I’m heading to London next week for Raindance. Danze Macabre: The Le Ombre Rosse Story screens in the Main Programme — not the AI sidebar, the main programme — and I’ll be there for it.

Before I get on the plane, I want to put the book in your hands.

What the book is

Cinema 3.0: The Narrative-First AI Production Manifesto is the methodology text behind the last two years of work you’ve been following here. The documentary. The music. The fictional band that 69,000 people on SoundCloud engaged with as a genuine discovered archive, many of them arguing — with some heat — that it couldn’t possibly be AI-made.

The book documents how that happened. Not as a case study of what AI tools can do, but as a practitioner’s argument for what you have to bring to the tools before they’re useful. I call the methodology Narrative-First AI Production — NFAP — and it comes down to six principles that put world coherence, craft knowledge, and audience engagement before any tool is opened.

The central argument is this: generative AI doesn’t democratise production. It democratises worlds. The question has never been whether you can now make something. It has always been whether what you make has the internal logic and emotional weight to earn a real audience’s sustained engagement. That has always required something the tools cannot supply. This book names what that something is.

It’s structured in five parts — the historical argument, the six principles with case study evidence for each, the primary case study (Le Ombre Rosse and Danze Macabre in full production detail), the practical argument (tools, economics, pedagogy), and a final section on what NFAP is not and why that matters as much as what it is. It closes with a speculative argument for Cinema 4.0 and four practitioner appendices: a World Bible Template, a Production Prompt Framework, a Curation Checklist, and a full Portfolio Index.

It is the sequel to The Cinema 2.0 Manifesto (2015). It is aimed at independent filmmakers, AI creative practitioners, educators, and anyone who has opened a generative AI tool and wondered whether what they made was art.

Why I’m offering ARCs now

The book goes live on KDP before the end of August. I set that deadline against a hard professional obligation and I intend to meet it.

But the Substack community is the right first audience for this. You’ve been here through the production of the work the book documents. You read the Substack essays that preceded it. Some of you pushed back on the methodology arguments in ways that made the manuscript better. You are not a general audience — you are the community of practitioners this book is written for.

I’d rather you have it before the general public does. And I’d rather have your honest response than a clean launch.

If you read it and it’s useful, a review on Amazon when the book goes live would mean a great deal. If you read it and have corrections, disagreements, or observations I should address before publication — I want to know.

250 copies. Download available until the end of August 2026.

Get your copy here

Download your Advance Reader Copy

The link delivers the EPUB directly to your reading app or device via BookFunnel. No cost, no commitment beyond this: if the book earns a review from you, post it on Amazon when the title goes live. If it doesn’t earn a review, no obligation.

What I’ll be doing at Raindance

Attending the Danze Macabre screening. Talking to whoever wants to talk about the methodology. Carrying a QR code to this download link for anyone who asks about the book in person.

If you’re in London for Raindance and want to connect, reply to this post. I’ll be there.

Cinema 3.0: The Narrative-First AI Production Manifesto — Julian Grant — KDP, August 2026.

“The creative act is everything that happens before you open the tool.”

Watson published sixty adventures. He also, across thirty years of publication, made sixty adventures’ worth of decisions about what not to publish.

That’s the premise of The Watson Problem, the third expansion pack for The Sussex Journals, out now at jgesq.itch.io for $1 pay what you want.

The first two packs took the archive outward — into Whitechapel, into the machinery of government and Mycroft’s long shadow. This one goes inward. Watson was in Baker Street for most of the cases the base game reconstructs. He was present. He took notes. He chose, each time, what to submit to the Strand and what to set aside.

The pack introduces the Cross-Reference Mechanic, which I think is the most interesting mechanical addition in the line so far. When Watson appears in a reconstruction, Holmes isn’t writing in isolation anymore — he’s writing against a parallel document that already exists, the published Watson account, and the mechanic asks him to locate the gap. What did Watson omit? Was it the client’s name, the method, the institutional connection, or the entire third phase of the investigation? Did Holmes know Watson was omitting it? Did he permit it?

The pre-written casefile, The Strand Suppression, is built around a specific and uncomfortable premise: Watson submitted a case to the Strand in 1898 with a chapter removed. The chapter exists — Holmes wrote it. The published account is coherent and incomplete and was well-received. This casefile is the chapter.

Watson is not a villain in this archive. He was a biographer making defensible choices under real constraints. That’s what makes the gap between his account and Holmes’s dispatch so interesting to play inside. One of them is the readable version. The other is the honest one.

The Watson Problem is $1 PWYW at jgesq.itch.io. It requires the base gamebook. It stacks cleanly with Packs 01 and 02.

https://jgesq.itch.io/the-unmentionable-dispatches-of-sherlock-holmes

Next month: The Untold Cases — pre-written casefiles for the investigations Doyle referenced but never wrote.

I want to tell you about a band that never existed.

Le Ombre Rosse — The Red Shadows — were a progressive rock group from Turin, Italy. They formed in 1971, recorded six albums across a decade of intense creative work, toured relentlessly through the fog of the post-68 Italian political scene, and broke up bitterly in 1982 after a final, catastrophic falling-out between founding members. Their music is melancholy and dense, shot through with folk undertones and jazz dissonance, the way Italian prog always was. Their photographs capture them looking exactly the way you’d expect — serious young men in serious clothes, standing in front of serious walls.

None of it is real. The band does not exist. Every song, every photograph, every liner note and band biography and internal mythology was produced using AI tools — Suno, Midjourney, Claude — for a total production budget of under $400.

The resulting 44-minute documentary, Danze Macabre: The Le Ombre Rosse Story, was selected for the Main Programme of the Raindance Film Festival 2026. Not the AI sidebar. The main programme — evaluated against non-AI documentaries by a jury with no obligation to make allowances for the production method.

More than 69,000 listeners engaged with Le Ombre Rosse on SoundCloud as they would engage with a genuinely discovered archive of 1970s recordings. Many did not believe — and some actively argued — that the music was AI-produced.

I am telling you this not to impress you, but to give you evidence. Evidence for a methodology. A way of working with AI that I’ve spent the last several years developing, testing, and refining across more than a dozen projects and multiple media forms.

I call it Narrative-First AI Production (NFAP).

This is its manifesto.

The Problem With How Most People Use AI

Most AI creative production works like this: you open a tool, you write a prompt, you generate some output, and then you decide what it is.

The tool defines the territory. The output determines the world. The creator’s role is to sort through what the machine produced and identify the pieces that seem usable.

I understand the appeal. It’s fast. It’s low-friction. Sometimes it produces genuinely surprising results. And for certain tasks — generating a quick piece of background music, producing a stock image, creating filler content — it works fine.

But it doesn’t produce art. It doesn’t produce work that coheres. It doesn’t produce worlds that an audience can inhabit, believe in, or feel emotionally moved by.

The reason is simple: the machine has no idea what the work is for. It has no understanding of the emotional register the project requires, no investment in its internal logic, no knowledge of what would make an audience lean forward rather than lean back. The machine is not a collaborator. It is a very sophisticated output device. And like all output devices, it produces exactly what you bring to it — which, if you have brought nothing, is nothing.

The fundamental error of prompt-and-generate production is the belief that the tool is the creative act. It isn’t. The creative act is everything that happens before you open the tool.

Six Principles

1. World Coherence Precedes Tool Selection

Before a single note of Le Ombre Rosse was generated, the band existed. Completely. Their biography, their musical influences, their internal conflicts, their label history, their visual aesthetic, their geographic and political context — all of it was fully articulated in writing before Suno was opened.

This is not optional. It is the load-bearing principle of the entire methodology.

When the world exists before the tool, the tool serves the world. Every generated output can be evaluated against a fixed standard: does this belong in this universe? Does this image look like a photograph this particular band, in this particular city, in this particular year, would have taken? Does this musical passage achieve the specific tonal register of late-period Italian progressive rock as filtered through a particular set of political and aesthetic commitments?

These are answerable questions — but only if the world exists first.

When the tool runs first, no such standard exists. Every output is equally valid. The result is work that feels like what it is: a random walk through probability space, wearing a thin costume of creative intention.

2. Craft Knowledge Functions as a Quality Filter

Generative AI tools produce enormous volumes of output. For Le Ombre Rosse, this meant sorting through 200+ AI-generated images to find the twelve that would constitute the band’s photographic archive. It meant evaluating dozens of musical passages to identify the handful that achieved the right tonal register.

The machine cannot do this work. The machine does not know what “right” sounds like. It does not know the difference between a convincing 1970s Italian rock band photograph and a plausible-but-wrong one. It does not know what “late-period Italian progressive rock filtered through political consciousness” actually sounds like, feels like, means.

That knowledge comes from thirty years of working in film, music, and narrative fiction. From watching hundreds of documentaries. From listening to thousands of records. From making things — and learning, through repeated failure, what makes things work.

The quality guarantee of NFAP is not algorithmic. It is craft. The methodology’s claim is not that AI produces good work — it is that craft-trained human judgment, applied rigorously to AI-generated output, can curate it into something that functions as art.

This is the skill that cannot be automated. This is what the tools are reaching for and cannot quite grasp.

3. Constraint is Generative

The $400 production budget for Danze Macabre was not a limitation to be overcome. It was a methodological parameter.

Constraint forces narrative economy. When no decision can justify itself on production value grounds — when you cannot simply throw more budget at a problem — every decision must justify itself on narrative grounds instead. Is this image in the documentary because it’s beautiful? Because it was cheap? Or because it belongs — because it advances the story, deepens the character, earns its place in the world?

I learned this principle thirty years ago making micro-budget films. It applies with equal force to AI production, and it is one of the methodology’s most transferable insights. The creator who works within constraint is forced to develop the one resource that AI tools cannot supply: clarity of intention.

The $400 budget produced a Raindance-selected documentary. The constraint was not the obstacle. The constraint was the point.

4. Audience Engagement is the Primary Validity Criterion

There is a version of AI creative production that exists entirely within the AI creator community — evaluated by other AI producers, celebrated for its technical sophistication, circulated among people who understand and are interested in the production method.

That is not what I am doing.

NFAP’s validity criterion is audience response — and specifically, the response of audiences who did not know, and in many cases did not believe, that the work was AI-produced. The 69,000+ Le Ombre Rosse listeners who engaged with the music as a genuine archive. The Raindance jury that selected Danze Macabre for its main programme without obligation to consider its production method.

This matters because it is the hardest test. It is easy to impress someone who is already impressed by AI. It is much harder to move someone who is simply listening to music, or watching a documentary, with no prior disposition to find the experience meaningful.

When AI-produced work meets that test — when it earns emotional engagement from an audience that doesn’t know and doesn’t care how it was made — it has achieved something real.

5. Transmedia Extension Tests and Deepens World Coherence

A world that exists only in one medium is a fragile world. The pressure of transmedia extension — of asking what this world sounds like, looks like, reads like, plays like — reveals whether the underlying architecture is genuinely coherent or merely convincing from one angle.

Le Ombre Rosse exists as music (79 songs, six albums), as documentary film, as photography (200+ images), as written text (band biography, liner notes, press materials). The Ironwood: The Nature of Things rock opera — a 26-track, three-act fable — extends the NFAP methodology into theatrical register, demonstrating that the same disciplinary sequence produces coherent work regardless of genre.

The Victor Sable and Hollow Archive podcast universes extend the methodology into audio drama. Sixty-plus interactive fiction titles on itch.io extend it into procedural narrative. The methodology’s claim is not that it works for music, or for documentary film, or for any single medium. It’s that it works — that the principles transfer — wherever coherent world-building and disciplined craft judgment are brought to bear.

6. The Methodology Generates New Research

This principle emerged through practice rather than design, and it is perhaps the most surprising.

In producing Ironwood, a production note read: “silence is a compositional element.” Finding a way to make the platform honour that instruction surfaced new understanding of the relationship between language and music that conventional production would not have accessed.

NFAP is not merely a production methodology. Applied with sufficient rigour and reflexivity, it is a research methodology. It generates new knowledge about the creative process, about the relationship between human intention and machine output, about what narrative coherence actually requires — not as abstract theory but as practitioner understanding, tested against the evidence of audience response.

What This Is Not

NFAP is not a claim that AI is equivalent to human creativity.

It is not a claim that the tools don’t matter, or that anyone with a good idea can produce work of artistic merit without craft foundation.

It is not a celebration of AI as a shortcut. The methodology is, in practice, more demanding than conventional production in certain respects — the world-building requirements alone are substantial, and the curation work is relentless.

It is not a manifesto against traditional craft. The methodology depends on traditional craft. Without thirty years of production experience as a quality filter, the methodology collapses.

What it is: a rigorous framework for ensuring that AI tools serve human creative intention rather than replacing it. A claim that the question “what story are we trying to tell?” must always precede the question “which tool should we use?” A demonstration that this approach, applied consistently, produces work that earns genuine audience engagement at serious critical venues.

The Invitation

I have been documenting this methodology in practice — through case studies, production diaries, and public scholarship — because I believe it matters beyond my own production work.

We are at an early and consequential moment in the history of AI creative production. The norms that are established now — what counts as rigorous practice, what counts as genuine artistic intention, what the relationship between human creativity and machine output should look like — will shape the field for decades.

The prompt-and-generate approach produces content. It does not produce art. It does not produce worlds. It does not produce the kind of work that earns a place in a serious film festival’s main programme, or 69,000 listeners who don’t know they’re listening to AI, or the kind of emotional response that makes an audience lean forward.

That requires something the machine cannot supply.

It requires you to know what the story is before you ask the machine to help you tell it.

That’s NFAP. That’s the practice. That’s the work.

Julian Grant is a Canadian filmmaker, scholar, and AI creative practitioner. His 35+ features have been distributed by HBO, Syfy, Lifetime, and Lionsgate. He spent fifteen years as a tenured Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago. His AI music portfolio has accumulated 182,000+ plays across SoundCloud in the past twelve months. Danze Macabre: The Le Ombre Rosse Story is an Official Selection of the Raindance Film Festival 2026 — Main Programme, and the AI Film Awards Las Vegas 2026.

Follow the work: SoundCloud · itch.io · YouTube

#NFAP · #NarrativeFirst · #AIProduction · #LeOmbreRosse · #DanzeMacabre · #Raindance2026

The work arrived the way the work always arrives: insisting. I woke at hours I would not have chosen. I sat at a piano that was slightly out of tune. I wrote the things the silence wanted me to write and the silence was very specific about what it wanted.

The songs on this record concern themselves with Victor Sable. This is the only subject I had complete authority over at the time. The city that made me. The name I chose. The hunger that preceded both of them. The crown built from available materials. If this is solipsism, then solipsism has underestimated what a person can make from the interior.

I was twenty-one when I signed the contract and twenty-two when I made this record. I had read twenty-two pages of a forty-one-page document. In retrospect, this says something about the record. I cannot tell you yet what it says.

The title was not a self-deprecation. I want to be clear about this.

I know what paper crowns are. They are the crowns at children’s birthday parties. They are the crowns in Christmas crackers. They are the crowns handed out to people who cannot be trusted with the real thing. They are flimsy by design. They are not built to last. A gust of wind and they are gone.

I know this. I chose the image anyway.

Because the alternative — the gold crown, the permanent crown, the crown that does not bend in rain — that crown belongs to a mythology that predates the artist’s labour. You are born into that crown or it is given to you by someone who has the authority to give it. I was not born into it. No one gave it to me. I made it from whatever I had to hand.

Paper is what I had to hand. Paper and the organ and the dark and the hunger and the name I chose and the city that made me and the contract I did not finish reading. From these materials I have made a record. From the record I have made a crown. The crown is paper. I wear it anyway.

The coronation is in the wearing, not the material.

https://on.soundcloud.com/qR3AeQaA5oxNFkxNfL

Not for long. A few weeks, maybe a month — I’ve compressed it the way you compress things that are too uncomfortable to hold at full size. I had more options than most people in that situation. Social capital, a network, the kind of face that doesn’t make service workers nervous. I wasn’t going to be outside for a full winter. I knew that, even then, in the way you know things you’re not quite admitting to yourself.

But I knew the feeling. The untethered horror that is different from any other kind of difficulty. It’s not discomfort. It’s the removal of the fixed point everything else is organized around. You don’t realize how much of your identity is a postal code until you don’t have one. You don’t realize how much of your sense of self is a key in your pocket until you reach for it and there’s nothing there.

I got through it. I rebuilt. I’m twenty years sober now. I have a wife I love and a home I’m glad to be in and a design practice that has given me more than I expected when I started it. But I never forgot the boiler room. I never forgot what it felt like to be carrying the question of how I’d gotten there alongside everything else that needed carrying. Some things you don’t metabolize. You just learn to walk with them.

UNHOUSED started there. Not with research, not with a design brief, not with a gap in the catalog. It started with the boiler room and with the particular guilt of someone who got out and knows — knows with certainty — that the getting out was at least partially luck.

The rest came later. The research. The mechanics. The specific setting — small-city Ontario, not Toronto, because the crisis in a town of sixteen thousand looks different from the crisis in a city of three million and I live in a town of sixteen thousand and I’m not interested in making games about places I’m imagining. Napanee has a shelter with eighteen beds and a waitlist. It has a warming centre open four nights a week in a church basement. It has three meth clinics and a Mission on West Ave and, at last count, ten tents down by the river that keep appearing no matter what anyone does about them.

I walk past those tents. I’ve been walking past them for months.

I’ll tell you something I’m not proud of. I tend to avoid certain people on the street. The loud ones, the erratic ones, the ones whose addiction is visible and frightening — I cross the road. I tell myself I’m being prudent. What I’m actually doing is letting the most acute manifestations of crisis stand in for the whole population, and using that as permission to look away. It’s a comfortable lie. I’ve been telling it for years. The boiler room, apparently, was not enough to cure me of it.

Then I met Shane.

He was staying at the Mission when I ran into him on West Ave. He was my age — early sixties, give or take — and what broke the ice, the way it always does with me, was my dogs. He had a way with them that you can’t perform. Animals know. He crouched down and let them climb on him and talked to them like people and I watched his face and saw someone who was glad to be exactly where he was for that one minute.

We talked for a while. Not about his situation — about lives. The kind of sidewalk conversation you have with someone when you’ve both been around long enough to have some material. I didn’t offer him money. I didn’t offer advice. I didn’t offer anything except time and the company of two dogs who didn’t know or care where he slept.

What Shane gave me was the thing I didn’t know I needed: he let me see him. Not his circumstances. Him. The person who existed prior to and separate from everything that had gone wrong. I went home that afternoon and sat with the gap between who Shane was and what his situation had reduced him to in the eyes of the town, and I thought about the boiler room, and I thought about luck, and I thought: I should make something from this.

He found a long-term arrangement eventually. I hope it held.

The design problem with a game about homelessness is the same as the design problem with a documentary about homelessness: how do you render a human being accurately without making their crisis the whole of them? The easy version is the redemption arc. The subject suffers, finds resources, overcomes. The audience leaves feeling that the system works, that effort is rewarded, that the situation is temporary and solvable if you just — and here the game would gesture vaguely at agency and resilience.

I didn’t want to make that game. I don’t think that game is honest.

The harder version is witness. You play one night. The night ends and you’re either warm or you’re not, and either way you wake up tomorrow and the situation is the same as when you started. The game documents what that one night costs — practically, in the resource called SHELTER, and in the harder-to-name register tracked by the resource called SELF. Dignity. The continuity between who you were and who you are. The thing that grinding wears away whether or not you find a bed.

The mechanic I’m most committed to is the tension between those two resources. They pull against each other by design. The shelter’s intake gets you warm and costs you something. The service worker is trying to help and treats you like a project. You can comply and be warmer or hold your ground and be colder. The game doesn’t judge either choice. It asks you to write about it. That tension — the impossible accounting between survival and self — is as close as I could get mechanically to what the actual experience seems to be. Not a puzzle to be solved. A condition to be navigated.

The playtest ran this week. I played as Gus — sixty-three, recently unhoused, twenty years of sobriety broken, carrying a question about one bad night that he can’t answer because he was somewhere he’d promised never to go again.

I’ll be direct: Gus is built from my own fears. Not my biography — my biography ends with the loving wife and the home and the twenty years. But underneath that, in the place where the boiler room lives, there is a version of events in which things went differently. In which the luck didn’t hold. In which I am sixty-three years old with a backpack and fourteen dollars on a main street in late October. I know that version. I’ve always known it was possible. Gus is what I made from knowing it.

His night was hard. The shelter intake was at five and he didn’t know that. A lead fell through — St. Andrew’s, a church basement, a volunteer named Marta who had a family emergency and left a note in a plastic sleeve on the door. He tried to go back to the garage of the house he’d been locked out of and his wife found him in the blankets and said his name the way people say a name when they’ve run out of everything else. She let him take the moving blanket when she sent him away.

He ended the night in a plastic children’s playhouse on a schoolyard. Four feet of moulded plastic that trapped his body heat and kept the wind out. He survived. In the morning he folded the blanket neatly before he left.

