AI WOVEN ART LAB

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scene 0.1 Welcome

The Sword of the Creator The Sword of the Creator is a collaborative art project — part audiobook, part graphic novel — made by many hands, refined by many voices, and brought to life by many talented carrot peeple. Is it a new and novel experience? Heck yes. Is it great writing? Define great. Did many awesome people put real pieces of themselves into this? Yes. Did something come out the other end that surprised us? Also yes. Now…. please enjoy this collaborative work in progress.

scene 1.1 The Loud Forest

Chapter One. The Wizard Geeile. Jelly Bun National Forest, the green middle of it. A morning so old it has forgotten it is morning. The forest had frogs. It had patience too — the kind the rest of the world had run out of a long time ago. A hill in its center, on the right kind of afternoon, resembled a pastry left out overnight, which is where the name came from. It was lovely, provided you could tolerate the frog density, the unscheduled mists, and the trees, which had opinions. The trees mostly kept their opinions to themselves. The mushrooms did not. There was a ring of them under a fallen log, each one the color of an apology, and they were arguing about things only mushrooms argue about — which is everything and nothing. Above them, moss climbed a stump in a patient way, as if it had nowhere to be. The moss was the oldest citizen here, and it knew it.

scene 1.2 Geeile Walks Through

Through all of this walked Geeile — pronounced GEE-ill. He was one hundred and forty-two years old. He had been fourteen for the last one hundred and twenty-eight of them. His face had the smoothness of a child who has not yet learned to be embarrassed and the eyes of a person who had been embarrassed several times and had already moved on.

scene 1.3 A Word with a Frog

His lips moved. They moved when he read, they moved when he cast, and they moved, mostly, when he was doing absolutely nothing at all. Geeile was fluent in Froggish, which he had acquired around his sixty-third year. There were frogs around his ankles doing their own kind of nothing. Hundreds of them, small and green. He bent down and said something quiet to a frog the size of a coin. The frog blinked once, slow in the way you blink when someone calls you a name you haven't heard in a while.

scene 1.4 What He Loves

He loved the forest the way very old people love things they have outlived. He loved the moss especially. He loved a clearing he had been told was on the eastern edge but which seemed, most days, to be not east at all. He loved small natural things, and fantastical things, oh, and tiny cakes, which the forest (on special occasions) would generously produce. There was a place, east of the eastern clearing, where the mushrooms had stopped arguing. He had not mentioned it to anyone. He did not know what it meant yet. He hoped it meant nothing. His mother had made this place herself. Her final spell had been the one that stopped her where she stood, and what bloomed in the stopping was a realm of frogs. Geeile saw her, sometimes, in a frog's blink, in the green-water flicker of a tadpole turning. He never talked about it.

scene 1.5 The Quieting

He had been on more adventures than anyone had bothered to count, in roles ranging from protagonist to angry shopkeeper to “anonymous wizard” mentioned in the index of a much longer book. Whether he was a hero remained undetermined. What was determined was that he loved this forest, and would, given the opportunity, do anything for it. The opportunity, as it happens, was coming. The narrator finds this both inconvenient and exciting, and intends to keep an eye on it. This is the beginning of a long story without a planned ending. In a clearing he didn't remember being a clearing yesterday, Geeile sat down on a log that had not been a log yesterday either, and ate a tiny cake the forest had given him, and watched the mist rearrange itself. His lips moved around words no one was saying. Far away, something with mud on it was about to enter the forest. He did not know this yet. What he did know — what the frogs knew, what the moss knew in the patient way moss knows things — was that the arguing had been getting quieter for a long time. That somewhere, the color was going out of things. That this, whatever it was, was the reason.

scene 2.1 Daedee in the Swamp

Chapter Two. A Pure Soul Enters the Forest (Unwisely). The Long Swamp at the southern edge of Jelly Bun National Forest. Mid-afternoon, the crap part of it. There was a swamp at the south edge of the forest, and at this hour it was doing what swamps generally do, which is breathing slowly through its teeth. Into this swamp came Daedee — pronounced DAY-dee, armored at all times, with the kind of stride that arrives somewhere before the rest of her does — swinging a sword at a reed that had done nothing to her. She had no map. She had no plan. She had, by any field-guide standard, no detectable knowledge of swampcraft.

