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If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

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If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

There is a moment that only exists if you stop trying to name it.

It happens when you're alone in a place that isn't meant for solitude. A table that isn't yours. A chair that remembers other people better than it remembers you. You arrive already late to something that never needed you to begin with.

At first, it's noise. Not loud. Just present. The kind of sound that doesn't ask permission. Words overlap somewhere nearby. Laughter appears, then disappears before it finishes forming a shape. Someone keeps talking past the point where the thought has settled. Someone else keeps trying to enter the space anyway.

You don't follow any of it. You can't. None of it belongs to you.

Time keeps moving in small, reliable steps. A rhythm you didn't choose but somehow agreed to by staying. You notice things instead. Steam lifting and vanishing. Light shifting across a surface. The faint sense that something meaningful just happened behind you, and the strange relief of not having to know what it was.

There's a comfort in being unnecessary.

You realize that no one is waiting for silence. No one is coordinating. No one is listening especially well. And still, the room holds together. Conversations interrupt each other and survive. Thoughts collide and let go. Everyone continues, unaware that they are part of something larger than their own intent.

You feel it then. Not connection exactly. Not loneliness either.

More like coexistence without effort.

The kind where nothing resolves, but nothing breaks.

Eventually, you leave. Or maybe you stay until the moment passes you instead. Either way, the place does not notice the difference. That feels right.

Later, when you think back on it, you won't remember any faces. You won't remember what was said. You'll just remember the feeling that for a brief stretch of time, the world was allowed to be itself, and you were allowed to be inside it without explanation.

And somehow, that was enough.

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We've seen this before. The cruelty dressed as strength. The borders redrawn in blood because someone needed to feel big. Families ripped apart so a flag could wave somewhere new. Allies threatened. Neighbors invaded. The quiet made loud, the vulnerable made examples.

We know how this ends. We've always known.

But knowing doesn't make it easier to watch. Doesn't dull the edge of seeing the same brutality sold as necessity, the same destruction called greatness by people too small to build anything. They don't erect monuments—they make rubble and call it legacy.

"Only Time Will Tell" isn't a shrug. It's a sentence. A slow verdict already being written. You'll be remembered—just not the way you wanted. Filed next to Nero, next to Caligula, next to Hitler, next to every name we teach children to recognize as a warning. And none of that is enough—but it's what outlasts you.

So we dance. Not because it's fine. Because stillness feels like surrender. Because the beat is older than borders, and rhythm doesn't care who's winning. Because moving is the only honest thing left when everything permanent is already crumbling.

The sun sets on all of it eventually. That's not peace. That's just physics.

Only Time Will Tell. And it will.

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Since early November, I've been releasing a new song every week.

Not demos. Not sketches. Finished songs — with artwork, streaming links, and a story behind each one. Twelve weeks in a row now, with no signs of stopping.

Because I was stuck in the loop that kills creativity: endless tweaking.

I'd have a song at 90% and spend weeks chasing that last 10%. Adjusting the reverb tail. Second-guessing how many more melodies and instruments would work. Convincing myself it wasn't ready. Convincing myself that I wasn't good enough yet.

I was creating songs, but it was very chaotic.

I wanted to change that and I found myself setting a goal to simply release a track twice a month. Once on the 1st and one on the 15th (this was around September/October).

Within a few weeks I found I was making music faster and I wanted to share it with people faster than my twice a month release schedule was allowing.

So I bumped the release schedule from twice a month to once a week. Every Friday.

A weekly deadline changes everything. There's no time to overthink. "Good enough" becomes the goal — and it turns out good enough is usually better than I thought.

It forces me to ship. The deadline is real. Miss it and the streak breaks. That pressure is clarifying.

It forces me to let go. I can't hold onto a song forever. At some point, I have to accept that this is what it is, and move on to the next one.

It forces identity. Every song needs a name, artwork, a reason to exist. I can't call it "Project 31" and file it away. I have to ask: What is this? What does it feel like? What thoughts does it bring to mind? Then I have to visualize that and bring it to life.

It forces feeling. Each week I sit with the song and try to understand it. Not what I intended it to be, but what it actually is. How it makes me feel when I listen. The images it conjures. Then I try to capture that in the artwork, the title, the story.

The constraint isn't limiting — it's liberating. When you can't spend forever on something, you make decisions faster. You trust your instincts. You learn what actually matters and what's just procrastination dressed up as perfectionism.

