Angol
"This won't end as a tragedy."
Four doors behind him. Seven to go. Elijah is still in the house, the house built from the wood of the Tree of Life, and every door he opens leads him higher into its branches and deeper into himself.
Beyond the fifth door, under two suns in a world of gold, he meets Het-Heru, a blue-eyed woman who promises him a happy ending. Then she is gone, and the worlds grow stranger. He crosses a red wasteland ruled by a warlord who worships strife, a blue world of horned horses and three-eyed giants, a black world lit by a thousand Saturns, a gray crater where robed pilgrims wait for a fallen serpent to rise, and a white palace where a virgin priestess teaches him to stop fighting the story he is in. In each world he eats the fruit and takes the seeds, and with every trip something waits for him: a monstrous spider-thing with his own face and eleven golden eyes, claiming to be the true author of his life.
The dreamstaff Aurora left him grows harder with every world. Penumbra, the three-eyed trickster, keeps whispering that the Spinner is a fool. And the dreams of a boy on a farm keep coming, clearer each time, as if the boy is beginning to dream Elijah back.
At the end of the hallway the eleventh door is waiting. Behind it, he is told, are all the answers. But Elijah is starting to suspect that the answers were never the point, and that the only way out of the story is to write it himself.
The final half of a visionary allegory built on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and the four faces of Jung's anima, Anomaly is a story about fear and hope, about the women who lead us home, and about the strange love between a character and the one who writes him.
By choice is the story written.