scene 2.2 Daedee's Résumé

A brief résumé, delivered in the register of a naturalist who has been on the road too long: two months living inside a vomit-horpse, which is exactly what it sounds like; a tenure as a rotten-food taste tester, terminated by mutual agreement; the time she was trampled, skewered, and left under the stars after losing a wager to a newt about whether a herd of dorbins could be defeated through pure mental intensity. She had survived all of it. She tended to. Daedee forgot battle plans within the hour, but she remembered every person she had ever met — name, face, the specific thing that mattered to them — which is its own kind of weapon, and a kinder one. She also had a Something under her armor — unnamed, undescribed, irrefutable — that told her where to go, and she followed it the way other people followed recipes. The last town she'd passed through had lost its baker three months prior and nobody had thought to replace him. She'd noticed, lately, that towns were doing that — losing the “unnecessary” things first. The color going out of market stalls. Fewer musicians. Fewer arguments about nothing. She didn't know what to make of it. She kept moving. The Something lived tucked away alongside three satchels of items of no apparent utility. She fed this Something from the satchels and refused to elaborate on. The creature, today, was being quiet. The creature, today, was paying attention.

scene 2.3 The Branch Catches Her

She smashed forward through a curtain of cattails and immediately misjudged a stone that was not a stone. She went down to one knee in the murky water. Geeile, who had climbed into a low willow at the swamp edge for no reason, watched her almost die. Frogs gathered on the branch around him as if they didn’t want to miss what came next. He sighed. It was the sigh of a man being asked to ruin his afternoon.

scene 2.4 The Wizard in the Tree

He suddenly grew still. His eyes drifted close. His lips moved. From the willow, a branch grew — long, soft, deliberate — out across the swamp. It found Daedee's wrist with the utmost carefulness. The branch tightened. The branch lifted. The swamp made a sound as if it was losing. She came up out of the water dripping, indignant, and not entirely sure who had done what. The willow set her on a tussock with the ginger care of a librarian replacing a book on its shelf.

scene 2.5 Wrong Direction

Geeile, in the tree, did not climb down. He looked at her. He sensed, all at once, the Thing under her armor. He did not know what it was, but he knew it mattered. He knew, in the cold and certain way the old do, that the rest of his life was now attached to this stranger with mud caked in her hair. Far, far away, in a place that had not yet been described, something else knew this too. It opened, very slightly, like a mouth deciding to start screaming. Then, it began to rain. Daedee, on her tussock, glanced up to see the wizard in the tree. She said something extremely uncomplimentary about wizards in trees, stood up, and walked off in the entirely wrong direction. Geeile climbed down. The frogs followed him at a polite distance.

scene 3.1 She Works Alone

Chapter Three. An Unwilling Partnership. A long line of forest, wrong direction becoming right. Days, then more days, the calendar gone slack. She announced she worked alone. She reaffirmed it to a tree, to a clearing, to a frog that did not appear interested in the news. Geeile, several paces behind, did not announce anything; he simply continued to exist at the edge of her vision, which was, statistically, the only strategy for accompanying Daedee that had ever worked. But the forest helped him. She marched east when east was wrong, and the trees, with quiet encouragement rearranged themselves so that east became, by the time she got there, the way they actually needed to go. When the mossy quicksand caught her ankle on the third afternoon, a branch found her elbow and lifted without comment. She got out of it, walked on, and did not say thank you. He did not expect her to. The branch retracted itself the way a cat retracts a paw it has decided not to use.

scene 3.2 Sausage and Boot

She found, on the fourth day, a forest object that looked like a small purple sausage hanging from a vine. She tasted it, which was regrettable, and the indignant silence this produced lasted until she fell asleep with her head against her shield. She woke to find Geeile and a respectful circle of frogs observing her at a polite distance. She threw a boot at him. He moved a single inch to the left and the boot whizzed past into a fern. On the fifth day, the rain kept up. This was just how it went. Geeile never asked Daedee to accept him. He simply continued to be there, days running into other days, the route stitched together by his small interventions and her continuously not acknowledging them. Sometimes, she glanced back over her shoulder to check if he was still there, and pretended she hadn't. The narrator notes that this is a strategy older than language, and is, statistically, the one that works best in these types of adventures.