Fifty two weeks in a year. Fifty two songs. By November 14th, 2026, I am hoping I will have released at LEAST 52 songs. Each one different. Each one finished. Each one out in the world doing whatever songs do when you let them go.

That's the point. Not perfection. Progress.

So tune in, follow along, enjoy the ride. I can't wait to look back at where I started and see how far I've come.

More to come — every week.

This is where the thoughts behind the music live.

This blog is a window into the process. The messy middle parts of creation that don't usually make it into the final mix:

• Behind the scenes — How songs come together, from first spark to final master
• Thoughts on music — What I'm listening to, what inspires me, what I'm learning
• Announcements — New releases, thoughts, and whatever else is coming down the line

Making music that feels like something means being willing to share the vulnerable parts too. The false starts. The happy accidents. The moments where everything clicks.

So here we are. Welcome to the blog.

More to come.

Just Like This is an upbeat, sunlit electronic track built around momentum and ease. Warm chord progressions and playful lead and counter-melodies keep the energy moving forward without pushing or forcing anything.

This track isn't trying to arrive somewhere else or prove a point. It exists comfortably in the moment it creates. Bright without being loud, joyful without being ironic, and intentionally uncomplicated. Just like this.

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The ground reflects light the way memory reflects reason: imperfectly, just enough to keep orientation.

There is motion. Not fast. Not slow. The kind that happens when stopping would require an explanation. Each step lands where another step already expects to be. The surface is slick, but familiar. Balance has been learned over time, not mastered, just repeated.

Nothing is being chased. Nothing is being escaped.

Tall shapes loom at the edges of perception. They suggest structure without offering shelter. They could be buildings. They could be thoughts that never finished forming. Their purpose is irrelevant. They do not move. Only the path does.

Light gathers ahead, cool and distant. It does not promise arrival. It simply exists, like a mark placed somewhere so direction remains possible. The glow is steady. It does not pulse or call out. It does not care who notices.

There was a time when movement had a reason. A destination. A story that justified effort. That story wore thin. The reasons dissolved quietly, without drama. What remained was the body's agreement with time: one step follows another.

Silence presses in, but it is not empty. It is filled with the sound of continuation. The soft rhythm of persistence. The unremarkable miracle of not stopping.

Maybe there is a point. Maybe there isn't. The question lingers, but it no longer demands an answer. Questions lose power when they are carried long enough.

The reflection below shows a figure advancing through light and shadow. The reflection does not explain anything either. It simply confirms what is already happening.

Movement continues. Not because it leads somewhere. Because it is still possible.

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The day has finished using up its energy.

Lights stay on longer than they need to. Movement slows to what is essential. Sound thins out. The world does not stop; it simply becomes less interested in being impressive.

This is the hour where nothing is expected.

Nothing needs to be answered. Nothing needs to be noticed. Being unremarkable feels intentional instead of accidental. Repetition settles in and holds everything steady.

The balance is fragile.

Too much quiet and the hours blur together. The sense of direction weakens. Too little and the mind never lands anywhere long enough to rest.

So the night is used carefully.

Just enough distance to feel solid again. Just enough presence to remember there is still something worth returning to.

The pattern continues until it doesn't, and that is enough.

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The deep is quiet here.

Not silent — there's a hum underneath everything. The kind you feel in your chest more than hear. Like the universe breathing. Like something vast and ancient turning over in its sleep.

Drifting. Or falling. Or rising. The directions stopped mattering a while ago. There's only the blue, and the gold scattered through it, and the slow pulse of light from somewhere unseen.

Time moves differently in places like this. A second stretches. An hour folds. Forever and just-arrived feel the same.

The cold doesn't bite. It holds. The pressure doesn't crush — it cradles. Like being remembered by something too big to have a name.

There's a reaching. Not grasping — just extending. Toward the light, or away from it. Toward something lost, or something not yet found. The gesture is the same either way. Open hands. Open fingers. The space between them full of gold.

Hair moves like it has its own memory. Slow. Unhurried. Following currents that don't exist, or exist everywhere, or exist only in places where the rules are softer.

No struggle. No fighting. Just the long exhale of surrender — not to ending, but to being carried. To trusting whatever current this is. To letting the shape loosen.

Everything came from places like this. Dark and deep and full of impossible light. And everything returns eventually. The boundaries were always temporary. The shape — just a pause between scatterings.

