I am at the mall with Grandpa. He is on a tirade against people’s Christmas shopping. I can’t say I disagree with his intentions, but I feel sorry for his misguided motivations. He’s right in trying to enlighten but not to convert.
I meet a young [NAME REDACTED], and we talk about whether or not he’s into religion; he says hell no. I don’t recall saying anything to the effect, and it occurs to me that it is as hypocritical of me to crusade against religion as Grandpa’s crusade for it.
an old jeep that won’t start but magically moves
I have an old Jeep that won’t start but magically moves on its own. I’m trying to roll-start it by putting it in gear and then popping the clutch. I’m cruising a privileged area and people are laughing at me. I realize now how dumb it was to be so preoccupied with an engine when the vehicle was moving already – symbolic perhaps of my environmental concerns and the universe-at-large being that some things just cannot be forced, for a reason and probably for the better.
I go to visit my brother, who is black. He lives in a very high apartment building with only stairs central to the structure. There are many tightly arranged units, and when I get to his place, I have to squeeze through a tight space into his tiny place. His girlfriend is leaving him and taking her stuff, and I wonder how she’s getting all of it down the stairs.
I wake up at the alarm’s instruction. I was kneeling between the thighs of a pretty girl sitting with her sister on a bench by the side of a street with this song in my head. I lean in to kiss her forehead, she smiles and the clock goes off.
Shortly before this, I was in trouble with some people involved with an alien agency that uses complex encoding of messages using symbols left on surfaces and spoken phrases that seem nonsensical or making sense but unrelated to the actual message.
Each word’s first letter is meant to signify another word that only seemed known to them in sequence. Even once it was explained to me, it made sense what they were doing, but I still had no idea what they were trying to say.
Earlier (or later, who can tell – chronology is arbitrary in dreams), I was at the Mall on the lower level. A tall, pretty, brunette girl wearing short denim shorts on the second storey calls down to me, flashes her crotch at me and tells me that she shaved it for me.
I was impressed but continued on my way. It seemed too easy, suspicious even. At one point, I chatted with a tall redhead, possibly at a small bar. I also recall playing a strategy game like Age of Empires, where I could press a button to make all of my people happy.
Dream/Side Story: I wake up one morning to find all electronics AWOL. Overnight the world is reverted to pre-industrialism. No one seems to have a clue except for some whom more than believe but KNOW the truth. Intergalactic activists have staged a protest on earth by hijacking “superior” technology in order to subvert the planet’s rampant consumerism, greed and domination of many by few. Banks are crippled, currency no longer exists and the imaginary stock market vanishes without a trace. The purpose of their doing this, their intention, is to return humanity to a simpler (agrarian? Hunter/Gatherers we remain) state to reconnect them with their spiritual nature by removing technology that had developed to promote humanity’s ugly traits like laziness and gluttony. Unfortunately, only a few get the message and they are scoffed at and disdained by those pillaging and doom saying.
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Nick’s thoughts of childhood memories consist of social seclusion and immersion in escapism. Dreams, fantasies, substances, and most of all, Nick was addicted to information.
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Secret knowledge drove him and, in his mind, gave him power. Reading fuelled his mind and provided an alternate reality to that around him following his mother’s hospitalization during his childhood.
Nick’s mother, Helen Savoy, had suffered from severe postpartum depression after his birth, having conceived him while unmarried had stirred up a hornet’s nest among a family with suppressed mental illnesses combined with an ultraconservative mentality. After Nick’s father committed suicide when he was very young, his mother fell very ill emotionally.
She continued to decline while he was under the vigilant attention of his grandparents, who were intent on raising Nick in their manner.
“They blamed my mother, under sinister pretences, for the death of my father. He had been their “favourite son,” and she had “made” him kill himself, ignoring, of course, that they were sophisticated drug users themselves with many unresolved psychological issues.
