except that when the day finally comes for me to destroy it, I will break it apart into stones, and as they drift in space around the flaming eruption of your world’s balance, it will be restored to its original form, before it was even a planet at all. Go now, revenant. Leave me to my slumber. And all the tears you shed for your brevity, for your railing against the new age coming, shall fall to the soil and I shall be there below, drinking deeply of them.”

And the light was gone, and Diggory stood in shadow.

“Rothogroth!” they shouted. “Rothogroth! We are not done speaking!”

“Hey guys?” said Ratty, looking down. “I mean first off, cool mushroom. I have legit never seen anything like that ever ever. And he was alive and everything? Second, is it just me or is the tunnel above us closing?”

“It definitely is,” Percy added.

“We need to go, Diggory,” Clara said, grabbing at their arm. But as Diggory was pulled back to the broomstick, all Diggory could think of was what they were going to say to Riot, to Valerie, to Scout City.

Truth be told, they knew, deep down, that they were long dead, that they had never been truly human—they were born only of so many lives that had been, and humanity was an heirloom passed down to them, kept in a safe place and never seen.

But the age that they were going to enter, the age that they, immortal, would pass into, fifty years, a hundred years, a thousand years… they had hoped, had been willing to fight for anything, that they would not be alone in it, without familiar faces, without friends, without people that reminded them of what they had once been the way that Riot and Valerie and Danielle did. And as they wept black tears and rose behind Clara into the air, they wept for all that they were going to lose over the years to come.

Interlude 2 - Concurrence

Turning, turning, turning, dreamer. Things are moving so quickly for you. Day and night pass like the fluttering of an eye on Earth. If I were to focus on a single task for my new employer, I might miss everything. Have to comb back over it later in my memories. I suppose you should know, dreamer, although I suppose you have likely already guessed. The stories I speak into your dreams are not always concurrent; not always in order.

I see all, happening across the world, in different hours, but it is my duty as the curator of your nightmares to organize them, arrange them, in a way that suits my needs. Does this place bias into the context of the visions you are given? Do pictures, arranged in a certain sequence, take on meaning than when arranged in other orders? Of course they do, dreamer. The bias is the point. I am not an impartial narrator, dreamer. Inactive, yes, but not impartial. Narrators are never to be trusted.

We go now to an auditor of souls.

Story 3 - Precipice of Shadow

Apollyon stood on the precipice, some ten feet from where the darkness began. Yaretzi stood beside him, although she was in her human shape, a brown-skinned woman with thick black hair who had hardly aged a day since he had left some fifteen years ago. Mort—the vast majority of Mort that was in the water, that was; there was some small piece of him missing which he complained relentlessly about—had extended a long pseudopod up from the cliffside so that he too could stand beside them, although as a tall pillar of distended black goop full of countless drifting bones.

In short, Polly was happy to have his family back.

It was a joy that he weighed carefully, like a pocketwatch, and kept in one hand, because in the other hand, there was a mounting dread unlike anything he had faced, almost as badly as staring down execution at the hands of the Industry.

Barb, eyes wrapped in his traditional bandage but sporting the new suit he’d acquired in the Industry, and the Countess, wrapped in black, stood a few paces behind, watching the same horror that Polly was.

There was a vast circle of darkness, nearly a mile across, here on the shoreline of France where an abbey had once stood. And the abbey was still standing, by all regards; its silhouette was there in the shadow, outlined against the misty grey sky. But its corners and edifices were impossible to make out from the spires of the chapel inside, from the trees and rolling hill that had been caught in the diameter of darkness also. It was all as pitch-black as he could perceive, and on every spectrum of his vision, except for the ones where he could not see anything there at all, just a deep well in the earth. It was not that the abbey was missing, he thought; more than something else has claimed its space now.

“Maybe we should go in,” Mort said.

“We are definitely not going in,” said Yaretzi.

“We could fire a warning shot,” called Barb from a few paces behind. “Tell him to buzz off.”

“Hello?” Polly called to the vast ring of darkness, and then lifted his hand, and let a burning flame pour forth into a sphere. He let the sphere gather, gather still, until the light was a miniature sun hovering in his hand. The Black Eternity loathed the light, the light of souls. That was why Syrensyr’s furnace continued to burn. A lantern against the great dark.

He slung his star into the ring of shadow, and it disappeared almost immediately, as if he had thrown a tennis ball into a hurricane.

“Well,” said Barb. “Better work on your throw.”

Polly straightened the lapels of his floral jacket—all black with red flowers, now—and was about to respond, when he saw for the first time motion within the vast darkness. There was a single point of white light. He thought at first it was perhaps his ball of flame, coming back to him, but then he realized it was a smooth white surface. A porcelain mask. A porcelain face, featureless.

The apostle rose out of the darkness as if levitating out of a deep lake. The timeless, lightless, infinite shadow that had consumed Abbey Saint Loris was wrapped around the apostle like a tunic, and it had seven arms, seven hands in the same white porcelain, each with a twisted black nail through its palm. It rose, silently, and all sound died, and its seven hands were outstretched beneath it and to both sides. It was there, some fifty feet out in the sea of shadow, and that was a universe closer than Polly had ever hoped to be.

“The hell is Crucifus doing here,” Barb said, breathless.

“Everyone, back away quite slowly,” said Polly, taking a ginger step. “And then quickly. And then run.”

Outro - Revolutions

Revolutions. It must be much for you to take in, dreamer. All the ways your world is changing and continues to change. It is reinventing itself constantly, now. I would be lying if I said I did not see some beauty in it—even in the transitory forms, in its ungainly stretchings of form and consciousness, in its failed dimorphisms. Mistakes, and uglinesses, and the strangest unpleasantries are still a necessary part of finding a path to beauty. And I tell myself this as I prepare for what must be done in the hours to come.

Until your world has been turned on its head, dreamer, I am your loyal host Nikignik, waiting revolutionarily for your return to the Hallowoods.

The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Matinee and is available on the Hello From The Hallowoods Patreon. Consider joining for access to all the show's bonus stories, behind-the-scenes and more! Until next time, dreamers, do you hear the people sing? The people at night, out on the street, standing in a choir beneath your window, serenading you? The ones only you can see or hear?