scene 3.3 Continuing to Be There

By the seventh day, the forest was running out of itself. The trees thinned. The moss had stopped having opinions and started being only moss. Frogs were fewer and arranging themselves, the narrator noticed, in the way frogs do when they are about to leave you. The Darkness that had been pacing alongside the story since the rain first began, finally stepped into view — not as a figure, because it had no figure to speak of, but as a place the ground no longer existed. A crag. Black, wide, breathing. Very much not natural. The air around this fissure tasted of charred paper.

scene 3.4 The Crag

Daedee, of course, walked straight up to it. Geeile opened his mouth to say something he had been saving — when the ground at her feet softened the way a swamp softens, except this was not a swamp. The dark underneath had simply decided to open — and down she went, sword and all, with a single sharp curse and the small unmuffled sound of armor meeting stone — thrice. The rain, by now, had gotten worse.

scene 4.1 At the Edge

Chapter Four. A Moment of Respite (And a Vending Machine). The edge of the crag, lip of the underworld. The next minute, drawn out long. Geeile stood at the edge. In front of him was the mouth of the underworld. This frightened him. Somewhere down below, in the black and breathing, was a girl in a lot of armor who had not asked for him and refused him at every turn. She may very well refuse him down there too. Plus, there was no guarantee she would even survive the fall. The rain put a cold hand on the back of his neck.

scene 4.2 Calling the Machine

He looked up at the sky. He cast — a wicked one, the kind he had not pulled out in a long, long time. The clouds swirled. Lightning crawled across the underside of the storm. He screamed a string of words that were not, strictly, inaudible, but that you could not understand if you tried. His lips, for once, kept up. A glowing vending machine slammed down out of the sky and skidded in front of him in a slick of mud. The narrator should note, plainly: this is incredibly hard to conjure. The Beerch Machine appears only to those who deserve it. To call one, you must be pure of heart, genuinely thirsty, and your intentions must be true. Many have tried. Very, very few have succeeded. Geeile, on this day, on the lip of a hole his only friend had fallen into, was one of the lucky ones. He smiled. He had not smiled in days.

scene 4.3 Beerch Water Commercial

Friend. Listen. You look thirsty and you look tired. You look like the kind of tired that water doesn't fix and beer doesn't fix and a long sit-down in a sunny window doesn't fix either. You look like you've been losing, quietly, for weeks. We have something for you. It's called Beerch Water. It's crisper than water. It's wetter than beer. It's almost certainly….something. It hydrates aggressively. It intoxicates, probably. It will definitely, positively make you cry. We promise. Pop the cap, take a leak. Beerch finds you when you're weak. One cold sip and let it speak. Beerch Water. It knew you were coming. It was already cold. Cut to: Geeile, robe sagging, chugging a tall green can with his head tilted back. He finishes. He gasps. His eyes leak. He does a small sock-footed dance, undignified, joyous, a dance that has been waiting in his body for a hundred and twenty-eight years. The frog beside the machine watches without comment, it has seen this before.

scene 4.4 Diving In

He hit the button. He hit it again. Several more Beerch Waters tumbled out of the rusty slot with the cheerful clunk. He filled his pockets, and then the pockets inside the pockets, and the secret pocket inside those, and the one his mother had stitched into the lining when he was seventy-ish. The robe sagged impressively. He looked like a man wearing a small avalanche of beverages. He turned to the frog beside the vending machine. The frog looked back. And declined comment. Refreshed, Geeile stepped to the edge of the crag. He dove in.

