Scissorbox

The Hiss of Butane: A Brief History of How and Why

My first job out of highschool earned me a whopping $8 an hour, and a large set of bags for the eyes. 3rd shift was a killer, and those nights were long

Lack of sleep does something to me. Something rotten. Among other things, it’s caused me to sleepwalk (a scary experience as an adult), prompted random acts of sleeping in public, and even caused me to fall asleep while walking at one point. No joke. One minute I’m walking down the long hall that exited the building, and next thing I knew I was twenty feet further along, as well as a good fifteen feet to the left of my last cognizant position. No sleep = Bad Things.

What those long hours did do however, was prompt me to escape to my mind for entertainment. One night, as I was packing up a container and scanning items with my scanning, gadgety thing, I noticed a small message scrawled on a nearby pillar. Nothing fancy or archaic, only two words written in green permanent marker. The message read: “Cathar was right”.

Maybe someone out there knows exactly what that means. Catharism was a religion, and maybe some scholar would look at this message and chuckle, noting “Damn straight he was right, yar!” but not me. I just saw an old word in a strange place.

My mind immediately started thinking about what this Cathar fellow was right about (because at the time, I thought maybe Cathar was some sort of ancient political figure. My later research discovered that it was a religion. Funny what we learn from randomly scribbled messages).

Cathar, an extremely powerful overlord type character was born, in some form, that very night. Then was born his arrogant, even more dangerous son, Gareth. That was over a decade ago, and the story has ebbed and flowed in my mind ever since. Forever changing, always evolving, and rarely spitting up enough good stuff to become cannon in my story. But over time, the story solidified, congealed, and slowly baked into something I wanted to put down on paper.

Two years ago I took the story, cut out the fat from my older renditions, and moved the timeline up a bit to see how the characters would adapt. Some didn’t, and unfortunately they’ll never return to my world (victims of my cruel editing and laziness to pursue their side-stories). Others, like Gareth Lutherford and Cathar Romano, are still there, still finding out if Cathar is really right about anything at all. Then there’s Trithian, a minor character who went and became perhaps the series most important character thus far. It’s been fun bringing them all up to my modern standard of the world I created so long ago. It’s more fun seeing how their entire world has changed, much like my own, and how we all have to adapt and make shit work out in the end, no matter what comes our way, or what hurdles we’ve jumped in the past.

First, “The Hiss of Butane” serves to tie up those loose ends. It’s just as much meant for me as it is to my readers. I had to look at Gareth, give him a few lessons to think over, slap him in the face a few times, and send him back into the (newly named) city of Carthis. Cathar is still waiting for him, as well as a few more enemies. Then there are the old friends… Chance, Blake Palmarin, and now this new guy John Trithian.

Where will they all end up? Your guess is as good as mine. But as you’re reading, keep an eye out for that tiny message scrawled inconspicuously where you’d least expect it, as I did all of those years ago. It really could lead you anywhere.