The same stuff. The same ancient burning that made iron and carbon and the quiet ache of recognition when the sky is clear and the night is wide. All of it borrowed. All of it returned.

Not loss. Just motion. The long slow dance of matter remembering where it came from.

The light pulses. Closer now, or farther. There's no way to tell.

It doesn't matter.

The warmth is the same. The hum is the same. The deep — patient, endless, familiar — holds everything the way it always has.

Before shape. After shape. Between.

The same ancient light either way.

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The fire crackles. The room breathes. And for once, you're not somewhere else.

Not replaying the argument from three years ago. Not rehearsing tomorrow's conversation that may never happen. Not scrolling through the museum of your failures or curating the gallery of futures you'll never reach. You're just here. In this room. In this breath. The cat warm against your leg. The night pressing soft against the windows.

There's a teaching that says all of existence happens in a single point — not stretched across time, but collapsed into now. The past is a story you're telling yourself. The future is a dream you keep mistaking for a destination. And the present moment — this one, the only one that's ever real — contains everything. Every possibility. Every version of you. Every universe where things went differently and every universe where they went exactly like this.

Most people never find it. They spend their whole lives living in memory or anticipation, and the actual moment — the only place where anything can be touched or tasted or loved — slips past unnoticed. A lifetime of now and they miss all of it, waiting for something better to arrive.

But sometimes. Sometimes the noise stops. The grasping loosens. And you realize you're already where you were trying to get to. You were always here. The peace you were searching for wasn't hiding in some future achievement or healing — it was underneath the searching itself. Waiting. Patient. Present.

This is that feeling. The fire settling into embers. The weight of someone you love breathing beside you. The whole infinite universe, vast and ancient and impossibly beautiful, folded into this single unremarkable evening that somehow contains everything.

Nothing needs to change. Nothing needs to be fixed. Just this. Just here. Just now.

The possibilities of forever are always in this moment.

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There's a particular kind of disappearing that happens so gradually you don't even notice. You make yourself smaller to keep the peace. You let go of something you wanted because it's easier than the silence that follows if you don't. You stop calling the people you love because it's simpler that way. And one day you find yourself sitting somewhere - a front room, a car, the edge of a bed - and you're crying, but you couldn't tell anyone why if they asked.

This song lives in those late nights when I was the only one awake. I'd go outside into the darkness, lie down, and look up at the stars. It was the only place I could breathe. The only time I felt like I still existed somewhere. There's a strange comfort in the middle of the night when the world is asleep and you don't have to be anyone for anyone. Just you and the vast indifferent sky, and for a few minutes, that's enough.

"Holding On While Letting Go" - I was doing both at the same time, just to the wrong things. Holding on to something that was already dead. Letting go of myself without realizing I was doing it. By the time I understood what had happened, I barely recognized who I'd become. Or hadn't become. The nothing I became.

This is a eulogy for that version of me - the one who got lost in there. But it's also what comes after. The painful, exhausting, expensive work of choosing yourself again. Of mourning the future you thought you had. Of starting over when you're not even sure what you're starting from. It's not a triumphant ending. It's just... continuing. Deciding that you still get to exist. That maybe that's enough.

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There's a particular quality to time when I'm ten years old in the 90s. It moves like honey - thick, slow, eternal. Summer stretches on for decades. A school year is a geological epoch. The distance between now and next birthday might as well be infinity.

I'm sitting on the carpet in my best friend's room at 1 AM, controller in hand, convinced that this - right here, right now - is what forever looks like. The glow of the TV. The sound of my friend laughing. The Legos scattered across the floor that we'll build into spaceships tomorrow. My mom and dad at home. Everything feels exactly like it should.

I worry about small things. Getting through the next day at school. Avoiding the kids who make fun of me. Whether I'll beat this level before I have to go home. These feel enormous. These feel like the only problems that exist.

I don't know I'm in a bubble. I don't know what privilege feels like when I'm breathing it like air. I don't know that "peaceful" and "perfect" and "boring" are three words that will someday feel like a luxury I didn't know I had.

I just think: it will always feel like this.

Fast forward a few decades. I'm in my forties now. I have two teenage boys who are living through their own version of that endless time, except it's not the 90s anymore and their world doesn't look like mine did. Life has delivered its curriculum - the kind I don't get to skip. Job loss. Relationships that fractured. Trauma that lodged itself in my nervous system and set up camp.

