Spiral
Follow the road. Face the darkness. Find your way home.
Sent From the Emerald City
Before the boy ever walked a farm road or heard a rooster crow, he floated. A tiny baby in a wicker basket, wrapped in soft light, carried by a river that wound through a land he would not remember — not yet.
The Emerald City glowed behind him. Something had gone wrong there. Something had sent him away. The river carried him toward a swirling vortex, and on the other side — the amber glow of a city called Chicago, flickering with lightning.
The human world received him without fanfare. A farm. A family. A new life.
The Farm Years
He grew up the way farm boys do — slowly, honestly, with dirt under his fingernails and stars overhead that felt close enough to touch. He didn’t know where he came from. Nobody did.
He learned to walk in the meadow, to ride a bike down a sunflower-lined road, to stare in fascination at a glowing computer screen. He read in haylofts with a flashlight. He studied until the lamp burned low. Whatever was in him — whatever the Emerald City had put there — was becoming something.
The Key in the Chicken Coop
Every great story starts somewhere unexpected. This one started in a chicken coop.
He was thirteen. Just doing his chores — collecting eggs, talking to his favorite hen the way you do when you think nobody’s listening — when the hay shifted and something caught the lantern light. Gold. Ornate. Alive with a green glow that had no business being there.
An emerald the size of his fist, set into the bow of an old key, hanging from a chain. It pulsed like a heartbeat. The hen tilted her head at him. He picked it up.
Nothing would ever be the same.
“Some doors aren’t built to be found.
They wait until you’re ready.”
The Magic Tree
The key led him into the woods. Deeper than he’d ever gone — past the familiar paths, past where the light still reached comfortably. The chicken followed. She always followed.
And then he saw it.
An ancient tree, massive and impossible, radiating soft green light from deep within its bark. Runes carved in circles around a lock set perfectly at eye level — a keyhole that could only belong to one thing.
He held up the key. It glowed brighter. The forest went quiet. He turned it.
The Yellow Brick Road
The tree opened like a door. Beyond it — the road. Gold and gleaming, winding through a world that breathed green light and smelled of roses.
He wasn’t alone for long. A girl with long blonde hair and a blue and yellow dress appeared — Alice, she said, though she didn’t seem entirely sure that was her real name. Her black cat came with her, trotting along the bricks without invitation, as cats do.
The three of them walked. The Emerald City shimmered in the distance, impossibly beautiful. And between them and it — a black silhouette under red lightning. A witch. Waiting.
Behind them, a tornado churned. Ahead, a reckoning. The road was the only choice.
The story continues…
Stream Spiral — the single from the upcoming Solarbluseth album Sonata