Back in 2016, I wrote a novel (or part of one) called T. Van Santana and the Codex of Coherence. It’s book 12, if you’re keeping up with that. Anyway, I’m in the process of reformatting all the books and, in doing so, have been finding things—things that used to be elsewhere but are not anymore.
So, here is what I found today: small paragraphs of primer for the book at the center of everything.
Three Pillars
One: This book is about abuse.
Two: This book is about family.
Three: This book is about living with both at once without killing anyone.
Consider yourself warned.
Three Skins
One: This book is not about technology.
Two: This book is not about the future of other planets.
Three: This book is not about secret magickal cabals.
But you will see all that shit. So do not be fooled.
Avan’s Island
Out on the Far Shores, that’s where he went. I’d said I would find him there but never had, not until this treachery threw me so far from home, landed me there on his island.
It’s full of motley colors and paths winding like blood vessels. It’s not dull or quiet, though there is a stillness that comes from being so far away from the center.
The flowers that grow, grow free. The wind is all around, dry and clear. It will be hard for me to leave this place.
Sinopa
She is known not only for speed and pure ghosting but also two slender blades, each lined with different poisons encrypted to act faster than onboard healing can counter. Death on two teeth from a little fox.
I can’t see why she would want this, to end all things and unravel the Grand Tapestry. I know people well enough to guess it’s some misguided attempt to mend some perceived wrong. Sure, some folks like nothing more than to fuck shit up, but not one so disciplined, so skillful. Not one who weaves the world.
The Coherent Codex
Enciphered morphemes that, once revealed, can string together into thought forms and then into physical being. The technology of creation and destruction and reconstitution holographically inherent in each thread of the tapestry, each fiber. And the dread heuristics cannot touch it, nor the right rules, nor the wrong algorithms. It is the essence of pure being. Totality, not separate or divisible or immersed. Reality.
Layered Reality
While y’all are dicking around back in the 21st with AR and VR and listening to Miley, we’re wasting away in the 32C with LR and up close mic kisses with Ryu Eddy.
Layered Reality is a blend of technologies, biological and computational, allowing access to different experiences within any environment. The Scense Gland lets users walk through an alleyway, say, and have it resemble 1920s New York City (one of muh faves) right next to someone who is going through a Martian themed passage.
While this may or may not appeal to your 21st Cen tastes, it is all the fucking rage around here. It started through Bubble™, ofc, with the Chew. Then Squiggle got in on it with Digout. Ogles gave way to implants: first the Cricket, then Henwaves, but it was the Tusk Scense Gland that won out.
Umberto Phero
He’s a pillar of the 32C magickal community, though not without controversy. His fixation on filament over thread is a common point of derision, as is his penchant for dispensing half-finished apprentices.
Bert is an undisputed expert of cryptokinesis and reality physics, but was largely ignored in Blackwater where he worked for CoDex; however, on the Westward Homeworld, he found acclaim among the Shining Night, a cabal started by his father--also named Umberto--and twin brother, Swig.
From the Shining Night sprang the Cult of Pages ... and the Badd Heurists, too ...
The Big Reconstitution
Like waves lapping, a string snapping, a ball rolling, the universe begins and rebegins.
You could blame me, I suppose, for the end of the world—even though I tried to stop it, and arguably pulled that off a couple times. Or you could say it was inevitable. But it happened. And then unhappened either through recurrence or direction, and in either case he was at its center. He the island boy. He the Czar of Paradise.
Now some of us know and some do not. And even those of us in the know aren’t always certain of what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. I couldn’t tell you, for example, if the time I lived my life over again for Gunvor happened separately or as part of the Big Recon, nor could I tell you if the reconstitution of the Jungle happened twice. So our already misty timeline is vaguer still.
Danielle
One of my earliest frenemies, Danielle and I met when we were twelve. I’ve never bested her in a fight, and she’s nearly killed me twice. We dated a lot of the same girls, including Mitz and Wendy.
After the reconstitution of the Jungle (the first one, before the Big Recon), Danielle was reborn and lived with our mutual friend, Reg Alvarado, on his cult compound. She had given up her blades for a life of service and her leather for humble sackcloth.
That’s the last time I saw her …
Swig Phero
Umberto is older than Swig by about an hour. And while Bert traveled to the teeming metropolis of Blackwater at the behest of The CoDex Corporation, Swig stayed behind. He was left with their father, Big Berto, to mind the shop, to carry on with business as usual. And the Phero business was magick.
The Grand Tapestry
There is a view available to all, but few can find appropriate vantage to see, what one mind called the Grand Tapestry.
Reality, infinite in its complexity and variegated expression, manifests in and around itself, apprehended by thoughts and made real in the minds of bodies. Each possible path a thread, some silver and some golden, weaving together the image of the total known. Is this reality? The ultimate reality wizards and philosophers seek?
I think not.
But it’s the lens we have for our miniscule understanding. By weaving and frogging the Tapestry, we craft our narratives. And with these stories we create and destroy worlds.