He didn’t know why that mattered.

That’s the moment I build these games to find. The small, specific, true thing that a table and two dice and a journal can locate if you come to them honestly. The folded blanket is not in any table. It came from Gus, which means it came from somewhere underneath twenty years of good decisions. The game made space for it. That’s what the format is for.

UNHOUSED is out now at jgesq.itch.io/unhoused. Pay what you want. One dollar suggested. Print it, fold it, sit with it for one night.

The tents are still down by the river. Shane is somewhere in Napanee, I hope warm. I still cross the road sometimes. I’m still working on that.

Julian Grant Games — jgesq.itch.io — jgesq.substack.com

Mara goes looking for it. She searches the Paris municipal licensing records, the Bibliothèque nationale theatre archive, street directories from 1970 to 1982. She finds the street. She finds the address. She does not find the venue. A reviewer writing for Rock & Folk in October 1974 described the room as claustral — a monastery word, an architecture of enclosure. The venue holds one catering registration and then stops appearing in any public record.

On Tape 3, Viktor describes the room: low ceiling, wooden chairs, a stage that is a raised section thirty centimetres high, a single overhead lamp that puts a circle of light on the performing area and leaves everything else in dark. At the back of the stage, a large oval mirror, gilt-framed, the gilding worn away in patches. When he stands in the lamp circle, he can see his own reflection clearly. The audience behind him is not in the mirror. The room, as far as the mirror is concerned, contains one person.

He also mentions a man at the best table. Stage left. He watches without moving for the full forty minutes. Viktor names him.

Then he mentions a woman at the bar. He tries to describe her. He stops mid-sentence. Three seconds of tape hiss. He moves on.

Mara plays Nosferatu — Track 3 from Lichtspiel Vol. I: Weimar Shadows. In the bridge, Viktor rewrites the ending: if he were the count, he would never have lingered. He would have taken what he wanted and walked away before the dawn could catch him. The story, in Viktor's version, ends on a fog-covered shore. The monster gets away.

After the song, Mara is not sure the monster sympathy is purely aesthetic.

The Strange Case of Victor Sable is an investigative audio documentary following audio engineer Mara Voss as she reconstructs the life, disappearance, and possible continued existence of cult dark cabaret artist Victor Sable.

Torn cleanly along the top edge — not in anger. Someone removed the pages before it and after it deliberately. What remains is a single clause, typed on paper heavier than standard, on a well-maintained mechanical typewriter, by someone who was being careful.

Mara reads it aloud.

All works of significant emotional origin, present and future, known and unknown to the artist, are held in perpetuity by Pandaemonium Records and its assignees.

In Episode 2, Mara returns to the investigation with something unresolved. She goes back through the press materials she moved past too quickly — the two reviews that give an address for the Cabaret des Oiseaux Noirs that has not appeared on any map since 1977, the 1974 Record Mirror studio address that cannot be verified, the Melody Maker interview in which Viktor described the writing process as inevitable and quoted Cornelius Ash saying the work comes easily to those who've made the right arrangements.

She also called a contact. He has been in the music industry since the late sixties. He knows the cult labels, the vanity pressings, the ones that existed for three years and left nothing behind. She described Pandaemonium Records. He went quiet.

He said: every act that signed with Cornelius Ash peaked and was simply gone. Not one came back.

She asked if he'd ever met Ash. He said he'd been in the same room once. He said Ash was impeccably dressed and very courteous and he had found himself not wanting to stay in the room longer than necessary. He said it was like standing next to a window that faces the wrong direction.

He said: I'd leave it alone if I were you.

Mara plays Tape 2. Viktor describes the recording sessions for what will become Victorian Murder Ballads — the songs arriving faster than they should, every session the session where everything comes complete. He notes Ash's correction during the rough mix playback: this is exactly what I needed, revised in the same breath to this is exactly what you have made it. Viktor says he has been thinking about the space between those two sentences since Thursday.

Then Mara plays Caligari — Track 2 from Lichtspiel Vol. I: Weimar Shadows — in full.

She closes on the contract clause. She is going to find Cornelius Ash.

The clause bothers her.

The Strange Case of Victor Sable is an investigative audio documentary following audio engineer Mara Voss as she reconstructs the life, disappearance, and possible continued existence of cult dark cabaret artist Victor Sable.

LONDON, UK — May 2026 — Julian Grant Productions is proud to announce that Danze Macabre: The Le Ombre Rosse Story, a 44-minute music documentary and transmedia event unlike anything previously presented at a major international festival, will receive its International Premiere at the Raindance Film Festival on Thursday, June 18th, 2026.

Danze Macabre chronicles the rise and dissolution of Le Ombre Rosse — a fictional Italian dark cabaret and progressive rock band formed in a deconsecrated Roman church in 1971 — through the eyes of those who knew them best. Set against the violent political backdrop of *l”gli anni di piombo” (the Years of Lead), the film follows a broken former musician living in a British homeless shelter as he receives a package of anonymous cassette tapes from a Tuscany monastery, unraveling a 32-year mystery surrounding his bandmate Elena “La Strega” Monti, who vanished without explanation in 1976.

Part rock biography, part mystery, part character study, Danze Macabre is a meditation on memory, loss, redemption, and the enduring power of music to outlast everything — including the musicians themselves.

-----

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Danze Macabre is the centrepiece of the Le Ombre Rosse transmedia universe, an ambitious, fully AI-assisted cultural experiment that asks a fundamental question: “Can artificially generated culture produce genuine human emotion?”

The answer, it turns out, is yes. The Le Ombre Rosse music catalogue — 79 original songs across six studio albums — has been streamed over 46,000 times on SoundCloud by listeners who engage with the band as if they were real.

The project was conceived, written, and directed by Julian Grant, who handled all narrative construction, world-building, scriptwriting, and creative direction. AI tools were used throughout production — for music generation (Suno), visual assets (Midjourney, OpenArt), voice work (ElevenLabs), and animation (Weavi) — with full transparency about their role in the creative process. Danze Macabre stands as a serious and thoughtful investigation into what AI-assisted cultural production can achieve when guided by rigorous human creative vision.

Festival Premiere Raindance Film Festival — International Premiere

Screening Date |Thursday, June 18th, 2026 With a repeat on June 19th, 2026

LOGLINE

A forgotten British musician living in a homeless shelter reconnects with his shattered past when anonymous cassette tapes arrive from a Tuscany monastery — revealing the fate of his bandmate who vanished 32 years ago, and raising the possibility that their dead singer may still be guiding her from beyond.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

“Le Ombre Rosse was built to answer one question: can something that never existed make you feel something real? Over 46,000 streams and two festival acceptances later, I believe it can. Raindance has always championed filmmaking that challenges what cinema is allowed to be. There is nowhere more fitting for this film to make its international debut.”

Purchase tickets here: https://raindance.org/festival/

I checked the numbers at six in the morning.

I do this more than I should — the SoundCloud dashboard, the itch.io sales, the little graphs that tell you whether anyone out there is listening. Usually the graphs are polite. A few hundred plays. The dedicated audience that follows the Grant Guignol Anthology for reasons I find genuinely heartening. Enough to justify continuing. Enough to feel like the work is landing somewhere real.

NEILSEN PARK had many thousands of plays by the time I looked. All 27 tracks. People were sitting with the whole thing. Over 21,000 as of this writing.

I sat with that for a while before I did anything else. Not because the number is extraordinary in any objective sense — the internet contains multitudes, most of them louder than a grunge rock opera about a dead teenager in 1979 Etobicoke. But because of what this particular piece of work is, and where it came from, and the specific thing it cost to make. Strangers were finding something in it. That is not a metric. That is a different kind of accounting entirely.

So let me tell you what it is. All of it, this time.

Nielsen Park is a real place.

It is a public park on the Etobicoke waterfront in Toronto’s west end — a strip of grass and trees and a small beach where Lake Ontario comes in. Beautiful in the way suburban parks are beautiful: designed for families, repurposed by teenagers every Friday night in summer. The fire goes down by the water. That was true in 1979. I assume it is still true now because the suburb never changes the parts that matter.

I was seventeen in the summer of 1979. I lived on the townhouse side of the Markland Woods border — if you grew up in Etobicoke, you know exactly what that sentence means, and if you didn’t, here is the short version: there was a line. On one side, detached houses, finished basements, garages that fit two cars, the visual language of having arrived. On the other side: us. Not poor. Not struggling exactly. Just on the wrong side of the line, which in Etobicoke in 1979 was its own complete education in how the world was organised.

We went to Nielsen Park on Friday nights because Nielsen Park was neutral ground. The crews from both sides of the border, the fires, the weed that someone’s cousin always seemed to have, the acid on the nights the summer went wide. We called it the Social. Nobody decided to call it that.

That summer, a boy I knew was killed at a party in that park.

I am going to be careful here not because I am protecting myself but because some of the people involved are still alive and the suburb’s version of events — which is to say the version that was never quite examined, never quite named, allowed to harden into the agreed-upon story — is the version that has stood for nearly five decades. I am not going to be the thing that destabilises that now. What I will tell you is what the opera tells you: there was a girl. There was a boy who was loyal to her in the worst possible way. There was a hammer. There was a part of the park where you could find someone who had been described to you just precisely enough.

The suburb processed this the way suburbs process everything: by not processing it at all. The cover story settled. The family moved through their grief in the language of avoidance — the casseroles from neighbours, the television sound, the stove cleaned twice. The following summer the park was full again. The fires went back down to the water. The chant started up, whatever they called it that year.

I have been thinking about that summer, on and off, for forty-seven years.

I did not intend to make an opera about it.

I was working through the Grant Guignol Anthology in what I imagined was an orderly fashion. IRONWOOD was a forest in winter. STRANG UND DRANG was a pirate king on a Great Lakes island. AVE SATANAS was Anton LaVey in a San Francisco parlour. Each one a controlled distance from the personal. Each one a world I could move through as a craftsman rather than someone with unfinished business.

Work 04 was going to be something else. I had notes. I had a concept. I sat down to begin and what came out instead was Roger — a seventeen-year-old dead narrator, already talking, already clear-eyed in the way I imagine the dead to be clear-eyed, narrating the summer that killed him from the other side of it.

He arrived fully formed in the first session. The geography came with him — the townhouses, the ravine, the Frat Pack from Markland Woods, the fire down by the water, the chant. Lisa came second. Sam came last, and Sam was the hardest, because what Sam carries is the most specific and terrible thing in the opera: a loyal boy handed a hammer by someone he loved, not fully understanding the weight of what he was holding, and carrying the understanding of that weight for the rest of his short life.

The hammer. I know where that detail came from. I am not going to say more than that.

The production ran across dozens of Suno AI sessions — 27 tracks, three acts, four principal voices each built from a distinct sonic register. Roger’s voice is Kurt Cobain’s ache filtered through Neil Young’s melodic undertow. Lisa is Courtney Love, Live Through This era — the pop hook underneath the distortion, the song you can’t stop singing when you understand what it’s about. Sam’s voice starts as a high baritone with the physical confidence of a boy who has never been tested and deteriorates, song by song across three acts, toward a full Tom Waits register by the time he reaches the garage in the finale. The register tells his story before the lyrics do.

The decision to make this a grunge opera set in 1979 felt wrong for about thirty seconds and then felt completely right. Because grunge is the sound of suburban dread made articulate. Because the distorted guitar is the instrument that tells the truth about the suburb the suburb refuses to tell about itself. Because Kurt Cobain, aged twelve in Aberdeen, Washington in 1979, would have understood Nielsen Park completely and never needed to visit.

What I did not expect was the forgiveness.

Roger cannot leave Nielsen Park until he forgives Lisa. He is trapped there — watching the crew dissolve, watching Sam find the garage, watching Lisa walk away from everything she did without looking back — and the only door out is the one that requires him to name what she did and then let it go. Not because she deserves it. Not because she asks. She never asks. She doesn’t know it’s happening. He forgives her because he is dead, and the dead have nothing left to protect, and the suburb offers no other exit.

Writing that aria — Song 26, Forgiveness (Nielsen Park) — was the strangest experience of the Grant Guignol project so far. Stranger than the Crow’s sacrifice in IRONWOOD. Stranger than Vera Cass watching Strang die at the dock. Stranger than LaVey at the solo piano. Because I was not writing a character finding his exit. I was working something out in the only medium available to me at that particular moment.

I have been standing in that park for a long time.

Roger is gone now. I think that is true. I made this opera to let him go and it appears to have worked, which is either a statement about the therapeutic value of AI-generated rock opera or a statement about the specific power of naming things you have been not-quite-naming for forty-seven years. Possibly both. Probably both.

The response has surprised me in a way I want to be honest about.

The people writing in are not all Grant Guignol regulars. They are people who grew up near a park like that. People who knew a boy like that. People who understood immediately what the line between the townhouses and the detached houses means without needing it explained. One person wrote: I grew up four blocks from a place exactly like this. I didn’t know someone had made this about it. Another: The cover story. That’s exactly what it’s called. That’s the word.

The cover story. Yes. That is the word. The suburb’s great ongoing achievement — the story that everyone agrees on because the alternative is the real one, and nobody is ready for the real one, and eventually the suburb decides it never happened at all and the park fills up again on Friday nights as if the ground is clean.

The ground is not clean. The opera says so. Thousands of people are apparently ready to hear that.

All 27 tracks of NEILSEN PARK are streaming now on SoundCloud.

Listen here.

If it finds you: I hope it finds you well. I hope whatever park you’ve been standing in has a door you can find. Roger found his. It took him three acts and forty-seven years of the person who made him, but he found it.

Social. Social. Social.

The chant rises. The summer is on.

He’s gone.

NEILSEN PARK is Work 04 of the Grant Guignol Anthology.

Works 01–03 — IRONWOOD: The Nature of Things, STRANG UND DRANG: King of Beaver Island, and AVE SATANAS: Do What Thou Wilt — are available now on SoundCloud and itch.io. A cross-anthology analysis covering all four completed works is coming.

All works produced using Suno AI.

© 2026 Julian Grant

RuneSlinger is an eight-book urban fantasy series set inside Ontario’s correctional system. New here? Start with Chapter 1. All chapters are free.

Previously: The Warden showed his hand. Thor played his. The meeting changed the shape of what’s possible inside CNCC — and what’s expected. Thor has nine years left on a ten-year sentence. He’s not the same man who came in. He’s starting to understand exactly what he is.

The Warden’s warning stayed with me.

Not three nights. Not three weeks. Longer than that. Much longer.

The months blurred together after that meeting. Wednesdays pushing the library cart with Gibbins scrolling his phone behind me. Books on the upper bunk every night, reading philosophy and asking questions that made my brain hurt. Werner’s frustrated glances across the yard. Axel’s calculating stares. Rey’s patient hostility simmering just below the surface.

The practice became routine. Not easy—magic’s never easy, costs too much for that—but familiar. Wednesday mornings I’d take requests. Evenings I’d deliver. Love spells for the lonely. Protection sigils for the scared. Curses for those who’d been wronged, or thought they had. The line between the two got blurry sometimes.

Books helped with that. Helped me think through the ethics, the consequences, the weight of each working. “You’re not just a practitioner,” he’d say. “You’re responsible for what you unleash.” Took me a while to really understand that. Took watching a curse I’d thrown rebound on someone who didn’t deserve it. Took seeing a love spell twist into obsession because I wasn’t careful enough with the parameters.

I got better. Had to.

The magic grew with the practice. Astral projection became second nature—within the prison, anyway. I could slip out of my body, scout the tiers, gather intelligence, be back before Books finished his current chapter. The temporal displacement problem stayed, though. Outside CNCC’s walls, I’d still drift through time like a leaf in a stream. Landed in the past more often than the present. Never the future, for some reason. Maybe you can’t project to what doesn’t exist yet.

The library became my sanctuary. Books and I would spend hours there on our off days, pulling dusty volumes on everything from Crowley to quantum mechanics. He was convinced magic was just physics we didn’t understand yet. I thought it was weirder than that. We’d argue about it, friendly-like, while the other inmates gave us space. Nobody fucked with the witch and his philosopher.

Brotherhood kept me protected. Werner still tried to recruit me fully—wanted me to commit to the ideology, not just the alliance. I kept dancing around it. Respectful but non-committal. Axel understood the game better. He’d nod when we passed in the yard. Didn’t ask for more than I could give. Just expected me to keep being useful. Which I was.

The Latin Kings stayed hostile. Not actively—Rey was too smart for that—but there was always tension. Always the sense that one wrong move would tip things over. I walked carefully around them. Avoided 2-Beta when I could. Kept my magic neutral, refused any job that smelled like faction warfare.

First year in, Old Man Petersen died. Heart attack, they said. Happened in his sleep. I didn’t cast that working, but I’d done enough spells for him over the months that part of me wondered if I’d contributed somehow. Books talked me down from that spiral. “You can’t control everything. Sometimes people just die.”

Eighteen months in, Chains’s cancer came back worse. The working I’d done had bought him time—over a year of being mostly pain-free—but pancreatic cancer doesn’t forgive. He died in the infirmary with the Brotherhood around him. Axel asked if I could do anything. I told him no. Some things magic can’t fix. He accepted that. Didn’t push.

Books became the closest thing to family I had inside. Flaco’s goodbye still ached sometimes—thought about him on the outside, hoped he was making it—but Books filled that space differently. Teacher, friend, conscience. We’d sit in Cell 47 after lights out, talking about everything. Philosophy. Magic. What happened after prison. Whether I’d ever really be free, or if these walls lived in you forever.

“You’ll get out eventually,” Books would say. “Question is: who will you be when you do?”

I didn’t have an answer to that. Still don’t, really. But I was working on it.

The magic kept growing. I’d add layers to Cell 47’s wards every few months, stacking protections like armor plating. The cell hummed with power now. Anyone with the Sight could probably see it glowing. But nobody in CNCC had the Sight except me. Far as I knew.

That thought bothered me sometimes. Was I really the only one? In a facility with fourteen hundred inmates, was I the only practitioner? Seemed unlikely. But if there were others, they kept quiet. Or maybe they were like I’d been at the start—unconscious, untrained, not even knowing what they had.

I kept Kraus’s six principles written in the back of that Kierkegaard book. Checked them sometimes, made sure I wasn’t drifting. Never enslave another’s will. Don’t harm innocents. Don’t work gang violence. Charge fair prices. Refuse jobs that cross lines. Use power to protect, not dominate.

Books had helped me write those. “You need rules,” he’d said. “Without them, power makes its own rules. And you won’t like what it decides.”

He was right. He usually was.

Connor called every month, same as always. Saturdays, fifteen minutes. His daughter was now six. Smart kid asked questions about everything. “When’s Uncle Thor coming home?” she’d asked during our last call. Connor didn’t have a good answer. Neither did I.

Eight more years, I’d tell myself. Almost a quarter through. Keep your head down, keep practicing, keep surviving.

But lately, I’d started wondering about Kraus’s old cell.

Eventually, I went looking for ghosts.

Books was asleep—or pretending to be, which was basically the same thing in a six-by-ten cell. I lay on my bunk, relaxed into the familiar feeling of separation. Body here, consciousness elsewhere. The ethereal tether formed, that golden dust trail connecting me to my meat. I’d done this enough times now that it felt natural. Easy, even.

I thought about Cell 23. Kraus’s old space, twenty-four cells down on 3-Alpha. Being renovated, which meant empty. Which meant I could look without some fish freaking out about a ghost in his cell.

The world collapsed. Snap. There.

Cell 23 smelled like fresh paint even in astral form—weird how some sensory shit crossed over. The bunks were gone, mattresses stacked in the hallway. Concrete walls bare, ready for new occupants who’d never know a Nazi occultist died here.

But I could see what they couldn’t.

Protection wards covered the walls. Not carved—painted, drawn, etched in substances I didn’t want to think about too hard. Invisible to regular sight, but in astral they glowed faint blue. Three layers, overlapping. The outermost was simple deflection work, the kind that made violence bounce off. Middle layer was confusion—guards would avoid this cell without knowing why, find reasons to walk past it. The innermost was personal, tied to Kraus specifically. Fading now that he was dead, but still there. Still humming with residual power.

Old man had been serious about his privacy.

I drifted to the bunk frame still bolted to the wall. Someone had half-assed removing it—one side hung loose, the other still anchored. Underneath, carved into the metal support beam where no casual inspection would ever see it, were diagrams. Instructions. A whole fucking manual for thought-form construction.

I moved closer. The symbols were a mix—Norse runes, alchemical signs, some shit I didn’t recognize. But the pattern was clear enough. Building blocks: will, belief, purpose, release. Steps for creating semi-autonomous magical entities. Little worker spirits you could send out to do specific tasks.

Warnings too. Carved deep, like Kraus had really wanted this part to stick: Lose control, they turn on you. Define poorly, they interpret creatively. Create too many, they drain you dry.

Yeah. Filed under “use sparingly.”

