Hi. I'm Nightrunner. Sometimes I write things. Stupid, stupid things. I should write more of them. So the idea of this page is just to post them. Half of my motivation for doing so is to hyperinflate The Guild with low-quality/high-quantity drivel. The other half is to boost my average number of posts a day. If you have any thoughts on them, post them. If you don't, go read something better.


It is said that the truest way to demonstrate that you are pleading is to place your palms skyward. But, if you continue begging for long enough, then eventually the weight of the world will find itself resting in your hands, just as the mist becomes the dew so too the dread that hangs in the air condenses until it runs through your hand as casually as a stream steps upon a canal. Soon enough you’re swimming in it. Somehow sooner still you are drowned in it. The men I used to be are dead and bloated, saturated by the dread.

Upon emerging from the canal that I had carved for myself, I made myself two things: a promise and a simple sandwich. The promise was that I would never taste dread again. I would not find myself in such a sorry state as I had so constantly been in recent times. I would seize opportunity by the throat and force it to breathe in the dread on my behalf. The sandwich was ham and cheese, my favorite. All things considered, it’s fair to say that I deserve it, I’d say.

I had hardly finished placing the bread atop the cheese when I felt the oddest sensation happening upon my intestines. I felt them writhing in pleasure, at once slithering about like snakes and galloping like horses. In spite of my forthcoming jubilation, I felt that something sinister was afoot and so, at once, in a single bite, I’d taken the sandwich into my maw, neither taking the time to chew nor swallow, instead flexing my abs powerfully enough to crush my stomach, predicating a change in pressure so intense that the entire sandwich rappeled into my gut faster than an army ranger.

“So I see I wasn’t quite subtle enough, dearest Arnold,” I garbled hatefully, sounds muffled by the pudding-like trail of bread that had eroded and been abandoned all about my insides. “Very well, then. I should’ve known that you were far too literally and figuratively introspective for such methods to have an effect on you, dear rival.”

“You oughta know by now that it’s not a matter of subtlety, Maleftos! There is no amount nor is there any sort of bullshit that you can send my way that I cannot overcome,” I shouted out at the top of my lungs.

“We’ll see about that. As the Lord of your Inner Demons, many bulls kneel before me, so to speak. And everything of theirs is mine to do with as I please. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. And we’ll see just how much of my bullshit you can contend with,” I said, biting my tongue several times as I spoke the words. Then, after a moment, I added “You really oughta take better care of our body. You look terrible. It’s like you’re literally trying to kill me off with all the cholesterol and cheese.”

Then, like a mist being swept away by the wind, I felt Maleftos’ influence recede. ‘Fifteen minutes, huh?’ I thought to myself. Well I can do a lot with fifteen minutes.

Staring into my soul, I saw the very canal that I had just emerged from. I swore I would never take in the dread again and that was true, I absolutely will not. Seeing my corpses lain about in the stream never fails to make me uncomfortable. Having just been reborn though, I reached out to the freshest one, a vacant body only hours old. This would suit my purposes better than the others.

Having only fourteen minutes to prepare myself for Mal’s Bullshit Barrage, I drug the fresh corpse out of the canal and over to a nearby altar, the very altar that I had lain upon before my first undoing. I had burnt myself for the sake of others many times, even many times more than I had been taken under by the all consuming dread that threads itself through my life.

Thirteen minutes remained. My toolkit was a ways away. While it was probably possible that I could retrieve it in as little as three, that would also cost me an additional three minutes on the return, leaving me only seven minutes for my rituals. No. Maybe it could work, but it’d probably be optimal to just get my hands dirty. Ho hum.

Thinking it through had cost me another of my precious minutes. So, with twelve remaining, I peeled the eyes of my prior self open. I had to part the eyelids with nails, seeing as laying face down in the dread had caused the damnable fluid to congeal into a viscous substance. Not unlike glue. Kissing my self on the forehead, I set my hands over his ears and sat him upright.

