Fragments

Abstract

Alex is a young man losing control of his life. Almost a year after his fiancée of three years abruptly ended their engagement, he finds himself still tormented by both his ignorance of what precipitated the dissolution and his inability to conceive of himself without her in his life. His self-image shattered, he descends into cycles of self-recrimination and destructive behavior that alienate his friends and family and leave his personal and scholastic lives in shambles. Desperate to save himself, he attempts to recall who he was before his break-up, but doing so only feeds the darkness growing inside him.

Viridian is an arbiter, a cybernetic-augmented defender of "reality" in a futuristic city where "logic" and "truth" are upheld as sacred laws and enforced at gunpoint. But when he catches a glimpse of a horror that lies just beyond the fragile veil of his reality, he finds himself under trial by the same virtues he upheld. Branded as tainted by what he has seen, the only hope for his redemption lies in giving up his basic humanity to combat the growing tide of deviancy at its source.

Kazin is the last in a long line of shamans for a good reason; the land he has sworn to protect is dying, withering away under the effects of a mysterious blight. Unless he can somehow find a way to replenish the source of the land's energy and sever the ties to the spirit that no longer supports it, his people will all perish. Yet doing so requires the aid of primal forces of destruction that his kind imprisoned long ago. In order to succeed, he must make a bargain with demons of a bygone age.

And all three of these characters are the same person.

Fragments is a story of loss, and the strange workings of the mind as it tries to rationalize and circumvent the pain of losing something precious. Through the mental escapades of a character's alternate selves, we see how the self fights for its identity, the heart struggles to survive, and how in every brain are many minds just waiting for the right catalyst to run wild.