Knot

I'm Knot Fernow. Prophet. Problem. Permanent residence for six demons who insist they're only here because hell's HR department is terrible at employee retention.

Welcome to Volume 3, where I've stopped apologizing for the chaos and started charging admission. (Not really. Knot Mine tried to monetize our dysfunction. It went poorly. Multiple Wednesdays were harmed in the process.)

In this collection, you'll find me:

Breaking mathematics with my teeth to free a toll collector who'd been stealing days from travelers for forty years (turns out absolutes hate fractions)... carrying hundreds of stolen names in my head because a gardener asked nicely and my demons thought it sounded entertaining... eating what might be my last breakfast with a collection of other theological disasters before confronting the Naming Authority... accidentally compressing every Wednesday in a city quarter into one infinite middle-of-the-week because an old man's grief was too heavy for linear time... and generally proving that six selfish demons can solve problems when it's convenient, amusing, or when they've trapped themselves in the same temporal anomaly as everyone else.

My demons want me to clarify: they're not helpful. They're strategically self-interested. Any good that happens is a side effect of them avoiding boredom, acquiring things, or getting out of situations they created.

• Rhymes (speaks in verse across multiple timelines now)
• Smell (detects metaphysical odors, it's complicated)
• Knot-in-Your-Neck (applies spinal metaphors to everything, including time)
• Knot Tired (dreams of infinite Wednesdays where nothing is expected)
• Knot Knowing (calculates probabilities, recently became philosophical)
• Knot Mine (claims ownership of abstract concepts, successful 40% of the time)

Together, we're seven disasters who've achieved collective dysfunction. We're not heroes. We're not even particularly good at being villains. We're just broken things that accidentally fix other broken things by insisting everything stay broken.

The demons made me include this: "We only help when it's entertaining or convenient. Any appearance of altruism is coincidental. We're demons. From hell. We have reputations to maintain."

Read these in any order. They're standalone adventures held together by my complete inability to have a normal day and six demons who can't agree on anything except that I'm the worst host they could have chosen.

Fair warning: This book contains fractional mathematics used as weapons, plants hosting refugee identities, breakfast foods that achieve sentience, temporal anomalies caused by grief, and aggressive wordplay. The kind that makes "Knot" do far too much work as both name and pun.

My demons insist the dysfunction is the point. That chaos packaged becomes boring, that broken things work better than fixed ones, and that Wednesday is the most honest day of the week.

They're probably right.

But they're definitely only saying it because it's convenient.

-Knot

P.S. Knot Mine wants you to know this book is mine. All mine.

The other demons are still arguing about it and probably will be through Volume 4.

Which is very on-brand for all of us.