I’ve been long overdue for a blog post like this, because it’s one of the main things that I either get questions about or hear people struggle with. The questions are usually in the form of “how do you come up with this stuff” or “where do you get your ideas from”, while the struggles […]
Worth the Candle, Epilogue 8: Nevermore
After ten years of heaven, it felt to Raven like everyone had moved on but her. She kept in touch with the entire party, with the exceptions of Bethel and the locus, occasionally meeting with them for a movie or game night, and sometimes one-on-one for coffee, or dinner, or something like that. They had […]
Worth the Candle, Epilogue 7: Multitudes
The primary question of heaven was different for everyone. For some it was ‘how do I deal with other people?’ and for others it was ‘what is my purpose?’, but for Bethel, it was ‘who do I want to be?’ The question was a fairly common one, and it was something that everyone in the […]
Worth the Candle, Epilogue 6: The Narrator, the Angel, and the Devil
The Angel and the Devil had dressed up to play cheerleader to their Juniper, the Narrator. The Angel was Fenn, of course, the one who had died to poison and then gone to heaven, where she’d spent approximately three years with the Narrator, lounging about and getting a taste of the heaven that everyone else […]
Worth the Candle, Epilogue 5: It All Depends On What You Mean By Home
Darili Irid was the same as it had always been. Every time Grak went back, he found that strange. He could understand, in the abstract, that some people wanted things to be how they’d always been, and those sorts of people made up the bulk of those who populated the lower heavens, but the people […]
Worth the Candle, Epilogue 4: The Ongoing Adventures of Valencia the Red
Most people in the Mid-Uppers were there for the complete transhumanism or the lack of intellectual or creative scarcity, but not so for Valencia the Red. No, Valencia was a relatively rare specimen of the Mid-Uppers, someone who liked the neighborhood, so to speak, but also enjoyed a fairly mundane human existence. The assistants had […]
Worth the Candle, Epilogue 3: There’s No Knowing Where We’re Going
We drove down I-90 in a navy blue 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan, listening to Fenn’s eclectic mix of songs that were playing from her phone that sat beside her in the front passenger seat (she’d called shotgun). Amaryllis was driving, her hands at ten and two and her eyes straight ahead, while the rest of […]
Worth the Candle, Epilogue 2: Princess!
Amaryllis stood in the kitchen of our new home, the morning after the end of the world, cooking breakfast and singing a little song to herself. She was wearing her faded pink ‘Princess!’ t-shirt, which was at least four years old at this point, maybe more, and beneath that, pink and white striped undies. She […]
Worth the Candle, Epilogue 1: The End of the World
The world didn’t end the same way for everyone. Rance Su was a farmer, though not as diversified as the common conception of a farmer. He had no chickens or cows, no marbats or pigs. He had a single crop he tended to, taking three harvests of milk leaves a year from his numerous fields, […]