CasualWanderer82

Thank you @NorthernExpanse for the beautiful comment and for following my work. I'm humbled by your words.

I've spent a long time in the company of Devin and Luka, of a devil who plays by the rules and a maker who never once did, of a tree full of stolen light and two estranged lovers on a bench in the snow. And somewhere along the way I understood that the story was never only about a soul trapped in a tree. It was about how grief and devotion are the same muscle worked in opposite directions. And how hope, unreasonable and unaccountable and impossible to prove, is not weakness but the highest form of courage there is. Here's the thing no one tells you when you begin: a story is a kind of soul in a tree. It sits there, sealed, waiting, alive but unreachable, until someone comes. Until someone reaches for it. Everything I did alone at my desk, every scene outlined and redrafted, every sentence turned over until it rang true, none of it means anything, none of it lives, until a reader arrives and gives it breath. You were the light that freed it. You are the reason it isn't just words on a page but a thing that happened, a place people stood, a love that got to be witnessed. Devin resurrected Luka. You did that too, every one of you, simply by reading it. By following me down the hill in the dark on nothing but faith that there'd be a dawn at the bottom. So thank you. For your comments and your gasps and your theories, for loving Theron when he didn't deserve it and forgiving him when he finally did. Thank you for "reaching into the tree". A writer without readers is an empty voice. You made it a conversation, and that is the only kind of magic I actually believe in. So, until next time. I hope you'll follow me down the hill again. With all my love, Casual W. Special shout out to @Jjeffalch @centexhairysub @sandeman @dboggs9700 @Jkeeletupelo @Seraph28 @Cane23 @redw18 @VBlew for filling the chapters with the most sweet and humbling comments. That you took the time to do it, means the world to me. 🩵

There was a circle drawn in the earth that no one could see. It lay under the snow, around the tree, where a man had knelt three nights running in the hour the warden wept below, scoring it into the frozen ground with his hands while the white came down and hid the work behind him. He did not fully understand it. He understood only that it was a door of a particular kind, and that this one he meant to use against the oldest creature there was. He did not know if it would hold. He had laid i

Every story that began had to end. This was not cruelty. It was only the shape of things, the same shape that governed the candle and the held breath and the long gold afternoon that the boy in the gutter once watched come down over the rooftops of a city that no longer has that name. A thing that started was a thing that stopped. The two were not enemies. They were the same event, seen from its two ends, the way a door is an opening and a closing depending only on which side of

Thank you @equisxx I appreciate the sweet words and can assure you we're all actively rooting for Devin!

Ah, the old "I ordered romance and someone slipped immortality into my basket" dilemma. To be fair, Giancarlo living for centuries wasn't exactly hiding behind the sofa... it was quietly waving from the first few chapters. This one merely stopped being subtle about it. You're absolutely entitled to prefer your romances without ancient soul trees, reincarnation, and the occasional existential crisis. This one, unfortunately, tend to collect those things like loose change. Still, I'm delighted you stayed long enough to become attached to the characters before deciding they'd wandered too far into the supernatural. That's almost a compliment... even if Giancarlo has now outlived another reader. 👋

Here is what I can say... The relationship between Mister D and his Maker is not the old story of a creature who rebelled out of pride. That version flatters everyone, it gives the creation a clean sin and the creator a clean grievance. What happened between these two is worse and more tender than that. Mister D was beloved. He was, by the Maker's own reckoning, the most interesting thing he ever made, and that is precisely the injury. To be cherished as a fascinating instrument rather than loved as a someone. To be reached for, and admired, and never once asked. The thing that broke in him didn't break out of hunger for power. It broke out of the discovery that the one who made him would bend every rule by hand and still hold him to the rules, would call it love while calling it a game. So your question, who asks forgiveness, the creator or the creation? is the question the story is built around, and I think the honest answer is that each is waiting for the other to go first, and has been waiting for a span of time that would flatten a human mind, and that the waiting has hardened in both of them into the shapes we meet them in: one who refuses, and plays fair as his refusal. One who never plays fair, and calls it fun. Each believes himself the one who was wronged. Each is, from where he stands, correct. The "conundrum" regarding your plea, and I love that you made it, is the assumption that forgiveness is owed down the chain, that responsibility flows from maker to made. The story isn't sure it does. A creator's greater power may mean greater responsibility, or it may mean only that he had more ways to choose otherwise and chose this. And a creation is not a child forever. At some point the made thing acts, and goes on acting, for centuries, and the harm it does is its own. Mister D has done monstrous things. The fact that he was hurt into them first does not unmake them. Both things stay true at once, and the novel won't let you set either one down. So weep, by all means, you're reading it right. But hold the forgiveness open a while longer without deciding who must kneel. The two of them haven't decided either. Neither have I. That's the engine. 😉

This. Made. Me. LAUGH. And slightly annoyed that I didn't think of it as the title for this chapter.

The snow was still falling when he left the tree, and he went down the hill. He hadn’t planned to. That was the first curious thing, and Mister D noticed it the way he noticed all things, with a still and bottomless attention that nothing escaped, that his feet had chosen a direction his mind had not given them. He had looked up at the black sky and asked his question of the One who would not answer, and then he had lowered his face, and turned, and walked, not back into the warm house but

Theron's eyes opened on a low ceiling he didn't recognize That was the first wrong thing: he didn't recognize the ceiling. In nineteen hundred years he had woken in a great many rooms, and there was always, in the first instant, a knowing, the body's quiet report of where it lay, who slept near, what threat the dark held. The knowing didn't come. There was only a stranger's ceiling, water-stained, close, lit by the grey of a window he couldn't yet turn his head to see, and beneath the not-k

Devin stood by the dry wellhead with his hand still pressed flat to his chest and stared at the man in the lamplight, and the man stared back, and between them the warmth and the fragments and the impossible recognition went on surging up through the crack in the wall and breaking against the wrongness of what his eyes were showing him. Because his eyes were showing him Luka. The face was Luka, the face from the grainy photograph, the face his soul had crossed an ocean to find, the jaw and the m

Well...what type of "draining" are we talking about? 😅

Hmm...is he? 😜

I don't think he was either...