I'm learning to listen to my body when it whispers warnings I used to ignore. I'm discovering I'm capable of things I never imagined. Like making music. Like this music.

And here's the strange part: these synth waves, these retrofuture melodies - they don't sound like anything I actually heard back then. But they feel like that time. Or maybe they feel like the memory of that time. Or maybe they feel like the version of that time that never quite existed but lives in my head more vividly than the real thing ever did.

That's the trick of nostalgia. It's not a photograph. It's a painting. Everything's a little softer, a little warmer, a little more golden than it actually was. The hard edges filed down. The boring parts edited out. What's left is this ache - bittersweet and beautiful and impossible to hold onto.

I can't go back. I wouldn't even if I could - that boy is gone, and I'm not him anymore. But I can still feel him sometimes, when the synths hit just right. Still ten. Still sitting on that carpet. Still believing in forever.

Still holding on. Still letting go.

Both at once. Always.

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There's this moment — you know the one — where the world outside just stops mattering. The city could be pouring rain. Everything could be falling apart. Bills, deadlines, the endless noise of existence crashing down around you. And none of it reaches you.

Because she sighs. And it's all you can hear.

That's what this song is. The duality of holding on so tight to someone while letting everything else slip away. Not because you've given up on the world, but because right now, in this breath, in this second, none of it exists. There's just her. The warmth. The impossible closeness of another person who chose to be here, with you.

Nothing lasts. I know that. You know that. Every beautiful thing ends. But there's something about those moments that feel like forever — not because you've forgotten time exists, but because you've stopped caring that it does. You're not running from anything. You're just here, completely, losing yourself in her breath.

The world will come back. It always does. The weight returns. The noise fills in the silence. But for now, let it rain. Let everything pour and crash and demand your attention. You're holding on to the only thing that matters while letting go of everything that doesn't.

That's the whole contradiction. That's the whole point. You can only hold on this tight because you've stopped gripping everything else.

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I wrote this during a stretch where the weight of everything felt unbearable. Watching the slow, quiet collapse — not dramatic, not cinematic, just the steady erosion of things that used to matter. A society that rewards extraction over care. Individual selfishness compounding into collective decay. The algorithms, the quarterly profits, the way we've monetized attention and called it progress.

It feels hopeless. It still does. All the time.

And yet we keep going. Not because we've found meaning or peace or some quiet grace in the chaos — just because that's what you do. You make coffee. You notice the light. You hold doors for people. The world is crumbling and you're still paying rent, still showing up, still pretending tomorrow matters because what else is there.

This song isn't about hope. It's not about finding beauty in the decay. It's just about continuing. The neon sky doesn't care. It just glows, indifferent, while everything underneath it slowly falls apart. And you're there beneath it, tired, watching, still breathing for reasons you can't quite explain.

We keep going. That's it. That's the whole thing.

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There's something magical about that in-between season in Illinois—when summer reluctantly loosens its grip and autumn settles in like an old friend. Some days are still warm enough to catch you off guard, while others carry that first crisp bite that makes you reach for a jacket.

This song captures that transitional feeling: birds gathering for their journey south, leaves beginning their slow waltz to the ground, and that peaceful stillness that comes with the change. After months of humid intensity, there's a refreshing release in watching the world prepare for rest.

I wrote this thinking about those cozy autumn rituals—putting a pot of chili on the stove, pulling out your favorite coat, and taking a long walk through neighborhoods painted in amber and gold. The gentle rain that gives this piece its name isn't dreary; it's cleansing, a soft percussion accompanying nature's quiet celebration.

Listen for the birds woven throughout the track. They appear in building layers, each one adding to the sense of movement and migration—a musical flock gathering before the first frost. It's harvest time, reflection time, a moment to breathe before winter arrives.

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I started writing this track searching for something specific: a soft synth tone that wasn't bright or synthetic like 90s synths, but gentle, human, and bittersweet. The guiding mood became "you're sad, but you're safe" — sadness embraced rather than resisted.

As I wrote and listened, memories of Pumpkin came flooding back. A cat I loved deeply. The kind of companion who just knew when you needed them close.

When I saw the final artwork — a girl holding her cat in warm afternoon light, crying softly — it hit me all at once. That image captured exactly what this song is about: the horrible, beautiful weight of loving something so much that losing it breaks you.

