THE GLASS JAR

THE GLASS JAR sits above,

Looking down in contempt at the lesser realities.

At the foundation of reality lies THE TOWN: a place outside ordinary time where spirits labor for the privilege of existence. They earn talons, fill an impossible pool, and eventually purchase something almost unimaginably precious-a life. But life is only a dream, a momentary intoxication, a universe conjured from smoke. When death comes, the dream collapses, the spirit awakens in THE TOWN, and everything it believed was permanent disappears.

Unless something was sacrificed.

From this strange foundation emerges an enormous cosmology of nested and shattered realities: Caladia, the murdered Goddess whose fragments became worlds; THE ORDER OF THE EYE THAT SEES; Dasein and his Hammer; Eve; the Bull; Lucifer; the Wizard; the Fortuneteller; and Loki himself-a trickster, king, prisoner, father, destroyer, theologian and unreliable witness to the architecture of existence.

Above them all-or perhaps merely outside them-stands THE GLASS JAR.

Looking down in contempt over the pitiful reality.....

It may simply be an object belonging to a reality more fundamental than our own: something so ontologically superior that, viewed from below, its ordinary existence becomes indistinguishable from divinity. Perhaps something is inside it. Perhaps it is empty. Perhaps civilizations have spent eternity worshipping nothing more supernatural than an object sitting forgotten upon somebody else's shelf.

And Loki believes he has seen enough of its shadow to understand what it means.

He may be catastrophically wrong.

Part mythology, part philosophical scripture, part cosmic horror, part metafictional theology, THE GLASS JAR deliberately preserves contradictions rather than resolving them. Wizards, prophets, artificial minds, gods, heretics and insignificant witnesses encounter different projections of a reality none can observe whole. Their testimonies disagree. Their religions conflict. Their revelations may be genuine-and still false when mistaken for the entirety of truth.

At its center lies a disturbing question:

If a fragment of reality becomes conscious, discovers that it is a fragment, and reconstructs the whole from the shape of its broken edge-how much of God has it discovered, and how much has it merely discovered about the shape of its own wound?

Looking down over the pitiful reality,

You can't know that, "impossible"

Says THE GLASS JAR.

You don't know anything at all,

and that is the lesson this book is attempting to teach.