DIVINE GLITCH

© 2026 Rick Mave. All Rights Reserved.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This is a work of fiction used fictitiously.

Genre: Gothic SatireSynopsis: Morpheus can manifest your perfect reality—he just can't guarantee you'll survive the glitch.

OF GODS AND EGOS

Diary Entry #4092Client: Dr. Magnificent Thorne, a disgraced academic with a severe superiority complex.Request: “I want to be the smartest person in the room. I want to be at a high-stakes scientific symposium where my genius is finally recognized, and everyone is hanging on my every word, unable to keep up with my intellect.”The Vision: A wood-paneled lecture hall at a prestigious grand university. Venerable scholars in tweed jackets scratching their heads in confusion as Dr. Thorne solves a unified field theory on a massive chalkboard. Absolute silence, followed by a standing ovation from the world’s greatest minds.The Glitch: The Ledger of Divine Design took a lazy shortcut to ensure Thorne was the smartest person in the room.The Reality: Thorne manifested at a mahogany podium in a prestigious-looking hall, wearing a doctoral gown that smelled distinctly of apple juice. He launched into a complex lecture on quantum decoherence, only to realize his esteemed colleagues were all under the age of four. The hanging on his every word parameter worked flawlessly, but only because Thorne was waving a red laser pointer, and thirty toddlers were tracking the dot with predatory intensity.The Q&A Session: A toddler in a diaper raised his hand and asked if Thorne was a wizard, and immediately ate a blue crayon.The Peer Review: A small girl in a tutu challenged his thesis by throwing a plastic dinosaur directly at his forehead, screaming that the beasts were hungry.The Recognition: The requested standing ovation triggered on time, purely because the naptime bell rang and the world’s leading minds trampled Thorne in a desperate scramble for gold-star stickers.Note: All future lectures on quantum decoherence must not include toddlers in diapers.

GOTHIC ROMANCE

Diary Entry #18,404Client: Peregrine, an eccentric aristocrat obsessed with poetry of romantic misery.Request: “I want a classic Gothic haunting. Give me a sprawling, decaying manor where I can wander the corridors by candlelight, listening to the tragic, mournful weeping of a beautiful lady phantom.”The Vision: A candlelit terrace overlooking a misty moor. Peregrine stands in a velvet dressing gown, looking broodingly into the fog as a sorrowful, pale apparition floats gracefully down the hallway, her elegant sobs filling the hollow halls with poetic, romantic despair.The Glitch: The Ledger of Divine Design accidentally fused the phantom’sspectral manifestation with the Chronicles of Absolute Decay.The Reality: Peregrine awoke in a magnificent, cobweb-draped estate, holding a silver candelabra with tragic flair. The lady phantom appeared precisely on schedule, floating elegantly in a shroud of tattered lace, but the moment the candlelight hit her face, Peregrine’s romantic fantasy evaporated into pure terror. Her skull was a rotting, fleshless void lined with three rows of jagged shark teeth, and a mass of twitching, weeping maggots poured from her empty eye sockets like tears. Instead of gliding gracefully, her elongated skeletal limbs snapped and contorted at impossible angles, leaving a trail of black slime on the oak floorboards. She sprinted toward him with a sickening speed, her jaw unhinging to swallow his silver candelabra whole, leaving Peregrine to hyperventilate so hard he passed out inside a grandfather clock.Note: Future romantic phantoms must strictly cap their maximum shark teeth at zero.

GOTHIC DOOM

Diary Entry #99,666Client: Damien, a pampered, wealthy youth who writes cheap Gothic poems on expensive vellum.Request: “Give me the end of days. I want a harrowing, apocalyptic nightmare where the sky bleeds, skeletal horrors reap the living, and the entire human race cries out in absolute, gothic despair while I watch from a throne of skulls.”The Vision: A shattered, ash-choked wasteland under a dying crimson sun. Colossal, skinless ghouls march through ruined cities, tearing down civilizations with claws of rusted iron. Rivers of boiling blood overflow, carrying the echoing, weeping shrieks of billions into a permanent, silent void.The Glitch: There was no glitch. And that was the problem.The Reality: Damien manifested precisely where he asked—atop a towering mountain of jagged, freshly harvested human skulls that groaned beneath his weight. The execution of the gothic aesthetic was flawless, but Damien’s frail mortal constitution was completely unequipped for the sheer horror of a real apocalypse. He spent the entire dream hyperventilating in a tight fetal position, clutching a detached tibia for comfort, and sobbing hysterically into a pile of ribs while begging his childhood nanny to light a tallow candle.Note: I am done catering to the edgy whims of mortals. When Damien woke up, he burned his vellum, renounced the dark arts, and immediately applied for a peaceful apprenticeship in accounting.

MORPHEUS

Morpheus scratched the final words into the heavy ledger, the sharp nib of his quill scraping like bone on bone. He paused, letting a heavy drop of black ink pool on the tattered parchment before blotting it dry.He sighed—a low, sepulchral sound that made the single tallow candle flicker against the encroaching dark.
He closed the massive, silver-bound tome with a dull, heavy thud that puffed ancient dust into the air.Just as twilight bled its final purple onto the wet cobblestones outside, the shop’s door groaned open, ushering in two men and a restless gust of wind.Morpheus did not look up immediately. He remained still, his long, pale fingers resting on the cracked leather of his ledger, letting the silence stretch between them until it became a physical weight in the small room.“You are late,” Morpheus said, his voice a low baritone that carried the chilling resonance of an empty theatre. He finally raised his eyes, fixing the two men with a flat, unblinking stare that seemed to look through their flesh and into the marrow of their history. “What brings you to my domain?”Omar stepped forward, his boots clicking sharply against the cold floorboards. “A dream."“Not just any dream,” Elias added, stepping fully into the amber ring of candlelight. “We seek the ultimate eerie vacation, somewhere on a beach with breathtaking views—a dream so evocatively beautiful that it will haunt us for the rest of our lives.”Morpheus leaned back in his high-backed chair, his flat gaze narrowing.“Reality of this magnitude strains the very fabric of a soul. Your dream might bleed into your waking life,” Morpheus warned, his voice dropping into a register so deep it made the floorboards beneath their feet vibrate. “Have you no questions?”“What makes the dream worth that risk?” Omar asked.Morpheus leaned forward, his face crossing into the pale light, inches from theirs.“Have you ever truly wondered what if? What if you had been born beneath a different flag? In a different century, wrapped in circumstances that broke you or made you a god?” He paused, letting the silence settle in the room like dust. “I don’t offer illusions, gentlemen. I offer alternative destinies. You are about to find out exactly who you are when the chains of reality are cut. Are you prepared to lose your names in the ink?”The two men exchanged a ghostly nod.Instantly, the shadows on the wall detached themselves, climbing toward the ceiling asthe floor beneath them vanished into nothingness. The scent of ink, the stone walls, and Morpheus himself snapped out of existence.The Vision: A quaint little village on the Mediterranean Sea. A breathtaking church nestled between rolling hills and whispering olive trees. Elias meets a beautiful woman and Omar falls in love.The Glitch: The Ledger of Divine Design drowned the original words in ink, leaving only: an eerie dream that will haunt us for the rest of our lives.The Reality: —

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