Irresistible skirmishes with absurdity.
No one wins at nonsense, but everybody smiles.

This tale is an amoeba: no plot, plan, or forethought. What it has in its favor is adjectives, adverbs and characters.

Dyon: You could call him the sinister side of Dionysus, but that would be oversimplifying this man, fluent in seventeen instruments and every kind wine. Moles dot his body in constellations foretelling the birth and the death of humanity, but the timeline of neither.

Ashley: Ghost of forests past, guardian of the place where ash trees use to speak. Barefoot and moon-eyed, lost under streetlights and stop signs, haunted by the tattered remnants of old loves and dead friends. Ashley wanders, and Ashley searches, but Ashley’s been missing for a long long time.

Red Calla: Burnished blue and Black, thick locks hanging heavy with the weight of hollowed pebbles, shells, and young dreams. She dances birth and life, hip-hopping city streets into rubble. Some say she crawled from a gutter, some say she fell from a cloud, some say she’s been forever–or never.

Ashai: Cloaked in feathers long and slinking, she stares quizzically through canyons of sleeping minds, soars in arching circles and webs of thought over twisting rivers of human contradiction. Her red eyes flash and spin like binoculars as she discusses ends and beginnings and the uncountable every-color knots in between with every unconscious traveller. (NB: Dream is an archetype, not a Gaiman ripoff.)

Matty: A smile on his lips and nothing in his soul, he was a raver until he jacked off one too many time on Ecstasy. Once he realized Earthly delights would never do it again, he became a priest. A sick, cynical bastard, thin mouth stretched with other people’s pain in a pale face unmarred by laugh lines. Twig-legged, wrapped in cling-swirling dark pants like puffs of shadow, he never moves faster than a slow walk, because if there’s on thing he’s damn sure of, it’s that there is nothing in this world worth looking forward to or hurrying up for.

Cardea: The sun smiles when he does, rainbows shining through the tears (already five minutes old) on his face. She’s got lightning bolts around her wrists and a hurricane of hair, but it’s the lightest summer breeze that comes from her parted lips, soft as the first spring rain. He’s sunburned, she’s windblown, he’s everyone and nowhere, and she is always changing.

Scallion: Too ageless to be a puppy and too immature to be anything else, he jumps and plays with complete frivolity, pranks thoughtlessly. Half coydog, half human, he’s resplendent in ghostly pale-butter fur and glowing green eyes and he’s a ragamuffin in a brown rat’s nest of hair, deep-seeded tan, and threadbare collar. The collar is important: rescued from the corpse of a childhood pet, a beagle, the first person he ever loved, Cardea’s thumbprint on the tag.

Drah-zil: An affectionate (in Ashley’s case) and …elsewise… (in Dion’s case) phonetical nickname for the Ash tree at the center of the universe, the branches and roots that hold you together. Ashley’s mentor; you can’t say anything without saying too little.