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World Devotion Project is a mythology audio fiction following the emergence of a pantheon of Gods, and the prophets, knight, and saints that follow.
NARRATOR
Look down here. There is a city down in the south east. It sits nestled under the Farland Forest and just by the Hawken Peaks. Hearpick is a city that’s quiet in the way that a loud, humming drone is also somehow quiet. Busy, and constant, but no suddenness. No change in pitch or volume. Just constant, humming of daily routine. Easy to tune out.
This is where the first prophet lives. On the 23rd floor of one of the tall glistening grey apartment buildings, Angus sits at his desk and looks out over the city, glittering streetlights and shop signs and cars flickering in the dark. His face is illuminated by his monitor, tired facial features glowing a pale blue. His hair hasn't been cut in a good few years, and shrouds his face, draping around his sunken cheeks and over his heavy, dark eyes.
[World Devotion Project theme tune by Kaylee Scott]
ANGUS
There’s a quiet humming in my chest that reflects the sound of the city. The low buzzing of unending fatigue. The gaping void where some spark of energy should be, where instead some heavy vortex whirrs and echoes the voice of a God. My God, the King of the order. The strongest urge we as humans can feel. Unforgiving, relentless, quiet, and absolute. The God of sleep saw my gaping, heaving chest, and has had a grip on me ever since.
NARRATOR
Angus knows his god Arwyneth, as a recurring dream.
He knows him from the holidays as a child, family celebrating to loud music in the next room while Angus fights sleep on the couch, body heavy and twitching, breath shallow.
He saw him while sitting on the shore during golden hour, giving into dizziness and waking up to the gentle lull of cold water and no other light but the moon. Arwyneth was always there. 10 feet tall, stroking through Angus’ hair in his bouts of waking, shushing him gently. Angus recognises the man who looks like night sky, almost more than he recognises his own reflection. The king has watched Angus and held him nightly, cradled him in the hospital bed as cameras and heart monitors and an EEG searched for him inside the prophet and found nothing but bouts of breathless twitching. This is a story about their first formal introduction.
ANGUS
[NARRATING]
I know something is coming that night. I had spent the entire day with a weight in my chest, the kind that sits within me before I’m struck with a deep episode of paralysis, and delivered some indiscernible message. It’s the feeling I had described to specialists that had me diagnosed with narcolepsy, that I now know is the ringing of my God’s call. But it’s never felt as crushing as this before.
The rumbling that happens at the edges of deep sleep, the loud, warm humming of pushing through the veils from one side to another. The tensor tympani muscle, a low drumroll that accompanies my tired heart. This is what he uses. This is how he speaks to me. My own unique internal radio frequency that he tunes to the sound of his voice.
I can hear it humming, the soft sound of it starting up. The anticipation, the silence before my God’s speech weighs thick and heavy on my heart; an oil slick, iridescent tar that slows my breath and pulse, begging for me to lie down so it might take over my body to speak to me. But I don’t. Not today.
I have taken naps all throughout my life. Many times in school, I would go home in the middle of the day, unable to stay awake no matter how much caffeine I downed on my journey there. It always just left me shaking and weak, breathing like I was trying to hold back nervous bouts of laughter.
Even on days where I wasn’t in school, after I dropped out and started working from home, I would get a full night of sleep and still nap for at least four hours the following day. It felt like my body was too weak to live as lively as the people around me. And as it got worse, I was sure I was succumbing to death from this endless tiredness.
I had heard other folks with similar symptoms describe that it often felt like they were so tired, they were really about to die. But there was no way it was like this. I felt my soul almost glitching out of my body. Clipping out of plane from this place to the next, like some high resolution player character whose file was too big to fit in the shitty video game I’d loaded into.
NARRATOR
In times where Angus had previously felt his body begging for sleep, he now begins to feel it beg to move on. His unresting soul and its aching vessel no longer want sleep, but the place that will come after, if he would just lay down long enough to let himself pass on.
What Angus found out during this process, was that as his god, king of gods and god of sleep, came to have a tighter grip upon him, something else– something jittering and aching of systems and passages– had let Angus go to hand him over to the king. His heartbeat, his breath, it was all at Arwyneth’s will, at the will of Sleep. Keeping Angus breathing and his heart beating was low on the King’s priorities, and what Angus had thought was his body getting ready to die, was preparation to take on the responsibilities of his patron.