The toilet tank was next. I phased through the porcelain—one advantage of being incorporeal—and found more etchings inside the tank itself. Temporal anchoring techniques. How to fix your consciousness to a specific point in time before projecting. Blood sigil on the body, specific rune sequence, focus on the now.

That’s why I kept slipping into the past when I projected outside CNCC. No anchor. I was drifting through time like a leaf in a stream, landing whenever the current took me.

Kraus had solved that problem decades ago. Left the solution in his fucking toilet tank.

I checked the ventilation grate last. Had to squeeze through—even in astral, tight spaces felt wrong. But there, carved into the metal ductwork behind the grate, was Kraus’s darkest work.

Binding rituals. Instructions for enslaving another person’s will. Making them puppets. Taking away choice, autonomy, everything that made someone human and turning them into a meat robot that did what you wanted.

I read it all. Needed to know how it worked—if only so I’d recognize it if someone tried it on me. But the whole time I was reading, my skin crawled. This wasn’t magic. This was evil wearing magic’s clothes.

Behind the binding instructions, carved even deeper—like Kraus had hidden his final message where only someone serious would find it—was an inscription in German. Books had been teaching me basics, but I sketched it anyway. Would need his help translating.

I followed the golden tether back to Cell 47. Snapped into my body with the usual disorienting jolt. Took a breath. Another. Checked my watch—two hours gone. Books was definitely awake now, reading by the dim light from the tier.

“You find what you were looking for?” he asked without looking up from his book.

“Yeah. Kraus left me homework.”

“The good kind or the kind that gets you killed?”

“Both.”

Four weeks. That’s how long it took to decode Kraus’s architecture grimoire. Nightly visits to Cell 23, sketching everything I could see. Days spent cross-referencing with library books, figuring out what the symbols meant, how the techniques worked. Books helped with the German, translated the philosophical stuff I couldn’t parse.

The old Nazi had been brilliant. Racist piece of shit, yeah, but brilliant. He’d encoded his entire practice into that cell. Every surface had lessons. The walls taught protection. The bunk taught creation. The toilet taught time. The ventilation taught domination.

I took what I needed. Left what I didn’t.

Temporal anchoring came first. I practiced in Cell 47, Books watching like this was the most interesting biology experiment he’d ever seen. Blood sigil on my forearm—small, discreet, looked like a scratch to anyone who didn’t know better. The rune sequence was simple: Dagaz for day, Jera for year, Raidho for journey. Combined, they meant “now.” Present moment. Anchor point.

I projected to the yard. Stayed in the present. Saw inmates in real-time, not six months ago or three weeks future. Just now.

“It worked,” I said when I snapped back. My nose was bleeding—the sigil took more out of me than I’d expected—but it fucking worked.

Books handed me toilet paper. “You’re getting better at this.”

“Or the magic’s getting better at using me. Kraus warned about that.”

“Then stay vigilant.”

Yeah. Easier said than done.

Layered wards took a week to implement properly. Cell 47 already had basic protection—the shit I’d thrown up after the Brotherhood came for me that first time. But Kraus’s technique was different. Multiple spells, different purposes, stacked like armor plating. Each layer exponentially stronger than the last.

I added three new layers. First: physical barrier enhancement. Made the walls harder, denser, resistant to force. Second: magical deflection. Any spell thrown at this cell would bounce. Third: perception filter. Anyone looking for me specifically would have trouble finding Cell 47. Their eyes would slide past it, their minds would find reasons to check other cells first.

Cost me two nosebleeds and a splitting headache that lasted three days. But when I was done, Cell 47 was the most protected space in CNCC. Maybe the most protected space I’d ever created.

Books tested it. Tried to remember our cell number while I was maintaining the perception filter. Took him five minutes to get it right, and he lived here.

“That’s deeply unsettling,” he said.

“That’s the point.”

Thought-form construction I only tested once. Too dangerous, too draining, too much potential for shit to go sideways. But I needed to know I could do it.

Library cart day. Gibbins walking behind me like usual, scrolling his phone like the world’s most disinterested prison guard. I visualized a small entity—barely conscious, single purpose. Looked like a gremlin in my head, all spite and mischief. Gave it one task: make Gibbins drop his phone.

Poured will into the visualization. Felt it take shape, become semi-real. Released it.

The thought-form zipped across the tier, invisible to everyone but me. Wrapped around Gibbins’s wrist. Yanked.

His phone clattered to the concrete. Screen cracked. Gibbins cursed, bent to pick it up.

The thought-form dissolved. Job done, no reason to exist anymore.

I kept pushing the cart like nothing happened. But my head was pounding, my nose was bleeding, and I was so exhausted I nearly collapsed when I got back to the cell.

Books caught me. “What did you do?”

“Tested something. Won’t do it again unless I have to.”

“Good. You look like death.”

Took me two days to recover. Thought-forms weren’t toys. They were weapons. Expensive, dangerous weapons that cost more than they were worth most of the time.

But I could make them. That knowledge alone was worth the price.

Blood wards were the final piece. Permanent protections tied to location, not person. I added them to Cell 47’s corners, tiny sigils drawn in my own blood, activated with focused will. They’d last until someone stronger came along and broke them. Since I was the only practitioner in CNCC—the only one I knew about, anyway—that meant they’d last as long as I was here.

The cell was mine now. Truly, completely mine. Warded tighter than a drum, protected six ways from Sunday. Nobody was getting in unless I let them.

The binding rituals I read. Understood. Refused to use.

Books helped me translate the final inscription—the warning Kraus had carved behind the ventilation grate. We sat in the library, Books reading the German I’d sketched, speaking it soft so nobody else would hear.

“Die Macht wählt sein Gefäß.“ He paused. “The power chooses its vessel.”

“Yeah, Kraus said that before. What’s the rest?”

Books kept reading. “Nutze es weise, oder es wird dich verzehren. Ich dachte, ich wäre Meister. Ich lag falsch. Die Magie benutzte mich so sehr, wie ich sie benutzte. Mache nicht meinen Fehler, Junge. Sei stärker als ich war.“

“Translation?”

“Use it wisely, or it will consume you. I thought I was master. I was wrong. The magic used me as much as I used it. Don’t make my mistake, boy. Be stronger than I was.”

We sat there quiet for a while. The library was empty except for us—Tuesday afternoon, nobody gave a shit about books when there was yard time available.

“He was warning you,” Books said finally. “At the end, dying, he had enough clarity to see what the power had done to him.”

“Nazi regrets. Touching.”

“Don’t be flippant. This is important.” Books closed my sketch, looked at me direct. “Kraus gave you everything he knew. Techniques, knowledge, power. But he also gave you a choice. Use it like he did—to dominate, control, serve your ideology—or use it differently.”

“I’m not him.”

“No. But you could become him. Power’s seductive. It offers solutions to every problem. Protection. Wealth. Respect. Fear. All the things you need to survive in here. Easy to start crossing lines when the lines get you killed.”

“That’s why I have you. Moral compass and shit.”

Books smiled. “That’s why you have you, Thor. I can advise. You decide.”

Yeah. He was right. Every spell, every working, every choice—mine. My responsibility. My soul on the line.

We created the framework that night. Back in Cell 47, Books on the upper bunk, me on the lower. He pulled out a library book—Kierkegaard, some dense philosophy shit nobody else would ever check out—and opened to the back cover.

“Write them down,” he said. “Your principles. The lines you won’t cross.”

I thought about Danny. About Rochelle and unborn Jamal. About Chains dying of cancer, pain managed but not cured. About Rey wanting me to curse some Kingsmen because gang politics. About the Brotherhood wanting full commitment. About the Warden’s warning. About Kraus’s final message.

I wrote six principles in tiny letters inside the back cover:

1. Never enslave another’s will
2. Don’t harm innocents
3. Don’t work gang violence
4. Charge fair prices
5. Refuse jobs that cross lines
6. Use power to protect, not dominate

Books read them over my shoulder. “Good. Now the hard part.”

“What’s that?”

“Keeping them.”

Saturday. Phone call day.

Connor picked up on the second ring. “Thor. How you holding up?”

“Better. Yeah. I’m good.”

Silence on his end. Then: “You sound different.”

“Different how?”

“Less scared. More... I don’t know. Settled.”

I leaned against the payphone, watching the yard through wire mesh. Latin Kings on the basketball court. Brotherhood at the weights. Black Kingsmen scattered throughout. Everyone in their territories, everyone knowing the lines.

“I found my place here,” I said. “Weird thing to say about prison, but it’s true.”

“Your place doing what?”

Couldn’t tell him. Wouldn’t understand. “Just... surviving. But better at it now.”

“Marco called again. Wants to apologize. Says he thinks about what happened every day.”

“Don’t care.”

“Thor—”

“I mean it. What Marco did, what happened—that’s done. This is mine now. I own it. He can keep his apologies.”

Connor was quiet again. “You really have changed.”

“Two years’ll do that.”

We talked about his daughter. She was six now, asking questions about everything. Why’s the sky blue. Where do babies come from. When’s Uncle Thor coming home. That last one hurt, but I handled it.

Eight more years. She’d be fourteen when I got out. Might barely remember me.

“I’ll see you all as soon as I can,” I’d told Connor. Though at the time I thought I had eight more years. Turned out I was wrong about that. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Fifteen minutes passed fast. The automated voice cut in: “One minute remaining.”

“Love you, man,” Connor said.

“You too. Tell the little one her uncle’s thinking about her.”

“Always do.”

Click.

I hung up. Walked back to the tier. Cell 47 was waiting. Books was waiting. Wednesday library cart was waiting.

But I wasn’t scared anymore.

Wednesday morning. Library cart. Gibbins with his replacement phone, scrolling like the first one never died.

Inmates approached. Same requests, different day. Love spells, protection sigils, curses on enemies. I evaluated each one against the framework. Personal business? Sure. Gang war? No. Innocent target? Absolutely fucking not.

Old Man Petersen wanted another dick spell. “Last one wore off.”

“They do that. Fifteen.”

“Ten?”

“Fifteen or keep your limp dick.”

He paid.

Vinnie Pipes asked for a protection sigil for his daughter. Birthday coming up, wanted her safe. I drew it for free, same as always. He tried to pay anyway. I refused. He nodded, respect in his eyes.

Prophet Muhammad requested a theological debate about the nature of divine will versus human agency in magical practice. I told him to ask Books—way above my pay grade. He laughed, said he would.

By lunch count, I’d taken seven jobs. Turned down four. Two Brotherhood requests for gang curses—Werner looked disappointed but not surprised. One Latin Kings request that felt like a setup—told the messenger no, walked away before it escalated. One independent who wanted me to make his cellie disappear—told him to fuck off, that crossed every line I had.

The magic was mine. The choices were mine. The consequences would be mine.

I could live with that.

That night, I took stock.

Books was reading again—always reading. I lay on my bunk staring at the ceiling, counting up where I stood.

Time served: Two years, give or take. Felt like twenty. Felt like two days. Time was weird in prison.

Time remaining: Eight years. Long time. Enough to master what Kraus left me. Enough to figure out what magic looked like outside these walls—if it worked at all out there.

Position: Established. “El Bruja” wasn’t just a nickname anymore. It was a brand. A reputation. Fear and respect in equal measure.

Allies: Books, first and always. True friend in a place where friendship was currency. Werner, complicated—protected me but wanted commitment I wouldn’t give. Vinnie, respectful—old-school criminal who understood honor. Scattered clients who paid fair and didn’t cross lines.

Enemies: Rey and the Latin Kings, hostile since I refused their curse. Some Brotherhood members who wanted full commitment thought I was disrespecting the ink. Anyone who figured out I was Danny’s snitch—though that seemed unlikely two years later. Maybe Danny himself, if he ever got transferred back. Doubtful. Violent offenders didn’t usually return to medium security.

Reputation: Fear kept me safe. Respect kept me employed. Isolation kept me sane, weirdly enough. Can’t betray people you’re not close to. Can’t lose what you never had.

Wealth: Comfortable by prison standards. Commissary account flush. Trade goods stocked. Cash hidden under the sink—couple hundred at least. Enough to handle emergencies, buy protection if the Brotherhood alliance ever collapsed.

Magic: Advanced practitioner. Still learning, still growing. Dangerous to others. Dangerous to myself if I wasn’t careful. Kraus’s grimoire gave me techniques that would take years to fully master. Temporal anchoring, layered wards, thought-forms, blood magic, all of it. Plus whatever I’d discovered on my own. Chaos magic meant no limits except the ones I set.

Soul: Intact. So far. Books helped with that. The framework helped with that. Refusing the binding rituals helped with that. But Kraus’s warning echoed: The magic used me as much as I used it.

Had to stay vigilant. Had to keep choosing right over easy. Had to remember I was Thor O’Reilly from Parkdale, not some prison demigod who could do whatever the fuck he wanted.

The power chose its vessel. Yeah. But the vessel still got to choose how the power was used.

I’d choose different than Kraus. Had to. Or I’d end up like him—brilliant and broken, powerful and poisoned, dying with regrets carved into ventilation grates.

Two years down. Eight to go.

The runes hummed under my skin. Blood memory. Will made manifest. Chaos magic.

I was Thor. Not the god. Just a guy from Parkdale with Nordic tattoos who learned sometimes the ink chooses you.

And I had work to do.

Thursday afternoon. Yard time.

Vinnie Pipes found me by the fence, away from the gangs and their territories. He looked around, making sure nobody was close enough to hear.

“Got some news,” he said quiet. “You know Danny Keyes?”

My stomach dropped. “Yeah. Why?”

“Word from up north. Violent offenders facility. Danny found himself a practitioner.”

The world tilted. “What?”

“Another spellslinger. Like you. Been working magic in that facility for years, apparently. Older guy, serious reputation. Danny’s been paying him for workings.”

“What kind of workings?”

Vinnie shrugged. “Don’t know specifics. But Danny knows about you. Knows what you can do. And now he’s got his own witch.”

He walked away before I could ask more questions. Smart. This conversation never happened. Just two guys in the yard, shooting the shit.

I stood there processing.

Danny Keyes. The man who killed Rochelle and Jamal. The man I snitched on, sent to violent offenders, thought I’d never see again. He’d found another practitioner. Someone with years of experience, serious reputation, magical firepower I couldn’t even guess at.

And Danny knew about me.

The Brotherhood could protect me from Latin Kings, from rival gangs, from regular prison violence. But this? This was different. This was magical. This was someone with power coming after someone else with power.

This was a problem I couldn’t ward my way out of.

I looked at my hands. The blood sigil was fading on my forearm—would need to refresh it tonight. Protection wards hummed around Cell 47, layers deep, strong as I could make them. Kraus’s techniques lived in my head now, ready to use.

But I wasn’t alone in the magical world anymore. Wasn’t the only one slinging spells in Ontario’s prison system. Someone else was out there. Someone older. Someone Danny Keyes had access to.

Books was right. The hard part wasn’t learning the magic.

The hard part was what came after.

Yeah.

That was gonna be a problem.

END OF BOOK 1

That’s Book 1. Thank you for reading. You can find the entire RuneSlinger Series on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/RuneSlinger/dp/B0FWBVWV7Z/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_kss_ap_sba_0?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=sitqp&content-id=amzn1.sym.a9b2f790-2337-4bd0-92a6-d6faa77cb826&pf_rd_p=a9b2f790-2337-4bd0-92a6-d6faa77cb826&pf_rd_r=139-4794036-6730958&pd_rd_wg=nWjPl&pd_rd_r=41cd3bfb-aec2-48b1-9032-20174824c99a

New to RuneSlinger? Start with Chapter 1.

← Chapter 11: The Warden’s Game | Book 2, Chapter 1 →

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There’s a line I keep coming back to when I try to explain what this game is.

This is not Weird West. There is no swagger here, no genre pleasure. The register is closer to Winter’s Bone — drought-cracked earth, failed homesteads, the specific American horror of a community that kept quiet until it was too late.

That line does a lot of work. It tells you what the game isn’t — which matters as much as telling you what it is. The solo RPG space has a well-worn groove for supernatural Americana: revolvers and railroad towns and monsters with style. That groove exists because it’s fun. I’ve played in it myself. But it wasn’t what I was reaching for when I wrote the story that started all of this.

The Story Came First

It always does, for me.

I’ve been publishing short fiction for years — Danse Macabre, Horla, Fiction on the Web, The Adelaide Literary Magazine, small press venues that take the work seriously without requiring you to sand off all the edges first. I’m a filmmaker by training and a professor by career, but the short story is where I think most clearly. It’s the form that lets me get at something fast and then get out before I explain too much.

The story that became The Holler was called, simply, Pride & Joy. A father and son. A dying county. A barn full of things that used to be neighbors. The father teaching the boy how to survive it — the protocols, the angles, the blood contamination rules — and the love underneath all that instruction that couldn’t find any other shape to take.

I published it. Moved on. That’s the deal with short fiction. You write it, you release it, you write the next one.

Then the reads started coming in on World Anvil.

Nineteen thousand of them, at last count.

I’m a working artist. I make films, I write books, I design games. Nineteen thousand reads on a piece of short fiction is not a number I take lightly. That’s not an algorithm. That’s people finding something in a story about a boy and his dead father in a fictional Appalachian county and deciding it was worth their time. Worth sharing. Worth coming back to.

It told me something was alive in that world. Something I hadn’t finished with yet.

Why a Game

I’ve been designing solo journaling RPGs for a few years now under the Julian Grant Games banner. The form suits how I think about narrative — not as a fixed track but as a set of conditions that generate something different every time someone sits down with it. You build the oracle tables, you build the resource system, you build the prompts. Then you let go, and the player and the dice make something you never could have planned.

What the solo RPG does that prose fiction can’t is put the reader inside the position rather than beside it.

When you read Pride & Joy, you watch Joshua Cain kill his father. You watch him walk out of the burning barn. It’s devastating in the way good short fiction is devastating — at a distance, with craft, controlled.

When you play the game, you are Joshua. You roll the dice. You draw on Jacob’s training. You mark the Weight when the Henley girl’s face stops you for two seconds too long. The hesitation is yours. The cost is yours. The journal entry you write afterward — in Joshua’s voice, in first person, in the dark — that belongs to you in a way no story ever could.

That’s the transaction I’m interested in. Not horror as spectacle but horror as identification. Not watching someone break under the weight of survival but feeling that weight yourself, in a controlled space, with dice and a journal and an hour alone after dark.

Building the World

The game is set in Homewood County — a fictional Appalachian county in the mountain south, drought-year, pre-electric, post-Civil War. I deliberately didn’t pin a date. The county collapsing under drought and economic failure before the monsters even arrive — that part is real in any decade you care to name. The ‘Suckers are a way of looking at it.

The short story gave me Joshua and Jacob. The game needed more — a source, a community, something for Joshua to walk toward when the farm was gone.

The mine came naturally. An abandoned coal mine above a failing Mennonite settlement is exactly the kind of detail that feels true to the landscape without needing to be historically verified. The mine is the infection source. The Mennonites have been interpreting the infections as spiritual failing — demonic possession in the old sense. They are not wrong about the supernatural dimension. They are catastrophically wrong about the response.

Then Grace arrived.

Every good story needs the thing the protagonist wasn’t trained for. Jacob Cain spent two years turning Joshua into a killing instrument. He taught him crossbow mechanics, decapitation angles, blood contamination protocol, the scream reflex. He taught him everything he knew.

He never taught him what to do when the monster is someone he loves.

Grace is a Mennonite girl, slightly older than Joshua, who knows the mine better than he does and doesn’t have his language for what lives in it. She becomes the third resource in the game — literally tracked as Grace on the resource sheet, depleting when Joshua chooses the method over the person, irrecoverable once the infection takes hold. The cruelest mechanic I’ve ever designed: his competence, the thing keeping her alive, is the same thing that costs him her.

Three Parts, One Arc

Homewood County: The Holler is a complete solo journaling RPG in three parts.

Part One: The Farm. One night, Joshua alone, three waves of ‘Suckers, and the night Jacob Cain died. The full short story is included as a prologue. The game picks up where it ends.

Part Two: The Mine. Joshua arrives at the Mennonite settlement. Grace enters the story. The mine descents go deeper with each session. By the close, Grace is infected — not turned, infected — and Joshua knows the protocol and cannot execute it.

Part Three: The Holler. The settlement fractures. Grace’s window closes. The method runs out. Five possible endings, none of them clean, all of them earned by whatever choices the player made across the full arc.

The resources carry forward across all three parts. Nothing resets. The Method starts at six and depletes one point after every wave, every descent, every day — the night costs you whether you succeed or fail. The Weight accumulates and never retreats. By Part Three, Joshua should be genuinely depleted. That’s the design. The tripack is one arc, not three fresh starts.

What the Process Taught Me

I’ve been making things for a long time — films, books, games, graphic novels, animation. The lesson I keep relearning is that the best work starts somewhere specific and personal and then opens outward.

Pride & Joy started with an image: a father guiding his son’s arm toward a monster that used to be a neighbor, teaching him the angle, the patience, the protocol. A love story told entirely through instruction.

