“How did it come to this…” the puppet muttered, rubbing his proverbial temples — poorly.

  “We’re gods, for gods’ sake.”

  “We’re lost,” said the one with bare feet.

  “A line has been crossed.”

  Then, sadder:

  “Expenses were lost.”

  “Stop whining about the present,” the puppet snapped.

  “Just re-gift it like a normal being.”

  He looked left. Then right. Then started walking.

  “Now where the hell is the Party Meadow?”

  A shimmer.

  A step.

  A wrong turn.

  They ended up in a very warm place.

  Lava. Fires. Screams. General damnation.

  “What the hell?” the puppet sighed.

  “It’s the smell…

  that quell…

  the fell…”

  The barefoot one beat-poemed, staring into the flames.

  “I don’t need Hell when I’m travelling with you!” the puppet hissed.

  “WHAHAH — PREPARE FOR DOOM!”

  A menacing, echoing voice erupted from the inferno.

  Then:

  “Oh… you again?”

  Satan emerged from a pillar of fire, visibly disappointed.

  “Come on, guys. Stop dropping in unannounced.”

  “Can you please, for once, point us to the meadow?” the puppet asked — strained, but trying.

  “I know of no meadow,” Satan replied bitterly.

  “I wasn’t invited to it.”

  With a snap of his fingers, the two gods vanished —

  back to stumbling through the corners of reality.

  Back to searching for the Party Meadow.

  ***

  With a not-realistically-possible bump,

  they collided with two other immortal beings.

  “Protector of Terrycloth, Lord of the Disc,” said the Barefoot, tipping his proverbial hat.

  “Bringer of Barefoot, God of Felt,” said the Lord, tipping his actual hat — a majestic blue one.

  “Might I trouble you for the logic behind your impressively incorrect choice of direction?” the Protector asked with a polite bow.

  “Were you,” the Barefoot began — to the visible dismay of the Felt — “deliberately probing the crevices of reality for… perhaps, a similar reason?”

  “Did you also forget to RSVP and leave without instructions?” the God of Felt translated dryly.

  “Well yes, how narratively whimsical,” the Lord of the Disc replied, amused.

  “We’re probably not going to find it now that we know of it,” he added.

  The Felt blinked slowly — straight through the fact that the puppet couldn’t blink.

  “Perhaps it would be advisable to expedite our removal from the current predicament by informing esteemed personae,” the Barefoot hummed.

  “Who would be prudent enough to alleviate us from our predicament?” asked the Protector of Terrycloth, delighted to have found someone who matched the eloquence of his vocabulary.

  “What?” The Felt turned to the Lord of the Disc.

  “Send a message to get picked up,” the Lord said, rubbing his hands.

  “All kinds of plot twists and comedic adventures can roll out of that.”

  “Who?” said the Felt, now losing the last fiber of his sanity.

  “ARRG, of course,” the Barefoot replied, confused.

  “All Realities Roadservices Guild.”

  “That’s not a real thing,” the Felt muttered, looking to the other two —

  …who absolutely disagreed.

  “So let’s prepare a sending enchantment and get it over with,” the Lord of the Disc concluded.

  “Let’s not ask the two thesauruses over there. The word limit’s twenty-five, I think?”

  The Felt led the Lord away from the other two, who were deep in a discussion about whether — purely philosophically — they could be the same entity.

  “Shame would be good for our word count,” the Lord of the Disc said to no one in particular, looking genuinely disappointed.

  “What?” The Felt looked around. He sighed. It was happening. He was losing it.

  “What?” the Disc Lord replied.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Just plan it out. Please. Let’s not do that terrible joke with the word-count jest,” the Felt warned.

  He was starting to really wish for either a bed or a beer. Or both. In either order.

  ***

  “Hello?”

  The Lord of the Disc spoke as the sending spell activated.

  Time passed.

  “Really?”

  The God of Felt had finally lost his last bit of patience and was now sitting on the floor of nothingness, trying to find it inside his own hands.

  “Hmm. No reply,” the Lord mused.

  “Perhaps the narrative demands we look for a different solution?”

  “A prophecy!” came the cry from both of the other entities — with giddy anticipation.

  “Doomed. We’re doomed,” came a tearful — also impossible, being a puppet — broken voice from the ground.

  “Good,” said the Lord of the Disc, nodding solemnly.

  “We need a decent text. Has to start with ‘Lo.’”

  The two others nodded. The third one cried.

  “Delivered in a timeframe that can be loosely interpreted,” added the Protector of Terrycloth.