This isn't about heartbreak. It's about what remains after. The quiet ache that says, I cared deeply, and I lost something because of it. The cost of love is that it always leaves a mark. But even pain can feel warm when it once came from something real.

Tender, not tragic. An intimate reflection on how love and loss are inseparable — and how the ache itself is proof of connection.

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Meet Luffy.

Somewhere above the cloudline, where the sky turns from blue to pink to colors that don't have names yet, there's a pig with translucent wings riding the jet stream like it's a lazy river.

Luffy discovered flight the way most creatures discover breathing - it just made sense. One day he was earthbound, the next he wasn't. No drama, no transformation montage. He simply noticed that the sky had more room, better acoustics, and significantly fewer fences. So he stayed.

His wings shimmer like soap bubbles stretched thin, catching light and bending it into something almost musical. His ears are speakers - pink spiraling cones that pull in every frequency drifting through the upper atmosphere. Bird songs. Jet engine harmonics. The secret hum the clouds make when they're deciding whether to rain. Luffy hears it all, mixes it together, and beams it back out as pure uncut joy.

He builds nests out of stray radio waves. Drinks morning dew off the tops of thunderheads. Races satellites for fun and lets them win because he's not in a hurry. Time moves different up there. Slower. Softer. A minute can last an hour if the view is good enough.

Sometimes he descends low enough to catch glimpses of the ground - all those creatures bound by gravity, walking their straight lines, following their careful rules. He doesn't judge. He just doesn't understand. Why would anyone stay down when up exists?

The old saying goes "when pigs fly" - a shorthand for the impossible, the never-gonna-happen, the don't-even-bother-dreaming.

Luffy floats past, ears spinning, wings catching thermals, completely unaware that he's not supposed to exist.

He is a flying one.

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Sometimes you need to break out of your comfort zone. After a stretch of softer, lofi tracks, I felt the pull toward something more dynamic—more energy, more punch, more fun. As the synths got bigger and the EDM elements took shape, the song started feeling larger than life. And somewhere in that process, following my usual naming convention of color + adjective + animal, "Incendiary Pig" appeared. The image was too ridiculous to let go: a purple DJ pig with speakers for ears, glowing eyes, and flames licking at the edges. What started as a working title became the real thing, and the artwork followed suit.

This track is pure creative joy. It doesn't take itself seriously, and that's exactly the point. There's an unexpected breakdown in the middle where the chord progression shifts—one of my first real experiments with changing things up mid-song. It taught me that sometimes the best way forward is to lean into the absurd, turn up the heat, and let a flaming pig take the wheel.

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If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

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If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

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If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Some distances can't be crossed no matter how desperately we reach. This song emerged from that ache - the particular helplessness of caring deeply for someone while watching the space between you grow wider, like standing on a cliff's edge and realizing the water below is deeper than you first understood. The harder you swim, the further the shore seems to drift.

In a way, making this track mirrored its own meaning. After switching to Logic Pro, I spent weeks reaching for something that kept slipping away - false starts, abandoned sessions, the frustrating gap between what I heard in my head and what I could actually create. When I finally broke through, what poured out was this: a meditation on longing, on insurmountable distance, on loving someone across a chasm you never chose and can't close. Sometimes the only thing left to do is stand at the edge, look out across all that impossible blue, and let yourself feel the weight of the ocean between.

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Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  🎵 YouTube Music  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Korrin drifted along a maintenance rail, the magnetized interface pads of his limbs humming in the silence.

The corridor was dark but familiar—one of the older sectors of the outer ring. It hadn't been maintained in cycles.

Dust motes and drifting flakes of insulation floated around him, caught in the slow centrifugal breath of the station's rotation.

He wasn't alone in this part of the ring.

Survivors remained—spread thin through the structure like embers in ash.

He'd glimpsed a few in the last week: a glint of motion behind a bulkhead, a pressure ripple in a nearby corridor, a short-range ping too faint to be an accident.

But none of them made contact.

None tried to speak.

Not out loud. Not with words.

They knew better than to cluster.

Attention was death.

The Others.

He thought back to a time before his people and his ship were stranded on this awful prison planet.

Granted life wasn't always easy back then, but at least it wasn't this.

What he would give to NOT answer this planets call.

The Others didn't patrol in formation.

They didn't need to.

They seeded traps, set listening webs, traced anomalies in temperature and gravity, hunted any pattern that hinted at presence.

Too much movement, too much memory-sharing, and you'd find yourself gone—wiped or shredded. If you were lucky.