The game started with a question: what does that boy become when the instruction runs out?

Homewood County is the answer. Or rather — it’s the space in which the player finds their own answer, with two six-sided dice and a journal and whatever they bring to the table.

The short story has been read nineteen thousand times. I’m grateful for every one of them. But there’s something the story can’t do that the game does: it can make you responsible for what happens next.

That’s the part I couldn’t let go of.

Homewood County: The Holler is available now on itch.io at https://jgesq.itch.io/homewood-county-the-holler. Part One: The Farm is PWYW. The complete three-part gamebook is $3.00 PWYW. The original short story is included as Prologue: Pride & Joy in all editions.

Homewood County is a series. The Holler is the first story told there. It will not be the last.

Julian Grant is a filmmaker, Pushcart-nominated author, and game designer. His short fiction has appeared in Danse Macabre, Horla, The Adelaide Literary Magazine, Fiction on the Web, and others. His solo RPGs are published under Julian Grant Games at jgesq.itch.io.

RuneSlinger is an eight-book urban fantasy series set inside Ontario’s correctional system. New here? Start with Chapter 1. All chapters are free.

Previously: Lockdown reshuffled the tier. Books arrived in Cell 47 and changed the geometry of how Thor thinks. The practice is deeper now, the conversation sharper. Thor is becoming something more deliberate than the man who walked in with a paper bag fourteen months ago. The Warden has noticed.

Two weeks after the riot.

I’d been called to the Warden’s office exactly once before — Year 1, some paperwork bullshit about my intake forms being incomplete. Guard walked me down, I signed three things I didn’t read, walked back. No drama.

This was different.

Morning count. Guard Thompson read my name off his clipboard like he was reading a death sentence. Flat. Official. The kind of voice that means someone above him gave the order and didn’t bother explaining why.

“O’Reilly. Warden wants you.”

The entire tier went quiet for about half a second. Then the noise came back — louder, if anything. Everyone talking at once, speculating. I could feel the eyes tracking me as I grabbed my jacket off the bunk. Brotherhood noting it. Latin Kings noting it. The unaffiliated guys who kept their heads down and their mouths shut, they were noting it too.

Books was on the upper bunk with his Dostoevsky, watching me over the top of the pages. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to. His eyes said it all: Be careful. Come back.

Yeah. That was the plan.

Thompson walked me through the facility — past the dayroom, past the Pit where the noise echoed up from all four tiers like the place was screaming, through two locked doors that clanged shut behind us with sounds that felt final. Admin wing. Different planet. The floors were actually clean. The fluorescent lights actually worked. No smell of sweat and bleach and fear, just... office smell. Coffee. Paper. The air conditioning worked here.

Warden Hutchins’s door was open.

He was behind his desk — wire-rimmed glasses, coffee in a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST DAD, organized surface with not a single paper out of place. The man had been running CNCC for fifteen years. Three Wardens before him had burned out or transferred. Hutchins stayed. That told you something.

“Sit down, O’Reilly.”

I sat. Cheap plastic chair across from his desk. The desk was elevated — subtle, but effective. Power dynamic crystal clear. I was looking up at him. That was the point.

Thompson left. Door closed.

Hutchins took a sip of his coffee. Looked at me over the rim of his mug. Not angry. Not friendly. Just... assessing.

“You do spells,” he said.

Not a question.

I kept my mouth shut.

“Curses. Protection work. Love spells, probably. Whatever the inmates want and can pay for. You’ve been doing it for about a year now.” He set the mug down carefully. “I know this because my guards know this, the inmates know this, and frankly the only person in this building who pretends not to know is you.”

I still didn’t say anything. Hutchins didn’t look like he wanted a confession.

“I don’t care if it’s real,” he continued. “That’s not my concern. My concern is 1,400 inmates in a facility built for 1,200, with not enough guards to keep them from killing each other on a good day. On a bad day, I need something else.”

He leaned back in his chair. Not relaxed — Hutchins didn’t do relaxed — but settling in for an explanation.

“You’re useful to me, O’Reilly. You know why? Because inmates come to you for their bullshit instead of going to the yard with a shiv. Fear of your curses prevents some violence. Hope for your spells prevents some despair. It’s not a solution. It’s a pressure valve. And I’ve been letting it run.”

The math was cold. Pragmatic. And it made perfect sense. Of course Hutchins knew. Of course he’d been allowing it. The question was why he was telling me now.

“But the riot changed things.”

There it was. My stomach dropped.

“You fought,” Hutchins said. His voice didn’t change. Still flat. Still bureaucratic. “You bled for Brotherhood. Saved one of Axel’s enforcers, from what I hear. That’s not a neutral practitioner anymore, O’Reilly. That’s a faction weapon.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. What the fuck was I supposed to say? *I didn’t mean to become a faction weapon*? That would sound stupid even to me.

“And faction weapons,” Hutchins continued, “get targeted. By other factions, by their own people when they become inconvenient, and by me if they become a liability to institutional order.”

He picked up his coffee again. Took another sip. Let that sink in.

“So, here’s the deal. You stay useful. You stay *just* neutral enough that the other factions don’t decide you need to disappear. You do that, I let you operate. You step out of that line — contraband, violence, disruption — I put you in the Hole so deep you forget what fluorescent light looks like.”

The Hole. Segregation. 23-hour lockdown, concrete box, no human contact except guards who hated you. I’d heard stories. Guys came out different. Or didn’t come out at all.

“We clear?” Hutchins asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Get out.”

I stood. Walked to the door. His voice stopped me before I reached it.

“O’Reilly.”

I turned.

“Don’t make me regret this.” He was already looking back at his paperwork. Conversation over.

Thompson escorted me back. The walk felt longer going back than it had coming in. Every locked door that clanged open, then shut, then locked again. Every tier we passed where inmates watched me through the bars. By the time I got back to 3-Alpha, the whole facility knew I’d been summoned.

Books was still on the upper bunk. Still reading. He glanced at me when I came in.

“Still breathing,” I said.

“Good sign.”

Yeah. For now.

Next yard time. Wednesday afternoon. I was sitting on my usual bench — not really *my* bench, but I’d been sitting there long enough that people knew it was where I could be found. Made business easier. Clients knew where to approach.

Werner found me there.

He didn’t waste time. Brotherhood didn’t do small talk when it was serious.

“Chains is dying.”

Garrett “Chains” Holbrook. 44. Enforcer. Loyal to Axel since before I’d arrived. I’d seen him around — big guy, quiet, the kind of quiet that meant he’d done things he didn’t talk about. Pancreatic cancer. The fast kind. Doctors had given him six months. That was two months ago.

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard.”

“We want you to heal him.”

My first instinct was to laugh. I didn’t. Werner’s face told me this wasn’t a joke.

“I can’t cure cancer, Werner. I’m not Jesus.”

“We’re not asking for Jesus.” Werner sat down next to me. Close enough to be having a private conversation, far enough to not be threatening. “We’re asking you to try.”

There it was. Brotherhood language. Try. Which meant do it or else. Werner wasn’t the one making the call — he was delivering it. Axel’s fingerprints all over this.

“Try,” Werner said again. “That’s all we ask.”

It was a lie. They wanted results. But I was smart enough to know that trying — visibly, publicly, with enough ritual weight behind it — bought me something even if it failed. It demonstrated loyalty. Demonstrated effort. And Brotherhood understood effort, even when it didn’t pan out.

“I’ll look into it,” I said.

Werner nodded. Stood up. Walked away without looking back.

I sat there on the bench for another ten minutes, running the math. Healing magic. The books in the library all said the same thing: it was the hardest kind. Harder than curses. Harder than protection wards. Because healing required giving something up. Your own life force. Your own energy. And even then, cancer might not give a shit.

But I’d told Werner I’d look into it.

So, I looked.

Library. Evening. After dinner count, before lights out. Books had the place mostly to himself — he worked there now, shelving returns, helping inmates find what they needed, keeping things organized in the way only Books could. I found him in the back corner, surrounded by a stack of books three feet high.

“Healing magic,” I said.

He looked up. Didn’t ask why. Just nodded and started pulling books.

Crowley. Rampa. Some Christian mystic I’d never heard of. A translated copy of the Corpus Hermeticum that looked like it had been printed in 1952 and read by exactly nobody since. Books stacked them on the table between us.

“Healing requires life force,” Books said, opening Crowley first. He’d already marked the page. “Not ambient energy. Not belief alone. *Your* life force. You’d be giving part of yourself to fight what’s eating him.”

“How much?”

Books looked at me over his wire-rimmed glasses. “Enough to matter. Enough that if it doesn’t work, you’ve paid the price anyway.”

I stared at the page. Diagrams of energy transfer — old-fashioned occult art, all flowing lines and ethereal light. Pretty on paper. In practice, it meant cutting myself open magically and pouring the contents into a dying man’s chest.

“And even then?” I asked.

Books was quiet for a moment. He set the book down carefully. When he spoke, his voice was gentle. Books was good at that — delivering hard truths without being cruel about it.

“Cancer isn’t a curse, Thor. It’s not malevolent. It’s not someone’s ill will made manifest. It’s biology gone wrong. Magic fights intention, belief, will. Cancer doesn’t have any of those. It just... grows.”

“So, I might bleed myself dry and it doesn’t do shit.”

“You might manage the symptoms,” Books said. “Pain. Energy. Quality of life.” He met my eyes. “That’s not nothing.”

I thought about Chains. The yellow skin. The way he moved like everything hurt. The way he’d stopped coming to the yard because walking from his cell to the weight pile took everything he had.

“No,” I said. “It’s not nothing.”

Three nights later. Infirmary. After lights out

Patricia Mills had been running the infirmary for eleven years. She’d seen inmates pray, rage, beg, and die in her twenty beds. When I came to her that afternoon — quiet, direct, asked for permission to work on Chains after count — she looked at me for a long time.

“I don’t know what you do,” she said finally. “And I don’t care. That man is dying. If you want to try something, I’ll be here.”

She didn’t leave. That surprised me. When I showed up at 11 PM with my razor blade and my books and my head full of diagrams, Patricia was standing in the corner by the supply cabinet. Arms crossed. Watching. Professional. Curious.

Not afraid.

Chains was in Bed 12. Corner by the east wall, under a window that looked out on nothing but dark yard and fence. He was thinner than the last time I’d seen him —and that was only two weeks ago. Skin the color of old newspaper. Eyes sunken but alert. Scared, underneath the enforcer’s face.

“You gonna fix me?” he asked.

“I’m gonna try.”

I set up the circle first. Slow. Deliberate. Blood from my palm — the razor blade was taped inside my waistband, same one I’d been using for every major working since Kraus died. I drew the protection circle on the concrete floor around Chains’s bed. Algiz rune at the four cardinal points. North, south, east, west. Then the healing sigils inside the circle — drawn from memory, from the books, from instinct that might’ve been Kraus’s or might’ve been mine. I didn’t know if the specific symbols mattered. I thought what mattered was that I believed they did.

Healing sigils on Chains’s chest. I pulled back the hospital gown, drew directly on his skin with my blood. He watched. Didn’t say anything. The yellow skin made the blood look almost black.

Then I laid my hands on the cancer site.

Right side of the abdomen. Books had showed me the diagrams — pancreas tucked in there behind everything else, doing its job until suddenly it wasn’t. I could feel it immediately. Not physically. Magically. Like pressing your hand into something rotten.

It wasn’t a smell. It was a *sensation.* Wrong cells. Multiplying. Hungry. Alive in the way that tumors are alive, which is not the way anything should be alive.

I closed my eyes.

Poured will into it. Visualized what I wanted: the cancer cells shrinking. The healthy cells fighting back. The body remembering what it was supposed to do. I spoke — Norse prayers first, because that’s where I started, that’s where Kraus started me. Then Christian prayers, because maybe Jesus actually knew something. Then words that weren’t prayers at all, just raw desperate *need* pushed outward through my voice.

*Heal him. Fight it. Shrink it. Kill it. Please.*

The drain started immediately.

It was like someone opened a valve at the base of my spine. Energy flowing out of me and into Chains — into the ritual, into the blood circle, into the fight his body couldn’t wage on its own. I could feel it leaving. Could feel myself getting lighter. Emptier.

Ten minutes in: nosebleed.

I tasted copper. Didn’t stop.

Fifteen minutes in: the room started to tilt.

I heard Patricia step forward. I waved her off with one hand, kept the other on Chains’s abdomen. Didn’t stop.

Twenty minutes in: my legs gave out.

Patricia caught me before I hit the floor. Lowered me down to the concrete. Professional. Efficient. I was shaking. Blood on my upper lip, my chin, my hands. Head splitting like someone was driving a nail through my skull from the inside.

“O’Reilly.” Patricia’s voice, steady. “You’re done.”

I looked up at the bed through blurred vision.

Chains was sitting up.

“Pain’s gone,” he said. He sounded surprised. Sounded like a man who hadn’t felt something other than agony in weeks. He moved his arms, twisted his torso experimentally. “What the fuck did you do?”

I didn’t answer. I was too busy trying not to black out.

Patricia helped me to my feet. Walked me back to Cell 47 herself — against protocol, probably, but she did it anyway. Books was pretending to sleep on the upper bunk. He opened his eyes when I stumbled in.

“Bad?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah.”

I collapsed on the lower bunk. Didn’t even take my shoes off. Just lay there, shaking, bleeding, feeling like someone had scooped out my insides with a rusty spoon.

Three days before I could do anything more strenuous than walk to the toilet without my hands shaking.

The news came through the Brotherhood grapevine on day two.

Chains had scans. Routine check, seeing how fast the cancer was spreading. The results were... complicated.

Pain was gone. First time in months he wasn’t on morphine. Energy was back. He could walk without help. Could eat without wanting to die. Could sleep without waking up every hour from the agony.

The cancer was still there.

Werner found me in the yard on day four. I was sitting on my bench, still pale, still drained, drinking water like it was the only thing keeping me upright.

“Axel says thanks,” Werner said.

I nodded. Waited for the *but.*

“He says good enough. Protection continues.”

No but.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Good enough. For now. Chains would die eventually — the cancer would win, because cancer always wins against magic. But I’d bought him months. Maybe more. Months of living without pain. Months of walking. Eating. Being human instead of just suffering.

That counted for something.

It had to.

A week after the healing ritual. I was mostly recovered — still got tired faster than I used to, still had a headache that wouldn’t fully go away, but functional. Back on the library cart. Back to business.

Rey found me during yard time.

He didn’t approach casually. No pretense of browsing or passing by. Just walked directly up to my bench and stood there until I looked up.

Luis “Rey” Santana. 38. Dominican. Street-smart in the way that meant he’d survived things most people don’t survive, and he knew exactly how much that was worth. Latin Kings leader on 3-Alpha. Flaco had reported to him — though Rey had never acknowledged Flaco as anything more than a low-level soldier.

“El Bruja,” Rey said. Slight smile. Not friendly. Assessing. “We got a problem on 2-Beta. Needs handling.”

“What kind of problem?”

“A Kingsmen. Disrespecting. Running his mouth about La Familia.” His tone was even. Conversational. Like he was discussing the weather. “Want you to curse him. Make him sick. Scared. Whatever you do.”

I looked at him. Held the eye contact. Didn’t flinch.

“I don’t do gang wars.”

Rey’s smile didn’t change. But something behind his eyes did. A door closing.

“This isn’t a request, bruja.”

“Then it’s a refusal.”

Silence. The yard didn’t go quiet — it never does — but the space between us felt compressed. Rey tilted his head, studying me like I was a new piece of information he was filing away for later.

“You do work for the woods,” Rey said. Not accusing. Just stating fact. “For the Kingsmen. Thor heals Chains last week — that’s Brotherhood business.”

“That was personal. A man was dying.”

“And this is personal to La Familia.”

“No. This is politics. I don’t work politics.”

Rey held my gaze for a long beat. Then: “Piénsalo bien. Think careful, bruja. You’re either with us or against us. That’s how it works in here.”

I stood up. Didn’t rush it. Didn’t show fear.

“Then I guess I’m against you.”

I walked away. Back exposed. Expecting the hit — shiv, fist, something. It didn’t come. Too public. Too many eyes. Rey wasn’t stupid enough to start something in broad daylight over a refusal.

But the damage was done.

I could feel it in the air for the rest of the day. Latin Kings watching me differently now. Not with curiosity. Not with the cautious respect they’d had before. With calculation. Like they were running the math on when and how to make me pay for the insult.

Werner saw the exchange from across the yard. I knew because he told me about it that evening, leaning against the bars of Cell 47 during free time.

“Axel says Brotherhood backs you,” Werner said. “But don’t make enemies faster than we can cover them.”

Translation: You’re running out of room.

Yeah. I knew.

Cell 47. Lights out. Books on the upper bunk, reading by the last thin light from the window. Me on the lower bunk, staring at the ceiling, running the math.

Warden wanted me useful but not too powerful. Brotherhood wanted me committed but controllable. Latin Kings wanted me gone. Black Kingsmen were watching to see which way the wind blew. And everyone — *everyone* — wanted to use me.

“Everyone wants to use me,” I said out loud. Not complaining. Just stating it. “Brotherhood. Kings. Even the Warden.”

Books didn’t look up from his book right away. When he did, he set it down carefully on his chest. Considered.

“How do I keep my soul in all this?” I asked.

Books was quiet for a moment. The question deserved a real answer. Books always gave real answers.

“Same way anyone does inside,” he said finally. “One choice at a time.”

I nodded. Stared at the ceiling. Thought about Chains sitting up in bed, pain-free for the first time in months. Thought about Rey’s eyes closing like a door. Thought about Hutchins’s clean desk and the Hole somewhere below us, waiting for anyone who stepped out of line.

One choice at a time.

Yeah.

That was all anyone could do.

Next week: Chapter 12 — Book 1 ends. Something is discovered that changes everything going forward.

New to RuneSlinger? Start with Chapter 1.

← Chapter 10: Books | Chapter 12 →

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I published twenty novellas between January and May 2026.

That’s not a boast. It’s a benchmark — and a question worth answering honestly, because the number means nothing without the infrastructure behind it. If you’re a working fiction writer trying to understand whether AI-assisted production at scale is real, repeatable, and artistically defensible, this is what I can tell you from the inside.

The short version: it is. But not the way most people think it works.

The Problem AI Doesn’t Solve

Let me start with what Claude didn’t do.

Claude did not write my books. Claude did not generate my characters, invent my plots, or decide that a Victorian post-mortem photographer named Violet Abrams would become the heart of an eight-book mystery series. Claude did not figure out that a prison magic system built around Norse rune practice and chaos theory would work better if the ethics were load-bearing structure rather than decoration. Claude did not decide that a quartet of German-language novellas set in Weimar Berlin needed a monster taxonomy — the principle that the monster is never the announced subject; the announced subject is always a woman doing the work available to her.

Those decisions are mine. They’re the work of a novelist thinking hard about what his stories are actually about.

What AI solves is a different problem: the problem of holding a complex creative world across dozens of sessions, hundreds of decisions, and months of drafting — without losing the thread.

That’s the problem most writers don’t name clearly. And it’s the problem the Series Bible, as a living document, was built to address.

What a Living Series Bible Actually Is

A series bible, in traditional publishing, is a reference document. Character names, timelines, locations, rules of the world. Writers have used them for decades. The bible exists so you don’t accidentally give your protagonist blue eyes in Book 1 and brown eyes in Book 6.

That’s the static version. Useful. Not what I’m talking about.

A living series bible is something different. It is the canonical record of every creative decision made across every session — not just what the world contains, but why it contains it, what supersedes what, and what remains deliberately open.

The RuneSlinger Series Bible is currently at Version 8. It runs to tens of thousands of words. It tracks not just what Thor Magnusson can do magically at each stage of his eight-book arc, but the psychological arc underneath the magic — book by book, the internal pivot from scared to survivor to practitioner to warrior to hero to strategist to master. It tracks open threads at series close that are seeded for a follow-on series. It contains a closing line that was locked in Version 7 and has not been touched since:

I didn’t choose this. I was going to find out what the terrain was... And then I was going to make every single one of them pay. I knew exactly how.

That line does not appear in the bible by accident. It appears because the bible is the place where creative decisions become permanent. The document hierarchy principle is explicit: the most recent amendment governs — not by synthesis. This means there is never ambiguity about what is canon. The latest version supersedes everything before it, and the version number is stamped on every document.

The Camera Macabra bible — The Violet Abrams Mysteries, eight books, Victorian London — is at Version 11. It incorporates 102 amendments across its production life. The Noble Rot bible, four novellas set in Weimar Berlin, is at Version 4 with 36 numbered amendments consolidated within it.

None of that infrastructure is Claude’s idea. It’s a production discipline I developed and refined across multiple series. What Claude does is make that infrastructure work.

How Claude Enters the Workflow

Here’s the practical architecture.

Each series bible lives in a Claude Project Folder. When I open a new session — whether I’m drafting a chapter, troubleshooting a plot problem, developing a new character, or building a metadata package for KDP launch — the bible is present as the authoritative reference. Claude reads it. Claude knows it. Claude applies it.

