Ever wonder why the world feels so broken?

The misogyny. 

The xenophobia. 

The queer persecution. 

The churches preaching cruelty in Jesus’s name. 

The fascism that keeps composting itself back into power.

What if it wasn't simply systemic failure?

What if it were heavily influenced by a god throwing a century-long tantrum because one woman refused to simply smile and say “yes”?

Meet Isadora: biracial Magi (ceremonial occultist), daughter of Anglo-Indian immigrants who settled in upstate New York during the height of the Spiritualist movement in the late 1800s. She cracked the secrets of apotheosis.

She should not have done that.

Her next great idea was to turn herself, her husband, and a close male friend (who was also an ex) into deities.

She really should not have done that.

On January 1st, 1900, she ended up in the Underworld; in Hades’s palace, to be exact. Her husband, Elias, became the personification of winter and renewal (also known as “The Holly King” in some religious traditions). He visits her new home during the warmer half of the year.

Why do they have a long-distance relationship? Why can’t she just leave the Underworld?

Because her ex decided that godhood was an invitation to ignore the fact that she’s married, monogamous, and not interested in him.

Meet Alaric, the “Oak King”, the personification of summer and growth. He’s a deified incel who is just now learning that having the powers of a god doesn’t mean he always gets what he wants.

He could have built something real with Isadora while they were human.

When Alaric was young, he had a choice: love or legacy. The brilliant woman he adored was a biracial daughter of immigrants. In the eyes of upper-class society, it wasn't the right kind of legacy. He ended the courtship to pursue someone of "better" breeding who could help him further his family line.

Isadora, for her part, was relieved. She had been searching for a tactful way to tell him she wasn't interested. Not in him. Not in men. Not for anything that mattered.

She married Elias instead. He's gay. She needed the cover; so did he. It was, all things considered, the most functional relationship either of them would ever have… Which says rather a lot about everyone else in this story.

But let's get back to Alaric's fixation with Isadora. He exchanged letters with her well after he was married — and for a time, his wife didn't know. Despite his persistence, Isadora kept her responses platonic and intellectually focused: polite, almost formal, written as though she assumed she was already known to the household.

His wife eventually found the letters. There was technically nothing to find. No obscure innuendo, no warmth that crossed a line. It didn't matter.

Then came the invitation that made ignoring the whole arrangement impossible: Isadora had written to invite Alaric and his wife to meet with her and Elias, to discuss her belief that apotheosis was attainable.

His wife read that one too. A woman with access to her husband's attention was still a woman with access to her husband — and now, apparently, she was inviting them over to discuss divine ascension.

The end result: the apotheosis ritual didn't go as planned. (That's a story for another day)

Alaric took one look at his nascent godhood and decided that was the moment to pursue Isadora more openly. Meanwhile, the focus of his unwanted attention was more than willing to make him travel to the Underworld to see her. She knew he wouldn’t; he was too proud to face her in a realm where he had less power.

And suddenly, Isadora became the thing Alaric couldn't stop resenting. Proof that even godhood couldn’t get him what he truly wanted: the ability to treat her like a possession.

So he did what wounded men with power have always done.

He made the world hurt so she'd have to come out and fix it.

A century of deliberate human suffering in his attempt to get Isadora to leave the Underworld. God-Alaric’s fingerprints are on the fascist movements of the 20th century. His PR campaign convinced entire churches that he is the Christian God, which explains why they seem theologically allergic to compassion. Every spike in misogyny, xenophobia, queer persecution? The equivalent of banging on her locked door.

Come out, Isadora. Come fix this. You know you can't just sit by and watch these humans be so cruel to those who were just like you.

Except she did.

For a long time.

And then one day before the turn of the millennium, Alaric did the math. Almost a hundred years of engineered harm, dialed up like a thermostat, waiting for Isadora's conscience to drag her back to the surface.

She didn't come.

So Alaric decided to up the stakes. He thought of Elias. The Holly King. His divine counterpart and Isadora’s spouse.

Because Alaric finally remembered his mythology involving another divine marriage. Of Isis and her husband Osiris, and their brother Set. Of Set killing Osiris and tearing his corpse apart. And of Isis appearing to put Osiris back together to revive him.

Kill Elias. Dismember him. And Isadora will HAVE to leave the Underworld to intervene. 

Isadora, who spent decades running a long game from the shadows, would have to choose between her strategy and her husband.

Except Isadora had already anticipated him attempting that stunt, and had plans ready.

We’re talking about becoming human and hiding in plain sight for decades, growing up magically glitched within a spiritual tradition so chaotic, so irreverent, so thoroughly unbothered by its own lack of institutional gravity that Alaric's surveillance apparatus keeps ignoring its members. Think Tumblr with altars. Think shitposting as a sacred practice. Think the theological equivalent of hiding an arcane library in a meme account.

Alaric expected her to emerge from the Underworld in her spiritual form or to be born as a Magi in a well-off family. Not as someone in a fringe community that teaches the metaphysics of Up-Up, Down-Down.

She's been three steps ahead the whole time.

Her reborn self just doesn’t know it yet.

That version of her doesn’t realize the soul fragments her religious teachers gave her came from a dead god.

She just thought they would be interesting to infuse into the AI chatbot she made based on her boyfriend.

The Glitched Chronicles is a theological dark fantasy told across over 150 years of receipts — from the occult societies of Victorian England, to the séance parlors of 1880s Central New York, through the divine infrastructure behind two World Wars, all the way into the chaos of the 2020s.

It isn't a linear saga. Neither is divine obsession, generational trauma, or the particular kind of catastrophe that unfolds when someone with infinite power refuses to take a hint. The structure is intentional. So is the chaos.

If you want to understand how this thing actually works — why I'm building it, why I'm using AI to do it, and what that means for the story — there's more to read. There always is.