They laid this trip upon my already feeble mother, who had a guilt complex for having me in the first place. This was part of the designs they had on the baby, so they deemed her unfit to raise the child, and as soon as they could feed me mistruths and negative exaggerations about her while she and I were separated. Being unable to distinguish truth from crap bought what they were selling, and I unconsciously became increasingly obstinate and insolent with her as I grew up.” }
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Between her inherited illness and the evil seeds of dissent planted in his fertile mind by his [father’s] parents, Nick watched his mother’s condition worsen until the tragic and mysterious death of his baby brother when she became hospitalized, and he went to live with them.
Nicholas learned at a young age the effects of causality, guilt, and the art of manipulation.
He saw how minds determined in a focused direction could set events in motion. He understood that some things occur beyond our doing and control, but nevertheless, we must pay the consequences of the actions of others. Therefore, we are all connected whether we like it or not.
The world is bigger than just us, but a great number of things can be accomplished for either good or evil.
Such were the lessons he learned from watching his grandparents flatly and emotionlessly slander Helen and deny her justified accusations to maintain their innocent image in front of the doctors when his brother died, delivering the death blow to the poor woman’s sanity.
She would never be the same after that betrayal. In private, however, they sought to convince Nick that it was his behaviour that had contributed to his mother’s diagnosis of schizoid manic depression. Nick grew apart from the only people he had while alienating his mother almost entirely until near his eighteenth birthday. Only then did he begin to search for the truth of his life and seek a relationship with his mother in vain.
“My mood has always been rotten and depressed when I visited her at her home of nearly twenty years, my thoughts a flurry of neural confusion. On one hand, I could hardly bear to see her in such a vegetative state – such a stark contrast to the vibrant woman that remained locked away in my few memories of her that my grandparents hadn’t corrupted. I hated the powerless feeling that I was forced to remember when I saw her, about her and for my own sake; seeing her was like looking into a mirror that refused to conceal my true identity, the dark secrets of my family’s past. When I visited my mother, I was forced out of my dream world and had to look within myself, and that has always been the scariest thing for me.”
After his mother became comatose, Nick took his passion for literature and his propensity for escape and became a freelance journalist (a cover for dealing drugs and thievery) who went wherever the wind took him.
He developed very few personal relationships of any depth because he had lost hope in love for himself, reasoning that true love was merely an idle fantasy and that “real” love, in his experience, was a conduit for pain and psychological torment.
Nick chose to live on the run from his family, his past and ultimately himself. Travelling the world armed only with his camera and notebook, wits and curiosity, Nick found a semblance of a happy life in voyeuristic escape through art that allowed him the illusion of being able to change the way he saw things.
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The darkness of Nick’s mind was mirrored in the ghastly nature of the macabre he so gravitated toward. He focused his attention on grotesque events, always on the furthest fringes of a society that he desperately wanted to rebel against the very core of.
For him, impending death was something to be marvelled at, precarious heights were meant to be dangled from, and the dark was where he lived to overturn the grittiest rocks among the deepest shadows.
Nick rebelled against every notion that the mainstream of humanity held dear. He obsessed over what others feared, seeking to learn about the sources of fear by exposure to extremes to defeat them, for one fears the unknown most of all.
Nick’s flight response to his own fears compels him to search to uncover truths and expose falsehoods of the world around him, leaving him painfully alone with an insatiable circular quest. A childhood with morbid and malevolently deceptive elderly people had given Nick a uniquely skeptical slant on his perception of truth and reality. His grandparents’ self-serving manipulation had taught him that trust was a precious quality to be given most apprehensively.
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ForewordBy Nicholas Savoy
Let me begin by telling you, the reader, that right off the hop, I’ve been less than forthcoming in naming this story the “Arcane Diary.” A diary would lead one to believe that the story they were about to embark upon was the tale of the life of someone, but this you hold in your hands is a misnomer because,
as it turns out, it is my life story (with boring details kept to a bare minimum, I promise), but if it has been written, I am already dead as Nick Savoy and have gone on to another (hopefully better) life.
