.. . join the adventure . ..

has finally begun to descend. Been quite the ride, hasn’t it?

Quick recap: you’ve extricated yourself from so many myriad entanglements that have grasped and grabbled at you, pirates and tiredness, confusion and mystical plotlets. You have survived shipwrecks and poisoned arrows, shamless doxxing, even the hall of alien consciousness, which was pretty damn cool if you haven’t found it go back and look. You’ve made it through way, way too many literary puns and references, through tired eyes and ennui, through many hard battles with vast unknown forces, and always you have kept moving, resolute, implacable, undeterred. Bob’s your uncle, boy-o. Turns out you are the force that cannot be stopped—the gravity gathering mass to its bosom—the pinball that plummets onward, leaping any trapdoors—the reader who will indeed make the final page—and so what if you get distracted from time to time? Everyone does, we’re all a little dopey.

So what if you’ve had the odd detour here and there, if your head is a bit banged up, your ears a little seaweedy. Turn to the side, give your head a good whack. Hell, what of it—maybe you’re already dead, but dead in the manner of the Buddhists and Jains and the Hindu, dead again and again only to live again and again, each death/life/death a move ever closer to truth, to the light at the center of the mystery. Or maybe there’s no center at all–maybe living itself is the so-called center, that it turns out that dipply slogan is the truth after all, the journey matters, not the destination.

We all know the destination.

We always know it.

Of course it’s the journey that matters.

A journey that has led you here. You need only take the final steps to complete it, to avenge and save your father/lover/child/sister/friend/student/teacher/self. To kill your foe. To find happiness. To die. To forget the past. To even things out. To learn the identity of the person who has for years been rigging life against you—and, far more, to understand the why of it all.

The party, finally, comes to its end. The cars are all gone, the last taillights redfaded into night. The moon has set, the night now dark. Inside the great room, a single lit lamp. A form in a chair, reading.

It is time. Rub your eyes, stretch your limbs, take a breath. Quietly exit the conjoined quarters of the shed. You know the directions: it’s all laid out before you now: a slight veer left across the garden, up the stairs beside the veranda, and then you’ll come to a door. The path falls beneath your implacable steps. The grass damp against your ankles. The forest black as the sins it conceals. Which is to say that it is white—only now there is no light.

And you put your hand on the doorknob. And you step inside.