ANGUS
[NARRATING]
I had passed out on the bus, a few days before the first encounter, and dreamed of his words, woken when I trembled with some rush of adrenaline and fell out of my seat. Nothing that hadn’t happened to me before, really; fear is a welcome and close companion of sleep, but where I would usually feel a weight in my chest and breathlessness for the hour beforehand, this episode swept me up suddenly. The next day was the same, and I passed out in the backstreets of the city after picking up something to eat for breakfast. I woke up some time around six, freezing and sweating, my skin burning and my head throbbing. I could hear only the occasional car in the distance, and the tall buildings seemed to sway above me, a strip of evening sky felt like it was worlds away. I watched a distant aircraft pass slowly overhead, humming and idle as it floated over the city like a dragon flying home. Someone settling down in a sleeping bag watched me stutter to life from across the road and it felt like we were the only two people in the world.
NARRATOR
Then the time finally arrives. Angus can feel his soul begging him to lay down and surrender, the humming of his engine slowing as the hours pass. Night comes. The town starts to fall silent and the nearby stores close. He sits at his desk, watching some mindless playlist of videos as the sound of shops shutting down for the night echoes throughout the empty alleys around his building. The crash and echo of each metal screen falling jolts him forward with one harsh beat of his skittish heart. The only remaining lights are street lamps, and o’er the one half world nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep. Or at least they would. But something at the back of Angus’ mind won’t let him settle in his room.
ANGUS
[NARRATING]
I know this feeling well. It’s pitch black at 5pm and my body is in my room but my soul is five streets away in the city, listening to distant traffic. It’s the kind of feeling I would get more often as a teenager, when everything felt so horribly tragic because night had fallen, and you are left alone with your thoughts. Sleep and Fear watch over you in shifts, and when I wasn’t sleeping, I would feel Dread creeping in to take His place. I would think about my teen years and how everything that’s happened to me took place only a few miles away. And I think about it now. How I could just… go out. Just a mile or two away from home around some quiet backstreets. Just stand and feel cold, still air against my overheating skin. Listen to the distant hum of the highway, and dragons rumbling out of the station. I could stand across the road from a streetlamp and watch the rain that's too light to fall dancing under it in a cloud. I find it easier to go outside when there’s no one there. When the city feels less like a performance space for afternoons choreographed by quota, and more like a dark glass canyon. It lets me feel like an animal, just walking through the world.
NARRATOR
That same feeling stirs within Angus, while he is without Sleep, something treading the fine line between excitement and dread beckons him outside. Tells him that there is something waiting, there is something out there, calling for him. Behind the rigid square borders of estate, his city, he sees black. There is a silence at the edge of the static, where the sound of traffic and night life ends, and the wind begins. Angus opens his window and feels the open air singing back to him. He doesn’t know if it’s the wind whipping through the buildings or the buzz of distant traffic, but it feels like the humming in Angus’ head fills the whole world. His weak heart beats against his chest like it’s trying to pull him outside. Something that dances between terror and joy coaxes him out into the night, like he could run straight towards where his body is always trying to take him when he's sleeping.
Angus sees the hills, the fields, he sees forest. He looks out past the city at the silent empty countryside and tears come to his eyes as his soul screams yes. Go.
Everything feels like a blur, guided by something restless and twitching, that turns the exhaustion buzzing in his legs into almost involuntary Movement. The same way that, at his most exhausted, he starts to laugh giddily, his restless legs carry Angus out of his apartment to the lift down the hall. Angus’ vision hums and distorts into a violet haze at the very edges. He pushes the button for the ground floor and vertigo makes the world roll as he descends 23 floors to the ground.
And once the cold night air hits him, Angus feels a surge. If you have ever run in a dream, especially during deep sleep, you know what it means when I say he bolts down the side of the road with no pain and no laboured breath. The buzzing sparks of movement that usually have him twitching and writhing as he sleeps, now propel him forward towards the waiting forest, away from the routine and expectation and blinding lights of the city.
He runs for maybe an hour, and though the sounds of the city at night and the lights of it start to fade, no feeling within him is subdued. As the city in its volume grows quiet and distant, the rumbling in his mind grows louder, like the hazy reality Angus is always dipping into is very quickly becoming real. The wind whipping past him feels like it carries him, a hand on his back and wheels under his feet, launching him forward faster than he can keep up with. The whole time he feels on the verge of tears, or laughter. It’s hard to tell. Angus often can’t.