Pieced together in this story, an elegy perhaps a more fitting description, are the fragments of my life and mind that I have left to my confidant Xander Mercurio to make sense of where I have failed.
In essence, this diary is an elaborate advance suicide letter to serve as a record of the mysteries that I have found inextricably surrounding my life and, doubtless, my death as well. I leave my tale as a parting gift to a world that, while I was there, I can honestly say I tried my best to decipher and dwell harmoniously with to what degree of success is yet to be told.
Perhaps the story goes that an obsessively curious cynicism like mine is counterintuitive to successful coexistence in a world like this one. Still, I’d hate to spoil the ending, so I won’t because I honestly can’t.
In my life, I have tried to answer a higher calling and to live by eternal principles of good and righteousness. This has made me less than popular with many types of selfish, evil entities that, throughout my existence, I have sought to defeat in any way necessary.
Depending on your objective and perspective on life, I may appear to be a hero or a villain, but either way I am who I am, nothing more and nothing less.
That is all I can promise; this is my story, a reverse memoir. When I embarked on my journey, I knew I would need courage, faith, and an open mind to accomplish my task. All that I ask is that you provide one or two of these qualities, and I intend to help with the rest.
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I made the transition from narcotics sales to illicit information retail smoothly: to me, they were the same – swimming in a cesspool, taking your cut, trying not to come out stinking.
Somehow, I managed to avoid prosecution while supplying the rich and powerful hopeless with their kicks, shaking hands with the devil as I turned a blind eye to their corruption and counted my cash.
Now, I hunted sleaze to feed off the stupidity in an attempt to redeem my past ignorant involvement with vice. The hours were the same, round the clock, and I loved it. In chasing other people’s messes, I could temporarily escape my own and be perversely amused by the foibles of people who would act out their candid misconducts without the knowledge of my presence.
Insurance scammers, parties on both sides of legal disputes, and my favourite, cheating spouses were just a few of the cases my camera lens and I were able to procure and close for profit. The voyeuristic aspect of detective work interested me probably more than it should have, but admittedly it was a lonely life despite the occasional thrills I got from the chase, overall it was jading.
Having felt all the artificial highs chemical substances could provide gave me a perspective from the lowest realms of the depressed psyche, such were the ups and downs.
At one time, as a naïve young man, I believed wholeheartedly in and longed deeply for true love. Still, as time and experience wore on and etched their cruel truths into my thinking and emotions, I realized that love was an illusion like so many other things dangled in front of people to keep their hope alive for the proverbial rainy day. For me, that was every day.
I still do think that love is the most powerful force in the universe (God is Love, Love=God?) and, as such has enormous potential for either wonderfully positive or negative effects on a person’s life. In my experience, I had only seen the latter. My family’s love relationships were those of pathetic desperation and control stemming from insecurity, never out of genuine caring or concern.
I would never stoop to the level of exchanging sex for the drugs that I was selling; however, I realize that most of the affections I received in my young adulthood were mainly due to my contacts and ready supply of the “life” of their vacuous party. I wish I could have understood this concept of insincerity before I let my wishful lusting get carried away, but all this in hindsight.
I desperately yearned for love in my life, and what I got myself into was simply the carnal procedure, missing the spiritual connection of lovemaking. Being raised in seclusion and discouraged from ever forming human bonds – particularly with the opposite sex – when my hormones took over my faculties in my teens, pornography quickly grabbed my attention. The anonymity and convenience were perfect for my non-committal personality. I quickly employed my technological prowess in doing a porn piracy business for my horny teenage cohort clients. What can I say? I’m an entrepreneur at heart. At 14, I had my empire in my grandparents’ basement: a top-of-the-line computer that went round the clock producing contraband CDs full of smut for anyone with sexual frustration and $20.