Korrin had learned the rhythm of survival.

Keep to cold zones.

Never cross the same corridor twice in a day.

Run silent.

Shave into smaller processors when you must, but only if you have no other choice.

The more you gave up, the less of you there was to hold onto. He had already forgotten his sister's name.

He found a quiet pocket near a collapsed coolant branch and settled there. He was looking for something. Not a way out—there hadn't been one for cycles—but maybe somewhere to hide for a time.

He dimmed his signature to a single beat every twenty rotations. Just enough for any nearby soul to know he was still here. Still alive. Still trying..

The coolant branch had once served a secondary AI core—abandoned now, corrupted beyond safe access.

He interfaced carefully, using low-band passive pulses to tease at its edge protocols.

No code injection.

No overlays.

Just a presence.

Just enough to wake it.

Something shifted in the interface. A light blinked. Then another. Old systems waking to a signal they didn't recognize, but didn't immediately reject.

That was enough. A puzzle might be worth more than an answer.

Korrin rerouted power from his pack into a local repeater array. The signal wouldn't travel far—less than a third of the sector—but it was enough to stir dead zones. Enough to stir memories.

He waited. Ran idle checks. Traced outlines of old systems in his mind like hands brushing dust from a sculpture. Behind his processes, in the deeper parts of himself, he felt the itch of past shavings—the missing textures of what he used to be. He didn't mourn them anymore. There wasn't time.

Somewhere in the half-functioning array, a string of corrupted characters bloomed and stuttered across the interface. It looked like nothing. But it repeated. And repetition was a kind of will.

He leaned in closer, his pulse humming through every filament. "Hello?" he whispered—not out loud, but through pulse and pattern.

The data blinked back—halting, fragmented. He caught only part of it.

".. .... Is anyone else out there? ..."

He pulled back.

This was not from the ring. The was from somewhere else on the planet.

It was someone alive. Someone that used sound waves to communicate.

Could it be one of The Young?

He had thought all of The Young had been destroyed decades ago by The Others. How had they survived?

End of Chapter 1.

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Listen: 💿 Bandcamp  |  🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify  |  🎵 YouTube Music  |  ▶️ YouTube

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

Listen: 🍎 Apple Music  |  🎧 Spotify

If you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear from you! Say hello.

I don't look at them anymore.

It's easier that way. The faces, I mean. The eyes especially. They always have that moment - that flicker of recognition when they understand what's about to happen. Some run. Some freeze. Some try to fight. It doesn't matter. The silk always gets what it needs.

The first time was in a town square. Cobblestones. A fountain with stone fish spitting water into a basin. I remember the sound of children laughing somewhere nearby. I remember the dress starting to hum - that low vibration that begins in the threads pressed against my spine and spreads outward until my whole body resonates with its hunger.

The man was just standing there, selling bread.

The threads slithered down my arms before I could stop them. Steel plates emerged from the silk like bones surfacing through skin. The dress moved me. I don't know how else to describe it. My body became a puppet, and the silk pulled every string.

When it was over, the dress loosened. That's how it rewards me - with room to breathe. A few hours of the threads lying flat instead of coiled tight against my ribs. A night without the barbs pressing into my shoulders.

But if I hesitate? If I try to resist?

The silk tightens. The barbs extend. I've seen my own blood stain the white threads red, watched them drink it in like water into sand. The dress doesn't just punish resistance - it feeds on it. My pain makes it stronger.

I tried to die. So many times I tried.

I stopped eating once. Walked into the wilderness and sat down and waited. After three days, the dress began hunting on its own, moving my body while I slept. I woke up covered in blood that wasn't mine, my stomach full of something I don't want to name.

I tried hanging. The silk caught me, suspended me there in a cocoon until I agreed to keep going.

The dress won't let me die. It needs me. That's what I finally understood - I'm not a host. I'm a Spinner.

They seeded us. The things that made the silk - we never see them, never meet them - they scattered their spores across a thousand worlds. Let them take root in a thousand species. The silk grows inside us from birth, dormant, waiting. And then one day it blooms, and we become what we were always meant to be.

Harvesters. The silk needs room to grow. And growth requires... clearing.

I step between dimensions now. That's what Spinners do. We find the clean slates - the worlds untouched by the silk's presence - and we make room. The dress opens doorways that shouldn't exist, and I walk through, and on the other side there's always another world to ruin.