He runs until the motorway becomes a country road, and the country road becomes shrouded by trees as the strange in between melts into the Farland forest. He runs off the path and into the trees, no particular direction in mind, he just has to get deeper. Dull, cloudsoaked sunlight is starting to come back, but it isn’t morning. No, usually when morning comes, it feels as though Angus has run out of time. The world is no longer his to walk freely and he has to pretend to confine himself to the routine of the day.
But out here, where he cannot even see the borders of the forest, night and day have no connotation. Angus is no longer part of this world. In that same frenzied state he would feel as a teenager, desperate to abandon his life, he runs until all he can see are trees. Part of him knows the forest doesn’t go this deep. That no matter how deep you go into Farland, you can always hear civilisation, even if just in the distance. But not now. Now he just hears leaves under his feet and that quiet thunder in the back of his head as he fights to keep his eyes open, the rumbling sound muffling the rest of the world.
He feels that familiar violet bubble forming around his head. The field that amplifies the humming in his ears, and projects his surroundings and his dreams into one blurred field of vision. The world is blurred and dark, unreal, the humming so loud that it divides the colours into a prism in Angus’ peripheral. The more he gets lost, the more Angus feels his soul lagging behind him, taking his ability to breathe with it. Like it clips in and out of his body and each delay elicits a gasp from him that turns into Fearful laughter.
And when he finally stops running, exhaustion hits Angus like a wave. Not the kind that should, not the stinging, coughing, wheezing breathlessness or racing heart and rushing blood. No throbbing head and aching muscles. It’s that thick and warm exhaustion that his god bestows upon him when he needs him to listen. The kind of buzz that runs through you when you stretch out your whole body in just the right way, when your bedsheets are just the right kind of warm.
ACLYN
[NARRATING]
There's a humming, half dead power station sitting like a heavy heart among the moss and leaves on the Farland forest floor. I’ve been sleeping here for ages, I’ve kissed moss and ivy up the sides of the building, licked its painted skin until it cracked, and loved its wooden beams until they began to rot. I’ve stroked the trees bare, their branches now black and almost coal, the ground mulch, dead under Angus’ heavy footsteps.
GETHINOCH
[NARRATING]
Some of us hide among the dead wires and coils inside it as he slumps over, barefoot and half dead, skin still warm and flushed from being pressed into place in bed.
PTHENNRYN
[NARRATING]
Angus walks around like a lost cat, no matter where he is. I like him. He’s a good one to start with.
ACLYN
[NARRATING]
He looks weatherbeaten, for someone who doesn’t experience much more than the occasional breeze through his stagnant bedroom. Like he’s forgotten he’s alive.
PTHENNRYN
[WHISPERING, ALMOST SUSPICIOUS]
Is that him?
GETHINOCH
That’s him.
ACLYN
You brought him here?
GETHINOCH
I had help.
[FOOTSTEPS AND WHEELS THROUGH THE LEAVES]
PTHENNRYN
He’s obedient.
KEYMENAAL
It isn’t hard to pull someone like him out. He has been floating above it all for years already.
STILLSONG
He’s been charging up for this. Came here like a baby turtle going out to sea.
NARRATOR
The king appears to Angus somewhere between his mind's eye and in the sliver of light where his eyes won't quite close as they roll around in their sockets. He appears in the part of his mind where he dreams vividly of the spot his body is in.
Arwyneth finetunes his prophet’s body to listen, contracts the muscles between his ears to tune into the frequency of his voice, making Angus an instrument that listens, then imitates. The deep rumbling of the tensor tympani muscle gets louder as his eyes spin as if marbles in his skull. His breath is pulled from him like a mooring rope straight through the middle of his chest and the rumbling feels like the hum of a black hole where his heart should be, his blood sent rushing through his body by its magnetic thrum, each pulse rocking him forward, the rushing of it making him dizzier. Angus can’t breathe, it just happens to him. He feels delirious.
Angus is held up by his head rolling backwards, mouth open to just let inhale and exhale take place, rather than under any command of his own. His only remaining instinct is Sleep. Any attempt to breathe deeper or speak sends shots of adrenaline through him that have him Fearing for his life. He can only laugh. Angus’ eyes roll back where he hovers, where he hangs, kneeling, but only his heavy feet touch the ground, and the dizziness washes over his head and eases his rumbling heart as he grins and laughs again. Like the sound is the revving to fix a stalling engine.
