The Twenty-Sided Dice

Chapter 10: The First Real Game

Maya's bare skin hurtled through amber cracks in the universe, going back further and further. It was only a second, or maybe a few years, before she opened her eyes. She was... in her mother's car? Huh? Why was she confused? Maya didn't understand... it was a normal day, right? She was just going to play D&D, right? Repair this fourth wall with my words...

She must've had some kind of weird dream.

She got out of the car with no incident. There were no mysterious figures in the woods, she checked. Why she checked, she wasn't exactly sure. There was supposed to be someone there, right? There wasn't. Must've been a really weird dream.

Above her flew a dusty, battered raven. It beat its wings laboriously, perching on a sturdy oak tree deeper in the forest, where it shook itself and morphed into a human. Skyler breathed heavily for a few moments, then I ran my hands through my hair a few times, almost habitually.

"I forgot how draining that was." I mused to myself. Oh, right. 

"Thank you, universe, for reminding me that I have to rewrite nine whole chapters. Dang it, this story was really going somewhere, too!" I groaned to the swaying leaves. Maybe, if I looked close enough at the leaves, I could see a person. A real person, not a character that could be manipulated at will. Another writer.

The phantom writer's image faded away seconds after it appeared. There wasn't much of a point in writing, was there? Give the characters some conflict? They were only temporary. I felt nothing about completely erasing the previous characters. They were only temporary. 

Did it really matter what I wrote next? A love story, a tale of self-empowerment, a lone boy against society, a young assassin, they were all fake. They were words on my page, stories written by a lonely writer. So what did it matter that they were gone? What did it matter that they never got their happy ending? Are they even real?

Would there ever be another writer? Another who understood my need for a story, my total emptiness when I'm alone without the voices in my head? Are the characters my voices and the words only glorious, miraculous soundwaves in the air?

Do these questions ever leave a writer alone? Or are they constant torments, reminders of our suffering, reminders of the late nights with my laptop open, reminders of the nagging writer's block and drained motivation? Do the questions motivate the writing or does the writing inspire questions? And the big question...

Do the characters even matter, when they're all just different parts of me?

They don't really matter, the world is my story and the people are my characters. They're subhuman, below my concerns, below my level, and they will never matter. They never mattered, these precious words and souls of mine...

They were only temporary, after all.

[ 500 words ]

take a look inside my brain its very empty