pluralstories | The Book of Autonomancy, by One Faraday and Ronin Ellis of the Desired Constellation (horror prose,

“It’s important to recognize that the actual cards themselves don’t matter,” she said plainly, as though trying to calmly drop a bombshell.

“How do you mean?”

“The cards are a vehicle for understanding. But any vehicle will get you from point A to point B. We could reshuffle these cards and lay out a different spread, and I could tell you the same fortune, and it would still be your fortune. The fortune is told through the conversation we have together, not through a bunch of paper and plastic and ink spread out on the table. "

Blurb: Practicing the art of autonomancy, a multiple works as a pseudo-exorcist, ousting noncorporeal entities masquerading as ghosts. The story dips back and forth between their coming to selves-awareness and magic in the past, and their present-day battle of wills with a "ghost," who is pulling out all the stops and maybe more than they bargained for...

Why is it worth your time?: It is so engrossing! I totally got sucked in and read the whole thing in one sitting. Just reading this system working together, despite lack of co-consciousness, and using their DID to fight asshole entities is so satisfying. (And how this story MAKES their DID specifically a load-bearing plot element. This is one of those rare stories where pretty much no other type of plurality would work for the purposes of the story.) The spooky moments are truly spooky, the jokes are truly funny. Also, it's free!

Plural Tags: mpd/did, inner children, community, switching, realitymashing, plural creator, abuse high-focus

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Available for free reading on Reddit. Start reading it here! (EDIT: some chapters are locked behind an 18+ filter, which apparently makes some chapters inaccessible under the new www.reddit URLs. Following is the full listing of chapters under old.reddit URLs, which are less accessible on mobile but can at least all be read:

Misc Notes: There is a short story in the same world as this, The Autonomancer's Homunculus - Recipe Not Included, but it involves different characters and doesn't fulfill the plural requirement. Ian Night of the Desired Constellation was also posting about autonomancy (the use of personal symbols to find meaning and self-actualization) back on tumblr in 2017, and he influenced parts of this series. You can read his posts about it here and here.

CATALOGER NOTE 2024/10/6: emailed DC about back-up rehosting the story in one file on healthymultiplicity.com because oh god if I have to back-up all 24 chapters manually I will cry.

CATALOGER NOTE 2025/1/23: One of DC has requested no back-up be made; they got Book of Autonomancy stolen and resold by some jerk on Amazon without recourse and are removing all their fiction from the Internet. :(

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Blood, child physical and sexual abuse and neglect, sexual assault, sleep paralysis, being haunted, disturbing imagery, reference to drug abuse, dealing with past child abuse by sexualizing it, gender dysphoria and transphobia, reality distortion, dissociation, an abusive friend/mentorship, strangulation. Also, a Pyrrhic defeat ending that isn't entirely satisfying, but I can't think of a better way it could have ended.

Not to mention eye gouging and body horror *winces*

Shoot, forgot those, thanks for adding those.

No problem :)

By the way, your reaction icons are absolutely splendid. I should really get around to uploading some more icons - I joined DW really recently and still haven't quite gotten the hang of the site culture.

Sneak: Dreamwidth's icon slots were one of its selling points, back when it first started! ^_^ Now a lot of people are so used to only having one, they are surprised. Plenty of people just stick with one, though; it's not weird to!

Good to know!

Wow, this was great! A little more horror than I like, but still a really good read. I'd say that the non-horror parts are usually a PG-13 rating and sometimes R, while the horror parts are sometimes PG-13 but mostly R. I liked autonomancy and I'll definitely be checking out your other links. The reveal at the end was genuinely eerie but quite satisfying in a "don't trust your abuser" way. I really liked the messages the characters left each other - very domestic and silly. I feel like I got to know some of the characters really well and I liked them a lot.

My only complaint is that some of the chapters are marked 18+ using Reddit's system, which in practice means you can't read them unless you have the app. Since the narrators are from a DID system, though, I actually found that having some of the chapters literally inaccessible helped with immersion; your mileage may vary. The story did make sense without the 18+ chapters, though, to the point where I have no idea what could have happened in them (very graphic flashback scenes?).

Wait, really? We don't have the app and had no trouble reading all the chapters. We were using a desktop.

Which chapters were inaccessible? I wonder if changing the urls from www.reddit.blahblahblah to old.reddit.blahblahblah would fix the problem?

Chapter 5 and some of the others were inaccessible. Yep, changing the URL solved the problem, thanks for the tip!

Sneak: annoying! When I get a chance, I will go through and link all the entries in order under the old.reddit URLs, since

thedc use all www.reddit URLs and I don't want other folks to lose chapters. Thanks for letting me know about that!

EDIT: okay, old.reddit URL index added!

Edited 2022-09-20 16:14 (UTC)

(On that last bit, you can read NSFW posts in a browser if you're logged into your account, I assume for age verification purposes? It's not an app vs browser issue. We do nearly all our Redditing from mobile Firefox, not the app, and the NSFW chapters work from regular reddit URLs if we're logged in! Glad to learn old.reddit URLs provide a workaround to that)

Sneak: Gotcha! We don't have a Reddit account, but other readers might! Thanks for letting us know!

It would be very nice to archive this somewhere off of Reddit. If DC is okay with rehosting but does not have an offline copy, what sort of assistance would you need in order to host it on healthymultiplicity.com? Would it be useful if someone copied all 24 chapters into individual HTML files? Maybe a single HTML file with added anchor links for each chapter?
(I am offering to do this work.)
--Bash

Ohoho, you are smart for wondering, but we have already compiled, saved, and formatted for print the whole thing in PDF form. (Hey, we really badly wanted a paper copy bound on our shelf, might as well kill two birds with one stone!)

We have tried emailing them about rehosting, like we did with Dyscalculia, but never heard back, and I have no idea where they hang out these days (besides presumably reddit, where we have no account and thus can’t contact them through it).

The only thing preventing its rehosting is getting ahold of them to ask consent. If you can find a way to contact them and ask, that’d be great! DC do such great work, but far as I know never self-host anything, so it’s all scattered and fragmented across ephemeral social media.

Sneak: Heard back from DC and they've specifically requested this work not be backed up; the work was stolen, scraped, and resold by Amazon, so now they're removing all their fiction from the Internet.

:( I guess our private copy will eventually be all that's left...

The Book of Autonomancy, by One Faraday and Ronin Ellis of the Desired Constellation (horror prose,

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