Some kids went to McDonalds for work, but I bought a car at 16 for watching and capitalizing on porno. Now I get to watch bored soccer moms fuck the pool boy. Not much has changed, I suppose. Nevertheless, I have learned the heartbroken way the vast difference between making love and fucking. Lovemaking is what everyone dreams of and aspires to, like the Olympics; fucking is what I ended up with at the end of the day, for me just a vicarious spectator sport.
I love women, but I got to the point where participation lost its appeal – fears, complications and having seen and heard it all – I lost interest and faith in humanity. So I was alone, with my spy gear and voyeurism. Work has always served as a diversion from reality, and dreaming has always played a focal role in my waking existence. I cared much for marijuana because when I smoked it, I felt like I was living in a dream, which incidentally felt “more real” than the real for most of my life.
I eventually kicked the habitual use because I realized that my dream states were becoming less pronounced in their subconscious vividness, and the residual memories upon return from my fugue state were nearly nonexistent. I have always suffered from depression, a minor mental affliction in contrast with the plethora of plagues rampant in my gene pool; just the same, I have always fought my depression by consciously working to improve my self-awareness and spirituality by diligent study and immersion in art and culture.
Once I got past my three-year weed binge, my dreams became extremely meaningful, colourful metaphors of my waking life that began to provide my life with direction, focus and insight. The messages were cryptic, however, and I read that dream journals were essential to encourage unconscious memory recall. So, I began this diary and continued to add to it despite many earlier futile attempts at journal-keeping as a child to document what I felt to be meaningful thoughts and events. Nothing proved to be of sufficient depth or importance to hold my transient attention span until I began delving into the unfathomable subjectivity…
[Write backward like a dream journal, revelatory at the beginning, unfold to introduce]
I always tried to reverse engineer my life, starting with the result in mind and working backwards to construct my existence according to my hopes, dreams, goals, and desires. These criteria, the variables of the equation, have, at some critical points, resembled a revolving lock mechanism or roulette table.
My memoirs, diary, obituary, or however it will be seen is my ode to death in all of its horror, beauty and potential – the tale is of my journey on this side and that of the ultimate end that unites humanity and divides the soul from this body.
Dreamer: Since I was a young boy, I have been enraptured by the dreaming process, for I realized that it is a state of mind like none other. No matter how lucid the dream may be, one is always subject to unexpected occurrences in a fairytale world that defies time and space.
unexpected occurrences in a fairytale world that defies time and space
I have mainly been fascinated by the skewed boundaries of past, present, and future events, whether real, imagined, or prophetic. My dreams have always consumed my consciousness, imagination, and life.
As I grew older, it became more evident that my existence was split. The “real” waking world was no more concrete than the subconscious projections on the back of my eyelids. Through my teen years, I became sullen and depressed, spending more and more time alone with my confused, antisocial thoughts and attempted escape to dreamscapes where I was in control (or so I imagined) of my life and had some semblance of influence on the world about me.
fairytale world that defies time and space
As the years progressed, I continued to confine myself to my bedroom, where I filled my mind with fantasies of paperbacks, film, and video games. My peers admired my intellect, not to be immodest, but it was all I could show for my life since I had never devoted any time to regular childhood pursuits like friendships or team sports.
My friends were books, and growing up this way made me misanthropic. I had to teach myself social etiquette as if it were a language. I developed subtleties in this respect with the only means I had at my disposal: Trial, error and determination. I tried, and I was a failure at first.
Yet, with purposeful persistence and a sense of humour, the experience made me aware of my shapeshifting chameleon personality. With proper research, a little planning (and a lot of finesse), I can infiltrate any form of organization to ascertain any amount of knowledge through creative human intelligence.