scene 5.1 The Eating-Thing

Chapter Five. Crossing the Threshold. Down inside the crag, a chamber softer than it deserves to be. A minute later, or a year — the falling decides. He fell, and the fall was all wrong — the way certain falls feel purely in the favor of the falling. The crag took a deep breath in. The dark, which had every reason to hurt him, did not. He landed on stone that was somehow not stone. It had a kind of give underneath as if the underworld were not yet ready to lose its wizard and was holding its breath about it. He was in a chamber. The walls had a faint phosphorescent growth on them, the kind that grew on things that had never seen a sun and had nevertheless decided to glow. By its light he saw a great wet shape working away at something on the far side of the chamber. The something was Daedee. The shape was eating her. It was vast and patient and where it moved, the glow on the walls went out — not dimmed, out — as if light was the first thing it consumed and Daedee merely next. It was not a creature that lived down here. It was a piece of something larger that had decided to take a shape. He recognized it. The fissure above had smelled of charred paper. So did this.

scene 5.2 The Beerch Strike

Geeile pulled a Beerch Water from his pocket. He did not know if the can would work. He had, in his long career, never tried this specific thing but had heard a lot about it. He shook it once. It hissed as something about to be useful does. He threw it underhand. The can struck the eating-thing in the side of what must be its head. It detonated in a green spray of foam and what the narrator would, generously, call carbonation. The thing reeled. The thing forgot, briefly, that it had been eating. The thing also seemed, by all available evidence, to have begun to cry. Daedee rolled free.

scene 5.3 "Fine."

She came up to one knee, sword still in hand, breathing hard. Her armor had acquired six months of scuffing in one hour. The unnamed creature under her breastplate moved, once, the way a sleeping cat resettles. She gave it a safe “pat.” The eating-thing wept its way back into a tunnel. She did not say thank you. She said something better. "Fine." A partnership was, technically, formed. The narrator notes that "technically" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and that this is, often, how partnerships start. Geeile sat down on the not-stone with his legs out in front of him like a child, and tossed her a second Beerch Water. She caught it without looking. She did not drink it yet. She held it the way you hold a thing you are not sure you want to admit you desperately want and are grateful for. Far above them, in a place that no longer mattered, the rain kept saying what the rain was saying.

scene 6.1 The Skitter

Chapter Six. A Battle Like No Other. The underworld below the crag, three rooms of it in a row. Hours, or days; down here time is a suggestion. The Skitter came out of a side tunnel before they were ready. A wave of small fast things with too many legs and too many opinions, pouring like spilled marbles into the chamber. Daedee dropped into stance and began — one on her left, she cut it clean; one on her right, she grabbed the shaft of a fallen torch and broke its fucking jaw with a wet crunch that made the moss flinch. Geeile, who was bad at small fast things, raised his hand to cast a spell. His lips moved. He cast one of his favorite spells of all time, intending one output, getting something entirely different — and entirely confusing. Daedee laughed once, mid-cut, a real surprised laugh, and was immediately annoyed at herself for it. Geeile looked across the chamber at her, perfectly calm, and gave her two thumbs up. She told him to fuck off. He smiled.

scene 6.2 The Slow One

Then it got worse. The Slow One came up out of a deeper place, an enormous animal that had been down there a long time and did not tolerate disturbance. It could not be defeated. The fight blurred into a perilous chase — narrow corridors, falling stone, Geeile casting certain spells at the wrong moment which somehow produced an even angrier smaller version of the Slow One, which was not helpful but did, briefly, distract its parent. Daedee made hard, fast tactical calls about which tunnel would not kill them. There was no banter. There was only the breathing. When they finally evaded it, they sat shoulder to shoulder against a cold wall for a long time and said nothing. He handed her a Beerch Water. She drank it. Her eyes leaked. So did his.

scene 6.3 The Chorus

The Chorus came up after, the way a black tide comes in. The whole underworld pouring up the tunnel in globs and teeth and bad intent, far bigger than the first two combined. They could not fight it as individuals. For the first time, on purpose, they combined — her strength, his strangeness, the Something under her armor lighting up and calling to something in him neither of them had named. Daedee ran three steps up the cavern wall and brought her sword down through one of the evil things on the way back to the ground. Geeile spun like a whirlwind, robe out, arms wide, lightning crawling around his hands, and blew the shit out of a whole row of them. Mid-arc she glanced at him with an impressed look. He, mid-spin, grinned like he had been waiting his entire life for this moment. She ripped a Beerch Water can into a flat shape and went in slashing with the jagged end. He grabbed a piece of rock off the floor and brought it down on something's head with a sound that did not belong indoors.

