entry #6:
i woke up on a hay mattress in fresh clothes. at my bedside was a table with food i didn’t recognize, but it looked beyond incredible. it hadn’t even occurred to me that i hadn’t been eating. i guess since i was so hastily made, my body has the mechanic of hunger, but not the need to eat. i devoured the whole plate in under five minutes. i sat up in bed and began to scan the area. this room hadn’t been here a moment ago, but everything else remained exactly the same.
“where am i…?”
“You’re in my Workshop. Reapers brought you here as soon as I saw where ya were, but I’m only allowed to interact with folks like you if they ask, which… y’know… kinda makes my job hard sometimes.” he was seated across the room, cradling some kind of non-euclidian tool.
“the beaver-raccoon-man has a job. i’ll go with it. what’s your job?”
“Kid, you learn pretty fast that around here, if you try and make sense of anything, you don’t make sense of much at all. Name’s GrimChuck, by the way, happy to meet ya. Been looking for you for a long time." he walked across the room and picked up an unfamiliar tool, something between an ice pick and a monkey wrench, with a screen on the handle.
“you didn’t answer me. I’m not the type to let things go unanswered.”
“And how far has that gotten you? Besides, if you stop badgering me for a moment and let me help you, maybe I can give you answers that you actually need.” he stepped up to his desk and gestured for me to follow him. pressed onto the desk under a glass panel was a piece of paper. it looked like an abstract watercolor with words and lines scribbled all over it.
"why is my name on here?"
"That's where you just came from. This here is a map of everything that exists. Well, kind o--"
"what do you mean ki--"
"I was getting to that!" he said, cutting me off before i could finish my question. "You always talk over folks this much?" he laughed, a sound that shook the room, but at the same time, i couldn’t help but feel comforted by it. i’d never been comforted before. "It's not really a map as much as it is a snapshot of the moment you left your reality and came here. I paused it so I could show you what you're doing."
that got to me. the comfort broke. with only a few words, all of the confusion and madness of the isolation i had endured came back, but so did the anger. "what i'm doing? what am i doing?"
i stepped back from the desk. "i've been lost and confused for months, maybe years, and i haven't even existed long enough to have a name that makes any fucking sense! so please, tell me how i'm messing everything up for another deity. please, tell me how everything i make just leaves a bigger mess for someone else to clean up, please, tell me what i'm doing wrong!" i crumpled to the ground. i couldn’t take it anymore. Survival mode shut off and everything i’d shut out came rushing back in. "what am i doing wrong?" GrimChuck stepped away from the map and sat on the ground next to me.
"I've been watching, y'know. I'm more limited than a lot of other Concepts, but I can watch, and man... what you've survived would kill any mortal. Anyone would have broken down like this so much sooner." he looked at me, and i could feel it again. the warmth, the comfort. it was then that i knew, he didn't bring me here to chastise me, he brought me here to help.
"okay. sorry, it's just... it's been a lot." i stood up and we both walked back to the desk. "It's alright. I know. Now." he pointed at a small yellowish orange patch just above the gray streak that tore across the page. "This is the world you built. See how it's got all those small lines inside it, and how it's right at the head of that gray mass? That's a sign of a world that can't stop Building. That gray mass is the Reaper Tail. It's how Things all across existence find their way to the After. It's a natural process that you've unintentionally interrupted with overgrowth."
"so i'm blocking the figurative rectum of the multiverse?"
"Not how I'd describe it, but pretty much." his tone seemed to shift downward ever so slightly. "There is a fix, but it comes with a few pretty big catches. Unfortunately, the hard part of your Story isn't over yet."
"ah." i sucked in a breath as the air started to feel colder. "so what do you need from me?"
"I don't need anything from you. I just need you to do something. I'm giving you a seed of Conception." his voice got quieter, and his face grew wistful. "It was given to me by my sister. She wanted to help too, but it's not in her nature to make appearances. That's... always been my brother and I's job. I'm rambling, sorry." GrimChuck opened the drawer in his desk and pulled out a beautifully carved wooden box, decorated with moss and flowers. "Before I tell you anything else, you gotta promise me you won't open this until you're ready to accept the consequences of becoming like me."
"…what?"
"Promise me!" he sounded desperate.
"i... promise?"
"Good... good. You might be the only being in existence who can handle something like this. Your origin greatly mirrors that of the Beginning of Everything, as if reality itself needed a foil. I'm excited to see what you do." i didn't understand what he meant by that. but i feel like i didn't need to. i may not have understood, but i Understood.
"is this going to kill me?"
"Probably not... but you won't be this. You'll be more like me. Better... than me. A Concept. The raw embodiment of an idea or function within The Wilds." he sighed. this didn't seem like an ultimatum he wanted to place on me. "When you get home, focus your energy on culling the overgrowth. You need to have your will fully aligned or you'll burn up with everything else. If you make it out the other end, you'll be someone else. Something else. You'll still be you, but that'll mean something different. once you've aligned yourself, open the box. After that, it's all up to you."
before i could even process what he had said to me, he thrust the box into my hands.
"If it's meant to Be, it'll Be. Good luck, tWoE. You've got one hell of a story ahead of you no matter what happens."
and with a blink, i was back home, holding a box, and feeling no closer to answers, despite holding them in my hand.