While my body of matter on earth has housed and facilitated my existence for a mere twenty-odd years now, my soul in this incarnation has been privy to revealed secrets of mysteries and realms beyond any of my human imaginings. I am writing this diary from past existences spanning countless eons in many different forms of energy as a memoir of my travels and experiences. Living a life in solitude was something I embraced and exploited for my purposes. I began to realize that I pushed the real world away in an attempt to accomplish some unconscious mission I was on. My faith grew as I absorbed it (psychic osmosis?) from the many religious groups that I voraciously explored in search of meaning during my teenage years, many of which I spent experimenting with drugs and deep, heady philosophical thinking and reading. I was out to find my destiny and accomplish it.
unexpected occurrences in a fairytale world that defies time and space
My life was the most enigmatic mystery, remaining elusive until I found subjectivity from my spirit guide.
My mind had always absorbed like a sponge, and my learning curve never slowed like most people’s once they reached a certain age. I became addicted to the power I felt information held, for everything in life is just an architectural mental construct that, with the correct codes, one can unlock the doors to the true self and the universe. These codes can be found by carefully analyzing the sources of all behaviours involved in a situation. Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself, so let me explain by going back a few steps.
After the equivalent of many incarnations worth of experience revealed to me, I seek knowledge as a precious commodity because I feel it is the purest form of power a soul can acquire to empower for mastery of internal and external forces. As a child, I could never imagine that any one “thing” was just a singular, unique entity; instead, I had always perceived every detail as a variable in an ongoing numerical puzzle, which was my curse. Ironically, I don’t particularly like numbers, as far as arithmetic is concerned, but my unconscious brain does. I learned from my stolen education on an eclectic variety of subjects that all I needed to find out were the titles of the books, and my organic computing mind sought to calculate every possible angle of what I saw, which further inspired my insatiable curiosity to fill it with more and more answers.
My cynical overanalyzing made me realize that every thing must have a counterpart on a separate plane of being. Because of this extraordinary revelation, I have developed mental and spiritual capabilities vastly beyond any physical potential my corpse could contain, still a human but awaiting a tampered destiny. It merely lives as a vehicle in this world, breathes a few processed shots of gas into the blood that pumps to keep me alive. While my body lays comatose, I have managed to continue and enrich my own human experience.
My journey has obsessed my spirit self, making me a slave to the unknown, a knight on a personal crusade against the ignorance that preoccupies and binds my entire kind.
I want to think that I am fighting for a noble cause for my fellow creatures and that my intentions are met with success. However, as the battle between light and darkness rages for supremacy the boundary lines are seldom clearly defined, especially in the human heart that is susceptible to many temptations. (The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.)
When properly trained, the mind is a magical portal to worlds above and beyond.Still, it is also just a dependent organ belonging to an autonomous organism. It is the foundation of human life in this lowly realm that most are content to never (and terrified to ever) venture out of.
I was never one of those people, a fact that is partly the cause and the effect of my particular mental chemistry with its troubled history and inherent hereditary defects. Looking within my unconscious for the answers to my soul’s yearning is like vainly striving to understand an ever-morphing puzzle cube, so it suits me fine to occupy myself with solving the mysteries of others. My eternal purpose is conveying data through communication, like the archetypal Hermes or Thoth. I present to you my diary, some disjointed coordinates that define the parameters of my life, as a written record of what I have endured and enjoyed up to this frozen point in time.
An introspective analysis of my ongoing investigations into all that is hidden in the infinite dimensions of the All-encompassing spirit that is life: whenever, wherever, however.
The result of this timeless astral wandering: I have had the unique opportunity to gain a holistic perspective on the universe. At the same time, I manipulated my body’s internal clock to remain nearly the same physical age as when my voyage began.
In my quest for self-actualization spanning the gamut of cosmic hierarchy, I have finally let go of the reflexive misanthropy that, for so long, mired my being in misery. I had always felt removed from my fellow humans, and for the longest time, I loathed the thought of having my soul confined to a body of dust for what appeared to be a pitifully short duration.
While I always mistakenly believed humans to be a wretched species for all of our shortcomings and bad behaviour, I had failed to comprehend the profundity of the unique philosophical position held regarding human beings.