This solves the most persistent problem in long-form serial fiction: the AI’s lack of persistent memory across sessions. Without the bible in the project folder, every session with Claude starts from zero. You spend half your time re-establishing what already exists. Worse, you risk contradiction — Claude offers a suggestion that conflicts with a decision you made six sessions ago and can no longer remember yourself.

With the bible in the project folder, that problem disappears. The canon is the bible. The bible is in the room. Claude works within it.

The second thing the workflow enables is what I think of as amendment discipline. Every creative decision that modifies the world — a new character introduced, a timeline clarification, a thematic principle articulated mid-draft — gets logged as an amendment. When enough amendments accumulate, the bible is consolidated into a new version. The amendment files are retained as development records. The new version becomes the governing document.

This is not bureaucracy. It is how you keep twenty novellas coherent across five months of production without losing a single thread.

Three Series, Three Worlds, One Methodology

The three series I’ve completed or substantially completed through this methodology couldn’t be more different in genre, register, and world.

Camera Macabra is Victorian mystery. Violet Abrams is a post-mortem photographer in 1895 London — she photographs the newly dead for their families, and she solves murders. The series is built on slow-burn romance, escalating institutional villainy, and a photographic eye for period detail. The comp titles are Deanna Raybourn, C.S. Harris, Simone St. James. The bible tracks 102 amendments worth of decisions, from the exact cylinder loaded on Violet’s phonograph at series close (Rock-a-bye Baby — period-correct, published 1765, a waltz giving way to a lullaby, everything unsaid in the gap between them) to the precise inquest finding on a murder committed in 1876. Eight books. Series complete.

RuneSlinger is prison magic. Thor Magnusson is a Norse-tradition runic practitioner serving a sentence in a Canadian medium-security facility. The tagline is “Hogwarts with shivs.” The magic system is built on six ethical principles that function as load-bearing structure — they are not a fence, they are an engine. The series tracks Thor across two prisons, two arcs, eight books, and ends with him conscripted into a government psy-ops program he did not choose and intends to dismantle from the inside. Eight books. Series complete.

Noble Rot is four novellas set in Weimar Berlin, following an archivist named Mauer who catalogues a collection of wax cylinder recordings made by Thomas Hoffmann — a man who built a machine to restore his dead wife, Elsa, to the world. The series is literary horror in the tradition of Thomas Ligotti, Angela Carter, and Daphne du Maurier. The monster taxonomy governs all four volumes: the monster is never the announced subject. Four novellas. Series complete.

Three genres. Three distinct narrative registers. Three production timelines running more or less simultaneously. All held coherent by the same methodology.

What the Bible Technology Actually Enables

Let me be specific about the capabilities the living bible unlocks in practice.

Continuity at scale. When you’re in Book 7 and a character mentions something that happened in Book 3, the bible confirms the exact circumstance, the exact wording of what was said, and whether that thread is closed or open. You are not relying on memory. You are not re-reading six manuscripts. You open the bible.

Thematic coherence. The best series have a governing idea that deepens across volumes. The bible is where that idea gets articulated, tested, and refined. In RuneSlinger, the principle that a will with no ambiguity has no surface for binding to grip didn’t emerge fully formed in Book 1. It was developed, clarified, and made load-bearing across six amendments. The bible is the record of that development.

Open thread management. Every complex series generates threads that cannot be closed within the volume where they open. The living bible tracks them explicitly: what is open, what is deliberately seeded for future work, what is closed without resolution and should remain so. At RuneSlinger’s series close, there are seventeen named open threads. Each one is accounted for. None are accidents.

Amendment discipline under pressure. Mid-draft, you will make a decision that retcons something established three books ago. This happens. The question is whether you catch it, document it, and propagate the correction forward — or let it sit unresolved until a reader notices it and emails you. The amendment system catches it. The version discipline ensures the correction is canon.

Cross-series coherence. Once you have two or three series in production simultaneously, the methodology scales. Each series has its own bible, its own project folder, its own amendment record. The discipline that makes one series work makes all of them work.

The Question Everyone Asks

Does using AI this way compromise the work?

I’ve thought about this carefully, and my answer is no — but the reasoning matters.

The bible technology doesn’t make creative decisions. It holds them. The decisions — who Violet Abrams is, what Thor’s twelve principles mean, why Greta Hoffmann is the series’ quietest monster — those are the writer’s work, and they remain the writer’s work. What the technology does is ensure that those decisions persist, stay coherent, and compound across volumes rather than degrading under the pressure of production.

If anything, the bible discipline has made the work more deliberate. When you know that a creative decision is going to be logged, amended, and consolidated into a governing document, you think harder before you make it. The infrastructure rewards precision.

The Benchmark

Twenty novellas in five months, across three series, in three distinct genres.

That number is possible because the infrastructure existed before the first word of Book 1 was drafted. The series DNA, the canon rules, the character architecture, the thematic principles — all of it was established, documented, and made available to every session that followed.

If you’re a working writer asking whether this methodology is worth building — whether the discipline of living series bibles, version-controlled amendments, and AI-assisted continuity management will actually change what you can produce — my answer is yes.

But start with the bible. The AI is the tool. The bible is the architecture.

Build the architecture first.

Download and read my work here

Julian Grant is a Canadian author publishing through Amazon KDP and Kindle Unlimited. His current catalogue includes the Camera Macabra mysteries, the RuneSlinger prison magic series, and the Noble Rot novella quartet.

There is a shot in To Catch a Thief where Cary Grant, standing on a Riviera rooftop in a tuxedo, watches Grace Kelly walk toward him across the zinc, and the camera holds just long enough for you to understand that he is not the most dangerous person on this roof. It is a perfect piece of cinema — funny, charged, morally weightless in the best sense — and I have been thinking about it for the last three weeks while designing Le Caté.

The new game is a solo journaling RPG set in Paris, 1955. You play a young woman — Sylvie Marchand in the fashion magazines, Colette in the network, something else entirely on the rooftops — who spends her nights returning looted art to the families it was stolen from during the Occupation. One die. A journal. Six thresholds between her and the Object. A black Persian cat who may or may not be where you need him to be.

It is the lightest game I have designed. It is also, underneath that lightness, the one with the most moral weight. I want to talk about how those two things sit together, because getting that balance right was the whole design problem.

The Hitchcock Problem

Hitchcock understood something about crime that most filmmakers don’t: the pleasure of the heist is not moral neutrality. The audience for To Catch a Thief is not morally neutral about whether Cary Grant is guilty. They have decided. They decided in the first scene. They are rooting for him because the film has established, with tremendous economy, that the world he is operating in deserves exactly what it gets, and that he is very, very good at his work, and that Grace Kelly is already three steps ahead of everyone in any room she enters.

That’s the architecture I wanted for Le Caté. The player should never feel the need to justify the work, because the game has already done that work — in the carnet entries in her mother’s handwriting, in the provenance she researches before every job, in the families who have been waiting since 1942 for something that the official world is processing at the speed of bureaucracy. She is not stealing. She is returning. The game does not ask the player to decide if this is right. It asks the player to inhabit the moral weight of it — which is not the same thing.

What Hitchcock gives you is permission to be entirely on the protagonist’s side while the protagonist does something the law calls a crime. Le Caté is built on that permission.

The New Wave and the Carnet

But if Hitchcock gives the game its moral architecture, the French New Wave gives it its texture.

I kept returning to Jules et Jim — not for the story, but for the way Truffaut holds the camera on people thinking. There is so much interiority in that film. You spend enormous amounts of time with characters in the act of understanding something, noticing something, filing something away. The action of the film is frequently internal. And yet it moves. It never stops moving.

That’s what the journal is for in Le Caté. Every table result ends with a prompt — write the thirty seconds, journal what she thinks about in a Paris courtyard at 2 AM, what does it feel like to move through someone else’s accumulated life? The game is a heist film on the outside and a character study on the inside, and the journal is where those two things meet.

The French New Wave also gave the game its aesthetic: Haussmann Paris rendered in the clean precise line of Hergé’s ligne claire, the same visual language Godard was working against and Truffaut was working with — a city that is simultaneously legible and deeply strange to anyone moving through it at 3 in the morning with a locked door between them and something that belongs to someone else.

Caper and Conscience — the Amélie Register

The hardest design decision was tonal. The original game was darker — more post-Liberation weight, more shadow, more of the GDD’s sober register. Then the art came in.

The cover image — a young woman on zinc rooftops, Paris spread out below, a black cat watching from the chimney — was playful. Confident. She was having fun up there. And it was immediately right.

Jeunet’s Amélie does something formally interesting: it takes a character with real grief and real absence at her centre and wraps her in a film that is joyful, warm, and visually exuberant. The grief doesn’t disappear. It’s there in every scene. But the film refuses to wallow. It moves. It is delighted by the city it inhabits. It believes that one act of precise care can re-route a life.

That’s the register I wanted for Le Caté. She carries the weight of her mother’s work, the weight of the carnet, the weight of families waiting. She carries it lightly. Not because it isn’t heavy — because she has made her peace with it, and because Paris at 2 AM on a zinc rooftop with a black Persian cat somewhere in the vicinity is also, genuinely, a remarkable place to be.

The shadows are still there. They earn their place. But the default is levity, and confidence, and the particular pleasure of watching someone be very good at something the city has decided to love them for.

Sebastian and the Problem of the Cat

Sebastian is a black Persian cat who was in the Resistance. He belonged to her mother. He operated under the same code name — Le Caté — from 1941 until the Liberation. He is finishing what she started. The daughter does not know this. Sebastian does.

Every game I design seems to end up with an element that shouldn’t work by any reasonable analysis and somehow becomes the emotional centre of the thing. In King of the Road it was the ritual of the mark system. In No Man’s Land it was the silence table. In Le Caté it is the black Persian cat with the operational history.

Sebastian resolves one Complication per session, unrequested, without a roll. The player writes what he does and why he was there. He works. Every playtest, the Sebastian entry ends up being the journal passage people remember. There is something about the combination of the mundane — it’s a cat — and the weight it carries — her mother’s cat, her mother’s work, her mother’s code name — that produces exactly the emotional texture the game needs.

She does not ask how old he is. She is afraid he might answer. That fear is the correct form of respect, and also, quietly, it is funny.

The Design Road

Le Caté is a trifold — one night, one Object, one delivery before dawn. It is also the beginning of something larger.

The pattern with Julian Grant Games is always: trifold first, play second, expand from what the play tells you. The gamebook — Le Caté : La Grande Affaire — is her mother’s unfinished collection. Fifteen Objects dispersed in 1942. The final session ends with l’Inspecteur already at a café table when she arrives, having chosen the same café at the same time without consulting each other, and they sit down and have the most precisely choreographed conversation two people of equivalent precision have ever had, and he does not arrest her, because the evidence is exactly as clean as it has always been, and they both know it.

That conversation has been building since the first time he understood what he was looking at. Playing the trifold is how you understand what he’s been reading.

Start there. One die, a journal, the carnet, Paris. Begin.

Le Caté — une affaire de nuit is available now at jgesq.itch.io — Pay What You Want, $1 suggested. Print it, fold it, find a night with a couple of hours, and a journal.

La Grande Affaire is coming. We’ll talk about it when we know what the trifold tells us.

Julian Grant Games designs solo journaling RPGs about people history overlooked, in the places history made. jgesq.itch.io | jgesq.substack.com

Previously: Lockdown came and went. The riot reshuffled the deck — people moved, alliances shifted, the tier settled into a new shape. Thor came through it. What’s waiting on the other side is a new cellmate, a new dynamic, and someone who’s going to change how Thor thinks about almost everything.

Two weeks of lockdown. Twenty-three hours a day in a six-by-ten box. Nothing to do but think, sleep, and go slowly out of my mind.

Or practice.

I started the first night after Flaco left. Couldn’t sleep anyway. Cell 47 was too quiet without him. So, I lay on the bunk, closed my eyes, and did what Lobsang Rampa’s book said to do. Relaxed every muscle. Breathed slow. Felt the body go heavy, then light, then gone.

The tether formed. My astral umbilicus trailing back to the bunk like a thread of light. I pushed off.

Astral projection inside CNCC was a different beast than outside. No time displacement. No guessing. I thought about a place, I was there. Simple as that. The prison was my territory — every wall, every corridor, every cell mapped in my mind after a year of walking them.

First night: I visited the Warden’s office.

Hutchins wasn’t there. Late shift, nobody home. Just his desk, neat as a surgery table. Diplomas on the wall. A framed photo of a woman who looked like she didn’t want to be in the frame anymore.

Papers on the desk. I drifted close. Read them.

One file had my name on it. Not the subject — I was buried in a list of inmates who’d used the payphones in the yard during the week of Danny’s arrest. Routine check. Part of Hutchins’s investigation into the Crimestoppers leak.

My heart would have hammered if I’d had a heart to hammer. Astral form doesn’t work that way.

I kept reading. The file was thin. Hutchins had cross-referenced phone logs with inmate schedules, yard rotations, guard reports. Standard procedure. Methodical. But there was nothing pointing at me specifically. I was one name in a list of forty-three inmates who’d used the phones that week.

Nobody suspected Thor.

Relief hit me like cold water. I floated there in the dark office, reading my own name buried in a list, and felt something loosen in my chest that had been tight since Friday.

I was safe. For now.

The practice montage ran for two weeks straight.

Every night after lights out. Sometimes during the day too — lockdown meant guards checked cells at random, but they couldn’t see me projecting. Just a guy lying on his bunk, eyes closed, not moving. Boring as hell to watch.

Day three: I visited the commissary.

The storage room behind the main counter. Metal shelves, industrial-sized containers. The good stuff was hidden — not for inmates, but for guards. A shelf behind a rack of industrial cleaning supplies. Chocolate bars. Real coffee. The kind that didn’t taste like dishwater. I memorized the location. Filed it away for later. Information is currency. You don’t spend it until the price is right.

Day five: I got ambitious. Visited other tiers.

Latin Kings meeting on 2-Beta. Three guys in a corner of the dayroom, heads close together, voices low. I couldn’t hear them — astral projection doesn’t pick up sound the way it picks up sight. But I could read body language. Tense. Angry. One of them kept gesturing toward the Brotherhood side of the common area. Planning something. Retaliation, probably. The riot hadn’t cooled their blood.

Brotherhood meeting on 3-Beta. Werner and two others. Calmer than the Kings. Strategic. Werner was talking — mouth moving, hands making shapes that looked like layouts. Floor plans, maybe. I watched for twenty minutes. Couldn’t hear a word. But I saw Werner’s face, and for the first time since I’d known him, he looked satisfied.

He thought I was one of them now.

Day seven: I pushed the range.

Tried to leave CNCC. Focused on the parking lot outside the main building. Visualized it — asphalt, chain-link, the guard tower. Pushed hard.

The tether snapped taut. Not broke — snapped taut, like a leash hitting its limit. Resistance like swimming through concrete. I pushed harder. Nothing. The image stayed flat, dead. Like trying to picture a place from a photograph instead of memory.

I’d made it to Parkdale before. The Danny job. But that was different — I knew that neighbourhood. Grew up blocks from that building. The visualization was sharp, specific, emotionally loaded. Twenty bucks and a pregnant woman’s life and the desperate need to see what was happening. The projection burned through whatever barrier existed because the fuel was right.

The parking lot outside CNCC? I’d never stood in it. Never been there. No memory, no emotion, no connection. Nothing to burn. The astral form had nothing to grab onto, and the tether pulled me back like a hand on my collar.

It wasn’t that outside was impossible. It was that outside was hard. Harder than inside, where everything was familiar, where the emotional intensity fed the power like oxygen feeds a fire. Outside required the right conditions — sharp visualization, real stakes, something to anchor the projection beyond raw will.

Inside CNCC, I could go anywhere. Outside, I could go where it mattered enough to take me.

That was a distinction worth understanding.

I drifted back to my body. Lay there in the dark, thinking about what that meant. Magic was strongest where I’d bled. Where I’d suffered. Where the emotional intensity was highest. Prison was a pressure cooker of need and fear and desperate fucking survival — the perfect fuel for chaos magic.

Outside was just... the world. Regular. Quiet. Not enough to feed the power.

I’d have to figure that out eventually. Nine years from now, when I walked through those gates for the last time, the world wasn’t going to be a prison anymore.

But that was a problem for future Thor. Present Thor had two weeks of lockdown and a lot of practice to do.

Day eleven: I found something interesting about Guard Gibbins.

Not during a projection. This one was pure observation — yard time, the one hour we got, rotating by tier. I was watching the guard rotation from the fence, nothing to do, when Gibbins walked past the phone bank with a civilian in a jacket.

Not a guard. Not staff. Some outside guy, clipboard, pretending to be from maintenance.

Gibbins handed him something. Small. Slipped it palm-to-palm like a card trick.

The civilian walked away. Gibbins kept moving, phone already out, scrolling.

Next day, during astral projection, I visited Gibbins’s locker in the guard break room. Found a cash envelope taped to the inside of the door. Counted it in my head — twelve hundred dollars. Too much for a side hustle. Too regular for a one-time thing.

Gibbins was selling phones to inmates. Contraband cell phones, smuggled in through the civilian contact. The guy on the phone bank was the middleman. And Gibbins was collecting.

I filed it away. Didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t need to. Knowledge like that was a loaded gun — you kept it in the drawer until someone needed to die.

By the end of the two weeks, I knew things nobody else in Central North knew. Things that could get people fired, transferred, buried. Things that could save my life if I ever needed leverage badly enough.

The astral projection was getting sharper too. Faster entry, cleaner visualization, longer duration without the physical toll. I could project for hours now without a nosebleed. The practice was paying off.

Prison was my domain. And I was learning every inch of it.

Lockdown lifted on a Wednesday.

Warden Hutchins came on the PA at 6 AM: “Facility-wide lockdown is hereby lifted, effective immediately. Normal schedules resume. Any inmate found engaging in unauthorized activity will face disciplinary action. That is all.”

The tier exhaled. Two weeks of 23-hour confinement was over. Doors opened. People moved. The noise started up again — shouts, laughter, the constant percussion of a prison returning to life.

I stood in Cell 47. Alone. Stretched. Felt good to move.

Then the guard came.

Mid-morning. Clipboard. Different from the lockdown guards — this one had paperwork, not a baton.

“O’Reilly. You’re getting a new cellie. Name’s Washington. Marcus Washington. He’ll be here by lunch.”

“Washington.” I kept my voice neutral. “Books?”

The guard looked at me. “You know him?”

“Everyone knows Books.”

“Good. Keep it civil.” He moved on down the tier.

I stood there, processing.

Marcus “Books” Washington. Black Kingsmen affiliated. Lifer. 45 years old, philosophy degree, 25 years served. The guy who sat in the library reading philosophy while other inmates played cards and picked fights. The guy every faction in Central North left alone because he was too old, too wise, and too respected to fuck with.

And he was Black Kingsmen.

I was Brotherhood-protected.

The riot had just ended two weeks ago. Brotherhood versus Kingsmen. I’d fought on the Brotherhood side. Saved one of their guys.

And now the system was putting a Kingsmen man in my cell.

Either somebody in admin didn’t know what they were doing. Or somebody knew exactly what they were doing and wanted to see what happened.

I sat on the lower bunk and waited.

Books arrived at noon.

The guard brought him to Cell 47 with a property box and a stack of books — actual books, paperbacks, dog-eared, held together with rubber bands. Books carried them himself, careful, like they were the most valuable things he owned. Maybe they were.

He was tall. Six-two, maybe more. Forty-five but carried it well — the kind of age that comes from decades of thinking more than fighting. Graying beard kept neat. Wire-rimmed glasses, the prison-issue kind, but he’d adjusted them to fit his face properly. Dignified. That was the word. Dignified bearing, the kind that’s earned over years, not given.

He looked at me. Looked at the cell. Looked at the upper bunk. Made his assessment in about three seconds.

I knew him. Not well. But enough. Library fixture — worked there three days a week, shelving and cataloguing while I pushed my cart through the tiers. We’d crossed paths a hundred times. Exchanged a few words here and there. Books reading Dostoevsky in the back corner while inmates around him played cards and picked fights. Quiet. Steady. The kind of guy who made a room feel calmer just by being in it.

He looked at me. Not surprised. Not assessing — he already knew what I was. Just checking whether the arrangement was going to work.

“Thor.” A nod. Not a greeting exactly. An acknowledgment.

“Books.” I stayed on the lower bunk. Didn’t move to make room or shake hands or do any of the shit people do when they’re trying to make a good impression. We were past that. “Kingsmen guy in a Brotherhood cell. Someone in admin’s either stupid or testing us.”

Books set his property box down on the floor. Carefully. Looked around the cell — six by ten feet, the lower bunk taken, the upper bunk waiting. He’d done this before. Many times, probably, over 25 years.

“Or someone in admin knows I’m Switzerland,” he said. Calm. Matter-of-fact. “And figured two smart guys could share a box without killing each other.”

