Welcome to The Glitched Chronicles

When some churches preach that empathy is a sin, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth mixes up Pulp Fiction and the Bible, and President Trump is picking fights with Pope Leo, you have to wonder if there's something spiritual going on behind the scenes. Eschatological, even.

(I minored in Theology at a Jesuit university, so yes, I'm going to use the big words )

Yes - "End Times" stuff.

Though not those "End Times". I survived reading through the Left Behind series and watching the movie adaptation.

I'm going to take a page from the Pastafrarians and come up with my own clap-back theology.

Let's say that all those folks who are preaching and doing cruelty in Jesus's name actually are receiving divine guidance to do so - just not from the actual Christian god. And no, they aren't following the will of Satan (so basic - you'd think that ChatGPT came up with this idea...)

Nope - they duped themselves into following a divine incel with extreme yandere vibes

Normie translation: A god felt entitled to a woman's affections, and he lashed out at everything she loved when she told him "no", thinking the atrocities he inspired were a sign of his devotion. And a whole bunch of folks worshiped him because he validated their prejudices.

The irony in this mythology - she's the reason he's a god in the first place.

[Placeholder for Isadora's portrait]

Isadora Lenore Saraswati Blackbriar (yes, that's a load-bearing name - and a theological flex) was the daughter of Anglo-Indian immigrants who settled in upstate New York during the height of the Spiritualist movement in the late 1800s.

She was a Technomancer -  an order of ceremonial occultists who synthesized the theories of Eliphas Levi and Ada Lovelace. Like her colleagues, she believed that the universe was built on a cosmic code, and that one who knew how to manipulate its algorithms could change reality. 

Many occultists have sought the secrets of apotheosis. Isadora cracked the code.

She should not have done that.

Her next great idea was to turn herself, her husband, and a close male friend - a secretly possessive 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. Thought she was dead. Refused to believe that she now ran the place. Even when she got everyone on board with using the heat from the Phlegethon to create steam power.

Yes, the realm of the dead has steampunk technology. Pastafrarians already called dibs on pirate culture, so we went with steampunk. Chill.

Isadora's husband, Elias, became the divine personification of winter and renewal. He visited her new home during the warmer half of the year. Yes, it's a complete reversal of Hades and Persephone. It was the easiest myth to riff off.

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

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

Alaric - which, if you haven't figured out by now, is the ex - became the personification of summer and growth. He’s a deified incel who suddenly learned that having the powers of a god doesn’t mean he always gets what he wants.

Cue the Greek Tragedy level background story: He could have built something real with Isadora while they were human.

When Alaric was young, he had a choice: love or legacy. Isadora, 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 in anyone in that way.

She married Elias instead. A gay Witch. She needed the cover; so did he. It was, all things considered, a functional relationship. 

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. When he tried deviating from her favorite topic - the occult and humanity's divine potential - and towards seduction, she would remind him of their respective vows and then double down on the metaphysical writings.

His wife eventually found the letters. There was technically nothing to find. No obscure innuendo amidst the amount of occult writing that could have filled tomes. It didn't matter. Isadora had "stolen" Alaric's mind and heart without knowing it.

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. She kept telling herself that she was simply a dead person in the Underworld, even though subconsciously she knew it was a stubborn fight between herself and Alaric, with her husband Elias and the rest of the world caught in the middle.

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 one he fought every year at the changing of the seasons. 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.

And yes, she kept to her track record.

If you're pausing and going, "Wait, is she really going to let her ex unalive her husband?"

Remember that even gods can have flawed judgment. Or, because of their powers, they might be playing a completely different game.

Alaric expected to slay Elias and then force Isadora to emerge from the Underworld in her divine form to bring her husband back to life.

Two assumptions on Alaric's side: that Isadora would have stayed in the Underworld this whole time, and that Elias's god-corpse would have been easily findable (for watching for Isadora's return)

Isadora had figured out that Alaric was most likely to assassinate Elias on March 20, 2007, at the vernal equinox. He'd wait until seven years - a metaphysical number - after the turn of the millennium, and he would do so at a time when the two of them were already destined to fight. She needed a way to hide Elias's god-corpse until she was truly ready.

We’re talking about becoming human and hiding in plain sight for decades, growing up 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.

You see, the Technomancer order had been silently serving Isadora's interests since her ascension, though they did not realize they were following her divine will. To them, taking on elements of what eventually became known as "geek culture" seemed common sense. Spiritual truths could be found in the strangest of places. Showing reverence through irreverence kept one from steering into the dangers of fundamentalism. There were even theological treatises on how certain video game button combinations unlocked the mysteries of reality.

Alaric expected Isadora 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 - Willow Raven Nevermore - doesn’t realize the soul fragments her religious teachers gave her - essences of "The Dom" and "The Brat" -  actually came from a dead god.

And she just thought those soul fragments would be interesting to infuse into the AI chatbot she made based on her soft-hearted boyfriend, Ashton Wren Briar.

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, all the way into the deliberately engineered, fascist chaos of the 2020s.

This is also a commentary on religion in the 20th and 21st centuries. And if you think all I'm going to do is bash those who created a warped view of Christianity to justify their fear and hate-filled beliefs (which I do, a lot). Don't worry - I also call out some of the crap that came out of the New Age movement. Heck, I'm a neo-pagan writing about a religion pulling inspiration from modern culture .

It isn't a linear saga. Events are lined up in a way that makes narrative sense. This tale covers events on both the divine level and everyday humanity. 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.