  “So like… in the Fifth Age or something,” the Barefoot suggested.

  “Nice.”

  “There should be a dragon in it,” the Lord of the Disc declared.

  “Of course. And a kitten,” said the Barefoot.

  “Why a kitten?” asked the Lord of the Disc, suspicious.

  “If you add a dragon, I add a kitten.”

  “Come on! If we juggle insane prerequisites, we’ll be here for ages.”

  “Five ages,” the Lord muttered.

  “I hate you all,” the Felt growled.

  There was a moment of silence.

  “How do we even get it into the realm?” the puppet finally asked.

  “Bill,” all five said at once.

  The puppet blinked.

  “Wait… who are you?”

  A figure in the corner waved.

  “I’m the Patron of the Stick,” he said.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “I was here all the time,” said the Patron of the Stick.

  “Ahh.”

  Everyone nodded. No further explanation was required.

  Too polite were they to point out that five characters plotting in a crevice of reality is very hard to write.

  ***

  “Okay guys, gather round,” the Patron said, trying hard to focus on the prophecy.

  Due to creative differences — both metaphysical and aggressively personal — they had decided to work in three separate groups:

  The Terrycloth and the Barefoot, who aligned themselves to get the feel just right: premonition, ‘spooky stuff,’ and ominous line breaks in all the appropriate places.

  The Patron and the Disc, who collaborated on making sure the end and the beginning made about as much sense as the middle — which, in turn, had to feel like the beginning, but with significant differences, because narratives, of course, demand a twist now and then.

  And finally, the Felt, who had simply given up. He was now miming the act of drinking beer at a made-up bar at the end of the universe — much to the delight of the Terrycloth.

  Which, in turn, annoyed the Felt enough to drink even more imaginary beer.

  ***

  “What’s this?” the Barefoot frowned heavily.

  “Drawings. Ain’t bliss. Something’s amiss.”

  “Creative freedom!” the Lord of the Disc cried foul.

  “It’s refreshing to have a stick-figure prophecy.”

  The Felt wandered over, squinted at the scroll, and shouted,

  “It’s fifteen hundred pages!”

  Then he promptly walked away, summoned a few imaginary friends, and was now having a surprisingly decent time.

  ***

  “Frankly,” said the Terrycloth, inspecting the sprawling mess,

  “the sheer size of the work demands something marginally more elaborate than a moderate plot twist — perhaps a quantum hiccup or a small localized apocalypse. Also, nice touch with the green sword. Might benefit from a dash of reality-bending — just enough to confuse causality and possibly offend geometry.”

  The discussion started again.

  “It needs to rhyme. Words that come together in poetic staccato fit the urgency better,” the Barefoot sang, yet again.

  “It needs to be a coherent story without trying to be coherent. Or a story,” the Lord of the Disc insisted.

  “The twist of reality is one of the things that are just obvious to include.” The Terrycloth shook his head. “We have to start again.”

  The Patron looked sadly at his work.

  “Well, at least I know a place for it.”

  “You buggers,” said an imaginary drunk Felt, leaning with one arm around his imaginary friends — otherwise he’d have dropped off his barstool, which also wasn’t real.

  “I sent the prophecy to the realm three hundred years ago,” he spat, every word soaked in disdain.

  “I finished it by my second drink.”

  Hicc.

  The four stared at each other.

  “Well, we can still do annotations,” the Lord of the Disc suggested.

  “Also do some different versions of exactly the same, so people can’t say which one is the correct version,” the Terrycloth mused.

  “We need a holy song,” the Barefoot decided. “A holy anthem.”

  “First, let’s have a drink for a couple of hundred years,” the Patron nodded.

  “I know of a bar that looks interesting,” the Terrycloth pointed.

  “I’ll do a three-year beat poem,” the Barefoot smiled, already riled up.

  “Dammit,” the Felt commented,

  “even my imaginary bar isn’t safe.”

  ***

  (or: Hatbound Salvation — Less Bulky)

  Lo,

  Hear now, O Realm, the Fifth shall rise—

  Of line unbroken, beneath fractured skies.

  The dragon shall fall by the blade not of steel,

  But of Void, who knows not what truths he shall feel.

  Beside him, the godchild, marked from the womb,

  And the Gaze that turns fate into petrified gloom.

  When the Three stand ’neath the shadow of That,

  They shall seek out the Crown, long veiled as a Hat.

  Only then shall the Lost be unsealed and made free—

  And the world remember what gods used to be.