A temporal blade inserted into the belly of the world and waggled around, guts spilling out. Everyone thinks it is a dragon. Fire leaps from its mouth. The metaphorm, that was hooked to the national consciousness via a meaning collection chassis, is not just dying for itself … inside it rattles the badges of every man and woman that is part of the localised dream.
Monsters erupt out of the unconscious here. They draw maps that say it, and people in the know know it.
The first person who put pen to paper or came up with a unifying theory was shaping reality into something for someone else. Technology layers on complexity, control mechanisms express themselves in a need for secret knowledge, and pretty soon you have a caste that must preserve the knowledge and run the control.
A whole cadre of Reality Engineers were in the field, wordswords and mathblades were drawn. They were here to kill stories. The stories had got out of control.
There was a Hivemind in the local sector that was sending out Spelling Bees to talk to various alchemists and give them the words and the symbols that would unlock dangerous tales that would wag the world.
They had an Apiarist come to deal with them.
Cheever was in charge of the operation. This place had been under observation for a long time. They had a We’d Garden here, and a Would Shed: the whole place was metaphormed to the teeth. An engineered environment designed to hothouse ideas that might be picked up and shipped out to different realities as needed. It was an older version of the cancer farms. It was a failure.
It does not feel good to be ankle-deep in blood and bodies of any kind.
They only liked to say that there was a reality war when there were easily identifiable battlegrounds, but whether it was a hot war or a cold war, the fact that there were Reality Engineers meant that there was a war going on.
This planet was lost. There was nothing left that was not rabid story. He got into orbit and he fired an eraser at the planet. How many stories throughout the multiverse collapsed as this planet was dropped to the cutting room floor. He didn’t like to think. It had kept too many of them employed for too long, and now all those Reality Engineers were all headed home.