Andrew here, author of Wandering from Death and Facing my
Fears. It’s with a heavy heart and a fair amount of shame and embarrassment
that I’m announcing that the story is being axed.
I really didn’t want to let this just drop. Honestly, I
didn’t. But life got in the way, time stretched on, and I just kind of lost
interest. That’s always a risk with a project like this. Unlike my previous
stories in the Slenderverse, my direction with this story got a bit muddled.
Now I Shall Know You Again was basically my take on the “how to survive”
character, with a “not even a clever person will survive forever” ending. Don’tShoot The Messenger was my take on proxies and how farcical the idea of a bureaucracy
for them and had a plot direction fairly early into the run. Wandering from
Death, on the other hand, shifted focus. It also grew less focused as I went
along and it just made it hard to stay enthusiastic about.
The beginning of Wandering from Death was an attempt to
troll the Slenderverse. More specifically, the main crowd of writers at the
time, who I honestly wasn’t too fond of. But most of those writers stopped
writing and a lot of the community started moving to the Fear Mythos. On top of
that, my initial plan (start an out-of-game blog and interact with the
community that way, do crossovers with everyone, then pull the plug on this
blog because things were getting “too real” and shifting to the main blog)
ended up falling through for various reasons. Then I decided to just do
crossovers well and attempted to plan crossovers with everyone I could. Then I
set up an epic story to kill off all the Fears and tried setting my protagonist
as a hero figure for a community that I didn’t have the time to stay involved
in and the whole thing just…kind of became a huge mess.
So instead of actually finishing the story (which would take
quite a bit of time and effort), I’ll try to do the next best thing: walk you
through my plans for the rest of the Wanderer Trilogy. Yes, this was slated to
be a trilogy that continued on a blog called “Facing Death.” But anyway. On to
the story.
The original plan with the crossover with Raggedy was to
kill off the Black Dog. Canis probably would have gotten involved somehow,
since that was his main Fear. As things dragged on, this was expanded to
include the plan I ultimately had for the Empty City, so that I could use the
City’s distortion of time and space to explain the absence. Oops.
I have no clue how we would have taken down the Black Dog
without repeating what I did with the Rake. But the Empty City I had a plan
for. The Empty City was to be the tomb for a lot of Fears.
I didn’t know how to kill all the “hivemind” Fears without
concentrating them all in one place, since they could, in theory, just keep
perpetuating. The way I was setting things up, they were all in one of two
alliances: with the Choir and Red Cap or with the Intrusion and the rest of the
Four Horsemen. And through EAT manipulating the followers, those factions were
are war with each other. In theory, they would have met in the Empty City where
they would be required to have the core of their hivemind due to how Domains
worked. At that point, the Masks (probably with the aid of the Manufactured Newborn)
would have blown the City up and narrowly escaped. Phones probably would have
died in the process. I wanted for the Choir to consume him eventually. That
way, the City would be destroyed and even if the other Fears weren’t dead,
they’d be trapped inside with no escape. All the Horsemen apart from the
Intrusion would escape, of course. They’re endgame players.
At about this time, the Magi (EAT, Blind Man, Manufactured
Newborn) would turn on the Masks. And of course, at this point, the
Manufactured Newborn would have upgraded itself to the point that it was
practically unstoppable, constantly improving and reproducing itself. They’d
still stop it, of course, by launching an attack on the Tower that was
controlling all the iterations of the Newborn that were around. The other Magi
would be easily dispatched.
There would also be a reveal sometime during this blog that
Canis is one of the Timberwolves, serving the Archangel. Around this point, his
interests cease to align with Kenny’s so he becomes a flat-out antagonist.
In one of the final conflicts, Kenny’s staff probably would
have broken. The idea was to find someone in the ‘verse with more mystic powers
to lead them to Yggdrasil, where Kenny would forge a new weapon out of wood
from the tree. Why? Well, because my incarnation of the Slender Man was in fact
one and the same as the Bleeding Tree, Yggdrasil’s opposite. If Yggdrasil is
the world tree, the Bleeding Tree is its antithesis, breaking down worlds and
causing them to meld together. Dimensional bleeding, y’know. So a weapon made from Yggdrasil would be the only thing capable of hurting it.
This is probably about the time that the final blog would
have started, in which Kenny and the Masks begin their final assaults. I don’t
know whether I would have tackled the Cold Boy/Wooden Girl/Masquerade or the
Four Horsemen first, but they’d be the first to fall, with the Slender Man
himself finally taking direct part in the action.
Then, of course, the final battle with the Slender Man. I
have no clue how this would have ultimately gone down. Maybe Kenny would have
succeeded. Maybe he wouldn’t have. I like to think that he at least cuts the
Slender Man out of his version of reality and he and Maggie get to have a happy
ending together. Because of course Kenny and Maggie get together at some point.
Last dies, though. He was definitely going to die at some point.
And looking back on everything I’ve written, it sounds
really stupid. That’s probably why I lost interest in it. Because it was a
narrative of epic-length scope with far too many climaxes that I didn’t know
how to execute and a setup I wasn’t particularly pleased with. We learn from
our mistakes, I guess. At least Last, Kenny, and Maggie were really fun
characters to write. Maybe I’ll revisit them in another project someday.
I’m incredibly sorry to everyone I’ve let down by not
finishing this project (though by this point I suspect most people don’t care),
especially Raggedy for essentially killing his own momentum. Maybe he’ll go
back to his blog after this. We can handwave the absence easily enough. He
probably escaped the Empty City after everyone else was killed or something. If he does something it's ultimately up to him.
So the Wanderer Trilogy has been officially abandoned, but
if you really liked my writing, I have other projects! I’m rewriting Don’t
Shoot The Messenger, which is being serialized in my school’s online paper and
which I’ll probably convert to ebook once it’s finished and I’ve gone back and
tweaked everything. And there’s one more project I’d like to write for the
mythos before I decide to stop creating and become just a fan. It’ll take a
while so that I can focus on some other projects and life events, but I’ll
probably be posting about it when it’s ready, so keep an eye on this blog
and/or DSTM for announcements regarding something called “Operation Stirling.”
Well, I guess this is goodbye, everybody. Thanks for
reading. And again, I’m sorry.
~Andrew A. Koerner