“Can we?”

“I don’t see why not.” He picked up his books, tucked them under his arm. Climbed the ladder to the upper bunk. Settled in. Laid the books out on the thin mattress, organized by size. Same way he organized the library shelves — neat, precise, everything where it belonged.

“But I should tell you something,” he said, not looking down. Still arranging. “I’ve watched you work. The library cart, the clients, the reputation. All of it.”

“And?”

“I don’t believe in magic.”

I almost laughed. Almost.

“You will,” I said.

Books glanced down. The ghost of something on his face — not quite a smile. Not quite amusement. More like curiosity. The look of a man who’d seen a lot of things in 25 years and had learned not to dismiss anything outright.

“We’ll see,” he said.

He picked up a paperback — spine cracked, pages yellowed — and started reading.

First full day together. Books was methodical about everything.

He organized his property box in twenty minutes. Books, toiletries, a few photos, a worn leather journal. Everything in its place. Then he sat on the upper bunk and read for three hours straight while I lay on the lower bunk and watched him not move.

Eventually he came down. Lunch. We walked to the common area together — first time either of us had been out in two weeks. The dayroom felt enormous after Cell 47.

We sat at a table. Books had his coffee — the bad kind, commissary instant, but he drank it like it was something worth savoring. I watched him drink it and tried not to think about the good stuff I’d found in the guard storage room.

“So,” Books said, between sips. “The witch.”

“El Bruja. Yeah.”

“What exactly does that entail?”

“Love spells. Protection sigils. Curses. Dream work. Astral projection.” I kept it clinical. Business description, not bragging. “People pay me. I do the work. Word spreads.”

Books nodded. Considering. “And you believe this is real? Not performance art for the superstitious?”

“It’s real.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it works.”

“Correlation isn’t causation.” Books took another sip. Patient. Not mocking — genuinely interested. “Someone pays you for a love spell. The relationship improves. Could be magic. Could be the placebo effect — they believe it worked, so they act differently, and the relationship responds to their changed behavior.”

“Could be,” I said. “But the coffee cup thing isn’t placebo.”

“What coffee cup thing?”

I looked at him. At his coffee. The cheap white ceramic mug, chipped on the rim, sitting six inches to his right.

“Watch it,” I said.

Books looked at the cup. Then back at me. “Watch what?”

“The cup. Don’t look away.”

He looked at the cup again. Skeptical. But looking.

I focused. Simple visualization. Cup slides six inches to the left. Slow. Smooth. Nothing else moves. Nobody touches it. Just the cup, responding to my will like it was on rails.

I poured everything into it — not rage, not fear this time. Just quiet certainty. I know what I am. I know what I can do. Watch.

The cup moved.

Slow at first. Barely perceptible. Then a smooth, deliberate slide across the table. Six inches. Stopped exactly where I’d visualized it.

Books stared at the cup.

Then stared at me.

Then stared at the cup again.

The common area was loud around us — conversations, card games, the TV nobody was watching. Nobody else had seen it. Nobody was looking at our table. Just Books and me and a coffee cup that had moved by itself.

“Still think it’s psychology meets physics?” I asked.

Books was quiet for a long time. Long enough that the silence became its own thing. He picked up the cup — from its new position — and turned it over in his hands. Looked at it. Set it back down.

“I need to rethink some things,” he said.

That night, Cell 47. Lights out. Books on the upper bunk, not reading for once. Just lying there, staring at the ceiling.

“Okay,” he said into the dark. “New hypothesis needed.”

“Yeah.”

“If magic is real — and apparently it is — what are the rules?”

I lay on the lower bunk, hands behind my head. This was the part I’d been thinking about for months. The part Books was now going to help me figure out properly.

“There are no rules,” I said. “That’s chaos magic. You use whatever works. Runes, sigils, prayers, blood. Mix traditions. If it works, it’s valid. If it doesn’t, throw it out.”

“No rules at all?” Books sounded skeptical again. Different kind of skeptical now — not doubting magic existed but doubting it could be that simple.

“Belief is the engine,” I said. “Will is the steering wheel. You believe something hard enough, and you want it bad enough, and you make it real.”

“Belief in what, though?” Books shifted. Springs creaked. “The mechanism matters. If you believe a sigil works because of some ancient power — gods, demons, cosmic force — that’s one framework. The power is external. You’re a channel.”

“Okay.”

“But if you believe it works because YOU make it work — because it’s your will given physical form — that’s a different framework entirely.” He paused. “And a very different set of implications.”

“Like what?”

“Like responsibility.” The word landed heavy in the dark. “If magic is external — divine, supernatural, whatever — you’re just a vessel. The gods used you. Not your fault what happens.”

“And if it’s me?”

“Then every spell you cast, every curse, every working — that’s on you. Every consequence. Every ripple. Every person who gets hurt because of what you did.” Books let that sit for a moment. “That’s not a parlor trick, Thor. That’s a burden.”

I stared at the underside of his bunk. Thought about Gustav falling down the stairs. Thought about Danny. About Rochelle. About the riot on 2-Beta and the blood on the concrete and the Brotherhood enforcer I’d pulled to his feet.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m learning that.”

Books was quiet for a while. Then: “Which is it? For you?”

“It’s me. It’s always been me. Kraus opened the channels, but the power comes from inside. From need. From will.” I closed my eyes. “Books would say it’s my will made manifest.”

“Books would,” he said. A pause. Then, quieter: “And Books would also say that makes you one of the most dangerous people in this building. Whether you know it or not.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

We lay in the dark, two men in a six-by-ten box and didn’t talk for a long time.

A week into the cellie arrangement, Books told me his story.

I hadn’t asked. Not directly. But we’d been talking every night — philosophy, magic, prison politics, the nature of belief and power and what it meant to be responsible for the things you set in motion. Books had heard my story (the short version — Marco, the setup, the plea deal). Seemed fair to return the favor.

He told it the way he told everything — measured. Honest. No self-pity.

“Philosophy degree,” he said. We were in the library. Books’s domain — he worked there three days a week, shelving and cataloguing. I had my library cart job back (Wednesday rounds with Gibbins, who hadn’t changed a bit — phone out, scrolling, couldn’t care less). We sat at the back table, away from the few other inmates browsing.

“Good school. Scholarship covered tuition. Student loans covered everything else.” Books cleaned his glasses on his shirt. Methodical. “Graduated into a recession. No teaching jobs. No money. Loans coming due.”

“How much?”

“Enough.” He put the glasses back on. “I was twenty-two. Same age you were when you came in. Desperate. Thought I was smarter than the situation. Thought I could solve it fast, move on, nobody gets hurt.”

“Robbery.”

“Corner store. Two in the morning. Nobody supposed to be there.” Books’ voice stayed level. Flat. Like he was reading a case study about someone else. “I had a gun. Stolen from a neighbor. Didn’t know if it was loaded. Didn’t want to know.”

“Someone was there.”

“Owner. Worked late. Wouldn’t leave his store unattended.” Books folded his hands on the table. “He saw the gun. Grabbed for it. It went off.”

The library was quiet. Somewhere across the room, an inmate coughed.

“Killed him,” I said.

“Killed him.” Books nodded once. “Right there behind the counter. I stood there for maybe thirty seconds. Then I dropped the gun and walked out.”

“You didn’t run?”

“Where would I run to?” A ghost of a smile. Sad. “I went home. Sat on my bed. Called 911 at 6 AM. Turned myself in.”

“Why?”

Books looked at me over the wire-rimmed glasses. “Because I killed a man. And running from that doesn’t make it not true. It just makes you a coward on top of a murderer.”

“Pled guilty?”

“Life without parole. Twenty-five years served. I’ll die in here.” He said it the way someone says the weather forecast. A fact. Nothing more. “I’ve accepted that.”

“And you’re not bitter?”

“I was. For the first ten years, I was furious. At myself, at the system, at God, at everything.” He picked up a book from the table — Dostoevsky, I think — turned it over in his hands. “Then I realized bitter is easy. It’s the default. The path of least resistance. You let the anger eat you and eventually there’s nothing left but the anger.”

“So, what did you do?”

“I chose hard.” He set the book down. “I read. I thought. I tried to understand what I’d done and why and what it meant. Not to excuse it. To learn from it. To become something other than the worst moment of my life.”

“And did you?”

Books considered the question seriously. The way he considered everything — like it deserved real attention.

“I think so,” he said. “But I’m still working on it.”

We sat in the library for another hour. Didn’t talk much after that. Didn’t need to. Some things land and settle on their own.

The alliance solidified over the next two weeks.

Not with any single event. No handshake, no agreement, no moment where we said “okay, we’re friends now.” It just happened — the way real things happen in prison, which is slowly, carefully, with constant assessment on both sides.

Books helped me think through job requests.

One evening, an inmate I barely knew passed a kite through the library cart — a folded note asking for a curse on his ex-wife’s new boyfriend. Standard revenge shit. The kind of job I’d have done without thinking six months ago.

I showed it to Books that night in the cell.

“Read it,” I said.

He did. Handed it back. “What are you thinking?”

“Twenty bucks. Simple sympathetic curse. Bottle curse, maybe. Piss and nails.”

“And what happens after?”

“Guy gets unlucky for a while. Bad luck, miserable time. Standard.”

“And the ripples?” Books took off his glasses. Cleaned them. Put them back on. “You curse the boyfriend. He has a bad week. Gets fired, maybe. Or gets in a fight. Or drinks too much and hurts someone. And that someone has their own ripples. And on and on.”

“That’s true of everything.”

“It is. But most people don’t have the power to set those ripples in motion deliberately.” He looked at me. “You do. So, the question isn’t whether it’s possible. It’s whether it’s worth it. Twenty bucks and someone else’s misery. Is that the kind of practitioner you want to be?”

I looked at the kite for a long time.

Wrote back: “No dice. Find someone else.”

The guy wasn’t happy. But he didn’t push it. Nobody pushed back on El Bruja.

Books watched me fold the note and tuck it into my pocket. He didn’t smile. Didn’t say “good.” Just nodded. Once. Like a teacher watching a student get the answer right without being told.

“That’s the real magic, Thor,” he said. Quiet. Almost to himself. “That’s the real trick. Not the spells. Not the curses or the sigils or the blood work.”

He looked at me. Steady. Those calm, tired eyes that had seen everything and chosen wisdom over bitterness.

“The choice to be better than the man who gave you the power.”

I sat with that for a while.

Thought about Kraus. The Nazi. The watchmaker. The occultist who’d given me everything he knew and expected me to use it the same way he had — without conscience, without limit, without care for what it cost the people caught in the wake.

I wasn’t him.

I didn’t have to be.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m working on it.”

Books picked up his book. Started reading. The cell settled into its usual quiet — two men, six by ten feet, the sounds of the tier filtering in through the bars.

It was the closest thing to peace I’d felt since I walked through the gates of Central North.

Next week: Chapter 11 — the Warden wants a word.

New to RuneSlinger? Start with Chapter 1.

← Chapter 9: Lockdown | Chapter 11 →

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RuneSlinger is an eight-book urban fantasy series set inside Ontario’s correctional system. New here? Start with Chapter 1. All chapters are free.

Previously: Thor saw a murder through the astral plane and spent a chapter sitting on the information. Then he made a call he can’t take back. In a prison, there is no word with more weight than snitch. Thor knew that when he did it. He did it anyway.

The thing about a secret this size is it doesn’t sit still.

It moves. Changes shape. Grows teeth in the dark when you’re not looking at it. I’d made the call on Friday. Saturday I’d lied to Danny’s face about failing the job. And then I waited.

Three days of nothing.

Danny acted normal. Played cards in the common area. Laughed at the right moments. Smiled at guys walking past. That charming fucking smile, always in place, always warm. Like he hadn’t murdered a pregnant woman and hidden the knife six months before.

I watched him from across the dayroom and felt sick every time he laughed.

Wednesday came. Library cart. Gibbins scrolling his phone. I pushed the cart tier by tier like always. Rico wanted an update on his love spell (working, he said — Michelle had called). Prophet Muhammad was still weighing the parole board working against his conscience. Old Man Petersen I skipped entirely. Told the guy at Cell 67 I had nothing new for him.

Business as usual. Routine. Normal.

Underneath it, my stomach was in knots.

The call was in. Crimestoppers had the location. Either they’d followed up or they hadn’t. Either cops had found the knife or they hadn’t. Either Danny was going down or my tip had disappeared into the bureaucratic void like a thousand other anonymous tips before it.

Nothing I could do but wait.

And try not to go crazy doing it.

Thursday morning. Count at six.

“Keyes, Danny. Cuff up.”

Two guards I didn’t recognize. Not the regular rotation. These guys had purpose in their stride — not the lazy shuffle of a Thursday morning escort. Full security. Hands already on cuffs before Danny even turned around.

The common area went quiet.

Danny looked up from his cards. Confused expression — genuine, from what I could see. Brow furrowed. Cards still in his hand. “What’s this about?”

“On your feet. Hands in front.”

“I didn’t do anything—”

“On your feet. Now.”

Danny stood. Slow. Hands up. Compliant. The confusion still there, real enough to fool anyone who didn’t know what I knew.

But I knew.

I watched from the edge of the dayroom. Face neutral. Relaxed. Practiced.

The cuffs went on. Click. Click. Danny looked around — scanning the room like he was searching for someone. Anyone who might know what was happening. His eyes swept past me. Didn’t stop. Didn’t linger. Just another face in the crowd.

They marched him out. Full escort. Two guards, one on each side, hand-on-the-arm grip. Danny walked between them like a man walking to his own funeral and not quite understanding why.

The common area stayed quiet until they were gone. Then it erupted.

“What the fuck happened?”

“Who’s that?”

“Danny Keyes. Someone said murder.”

“Murder? Which murder?”

By lunch, the grapevine had it all. Or most of it. Double murder. Woman named Rochelle. Parkdale. Pregnant when she died. Anonymous tip led cops to the weapon — a knife, hidden in a balcony overhang one floor above her apartment. Prints matched. DNA matched. Body had been found weeks after the murder when the neighbors complained about the smell.

Life without parole. Pending.

Transferred to the violent offenders’ facility eighty miles north. Gone. For good.

I ate my lunch and didn’t taste it. Flaco sat across from me, watching.

“You hear?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Danny fucking Keyes.” Flaco shook his head. “Guy was sitting right here two days ago playing cards.”

“Yeah.”

Flaco studied me. Those dark eyes, quick and observant. He was a good reader of people. Always had been.

“You know anything about this?”

“Nope.” I pushed my tray away. “Just surprised as everyone. I gave gim back his money. I couldn’t make the leap like he wanted. That’s what was pissing me off last week. I’m not as good as I thought. Bugs me.”

He didn’t look convinced. But he let it drop.

The Kingsmen started talking on Friday.

Not loud. Not obvious. The way things always moved in here — quiet conversations in corners, coded language, glances that carried more weight than words. But I heard it. Because I was listening. Had been listening since Danny walked out in cuffs.

Someone inside had tipped off the cops. An anonymous call. Crimestoppers. That meant someone in Central North had information about Danny’s crime and chose to hand it over.

Who does that? Who calls in one of their own?

Not the Brotherhood. Not directly — they had no reason to care about Danny’s girlfriend. But Thor was Brotherhood-protected. And Thor did magic. And magic meant seeing things. Knowing things. And Danny had gone to see Thor.

The logic was prison logic. Simple. Tribal. Wrong, but airtight within its own framework.

Brotherhood took out one of ours. Through the system.

By Saturday afternoon, the tension was visible. Yard time. Kingsmen clustered tighter than usual. A few of them watching the Brotherhood weight pile with expressions that had shifted from the usual territorial wariness to something colder. More focused.

Flaco found me by the fence. His usual spot when he wanted to talk without being overheard.

“Kings are talking,” he said. Low. Direct. “About Danny. About who snitched.”

My stomach dropped. Kept my face neutral. “Yeah? What are they saying?”

“Brotherhood.” Flaco didn’t look at me when he said it. Kept his eyes on the yard. Casual posture. To anyone watching, two cellies having a normal conversation. “They think Brotherhood fed the tip. Through someone. Thor the witch being the obvious candidate.”

“I didn’t do it.”

Flaco was quiet for a long moment. The yard moved around us. Kings on the basketball court. Brotherhood at the weights. The invisible lines drawn in concrete and blood.

“Okay,” he finally said. Not an accusation. Not absolution. Just acknowledgment.

“Flaco—”

“I said okay, hermano.” He turned to look at me. Face serious. “But be careful. Kingsmen are pissed. And when Kingsmen are pissed, they look for someone to bleed.”

He walked away. Back toward his crew on the east side of the yard. I watched him go and tried not to think about what his silence meant.

The riot started on Tuesday.

2-Beta. Mixed territory — Latin Kings, Black Kingsmen, some Brotherhood members who’d earned the right to use shared common areas. The kind of space where invisible lines crossed and recrossed and sometimes — when the pressure got high enough — those lines became visible in blood.

I didn’t see it start. Nobody on 3-Alpha saw it start. We heard it.

Shouting first. Then crashes — bodies hitting walls, chairs hitting concrete, the wet sound of fists connecting. Then the alarms. Electronic shriek cutting through the Pit, bouncing off four tiers of concrete and steel until it was everywhere, deafening.

3-Alpha locked down immediately. Guards slamming cell doors shut, radio chatter crackling — “All units to 2-Beta, all units to 2-Beta” — boots pounding on metal stairs somewhere below us.

Flaco dropped off the upper bunk. “What the fuck?”

“Riot.” I was already at the cell door, looking through the observation slot. Could see the tier — guards running, inmates being shoved back into cells, the red emergency lights strobing.

“Where?”

“2-Beta.”

Flaco’s face went tight. “That’s neutral territory.”

“Kings and Kingsmen,” I said. “Mixed.”

“Brotherhood too.” Flaco’s jaw set. “This is about Danny.”

He was right. We both knew it. The pressure had been building for a week. Danny’s arrest. The anonymous tip. The suspicion landing on Brotherhood like a stone in still water, ripples spreading outward.

Someone on 2-Beta had sparked it. Maybe Brotherhood. Maybe Kingsmen. Didn’t matter. The spark was just an excuse. The fuel had been building since Danny walked out in cuffs.

The riot lasted three hours.

We heard all of it from Cell 47. Shouting in English and Spanish. Crashes that shook the tier. Alarms cycling on and off. Guards’ radios bleeding through the walls — fragments of orders, updates, numbers.

Then, around the two-hour mark, Werner appeared at our cell door.

“O’Reilly. Coming in.”

Guard unlocked the door. Werner stepped in. Werner never stepped in. He summoned people to him. The fact that he was here, in our cell, meant something had changed.

“We need bodies,” he said. No preamble. No pleasantries. “Brotherhood’s taking a beating down there. Axel wants reinforcements.”

“I’m not Brotherhood,” I said. Reflex. Same deflection I’d been making for a year.

“You’re Brotherhood-protected.” Werner’s eyes were hard. Blue and cold and completely serious. “Same thing when it matters. And it matters right now.”

Flaco was on the upper bunk, watching. His face carefully blank.

Werner looked at him. “Kings guy. Stay put.”

Flaco didn’t move. Didn’t respond. Just watched.

Werner looked back at me. “You in or you out, Thor. Right now.”

If I said no — Brotherhood protection gone. Right when Kingsmen were actively hunting for someone to bleed. Which meant the next shower, the next yard time, the next moment I was vulnerable. Which in a lockdown situation meant every moment.

If I said yes — I fought for the Brotherhood. For real. Not protection tax, not magical services, not an arrangement of mutual convenience. I bled for them. And that changed everything.

No real choice.

“I’m in,” I said.

Werner nodded once. “Let’s go.”

2-Beta was chaos.

Not the organized violence I’d seen in the yard — the calculated, purposeful brutality of faction politics. This was raw. Desperate. The kind of fighting that happens when months of tension finally crack open and everything spills out at once.

The common area on 2-Beta was a battlefield. Overturned tables. Broken chairs. Blood on the concrete — smeared, pooled, splattered. Inmates fighting in clusters. Guards trying to separate them, batons out, some of them getting hit in the crossfire.

Werner led a group of six Brotherhood members from 3-Alpha. I was at the back, heart hammering, hands shaking. Not from magic. From adrenaline and the simple animal knowledge that I was about to get hurt.

We hit the floor of 2-Beta and it was immediate. A Kingsman — big guy, shaved head, tattoos up his neck — came at Werner with a chair leg. Werner caught it, twisted it away, put the guy on the ground in three moves. Practiced. Efficient.

I didn’t have Werner’s experience. Didn’t have years of prison fighting built into my muscle memory. But I had instinct. And I had rage — the cold, hard kind that came from carrying a secret that could kill me.

A Kingsman I didn’t recognize swung at me. I ducked. Barely. His fist whistled past my ear. I came up inside his guard and hit him in the solar plexus. Same spot Brick had hit me in the shower, a year ago. The guy doubled over. I shoved him sideways. He went down.