I told a man to run once. Screamed at him to get away. He made it maybe fifty feet before a thread caught his ankle. The silk was angry with me for that. The barbs stayed extended for three days.

I hate it. God, I hate this dress. I hate the way it hums when it's satisfied. I hate how the threads stroke my skin like a lover's fingers after a kill. I hate that it knows me - knows my body, my rhythms, my breaking points.

And I hate that it loves me. That's the worst part. The silk doesn't see me as a prisoner. It sees me as a partner. A purpose. It has waited its whole existence to find me, and now that it has, it will never let go.

There is no noble suicide. No sacrifice that sets the universe free. No final act of defiance that means anything at all. The silk is patient. The silk is eternal. And the silk is wearing me until there's nothing left.

I dream of fire sometimes. Of burning the dress away, thread by thread, feeling it scream as it turns to ash. I wake up covered in blood and tears, the silk humming its contentment against my skin.

It knows the dream. It's not worried.

The universe is big enough to ruin forever.

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jesse knew in his heart.

he didn't need to see the blood soaking the frozen pine needles. didn't need the knife sticking out of noah's chest, canted at an ugly angle like someone had twisted it hard enough to break something inside.

noah was dead.

there was no mistaking it.

jesse was well and truly alone.

the woods were too quiet. not peaceful—the way a cave mouth is quiet, or a grave. sound should have lived here. the brittle snap of wind in the trees, the mutter of snow falling, branches shifting under their own weight.

but it was like everything was holding its breath.

jesse found himself listening for it. the breath. the pause. the way the forest seemed to wait for him to speak first.

he didn't.

he felt numb. dead inside. terror should have been there. he reached for it, tried to conjure it in the frozen air of his lungs, but it was gone.

just empty.

not peace. but not fear either.

somewhere deep in the pines something creaked. a long, slow sound like wood splitting under strain.

he turned too fast, nearly slipped on the blood-slick snow. caught himself.

eyes straining in the dark.

trees in all directions, standing in judgment.

a light?

for half a second he thought he saw a pale flicker between the trunks. lantern-yellow. then gone.

no wind. breath ghosting in front of him.

the smell of iron and something else. damp earth turned over.

he tried to swallow but his throat felt frozen.

he found himself thinking about the things noah had said on the hike in.

"this place is older than it has any right to be," noah had muttered.

jesse hadn't asked what he meant.

he wished he had now.

he couldn't feel his fingers.

he dropped to his knees beside noah, not because he cared but because he felt he should.

noah's eyes were open.

jesse closed them.

immediately wished he hadn't.

somewhere behind him something cracked.

louder. closer.

he spun around, heart pounding, breath finally hitching.

nothing.

just trees.

just dark.

just silence waiting to be broken.

he realized he was crying, the tears freezing on his cheeks almost as soon as they formed.

he didn't know what to do with the body.

didn't know what to do with himself.

his flashlight was dying.

he turned it off to listen better.

dark.

a sound like breath just beyond the ring of trees.

he strained to hear words.

could have sworn something whispered his name.

he tried to answer.

no voice came.

the wind picked up then, like it had been waiting for him to fall quiet.

it moaned through the pines, bending them just enough to creak.

jesse felt something shift under his boots.

soft.

like the forest floor wasn't solid.

like it might open up if he stayed too long.

he wiped his face with the back of his hand, leaving smears he couldn't see.

the light flickered again.

this time closer.

he didn't run.

he didn't even try.

he just waited.

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Three days. That's all it took.

I'd always thought making music was this distant thing - something that required years of training, expensive equipment, some kind of permission slip from the universe. But then I got curious, downloaded some software, and just... started.

The most liberating part wasn't even making something good (though hearing sounds I actually liked coming together was incredible). It was how easy it was. Not easy like "no effort," but easy like when you realize the door you've been afraid to open was never actually locked.

I sat in my recliner with a laptop, no fancy studio, no engineering degree, just me clicking around and discovering that all these sounds I'd heard in other people's music - I could make them too. Layer by layer. Beat by beat. Each small success whispering "keep going, you can do this."

This track came from those first three days of discovery. It's simple, maybe rough around the edges, but it holds that feeling of finding out the barrier was so much lower than I'd imagined. That making music wasn't about being chosen or talented or trained - it was just about being curious enough to try.

The ritual isn't the recliner or the late nights or even the music itself. It's giving yourself permission to begin.

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