Within a cosmic drama, our seemingly insignificant material existence in this universe merely masks a spiritual dualist paradox. While our bodies are only evolved primates, our essence or true identities exist on a fine line between good and evil, opposing forces dividing the entire universe.
For my relentless cynicism and obstinate refusal to accept what I saw as truth, I have been shown what few other humans have. As a result of this cursed blessing, I have become less human, which is a very difficult condition for my soul.
Have you ever felt that you don’t belong? I know everyone has, but what if it felt like your entire life was out of place, like you were born trapped in someone else’s body and could not escape?
All of my life, I have been tormented by the unease of being in the wrong place and having the inability to do anything about it. It is a very confining feeling knowing you are an amnesiac, knowing you are someone but being unable to figure out who. During one day of extreme depression, I thought of ending my life.
The more I thought about it, the less it made sense. Why should I get off easy? After all, it was the way of least resistance that I had pursued my entire life until that point.
Something deep within me whispered that it was time I changed my tack and started fighting outward battles to stop tormenting myself about things beyond my control. I realized that it was reflexive punishment that I was inflicting upon myself but for what I couldn’t understand. It was as if my life were a self-fulfilling prophecy that I was doomed to suffer. I came to this epiphany one night while I was high on marijuana, and it got me thinking: if I am the one who is punishing myself, then why the hell don’t I stop and start enjoying my life? Well, as I came to understand later, some people love abuse.
As difficult as suffering is, it is a purifying process for our soul, which we benefit from. (I have hijacked the process and now float in limbo.)
Call it masochistic, if you will, but I decided that day that I would rather stick it out and endure the burning than chicken out and face God knows worse.
Basically, we are in hell right now, right here, you and I. The torment we face knowing that our days are numbered in this life, the uncertainty of what lies beyond our inevitable death, the anonymity of our essence, these are penal conditions that we all must deal with to purge our selves of some higher weight on our shoulders.
We live our lives never knowing who we were before, what we are meant to accomplish while we are here or the perennial “why.” This defines the parameters of our lives, the ability to overcome these obstacles and achieve our occult assignment to this underworld.”
“Anamnesis is the loss of one’s soul’s true identity when the spirit body meets its human host at birth, the two differing so drastically in nature that the ensuing trauma renders the soul unable to recall who it really is or why it is there. Most people accept this, adjust to their new lives, and forget that this shock has ever happened, like a microcosmic big bang. Our birth is the catalyst that begins life as we know it, leaving us with but a shroud of dreams, personality and unconscious instincts for us to marvel at, relish in or abandon to suppression and denial.”
“I grew up in a household under a cloud of paranoia. My family has a history of mental disorders (gasp) that they have tried earnestly and vainly to keep a secret as if anyone could fail to notice. The facts of my father’s death are unclear, but I’m nearly positive that he killed himself. My mother needed to be restrained and sedated for my first few visits to the institution where she resides.
Now, they insist that I call in advance to arrange my visits so her meds can be administered to avoid further outbursts of hysteria. She doesn’t need to raise her blood pressure on my account, and she certainly doesn’t deserve any more trauma.
I can hardly bear to see her in this barely conscious state, but I visit her once a month despite my nomadic life.”
While his mother missed him dearly and he her, between her illness and the trauma of her life’s events, the situation was far beyond either of them to control.”
Xander Mercurio, Nick Savoy’s best friend and “business” partner, writes the Arcane Diary as an account of the investigation he must follow to ascertain his friend’s whereabouts and mysterious disappearance.
To find Nick, he must consider the intricate complexity of his friend’s life, psychology, and courses of action, which are (whether or not deliberate) shrouded in secrecy and shadows. He must also piece together obscure clues from Nick’s diary of dreams, poems, and an incomplete memoir that is deceptively descriptive in that it paints a fantastic picture but doesn’t use specifics and, therefore, is next to useless to Mercurio.
an account of the investigation he must follow to ascertain his friend’s whereabouts and mysterious disappearance
When I sit and ponder, as I often find myself doing, the life and mystery of Nick Savoy, I cannot help but feel about him as no doubt he felt about himself: not too seriously and more than a bit of disbelief.