scene 6.4 The Cat

A cat appeared. Out of nowhere. Calm. Calm-calm. It launched off a stalagmite and flying-kicked two globs out of the air mid-leap and landed on its feet with the air of an accountant correcting a small error. Nobody asked. Nobody cared why. One of them got clipped — a bad one, blood on the armor, a wince he didn't see coming. The other got there first. The cat landed. Daedee looked at Geeile. He looked back. No words. She drove forward and he cast outward and the Something under her armor blazed. The horde came apart all at once, like a word mispronounced, like a spell reversed, like a thing that had never had any business being whole. The silence after rang like a bell.

scene 6.5 His Mother's Book

A cavern opened behind where the horde had been. Inside, on a shelf carved into the stone like someone had meant for him to find it, sat a book. Geeile knew the book. It had been his mother's. He had not seen it in a long time, and not by accident. It was full of spells. The margins were crammed with scrawling notes — half-finished, in her handwriting, with little drawings, the kind of underlines only a mother makes. As he held it, new ink began to appear at the bottom of a page, still wet. He whispered what it said. He did not know he was whispering. The wall in front of him fell down like a curtain.

scene 6.6 Threshold Winter

There they stood at the edge of a cliff in a winter that should not exist — not the friendly kind that can be tamed with a hot chocolate and fuzzy coat. The other kind. The one that makes you hide away from the shrieking wind and frost bite. The old books called this a Threshold Winter — Grade II, sub-category: Irreversible. Ahead, in the gap between two peaks: Powder Mountain. They looked at it. They knew, without speaking, that this was where they went next.

scene 7.1 The Mountain Wins

Chapter Seven. The Climb. The east face of Powder Mountain, in a winter without an exit. Many days, the kind that stop being countable. The mountain did not want them on it, and said so in the only language a mountain speaks, which is wind. Raw in the most bitter of sense; the wind snapped at them. The narrator notes that the register of this chapter is regrettably literal: there is a mountain, and there are two people, and the mountain is winning.

scene 7.2 Caught By the Robe

Halfway up, breath ragged, snow in the seams of her armor, Daedee almost suggested he turn around. Head back to where they came. But she knew that wasn’t an option. She knew he wouldn’t leave her. The cat on her shoulder did too. Geeile kept climbing, so did Daedee. Higher than that, Geeile lost a foothold he didn't see coming — the rock dropped out from under him like a hatch — and Daedee, three steps below, threw out an arm and caught him by the back of his robe. She was surprised, he was lighter than he ought to be. She set him on his feet. They climbed on.

scene 7.3 The Snow Takes Her

Higher still, the snow took Daedee, but Geeile got to her first. She had misjudged a drift; she was under it before she had finished the misjudging. He pulled her hand out, then her arm, then the rest of her, no comment offered, no comment needed. He conjured a fire from a miscellaneous collection of embarrassing leftover spell components — a sock, a memory, the last Beerch Water poured into the snow. She held her hands out to the fire. The cat sat between them and licked one paw with the patience of a sediment settling.

scene 7.4 The Long Quiet Stretch

Then came the long stretch where neither of them spoke, and the only sound was the snow, which is the kind of conversation in which nothing is said and both people know exactly what is being agreed to. The light, when there was light, came at strange angles, the sun a rumor behind the gray. One of them almost said the real thing — about the Something under the armor, about the mother in the margins, about what was going to happen at the top — and didn't. Instead, one hand went into a pocket and came out with a Beerch Water, slightly slushy. It was passed across the climbing rope, the other accepted it without speaking. The cat began to saunter to the front. As cats do.