“You were a good man, Arnie. A brave man. You deserved better. Don’t worry,” I advised myself, just as much as I was speaking to my other self, “We’ll have better. Just take a deep breath and let me take the wheel. Sometimes to make an omelette,” I hiss, placing my right hand on the forehead and the other upon the back of his neck. “you have to break a few,” I drove my right hand downward, like a twelve-year old playing Whack-A-Mole. Seeing the scarlet, borderline blackened, spatter, I inflated my lungs, needing the air in spite of the literally dreadful stench, “Skulls.”

Clocks ticking. Nine minutes left. So I handily parted the skull at the sagittal suture, like a DVD case, before reaching inside, sweeping out a metric fuckton of cerebrospinal fluid and eventually working my fingers around the occipital lobe. Bingo. I flapped my fingers to and fro before gently persuading it to secede from its cerebral union. Yes. And out it came. My hand coated in the dreadful ooze that eeked its way out of the brain. I held it up to the sun: beholding it as a beekeeper would his honeycomb.

Six minutes left until Bullshit Barrage and I still haven’t even begun the ritual. Hopefully Maleftos doesn’t have any of my more powerful inner demons on speed dial or I am totally fucked.

I shake my hands like I’m rolling dice as I loosely clutch the deceased brain matter between my fingers. Hands ironclad and distant at once, like a socially anxious deathgrip, perhaps more accurately called a life grip. Makes me wonder how I ever managed to kill people before. Sure, it was me but it wasn’t really ME. That part of me is dead and bloated.

I’m getting off topic, it takes a minute but I start to feel the knots unravel. My biceps burn like I’ve been trying to churn sand into butter but I am making progress. And after that minute blows away, I take another. Drat. I should’ve bit the bullet and nabbed the tools from my mind palace. Boo fuckin’ hoo, I guess. Too late for that now. Finally, I feel the grey matter give way, with a measly three minutes remaining.

The fatty, muscle decorated organ has disintegrated, unraveling into a haphazard association of Cerebra, one of the most potent resources in the world. I’d recount its many idiosyncracies but I’m the slightest bit strapped for time, with only two minutes remaining until my inner demons descend upon me. I already feel my intestines trembling as they march up the hill, preparing to cross the barrier and meet me here in Innerheim.

So I begin to recite my oath:


At that, the Cerebra finishes melting, bubbling with power as the last of its stillness evaporates before the brain matter slithers up my arms, oozing and fonduing over my flesh before collecting the majority of its mass behind my skull, above my neck, like a symbiotic exoskeleton called to action by the very same duties that I am bound. I feel it, enhancing my sight, granting me the skills of my fallen predecessor, paradoxically making me feel more like myself than I have in a long time and also transcending the very notion of my humanity. Yes, it is good to be amongst The Thinking Men.

And then, they cross the gates. Climbing up from a lower plane, they tumble into Innerheim clumsily, seemingly washing into the realm the way that a shadow stretches off of your body and onto the evening Earth. Mostly, Maleftos seems to have brought a hastily assembled platoon of whatever doubts had been running through my mind at the time. Sure, it’s an affront to my self-esteem, but to make up for they were carrying some remarkably heavy artillery: Dreadsabers and dread grenades. Clearly they were going to attempt to get some cheap shots in by capitalizing on my classic weaknesses of self-doubt and depression. Fine.

“Maleftos you dumb son of a bitch. This is the same bullshit I’ve been dealing with my whole life. I’m over it.”

“You keep saying that, but that has yet to be seen. Soon enough this body will just be another corpse that you mine for Cerebra before we do this dance over and over. Y’know the thing about self-doubt. They kill you today, you kill ‘em tomorrow.”

“Shut up. At first I was gonna kill you because it’s what you’re supposed to do to someone that threatens you. Now I’m gonna kill you because the only thing I hate more than myself is the new Star Wars trilogy.”