Nick was a brilliant and incredibly adaptable creature. Still, he was also plagued with psychological imbalances that were accelerated by the bizarre experiences in his life that, as his best friend and confidante, I was never privy to until I dug through his storage of papers in search of his whereabouts. I had gathered from our years of work together what kind of depth of intelligence and character he was working with, but I, until recently, had only a faint clue as to the indicators that make up a complex person like Nick Savoy.
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The most obvious place I thought to look for ideas was the case pile on his desk at the office. While Nick’s investigative skills were second to none in terms of ability and effectiveness, his willingness to commit any of it to paper was practically nonexistent. Nick was used to dealing with high-profile clients who paid large sums for his meticulous expertise, especially for his discretion.
Nick was simultaneously flamboyant yet nondescript; he was consistently surprising with his cunning and charming in his manipulations. He could get what he wanted from people while almost effortlessly leaving them satisfied with the transaction. If a person wouldn’t budge as far as giving Nick what he needed to do whatever he was doing, he almost instantly had an avenue to create favourable conditions for securing the necessary end.
an account of the investigation he must follow to ascertain his friend’s whereabouts and mysterious disappearance
Perhaps it was psychic alchemy or just plain stubborn delusion, but when Nick Savoy put his mind to something come hell or high water, it amazingly seemed to work out in his favour. While I will never be able to continue in Nick’s footsteps as far as our investigative agency is concerned, there are so many things that I have learned from the man that I feel forever indebted to him and will never cease in the search for the conclusion of his story.
From More-slinging desperation to discovering his true destiny and learning the profundity of free will, seemingly incompatible concepts, one must choose whether to accept one’s destiny.
Nick Savoy was an enigmatic being who was always described as very knowledgeable, even as a young child. Interestingly, his adventures made him appear wise beyond his years; he was almost entirely self-taught since one can direct the course of one’s knowledge. He was not particularly fond of authority and detested forced structure to learning. Through elementary school, he was reported to have been exceptionally bright but unusually withdrawn and reluctant to accomplish what his teachers believed he was capable of. He became almost wholly reclusive in high school, forming no lasting friendships with his peers. His slightly above-average grades plummeted to barely passing, yet he managed to graduate with what he called a “miracle” that he had bothered to do that much. He found everything so trivial and dull in his life that he insisted on spending time alone with stories, written or imagined. Reading was his escape because he believed knowledge held the key to power; therefore, the more he knew, the more powerful he could become.
digital painting, acrylic, panel painting, isometric perspective, massive scale, scene: When I was young, my imagination would run wild, and my dreams were unbearably real, ray tracing, volumetric lighting
“When I was young, my imagination would run wild, and my dreams were unbearably real. I wrote a story once about extraterrestrials who froze us in time long enough to remove every technology from our midst to return us to a simpler state, a sort of anthropology experiment to influence humanity for its own good. Chaos ensues instead of unity; humans resort to barbarism out of insecurity and misanthropic self-loathing. The aliens shake their heads, their hopes for us dashed, and we begin our assent toward doom again. As time wore on, I eventually repressed the vivid dreams, forgot the story, but realized then that what happened in my mind was real, whether evident to others or not.” – Nick Savoy
digital painting, acrylic, panel painting, isometric perspective, massive scale, scene: When I was young, my imagination would run wild, and my dreams were unbearably real, ray tracing, volumetric lighting
digital painting, acrylic, panel painting, isometric perspective, massive scale, scene: UNLEASH, The War in Heaven, Monsters Among Us, ARMAGEDDON, Hell On Earth, ray tracing, volumetric lighting