This is the worst it's ever been. Even laying on the floor of public bathrooms, eyes flickering and breath unsteady, Angus would still only fall until he hit a veil. Then he would bounce back once spoken to. Some passing stranger would check his pulse to make sure he wasn't in the depths of a medical emergency and his shrinking soul would fly back from the void, snapping back into place under his skin, his heart starting again as everything within him solidified.
Not tonight.
Angus hums out a death rattle and floats buoyant a few inches off the ground, reeling from his own exhaustion and only half alive.
He watches from behind his own eyes, somewhere deeper in his own body, his soul rolling backwards over and over as it feels like a lifetime of building exhaustion finally reaches its peak. The thundering under Angus' eyes grows louder as a hand reaches to hold up his face by his chin. Something past vertigo rushes through him with every heartbeat as the rumbling finally hits the right frequency, and then-
ARWYNETH
Hello little one.
NARRATOR
The voice is almost fond, and Angus can feel himself smiling, high on his own fatigue as the flickering channels of dreaming and waking phase into one, and Angus sees his God clearly for the first time.
Arwyneth stands at ten feet tall, compressed enough to fit in his prophet's exhausted mind. His face is stern and strong, wide, triangular features and deep, dark skin that almost glows on the high points of his face, iridescent in the cold early glimmer of sunlight. The corneas of his eyes are a rich, velvet purple, the irises a lapis blue, and they seem to spin slowly as Arwyneth watches Angus.
His hair is in long, thick locs, half tied back in a bun, some loose and draped over his shoulders or hanging down and framing his face. They glitter in some places, as though the king had laid down in the night like it was a field, and gotten starlight stuck in his hair like it was grass.
Arwyneth is draped in thick layers of cotton and satin, long loose robes and sleeves that come down to his knuckles. It's all shades of black and indigo, glowing and shadowed in a way that doesn't make sense with the sunlight that comes through the trees.
And he smells like sleep, somehow. A sweet, familiar smell of clean, dry linen. Warmth at the end of a day, almost dangerously coaxing, as though, if Angus were to lean into an embrace, he would fall among the layers of fabric into a thrumming, gaping, hollow chest, and never come out. Nestled eternally still in the soft, warm cavern where a heart is supposed to go.
ARWYNETH
Look at you. You’ve come so far.
NARRATOR
His voice rumbles in Angus’ head in that way he’s used to, the small muscles in his ear contracting like violin strings, ready for his patron to play his symphony upon. It sounds like a boulder rolling down a canyon, and Arwyneth’s irises spin as he looks down at his prophet with an affectionate pity.
The King doesn’t glow, but the world around him goes dark in Angus’ peripheral vision as he manages to focus enough to make eye contact with him. The hand that holds his jaw is soft and cool, almost like silk. Rather than his chin being lifted, it feels more like Angus’ head is falling backwards. It feels like the world is rolling rather than spinning, and Angus feels like he can only grip on and make it slow down when he looks up at his god and everything goes dark, all external noise muffled by the quiet sound of internal thunder.
ANGUS
[NARRATING]
He tells me everything. Everything I’ve been hearing at the edges of my dreams. The second King, who dances with him when my heart races in Panic. Movement and Desire and Dread, Silence and Rage and Revenge are all given names. He tells me about how they’re preparing to walk the world, and he tells me about the other people preparing to hear from me. A knight, his lover, sculptor and teacher and photographer, the second prophet, the outlaw, the small crowd who are waiting for me to introduce them.
He tells me I’m not alone, and I will never be again. He tells me my rest is coming, but there is something I must broadcast first.
And this is how I find out about the cameras that caught me running here.
I feel something more, and I see movement in the crumbling power station. A wheel turns, but then it's too Dark to see, and I'm left kneeling, rocking to the sound of my suddenly vigorous heart.
ARWYNETH
Not long now, little one.
CREDITS
Hello! This is Kit, um- the narrator, writer, director and illustrator of World Devotion Project.
Thank you so much for listening to episode one! Um- this episode featured the voices of Kit Paterson as The Narrator, Kendrick Cabanela as Angus, Darin F Earl II as Arwyneth, Bonnie Calderwood Aspenwall as Aclyn, Kestrel Bell as Pthennryn, Joshua Smith as Gethinoch, Moneesha "Misha" Bakshi as Keymenaal and Benjamin Callins as Stillsong.
Um, World Devotion Project is distributed by Stygian Catalyst.
You can find us on BlueSky @devotionproject.bsky.social and you can find us on Tumblr, TikTok and Instagram @worlddevotionproject
Thank you so much for listening.
World Devotion Project is the work of Kit Paterson and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License