scene 7.5 Peak

By the time they reached the peak, they had stopped pretending they were alone in this. The wind, sensing it had lost an argument, lulled into a whisper. The snow around their boots calmed. Somewhere behind the next ridge, a thin coin of light was beginning to be visible again, the way a friend you have ignored for years is visible across a room. They had not, in honesty, expected to make it. They had not seen the sun in weeks.

scene 8.1 The Shrine of a Rock

Chapter Eight. The Door. The summit of Powder Mountain, a flat plate of stone above the world. Morning, the first one in a long time. The wind had taken a step back, and the sky, for the first time since the forest, was not gray. At the center of the flat stood a shrine — or what passed for one. Four low stones in a square. A pedestal between them. On the pedestal: a rock. Just a rock. Worn smooth in the middle by the patient attention you only get from people who are very old or very dead. It was, by the standards of legendary destinations, an embarrassment.

scene 8.2 Daedee Snaps

Daedee snapped. After the swamp, after the crag, after the climb — this? She hammered on it with her fists, with the flat of her sword, with the heel of her boot, screaming at the rock, screaming at Geeile: "What is this? Why are we even here? Why did you lead us here?" Geeile did not answer. Geeile was looking at the rock. There was something in his eye — not pity, not patience — a twinkle of a smirk. The cat peered over his shoulder with the same glint in its yellow eye. She stopped hitting things. "What? What are you looking at?"

scene 8.3 The Quiet Thing Out Loud

Geeile spoke — quietly, for him, lips barely moving — and this was the first time in this story that anyone said the quiet thing out loud. "Daedee, you brought us here. Your heart is pure. You have a creative spirit. We could not have made this climb without you. You led us without even knowing where you were going, and we followed because you were going somewhere. And the thing we need — the tool that saves the world, that saves humanity, that saves every creative, remarkable, weird, imaginative person and place and idea and small wet thing nobody has time for anymore — is right in front of you. It has been the whole time." He pulled his mother's book from his pocket. He opened it to a page near the back — deeply creased, stained with coffee and tears and maybe a little blood — a page he had clearly looked at for a long time. He handed it to her. The page showed the rock. Underneath, in his mother's hand: Ancient Offering Pedestal of the Maker, Cl. III. Above the title, drawn and redrawn — in marker, in crayon, in something that looked like ash — the rock, except it wasn't a rock. It was a needle. A stick. A paintbrush. A candle. A flame. A kite. The drawings flickered. The drawings, as she watched, caught fire on the page and did not burn the paper. It was, the narrator believes, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

scene 8.4 The Sword of the Creator

Daedee lifted her eyes. Geeile put a hand on her shoulder. The cat put a small paw on the other. Reflected in her eyes, the rock had become the flickering thing. She walked to the pedestal. She put her hand on what had been a rock just a second ago. It was now the Sword of the Creator — and it was every shape it had ever been at once — and it came up out of the stone like it had only been resting.

scene 8.5 The Door

The mountain answered with a quake. A wave of light, of energy, of color the wind had not seen in a long time, blew outward from the summit in every direction. Daedee turned east. The Darkness was there — a black thumbprint pressed into the morning, the ooze, the nameless thing pacing the world. She looked at it with fighting determination. She didn't say anything. She just turned to face it. The sword was weightless in her hand. She raised the sword like a pen and cut a thin slice in the fabric of time and space. The vibrancy of life poured out of it — pomegranate, mint, the smell of warm bread in a kitchen you had long pushed to the back of your memory. The slice smelled round and sweet and loud and old and new and entirely wonderful. Geeile looked nervous for a brief second, then he steeled his expression ahead. The cat went through first. As cats do. Geeile and Daedee stepped through together, hearts pure, hearts full, to face the future together. The door closed behind them — soft as a held breath.

scene 9.1 Thank You for Being Here

Epilogue. [speaking softly] Thank you for being here. We hope you've enjoyed listening to this story experiment — and we hope you've enjoyed swiping through all of the fan art created during our inaugural A.I. Woven Art Lab. For more information about the creators of these works, please visit blackmath dot com. [mischievously] And always remember — start with art, shart with fart, and lead with your whole heart. [pause] [laughs] Peace be with you [pause] buddies.

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