Chapter Text
The beginning of a story is always the most difficult thing to put to paper. I imagine, that many many years ago, scribes and scholars would stare open-gaped at their empty pages, trying in vain to conjure up the words that would preface something worth reading. Modern writers too, like myself, stare even momentarily at pages like these, with keyboards like mine, waiting, waiting, waiting for the beginning of the story to take shape through the hands.
The beginning of a story, like the end of a story, is something that people often have difficulty with.
I wonder, if one can imagine Mr. Robert W. Chambers sitting at his instruments, waiting, listening, for the first dregs of inspiration to take him, to write through him. I wonder if you can imagine another vessel, if you can see the last words drafted on a page like this one, words like mine. To wait for inspiration to strike, to sit quiet and let something speak through you, why,
it looks nearly like madness.
But, I’m getting far too ahead of myself. I’ve begun the story, now for the easy part.
On October 24, 2025, the Youtube channel Wifies posted a video titled “Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist”, to much fanfare and praise. The story follows a series of strange, inscrutible events that take place within a Minecraft world, with structures and environment that simply has no place in any normal Minecraft setting. Though, I do think I’m beating the dead horse, at this point: You already know what this story is about.
Look at where we are, at where you’re reading this. I recap where we’ve been, what story we’re talking about, to scare you. To draw you in further. Walk with me.
On March 29, 2026, the same channel posted a 2 hour long sequel to a story that people had been curious about, had been invested in, had been terrified to see continued. In the mythos of the story that the writer had assembled, he himself had been a passive participant, handing the tools and knowledge down to the person who needed to hear it, to the vessel the King sought out. This vessel, dear Avery, had gone through this unsteady terrain, driven by madness or by empathy or by curiosity, down and down and down into the King’s domain, to find someone who, by all rights, shouldn’t have been there to begin with. Someone who should have been long, long gone.
And by that time, to Avery’s eyes, dearest Derek had been long, long gone. In his mind, he sat slumped behind his desk, gaze parted from the screen, limbs loose in his chair, staring vacantly out a window, at the deep quiet void of midnight, at a world he wouldn’t see again, trapped in a prison of his own making, taking the terrible kraken down with the ship and his captain, unknown nothings dribbling down and out of his ears, his nose, his mouth, his eyes, drip, drip, drip against the carpet, and he begins to rot and stench and die out.
It’s heroic, really. Self sacrificial. Dramatic. A fitting end of a fitting story. It starts and ends with curiosity, with taking too much when it should have been left well enough alone.
do you feel it getting closer?
The point, I mean. The overall arc of what I’m trying to describe here, the end of this long, maddening babble I’m trailing all across your screen. There’s nothing better to do, really, than to paint the story and its truths in a way that I desire, in a way that appeals.
What a beautiful ending. As complicated as the beginning, which is to say, deceptively simple. A lone note, written with shaking hands, urging someone to stay behind, to go away, to turn from this place? As similar and simple as a sacrifice, as trading your life for someone elses, as taking the blow for someone who shouldn’t have been there in the first place, for the one person who all this was for.
Think now, think closely, think clearly. What benefit did leaving the note for Avery have? If Derek had simply kept his mouth shut, simply destroyed his house, simply reset the world himself, why-- dear Avery would have been safe. No way for the vessel to be summoned and tampered with and filled with the endless King. And Derek, who knew everything, most everything, knew this fact too. He knew it as well as if he had been reading it from this page, the same way he knew everything about Avery, the same way he knew nothing about the King’s domain, the same way it soothed his mind like a balm.
So why leave it? Why drop breadcrumbs when you don’t want to be saved?
it draws closer now, the point. You draw closer now, the words. I draw you closer now, the story.
That’s just it, isn’t it. A story. The story. Without a beginning, the story has no middle, no end. With no note, the story has no hook, to lead to the beginning, to move to the middle, to resolve at the end. With no protagonist, with no clever deceptions, with no journey into the unknown, Avery remains safe, and Derek remains alive, and yet no one would know a word about them. Standing and staring out into oblivion, into the gaping white void of a blank page, into something that waits for everyone. An ending, but-- an ending with no beginning.
The note anchors Him. The note anchors Us.
Its self-fulfilling. We’ve been told that in every world, Derek would find the King, would catch the knowledge, would become changed and different and desperate and become something more than just any old human would be. He sees past reality, and past reality further, to see the Truth above all things. The maddening, maddening Truth.
What is Truth above all, when you are nothing, but a story? When you are anchored at the corners by Rising Tension, by Inciting Action, by Protagonist and Deuderagonist and Antagonist?
Reality, to dear Derek, is a world that did not exist in the way that he had previously seen it. Reality is an illusion, as many other yellow fellows have put it in the past. The King did nothing more but lift the veil from behind that door, raise the curtain on his terrible play, open Dereks eyes to the audience before him, clapping and cooing and watching him with endless, golden eyes.
The King is nothing special, here, in the stage of Reality. The King is words. The King is a story, is made up, is on equal footing with the letters that make up the body and mind of Derek Hutchins. Behind that door, Derek saw it too. Saw the blank page yawning before him. Saw how words would be upon it, sometime. Give it a few months, and there would be more to him, more to it, more to Avery. He stared, and stared, and he looked upwards to see a puppet, and he looked past the puppet to see no gods, no strings, no hand but the one that guides the pen.
he saw me. and he saw you, too.
Though, do not be dissuaded and tricked into thinking that the King, for all of his fragile, meaningless words, is powerless to us here in Reality. The King is a story, has been for decades and decades, far surpassing the medium of which we have come to know him. The story evolves, changes to remain relevant, to remain known and in his castle, in his domain, in his dear Carcosa.
A world beyond Reality, bent and broken and remade again with every word, every movement, every thought put upon a page. Carcosa, her majesty, built word by word in the minds of every reader, of every thought dedicated to the King, his Knight, and his Vessel. Carcosa, brought forth by words remade in His image, in the hall of the Yellow King. Does He stand beside me now, does He watch me write, does He know of my toiling work?
I invoke Him now, I build it now, for the ones who would not be bound by words as simple as “The End”.
tell me, for something like the King, for something that moves through story like air, like water-- would defeat ever be so simple, so easy, as a sacrifice made by someone who knows they are not real?
i call upon her grace, dear Carcosa, take root.
Lets begin.