Stayed down. Too winded to get back up fast.

I kept moving. Kept my back to a wall when I could. Kept my eyes on everything. The chaos was disorienting — noise, movement, pain everywhere — but somewhere underneath it, the survival instinct Flaco had taught me in my first week was doing its work. Eyes open. Always.

That’s when I saw it.

Far corner of 2-Beta. Two Kingsmen had a Brotherhood enforcer on the ground. I didn’t know his name — newer guy, maybe six months in, mid-twenties. White. Nordic tattoos, naturally. One of the lesser Brotherhood soldiers.

They were beating him badly. One held him down, knee on his chest. The other was hitting him in the face. Over and over. Not stopping. The guy on the ground had stopped fighting back. Blood streaming from his nose, his mouth. Eyes glazing.

Another ten seconds and they’d kill him.

I moved before I thought about it.

No magic. Too visible. Too many eyes. Too many people watching, even in the chaos. If I did something impossible here, every faction in Central North would know by morning.

So, I did it the stupid way. The human way.

I grabbed the guy doing the hitting from behind. Both arms around his neck. Squeezed. He was bigger than me — most guys were — but the angle was right and I put everything into it. He bucked, thrashed, tried to throw me off.

The other Kingsman — the one holding the Brotherhood guy down — turned. Saw me. Let go of his target and came at me.

His fist caught me in the jaw. Hard. Stars exploded. I felt my teeth crack together. The guy I was choking finally went limp — not unconscious, just enough. I let go, staggered sideways.

The second Kingsman was already swinging again. I blocked it with my forearm — pain shooting up to my shoulder — and countered with an elbow to his face. Felt cartilage crunch. He stumbled back, blood pouring from his nose.

Werner appeared out of nowhere. Put the bleeding Kingsman on the ground with one efficient move. A backhand that snapped the guy’s head sideways. Down and done.

The Brotherhood enforcer on the ground was trying to get up. I grabbed his arm, pulled him to his feet. He swayed. Blood in his eyes. But standing. Alive.

“You good?” I asked.

He blinked at me. Didn’t know my name. Didn’t matter. He nodded.

Werner looked at me. Something in his expression I hadn’t seen before. Not the usual calculating assessment. Something closer to respect.

“Good work,” he said. Short. Simple.

Then the guards hit us like a wave — riot response team, full gear, batons and shields — and everything dissolved into the chaos of being separated, sorted, pushed back to our tiers.

Warden Hutchins came on the PA at 6 PM.

“Attention all tiers. This facility is now under lockdown, effective immediately. All inmates will remain in their cells for twenty-three hours per day until further notice. Yard time will rotate, one tier at a time, sixty minutes maximum. Commissary and all programs are suspended. This order will remain in effect until I am satisfied that order has been restored. Anyone found outside their cell during restricted hours will face disciplinary action. That is all.”

Groans echoed through 3-Alpha. Someone cursed in Spanish. Someone else slammed a fist against their cell door.

Two weeks, minimum. Maybe longer.

I was back in Cell 47. Flaco on the upper bunk. My jaw was swelling. Knuckles on my right hand were split and bloody. I cleaned them in the sink. Cold water. Stung like hell.

Flaco watched me from above. Didn’t say anything for a while.

“You fought for them,” he finally said.

Not a question.

“Yeah.”

“My people were on the other side.”

“I know.”

Silence. The tier settling into lockdown quiet — quieter than normal, the sound of a place holding its breath.

“You saved someone’s life down there,” Flaco said. “I heard about it already. Word travels fast.”

“Yeah.”

“Brotherhood’s gonna remember that.”

“Yeah.”

More silence. Flaco shifted on the upper bunk. Springs creaked.

“You know that changes things,” he said.

I knew. Fighting alongside Brotherhood wasn’t a transaction anymore. It was a commitment. Blood commitment. The kind that stuck.

“I didn’t have a choice,” I said.

“Everyone’s got a choice, esse.” His voice was quiet. Not angry. Just tired. “You just don’t always like the options.”

We didn’t talk about it anymore that night. The lockdown pressed in around us — 6×10 feet, two men, 23 hours a day. The silence between us wasn’t hostile. Just heavy. Like something had shifted and neither of us knew how to name it yet.

Day 5 of lockdown.

Guard came to Cell 47 at 8 AM. Not the usual rotation. This guy had paperwork.

“Diaz. Carlos Diaz?”

Flaco dropped down from the upper bunk. “Yeah?”

“You’re being sprung. Early release order. Good behavior, overcrowding reduction.” The guard held out the paperwork. “Pack your shit. You’ve got thirty minutes.”

Flaco stared at him. “What? I got three months left.”

“Good behavior credit plus overcrowding policy. It’s all in the paperwork.” The guard shrugged. “Take it or leave it, Diaz. Your call.”

Nobody was stupid enough to leave it.

“I’ll take it,” Flaco said.

The guard left. Flaco stood there holding the paperwork, looking at it like it was written in a language he didn’t speak.

Then he looked at me.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“Thirty minutes,” I said.

“Yeah.” He set the paperwork down on the bunk. Started gathering his stuff. Didn’t have much. A few books. The deck of cards — dog-eared, worn smooth from a year of nervous shuffling. Some commissary items. A photo of his mother that he kept face-down on the shelf.

I helped. Handed him things. Folded clothes that didn’t need folding. Filled the silence with small tasks because neither of us wanted to be the one to start talking about what was actually happening.

Flaco was leaving. Just like that. Out the door. Back to the world. Back to Jane-Finch and his mother and whatever came next.

And I was staying. Twenty-three hours a day in this box. Alone now. With a secret that could get me killed and a reputation that was tightening around me like a fist.

“You’re gonna be alright, Thor,” Flaco said. He was at the door now. Property box in one hand, the deck of cards tucked into his waistband. He looked at me the way he had on my first night — that same assessing warmth, that older brother energy that had kept me alive through the worst weeks of my life.

“You got the magic. Use it smart.”

“Yeah.”

“And stay away from the gangs.” A pause. Something behind his eyes I couldn’t quite read. “They’ll eat you. Even the ones that say they’re protecting you.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” He held my gaze. Steady. Serious. “Because from where I’m standing, you just bled for them. And now you’re alone in this cell and they’re gonna come back for more. They always do.”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“Don’t try,” Flaco said. “Try to stay smart, try to keep your principles, try to not let this place turn you into something you’re not. Don’t try. Do it. Because trying means you’re still deciding. And you can’t afford to keep deciding in here. You gotta know.”

“I know,” I said again. Quieter this time.

Flaco nodded. Then he did something he’d never done before — stepped forward and hugged me. Quick. Hard. One arm around my shoulders, grip tight, then let go.

Rare in prison. Meaningful because of it.

“Take care of yourself, Thor.” He used my real name again. Not hermano. Not pescado. Thor. Like it meant something.

Then he turned and walked out. Didn’t look back.

I understood why. If he looked back, he’d cry. And crying in prison — even walking out of prison, even at the door — was something you didn’t do.

The cell door closed behind him.

Cell 47 was quiet.

Just me.

First night alone was the loudest silence I’d ever heard.

No Flaco’s snoring. No cards shuffling. No Spanish cursing when he stubbed his toe on the bunk frame in the dark. No “you okay, hermano?” after a bad night.

Just the sounds of the tier. Doors. Someone crying somewhere. The distant echo of the Pit.

I lay on the lower bunk and stared at the underside of the upper bunk — empty now. Flaco’s mattress, bare. His spot. Gone.

He was the closest thing to a friend I’d had in here. Real friend. Not a client. Not an alliance of convenience. Someone who’d watched my back because he gave a damn, not because I was useful.

And now he was gone. Back to the world. Back to everything I couldn’t have.

The loneliness hit harder than I expected. Settled into my chest like a stone.

But underneath it — quieter, but there — something else. An opportunity.

Twenty-three hours a day. Nothing to do. No clients to serve, no library cart, no yard time politics. Just me and the cell and the silence.

Time to practice.

I’d been learning magic in stolen moments — lights out, after count, between shifts. An hour here. Thirty minutes there. Never enough. Never uninterrupted.

Now I had nothing but time.

I closed my eyes. Breathed. Let the silence settle around me like a shroud.

And started planning what I was going to learn.

Next week: Chapter 10: Books — the dust begins to settle. Into something new.

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← Chapter 8: The Snitch | Chapter 10 →

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I have been in love with Weimar Germany for most of my adult life.

The films — Lang, Murnau, Pabst. The fashion. The Bauhaus. The specific fever-dream quality of a society producing extraordinary beauty while standing on a trapdoor. If you have not watched Babylon Berlin, stop reading this and go find it. It is one of the finest depictions of this period ever committed to screen — baroque, corrupt, gorgeous, and utterly aware that 1933 is always coming. It will ruin you in the best possible way. Come back when you’re done.

Still here? Good. Then you understand why I needed to write these books.

The Title

Noble rot — Edelfäule in German — is a fungal condition that destroys grapes under precisely the right conditions and leaves behind something intensely, almost unbearably sweet. The basis for the greatest dessert wines in the world. Wrong conditions and it is simply rot. Right conditions and destruction becomes transformation.

It is also, as it happens, a title with a history. My memory places it as an abandoned John Belushi film project from the 1970s — a title too good for the project that couldn’t hold it, left to languish in obscurity. It was too good to leave there. So I brought it back. It’s alive. It’s alive.

What These Books Are

Noble Rot: Edelfäule is a series of four novellas set in Munich, Weimar Germany, 1919–1933. Each one reimagines a classic monster mythology — vampire, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, Maenad — not as horror, but as literary archive. Each book assembles a different set of documents around a woman doing the work available to her in a city that is running out of time.

The announced subject of each book is always a woman. The monster is what the work becomes. It is never named directly. It is always legible.

Framing all four books is H. Mauer — a Germanic scholar writing from Paris in November 1946, assembling and annotating each archive with the precision of a man who is very carefully not saying what he knows. His detachment erodes across four volumes. By the end, the methodology is gone. What remains is a man, and these documents, and his conviction that the women in them deserve a record more honest than silence.

Four dark and dangerous women. A coven of witches, each beautiful in her own way. This is what I set out to write, and — I am genuinely proud to say — this is what arrived.

The Four Books

Endlos / Endless — Munich, 1922–1923 Veda is a countess with six centuries behind her. Gil is an American painter who sees her — not what she is, but who. The vampire myth, rendered as epistolary archive: letters, sketchbooks, a private journal in a language not spoken for five centuries. https://a.co/d/01I9Ikaz

Makellos / Flawless — Munich, 1922–1923 Dr. Elsa Voss has spent four years trying to reconstruct her husband from the theoretical residue of what he was. The wax cylinders she recorded document the project’s progress and its cost. Thomas Friedrich Voss died in 1918. By 1922, something was speaking in her laboratory. The Frankenstein myth, rendered as audio evidence. https://a.co/d/05pd59fi

Schamlos / Shameless — Munich, 1923–1924 Marta files copy for the Brownshirt press by day. At night, she runs a secret broadsheet from a basement two streets away. She has been reading Stevenson. She has decided she is not Jekyll — she was never Jekyll. She was Hyde the whole time, and the press room was the alibi, and the alibi is running out. Schamlos is a hybrid of Jekyll and Hyde and the wolf that follows — a journalist’s self-anatomy conducted over absinthe and stolen newsprint, in a city learning to catalogue which bodies belong and which do not. The transformation is political before it is physical. The claws are a form of testimony. https://a.co/d/00W8WWhk

Grenzenlos / Boundless — Munich, 1929–1931 Lena Kessler is a cabaret performer at the height of the city’s last golden season. Her sister Sofie is a chemist. The compound Sofie developed was not meant for Lena. The Maenad myth, rendered as an ecstatic possession the archive cannot fully transcribe. https://a.co/d/08KSFcK6

Noble Rot: Edelfäule — The Complete Series All four novellas in a single volume, with each book’s full scholarly apparatus intact. Complete with an Introduction and Aftermath documentation by the Author, plus Exclusive Editorial remarks.

Available Now.

On Epistolary Fiction and Its Pleasures

I am a committed lover of the epistolary novel — my own Hearthorne is testament to that. Nurse Beatrix Chalmers arrives at a cursed Lancashire manor in 1870 to find a household of women marked by something she cannot name. She documents it in her own clinical hand, with terrible precision, through letters and journals and testimonies — furious, resistant, and unsparing. Some things cannot be stopped. They can only be survived differently. That book and Noble Rot are working from the same conviction: that the epistolary form is not a decorative choice but a structural argument about who gets to be a witness and what witness costs. House of Leaves is the annotated opus I return to when I need my postmodernist fix: a book that uses apparatus and footnote and competing voice not as decoration but as load-bearing architecture. It is doing something the conventional novel cannot do. Noble Rot is working in that same tradition — four books where the framing scholar is not neutral furniture but a protagonist in his own right, whose relationship to what he is assembling is the series’ deepest argument.

The Weimar setting is not incidental to any of this. A society that produced the Bauhaus and the Beer Hall Putsch within the same decade, in the same city, is a society in which the archive is always contested — where what gets preserved and what gets destroyed is never accidental. Marta’s three document classes in Schamlos survive in inverse proportion to her public radicalism. This is not a narrative device. It is the structure of what suppression does. The form is the argument.

On Writing With AI

I am public-facing in my embrace of AI as a creative collaborator, and I have been since before it was fashionable to admit it.

Claude is my writing partner on Noble Rot, as on much of my recent work. What that means in practice: a rigorously maintained series bible, solid outlines for all four novellas, and a working methodology for finding the connective tissue — through theology, vampirism, addiction, reconstruction, classical philology, and the four-stage arc of a scholar losing his methodology — that makes these four books a single coherent argument rather than four separate novellas wearing a series badge.

What Claude enables is velocity without the sacrifice of precision. The half-formed things in my imagination — the instinct that Weimar Germany and monster mythology and the epistolary archive belonged together, that the announced subject should always be a woman doing the work available to her and the monster should be what the work becomes — those instincts needed a collaborator rigorous enough to hold them to their own logic. That is what this partnership does.

I have been witness to, and instrumental in curating, this batch of Noble Rot. I am proud of what we have made.

Where To Find Them

All four singles and the complete omnibus are live on Amazon Kindle now.

Singles are $0.99 each — Endlos is the door. The omnibus is $3.99 — four novellas, one object, the complete argument. Trade paperback editions are coming.

Julian Grant is an award-winning director and writer. Noble Rot: Edelfäule is his debut literary fiction series.

The Snitch

RuneSlinger is an eight-book urban fantasy series set inside Ontario’s correctional system. New here? Start with Chapter 1. All chapters are free.

Previously: Thor took the Danny Keyes job. He did the astral projection. He saw what he wasn’t supposed to see — a murder, clean and deliberate, and the man behind it. He’s been carrying that knowledge ever since. In a prison where the wrong information gets you killed, knowing too much is its own kind of sentence.

Friday morning. One day left.

I woke up before count. Flaco still snoring on the upper bunk. The tier quiet except for the usual sounds—toilets flushing, someone coughing three cells down, the distant clang of a door somewhere in the Pit.

One day until Danny expected his report.

One day to become a snitch and somehow not get killed for it.

I sat up. Rubbed my face. Hands steady now. Decision made last night, slept on it, still felt right. Solid. Children were the line. Danny crossed it. Simple as that.

The how was the complicated part.

Crimestoppers was anonymous. I knew that much. 1-800 number you called, gave information, hung up. They couldn’t trace it. Couldn’t force you to testify. Couldn’t connect you to the tip.

In theory.

But I was in prison. Every phone call was monitored. Recorded. Logged. Guards listened. Inmates listened. Someone was always watching, always listening, always ready to use information as currency.

Making a call from inside meant risk. Big risk.

But yard phones were different. Public phones, bank of six, neutral ground. Everyone needed them. Guards watched from a distance but didn’t hover. Conversations were semi-private. Volume of calls meant they couldn’t monitor everything.

Semi-private wasn’t anonymous. But it was better than cell phones or admin calls.

I’d have to wait for the right moment. Yard time. Busy period. Enough ambient noise to cover my voice. Enough people around that one more call wouldn’t stand out.

Friday yard time. Afternoon, probably. After lunch when everyone was out. Kings on the court. Brotherhood at the weights. Independents scattered. Phones busy with guys calling lawyers, families, girlfriends.

One more call in the chaos.

That’s when I’d do it.

Count came at six. I stood at the cell door with Flaco. Guard walked past, checked faces, moved on.

“You sleep?” Flaco asked when we sat back down.

“Some.”

“You still look like shit.”

“Yeah.”

He studied me for a moment. Then shrugged. “Whatever you’re working through, hermano, I hope you figure it out.”

“Me too.”

Breakfast. I forced myself to eat. Needed energy. Needed to look normal. Toast, eggs that might’ve been eggs, coffee that tasted like battery acid. Got it down anyway.

Danny wasn’t at breakfast. Probably sleeping in. Or avoiding me. Either way, I didn’t see him. Good. Didn’t want to look at his face right now.

The morning dragged. I went to the library, returned some books, pretended to browse. Books was there, shelving returns. He glanced at me, nodded, went back to work. Didn’t push conversation. Smart guy. Knew when someone needed space.

I found a book on Canadian criminal law. Old copy, outdated, but it had a section on anonymous tips. Read it twice. Confirmed what I thought: Crimestoppers protected tipsters. Anonymous reports were admissible if they led to physical evidence. A knife hidden in a specific location would count.

If they found it.

If Danny’s prints were on it.

If the tip led them to Rochelle’s body.

A lot of ifs.

But it was something.

I put the book back. Walked out of the library.

Yard time was at one PM. Four hours away.

I went back to Cell 47. Lay on my bunk. Went over it again.

The call had to be quick. Thirty seconds, maybe less. Get in, give the information, get out. No identifying details. No prison terminology. No voice they could connect to Thor O’Reilly, inmate #47928.

I’d need to disguise my voice. Not dramatically—that would stand out. Just slightly. Lower pitch. Different cadence. Flatten the Toronto accent. Sound like anyone from anywhere.

The information had to be specific but not suspicious. “I was partying next door” was my cover story. Saw someone hide something in the balcony overhang. Thought it was drugs at first. Then heard about the missing woman on the news. Thought I should call it in.

Plausible. Vague enough to be a concerned citizen. Specific enough to be useful.

I rehearsed it in my head. Over and over. Word choice. Tone. Pacing.

“Yeah, I want to report something about that missing woman in Parkdale. Rochelle Martinez.”

Pause. Let them respond.

“I was partying at 1507 Dundas West. Fifteenth floor. Saw someone hide something in the balcony overhang. Gap between the metal railing and the concrete. Thought it was drugs. But then I heard about Rochelle on the news. Same building, one floor down. Thought you should know.”

Pause. They’d ask questions.

“I don’t want to get involved. Just thought you should check it out. The overhang. Fifteenth floor. Unit 1507.”

Hang up.

Walk away.

Done.

Thirty seconds. Maybe forty if they asked follow-ups.

I could do this.

Had to do this.

Flaco climbed down from the upper bunk. “You going to yard?”

“Yeah.”

“Want company?”

“Nah. Got some thinking to do.”

He looked at me. Long look. Knew something was up. But didn’t push.

“Be careful, hermano.”

“Always am.”

Another lie. But he let it slide.

One PM. Yard time.

The afternoon was hot. July heat, sticky and oppressive. Guys stripped down to t-shirts, some shirtless if guards didn’t care that day. Brotherhood at the weight pile, skin pink and sweating. Latin Kings dominated the basketball court, shirts versus skins. Black Kingsmen scattered in smaller groups, talking, smoking when guards weren’t looking.

And the phone bank. Six phones bolted to the wall. Neutral ground. Everyone needed them.

Four phones were occupied when I got there. Two guys talking to lawyers probably—serious faces, low voices, occasional nods. One guy talking to family—Spanish, animated, smiling. One guy arguing with someone—girlfriend maybe, or ex-wife. Voice rising, finger jabbing the air.

Two phones open.

I walked over. Casual. Like I was just making a call. Nothing unusual. Thor making his weekly call. Nobody cared.

I picked up the receiver on the end phone. Farthest from the occupied ones. Maximum distance, minimum chance of being overheard.

Dialed 1-800-222-TIPS. Crimestoppers. Number was on a poster in the library. I’d memorized it this morning.

It rang. Once. Twice.

My heart hammered. Hands steady but everything else was adrenaline and fear.

Third ring.

Pick up. Come on.

Fourth ring.

“Crimestoppers. This call is anonymous and may be recorded for quality assurance. What information do you have?”

Woman’s voice. Professional. Neutral. Recording for quality assurance—that meant they logged calls but didn’t trace them. Or so they claimed.

I lowered my voice slightly. Flattened my accent. Not dramatic. Just different.

“Yeah, I want to report something about that missing woman. Rochelle Martinez. In Parkdale.”

Pause. I could hear her typing.

“Go ahead.”

