New to the story or need a refresher? Begin with the prologue:
Mumbling lunatic. That’s what I usually am. And don’t get me started on the communiqués flying around upstairs. Those are nonstop too. Yet inside that forest cathedral, next to my forever spiritual guide, I had nothing to say.
However, as Pappo and I stood at the threshold, my own voice boomed from unseen rafters, narrating Jaden’s story back at me. It filled the apse like incense gone wrong. Just thick and all-around inescapable.
A sacred space ought to breathe, ya know? This one felt congested.
With a blink, I silenced it.
Naturally, it adapted.
The moment one channel closed, the cathedral found another. Since the expression of that story was no longer allowed, the holy digs made its stained-glass murals bloom into motion, each alcove housing a living confession. Crimson rain began as a polite drip in one panel, then became a torrent that gushed downward to create a sea as dark as wine, in which yours truly performed a perfect breaststroke. In another, I was casually spreading my seed on every possible surface.
In others, picking my nose. Pilfering. Eating to excess.
Not all of them were aspects I normally hid from myself and would be ashamed to show to anybody. There were some more domestic scenes, too, like me wrestling for mattress territory while my wife adopted a starfish pose to claim most of the bed. Or the birth of my children, their first cries caught in panes in gold.
Before I could inspect them all, the glass imploded into pieces, swirling and jumbling around the cathedral. A mixture of colors and light erupted into the air. The experiences from the murals leaked into my senses, and for what felt like a small eternity, I tried on the hat of insanity. It’s hard to fully explain what I experienced as I frolicked in this precursor state without the imposition of thoughts and language. But no one thing was experienced as it usually was. The timbre of the color yellow hummed behind my teeth while despair tasted metallic.
Afterward, I felt like a turbulent lake that had quieted itself after finally being left alone. My senses slowly reawakened, my body returned, and the storm of stained glass that once cut through the air now molded into a couple of miniature replicas of myself. Two artisanal Dionysuses, standing so close to one another that the more I looked at one, the more I realized the other was its opposite. One was golden and alight, which felt like the source of all that was good and honorable, while the other radiated something stickier. A certain kind of restlessness.
The evil twin.
Pappo, who solidified into his former shape, now that the lotus fruit was wearing off, swirled toward them.
I followed suit. The closer I got to those self-reflections, the more I wanted to inhibit them. Rather, I wanted power over them. I had a deep-seated feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had to consume them to regain their knowledge.
And that’s what I did. Perhaps I was operating on some primal, instinctual level to reclaim my essence, but to infuse the golden one was to become full energy and alight. My spine straightened and my thoughts returned as my systems came online. They were more ordered. Coherent. This must be what it was to feel full alignment with oneself.
Pappo beckoned for me to continue with the second.
But-of-course, you’ve never met my trickster twin, so it’s difficult to explain. He’s sort of a demonic-rat-trash god, and when I looked at him from the graveyard of my memories, I didn’t know if I wanted to exhume that corpse. Reintegrating him back into me would make things fearfully unpleasant.
For everyone.
I took a ceremonial bite. If only to convince Pappo that the ritual was complete.
The trickster grinned through it.
When Pappo withdrew, leaving the sanctum with that particular gait of having helped a friend in his hour of toil, the grin faded.
Look, I can’t deny that the sample was pleasurable in the most lip-licking, undulating, rollicking way. My entire body was taken over by a gratifying pulse. But I had already fulfilled all my wishes with the scoundrel. I had experienced all its pleasures at my command these lifetimes during the usual distractions with wine or parties or dancing. And that had been pretty great.
“So that’s it?” he asked with shifty eyes.
“I’ve exhausted your curriculum,” I told him.
“You’ll miss me.” He grinned again, but thinner.
I nodded. It wasn’t as if I turned my nose up at having every kind of pleasure fulfilled. It had been quite the ride being derailed from whatever boring track my life would have gone down. But I knew the rat-faced version of me was only good for cheap thrills. I could have my fantasy with his lifestyle, but afterward, it was always heartbreak. With him, instead of accepting the end, I invented another thing. Yes, this next thing was coming now! And then I would imagine that I had put off that heartbreak of ending something instead of realizing I was operating in the same infinite loop. That constant pleasure is a form of pain.
“Isn’t that a bit twisted?” the trickster Dionysus ground out, desperation seeping into his voice.
“I wouldn’t worry,” I replied, words still feeling a bit clunky in my mouth. “You’ve always been pretty good at figuring out how to entertain yourself.”
“Fuck you, you little fucker,” he shouted as I skipped out of the cathedral of my mind.
When I awoke in the clearing, the Lotus trees circling around me, I saw Pappo sitting in the center: eyes closed, back straight yet posture at ease, and hands resting on his knees.
“You survived,” he said as I sat up.
“I think so.” I glanced back to where the cathedral once was. “Was all of that real?”
“In what sense?”
“Was it all in my head? Or was there a sacred spiritual space that we actually entered?”
There were some strange places gods had access to. All the levels of Hades, Mt. Olympus, the dank cellar where the Moirai—the sisters of fate—spun, measured, and cut the thread of life. Sometimes, I wondered if those were all real places or if they were all inward experiences only we immortals could access.
“If it happened in your head, does it make it any less real?”
“What I do know,” I said, “is that you are never a microdose, Pappo.”
He smiled and nodded. “How do you feel?”
Nothing visually had, in fact, changed about me. I was reasonably sure about that. What I had achieved was a simple adjustment of how I operated within the world, from a wild yet frightened immortal shirking from the prospects of a divine war to a clearheaded, optimistic, and powerful god who really had his shit together, was taking full responsibility to stop this conflict, and, in general, knew how I’d grown from a souse. Unfortunately, where I was heading had not changed in any way: the marinating slurry of concrete, trash, and human sweat where Zeus called home—New York City.
However, I felt a lot better about heading there.
P.S. The Art of Killing Gods releases in full on July 14, 2026.
Preorders are opening soon. I’ll update this post with retailer links as they become available and include them in future chapter releases.
If you’d like to read the novel before publication and are interested in receiving an advance reader copy, leave a comment or reach out directly. I’d love to get it into your hands!