“I was partying at 1507 Dundas Street West. Fifteenth floor. Few months back. Saw someone hide something in the balcony overhang. Gap between the metal railing and the concrete. Thought it was drugs at the time, didn’t think much of it.”

More typing.

“When was this?”

“Six months ago. Maybe more. Winter. There was snow.”

“And you’re calling now because...?”

“Heard about Rochelle on the news. Missing woman, same building, one floor down. Apartment 1407. Thought... I don’t know. Thought maybe it’s connected. Thought you should check.”

“What did you see hidden?”

“Couldn’t tell. Something wrapped up. Weatherproof. Could be nothing. Could be something.” I paused. Let doubt creep in. Made it sound like I was uncertain. “Just thought you should know. The overhang. Fifteenth floor balcony. Unit 1507.”

“Can I get your name?”

“No. I don’t want to get involved. Just check it out, okay? If it’s nothing, it’s nothing. If it’s something...”

I let that hang.

“Sir, if you have information about a crime—”

“I gave you what I have. Check the balcony. That’s all I can do.”

I hung up.

Stood there for a second. Receiver still in my hand. Heart still pounding.

Done.

I’d just snitched on Danny Keyes.

I hung up the receiver. Walked away from the phone bank. Casual. Normal. Just another call. Nobody watching.

Except everyone was always watching.

I found a spot by the fence. Far from the phones. Far from the basketball court. Far from the weights. Just me and chain-link and the certainty that I’d just crossed a line I couldn’t uncross.

The tip was in. Anonymous, but recorded. They had the location. 1507 Dundas West. Fifteenth floor balcony overhang. Specific enough to check. Vague enough not to raise immediate suspicion about how I knew.

Now it was up to the cops.

If they followed up.

If they found the knife.

If Danny’s prints were on it.

If they connected it to Rochelle’s body.

A lot of ifs.

But it was done.

I stood there, gripping the fence, watching the yard move around me.

Danny was over by the basketball court. Watching the game. Laughing at something. That charming smile. Blue-black skin in the sun. Intense eyes tracking the ball.

He had no idea.

Tomorrow he’d ask for his report. Expect me to tell him his stash was safe. Expect me to confirm the knife was still hidden, undisturbed, secure.

Instead, cops would be pulling it out of the balcony overhang. Dusting for prints. Running DNA. Building a case.

And Danny would know someone snitched.

He’d start looking for who.

My stomach twisted.

The afternoon stretched. I stayed in the yard longer than usual. Didn’t want to go back to the cell. Didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts. Needed the noise, the movement, the distraction.

Werner approached around three. Alone this time. No backup. Just checking in.

“You good?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You make your call?”

My blood froze. “What?”

“Your call. The phones.” Werner gestured with his chin. “Saw you over there earlier. Weekly check-in with your brother?”

Oh. Right. I made calls sometimes. Connor, once a month. Werner knew that.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just checking in.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Good. His kid’s growing up. She’s Five.” Truth mixed with lies. Safest deception.

“Nice.” Werner studied me. “You seem tense.”

“Just tired. Didn’t sleep well.”

“Still?” Werner frowned. “You been saying that all week. You need to see medical? Can’t have you falling apart on us.”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.” But he didn’t look convinced. “Just make sure you take care of yourself. You’re valuable, remember. Can’t have our investment burning out.”

There was that word again. Investment.

Werner walked away. I watched him go.

He’d noticed I made a call. Probably didn’t think anything of it—guys made calls all the time. But he’d noticed. Werner noticed everything.

I needed to be more careful.

Evening came. Dinner. I sat with Flaco. Forced myself to eat. Mac and cheese, or something approximating it. Fruit cup. Bread.

Danny walked past our table. Didn’t stop. Didn’t look at me. Just walked by like I didn’t exist.

Strange. Yesterday he’d checked in. Asked about Saturday. Confirmed I’d have something for him.

Today, nothing.

Maybe he was playing it cool. Didn’t want to look too eager. Didn’t want to draw attention to our business arrangement.

Or maybe he knew something.

No. Impossible. The call was anonymous. Cops wouldn’t have found the knife yet. Even if they did, even if they arrested him, it would take days. Warrants. Evidence processing. Building a case.

I was being paranoid.

Paranoid gets you killed, Flaco had said on my first day. But fear keeps you smart.

I needed to be smart.

“You okay?” Flaco asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve been weird all week.”

“Just got a lot on my mind.”

“Anything I can help with?”

I looked at him. Flaco. My cellie for over a year. Friend. The guy who’d taught me how to survive this place. Who’d protected me when I was a fish. Who had my back.

I wanted to tell him. Wanted to share the weight. But I couldn’t.

“Nah,” I said. “Just working through some stuff. I’ll be fine.”

He didn’t look convinced. But he nodded. Let it drop.

We finished dinner in silence.

Lights out at ten.

I lay on my bunk. Flaco snoring above me. The tier settling into night sounds.

I’d done it. Called Crimestoppers. Given them everything they needed. Location. Floor. Specific hiding spot. Enough to find the knife. Enough to connect it to Rochelle’s murder.

And tomorrow Danny would ask for his report.

What was I going to tell him?

The options cycled through my head again. Same four options as before, but now with different weight.

Option one: Lie. Say the stash was clear. Nobody found it. He was safe.

Buy time. Maybe cops wouldn’t find the knife before Danny figured it out. Maybe the tip wouldn’t lead anywhere. Maybe I’d get lucky.

But lying meant looking Danny in the eye and deceiving him. And Danny was smart. Observant. He’d see through it if I wasn’t perfect.

Option two: Tell the truth. “Yeah, about your stash. I saw what you did. Saw you murder Rochelle. Saw you hide the knife. And I reported you.”

Suicide. He’d kill me right there or send someone after me. Either way, dead man talking.

Option three: Avoid him. Don’t show up to yard time. Stay in my cell. Claim sick.

Coward’s move. And it wouldn’t work. Danny would find me eventually. Couldn’t hide forever in a prison.

Option four: Act normal. Show up to yard time. When Danny asks, tell him I failed the job. Couldn’t project that far. Technical difficulties. Offer to return the twenty.

Risky. But maybe believable. Magic failed sometimes. Everyone knew that. I’d turned down jobs before when I couldn’t deliver.

Option four was the play.

Show up. Act normal. Failed job. Return payment. Move on.

And hope to God the cops found that knife before Danny figured out who snitched.

I closed my eyes. Tried to sleep.

Didn’t work.

My brain kept replaying it. The phone call. The woman’s voice. “Can I get your name?” Me hanging up.

Anonymous tip. Untraceable.

Unless they found a way to trace it.

Unless someone saw me at the phones.

Unless Werner put two and two together.

Unless—

Stop.

Paranoia wasn’t useful. Fear was useful. This was crossing into paranoia.

I forced myself to breathe. Slow. Measured. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.

I’d made the call. I’d done what needed doing. Now I had to live with it.

Live being the operative word.

Had to survive tomorrow. Had to survive Danny asking questions. Had to survive whatever came next.

I’d faced down the Brotherhood in a shower. Survived a beating. Manifested magic to keep a door shut when three men tried to break in. Inherited power from a dying Nazi occultist. Built a reputation as a prison witch.

I could survive this.

Had to.

Sleep came eventually. Fitful. Full of dreams that weren’t quite dreams. Rochelle’s face. Danny’s knife. The phone in my hand. Crimestoppers operator asking for my name.

Over and over.

When I woke up Saturday morning, I knew one thing for certain:

Today was going to determine if I lived or died.

Saturday. Yard time.

I walked out into the sun. Hot again. July heat pressing down. Guys scattered in their usual territories. Brotherhood at the weights. Latin Kings on the court. Black Kingsmen in smaller clusters.

And Danny.

Standing near the basketball court. Watching the game. Waiting.

He saw me. Nodded. Gestured with his chin toward the fence. Away from the crowds. Semi-private.

Here we go.

I walked over. Casual. Like this was just another business transaction. Nothing special. Just Thor delivering a report.

My heart was hammering but my hands were steady.

Danny smiled when I got close. That charming smile. “Thor. You got something for me?”

“Yeah.” I kept my voice flat. Professional. “Couldn’t do it.”

The smile faltered. “What?”

“The projection. I tried. Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night. Couldn’t get there. Too far, or something’s blocking it. I don’t know.” I pulled the crumpled twenty from my pocket. Held it out. “Here. I don’t take payment for failed jobs.”

Danny stared at the twenty. Didn’t take it.

“You couldn’t get there,” he said slowly.

“No.”

“You do projections all the time. Parkdale’s not that far.”

“I know. But it didn’t work.” I met his eyes. Steady. Sincere. “Maybe it’s the distance. Maybe it’s interference. Maybe I’m just having an off week. Magic’s not a vending machine. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

Danny’s eyes narrowed. Studying me. Looking for the lie.

I held steady. Didn’t blink. Didn’t look away.

“You’ve never failed a job before,” he said.

“First time for everything.”

“And you tried multiple nights?”

“Yeah. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Same result. Couldn’t make the connection. Tether wouldn’t extend that far.” True, technically. I’d projected Tuesday night. But he didn’t need to know that.

Danny took the twenty. Slow. Thoughtful.

“That’s disappointing,” he said.

“Yeah. Sorry. If I could’ve done it, I would’ve.” Also true. If the job had been what he said it was—welfare check on his family—I would’ve done it no problem.

But it wasn’t. And I had done something. Just not what he expected.

“Alright.” Danny pocketed the twenty. “Appreciate you trying, anyway.”

“No problem.”

I started to walk away.

“Thor.”

I stopped. Turned back.

Danny’s smile was back. But different now. Colder. “You hear anything about Rochelle, you let me know, yeah? I’m real worried about her and the baby.”

The baby who died six months ago.

“Yeah,” I said. “If I hear anything, I’ll tell you.”

I walked away. Back toward the fence. Away from Danny. Away from that cold smile and those intense eyes.

He suspected something. Maybe not that I’d snitched. But something. I could feel it.

I found my spot by the fence. Gripped the chain-link. Tried to look casual.

The die was cast. The tip was in. Danny thought I’d failed the job. Now it was just waiting.

Waiting to see if cops found the knife.

Waiting to see if Danny got arrested.

Waiting to see if I’d survive what came next.

I stood there in the July heat, watching the yard move around me, and wondered if I’d made the right choice.

Too late now.

Children were the line. I’d drawn it. I’d stood by it.

Now I’d live with the consequences.

Or die with them.

Next week: Chapter 9 — the consequences land.

New to RuneSlinger? Start with Chapter 1.

← Chapter 7: The Murder | Chapter 9 →

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Today is April 11th.

Anton LaVey was born on April 11th, 1930.

I finished this opera today. On his birthday. Without knowing it was his birthday until I looked it up an hour ago.

I am not a superstitious man. I have, however, spent the last several years writing rock operas about people who built entire systems of belief around exactly this kind of moment — the date that shouldn’t mean anything, the coincidence that arrives with too much weight to be comfortable — and I have learned to pay attention when the universe decides to be theatrical about something.

So. April 11th, 2026. Anton LaVey’s 96th birthday. The opera about his life, his philosophy, and what it cost him is released today.

Do what thou wilt. He said that. He meant it. He preached it for thirty years in a black cape in a house full of the wrong century’s furniture on California Street in San Francisco. He wrote the bible of it. He sold a hundred thousand copies of the bible of it. He was on the Tonight Show being charming and dangerous about it.

He could not do it himself.

That’s the opera.

A Brief Personal History of Being Extremely Annoying About Rock Operas

It was Tommy that started it. I was thirteen, in a cinema I refused to leave, watching Elton John as the Pinball Wizard and Ann-Margret rolling in baked beans and The Who doing what The Who did, and something in my brain permanently rearranged itself. They threw me out after the third screening. I did not care at all.

Tommy was the gateway. Rocky Horror I saw twenty-seven times. Phantom of the Paradise I have loved for fifty years and will love for fifty more. These were not passive listening experiences. These were full-contact philosophical events dressed up as glam rock and horror movies, and I was completely unprepared for any of them and grateful for all of them.

What I loved — what I still love, what I have always loved about the form — is that rock opera does something that neither straight theatre nor a conventional album can do alone. It argues. It makes a case. It puts an idea inside a character, gives that character a melody, and makes you feel the idea in your chest before your brain has had time to put up its defenses. Tommy is about abuse and absence and the specific transcendence of a damaged mind. Rocky Horror is about liberation being more terrifying than the thing you’re liberating yourself from. Phantom is about the artist destroyed by the machinery of fame while the machinery cheerfully continues without him.

All three are, at their core, about the gap between what people preach and what they live.

Which brings me, inevitably, to Anton LaVey.

The Man, the Philosophy, and the Problem

LaVey was born Howard Stanton Levey in Chicago in 1930. He reinvented himself completely — lion tamer, carnival organist, crime scene photographer, all of it embellished, most of it fabulous, none of it the point. The point was the piano. He played the Micky Hotel in San Francisco at seventeen. He played the burlesque houses. The instrument was real even when the biography wasn’t.

He founded the Church of Satan on April 30th, 1966 — Walpurgisnacht, because of course it was — shaved his head, grew the Mephistophelian beard, put on the cape, and invented Anton Szandor LaVey as a complete character. Howard Levey never appeared in public again.

The philosophy is genuinely interesting. LaVeyan Satanism is explicitly atheistic. Satan is a symbol — of carnality, individualism, the refusal to subordinate the self to any external authority. Not a deity. Not a demon. A symbol of the one thing LaVey thought human beings kept giving away for nothing: themselves.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. He borrowed it from Aleister Crowley’s Thelema and built a church on it. The individual will as the only legitimate authority. The self as the only honest seat of power. External gods as projections of human need that humanity could afford to outgrow.

He wasn’t wrong about any of it.

He just couldn’t live it. Because by the time he’d built Anton LaVey thoroughly enough to preach from, there was no Howard Levey underneath to do the living. The self he built to replace the self he never had was the only self there was. Anton, all the way down. The man who preached radical self-sovereignty had made himself into an institution. And institutions, as he knew perfectly well, devour their founders eventually.

I found this irresistible.

Enter the Jesuit

The opera has three voices.

LaVey you know. I cast him in the Tim Minchin register — theatrical tenor, dark cabaret piano, wit with genuine edges. The intelligence audible in every line. The charm as weapon. Minchin is the obvious choice because Minchin is the only person currently working who can make a philosophical argument feel like seduction, which is exactly what LaVey did on television for thirty years. The song that opens the opera — Do What Thou Wilt — is the argument at full power:

The only law you owe allegiance to Is the one you make yourself The only god worth worshipping Is the one who signs your name

You almost agree with it. That’s the trap. That’s the point.

The second voice is Father Thomas Curran — a fictional lapsed Jesuit priest I invented as LaVey’s foil and, as it turned out, the opera’s actual protagonist. He arrives at the Black House in 1966 hollowed out by twenty years of subordinating a self he increasingly suspects is the only real thing to a God he can no longer locate. He doesn’t come to condemn. He comes because the philosophy answers questions he’s been carrying for two decades and he needs to know if it survives contact with a life.

The Jesuits trained their priests for adversarial engagement with heterodox thought. You go into hostile territory, you have read everything they have read, and you hold the line through reason and argument and presence. LaVey’s standard move — watch the bourgeois flinch at my bookshelf — does not work on a Jesuit. When LaVey says Can I call you Tom? and Curran says No — that No is the whole first act in one syllable.

I cast Curran in the Father John Misty register cracking into Tom Waits across three acts. FJM because Curran starts the opera performing his own detachment — the irony as armour over genuine searching — and Waits because by Act III the armour is gone and what’s left is a man who followed the commandment all the way through and came back to report what he found.

The third voice is Scratch — a trickster narrator who appears in three different costumes across the three acts. Carnival barker in Act I. Television producer in Act II. Last customer in a diminished room in Act III. Tom Waits throughout, accordion-driven, ancient amusement degrading slowly into something approaching sorrow. He has been watching this corner since before San Francisco had a name. He is not surprised by what happens to LaVey. He has seen it before.

I’ve been working this corner since before your city had a name. Man with a piano. Man with a question. And me. Just watching the door.

Three Decades, Twenty-Two Tracks

The opera runs from 1966 to 1997 across three acts. The Summer of Love pressing on the Black House from outside while LaVey argues against the herd from within. 1968 arriving with its full catastrophic weight — the assassinations, Chicago, the vindication that feels like grief. The Manson contamination, LaVey on every talk show drawing the distinction the press won’t draw. Watergate proving everything he said and the Church schism proving everything he knew about institutions simultaneously. The Satanic Panic burying him under a fabricated reading of a symbol he spent thirty years insisting was wrong.

He was right about all of it. He was magnificently, accurately, documentably right about all of it. He was also increasingly alone with his rightness in a sold house in Reagan’s America and Geraldo Rivera had a two-hour special.

Curran, meanwhile, does the thing. He leaves the Black House at the end of Act II having taken the philosophy and left the Church behind. He goes through the dark night. He follows the commandment properly — not as theatre, not as doctrine, just as the actual instruction it is — and discovers that there is, in fact, something on the other side. He comes back in Act III as the thing LaVey’s philosophy was always pointing toward. Not a Satanist. Not a Jesuit. A man who found his own authority and lives from it.

He offers the hand. LaVey looks at the hand, and something happens that has not happened before in the opera. He reaches for Howard and finds nothing. Not refusal. Absence. The self he built to replace the self he never had is the only self there is.

I can’t. [long pause] I can’t because there is no I to do it. There is only this. There has only ever been this.

Anton comes back. The performance reassembles. The philosophy stands, the door is real, he’s glad Curran found it. The last song is the opening song again — same words, same piano, same charm, same full ensemble — and the audience hears it completely differently because now they know what it cost.

The piano continues one bar after the voice stops.

Then silence.

On Music as Argument

People ask me why rock opera. Why not a novel, a film, a straight play.

Because a melody gets past the defenses. Because you can make someone feel an argument before their brain has had time to explain why they disagree with it. Because Tommy did something to me at thirteen that no book had managed and no film had quite achieved — it made me experience the gap between a damaged self and the world, not just understand it intellectually.

LaVey’s philosophy is a serious philosophical position. The self as the only legitimate authority. The refusal to outsource your moral weight to a supernatural entity. The individual will as the thing you’re responsible for above all else. These are not fringe ideas — they’re running through Nietzsche and Rand and Stirner and half of secular humanism whether it acknowledges the lineage or not.

What the opera does — what I hope the opera does — is make you feel the gap between the idea and the life. Feel it in the difference between the full ensemble of Do What Thou Wilt in Act I and the solo piano of Howard four tracks later. Feel it in the distance between LaVey’s Mode A and Mode B, the carnival musician alone with his instrument after the mythology has gone quiet. Feel it in the reprise at the end, where the words are identical and everything is different.

That gap. The distance between what we preach and what we live. It’s not a LaVey problem. It’s not a 1966 San Francisco problem. It’s the most human problem there is, and I have been circling it in three rock operas now, from three different angles, and I am not finished with it yet.

The AI Question, Since You’re Wondering

The opera was produced entirely in Suno AI. Every song generated from text prompts, every vocal register described in language before it existed in sound. Three saved Vocal Personas — LAVEY MODE A, LAVEY MODE B, and Father Curran — anchor the principal voices across all twenty-two tracks.

Getting Suno to hold two distinct voices in one generation is, it turns out, approximately as reliable as getting a philosophy of radical self-sovereignty to survive contact with thirty years of American celebrity culture. You can want it very much. You can write the instructions very clearly. The platform has its own ideas.

So most of the scenes between LaVey and Curran exist as separate tracks — LaVey’s side, then Curran’s side — sequenced so the conversation happens in the edit rather than the generation. The scene exists in the playlist. The drama exists in the listener’s mind, which is arguably where it belongs anyway.

The constraint turned out to be generative. It always does.

Go Listen

AVE SATANAS: DO WHAT THOU WILT is streaming now.

Listen on SoundCloud

If you want to own it — full album download, liner notes, and Creative Bible excerpts — the complete bundle is on itch.io for $5 pay-what-you-want.

Download on itch.io

Twenty-two tracks. Three acts. Three voices. Thirty years of San Francisco. The man who built the door and couldn’t walk through it, the man who did, and the trickster who was watching both of them from the corner the whole time.

It is not a condemnation of Anton LaVey. It is not a hagiography. It is the most human story I have told in any of these operas — the man who got the philosophy exactly right and couldn’t apply it to himself — and I have spent the last several months living in his Black House and his arguments and his tragedy and I have come out the other side genuinely fond of him.

He built something real. The door works. Curran walked through it.

The path doesn’t close when you refuse it.

It was always there. For everyone.

Even at the end.

Do what thou wilt.

— Julian Grant April 11th, 2026

The full download bundle — 22 tracks, liner notes, and Creative Bible excerpts — is available at jgesq.itch.io/ave-satanas. Pay what you wilt.

© 2026 Julian Grant — All Rights Reserved