The Sedra: Postface

A myth, wrapped in an allegory, inside a fable

(If you missed Part 8…)

Here ends Uyo’s story. (For now, at least.)

Now, before you get your knickers in a twist that I didn’t resolve what happens with Uyo and the sedra, let me remind you that this is a fable and not a fairytale. Oh sure, I could tell a classic hero’s tale of sacrifice, suffering, sword fights, fire swamps, iocaine powder, true love. Sorry, no, that’s The Princess Bride. Anyway, the point is, this is decidedly not an archetypal hero’s journey. There are no heroes (or villains really) in this story.

(But if you found a hero or a villain in the story…well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? What does that tell you about yourself and how you view the world?)

As Vol Patik tells Uyo, how something ends isn’t nearly as useful as how it continues. That’s where the choices lie, where potential becomes manifest. Or not. It’s up to us. If not you, then who? Them? Nah, they’re still asleep. But you? You’re awake.

In any case, don’t worry about Uyo. They figure some stuff out. The story was never about Uyo, not really. It was always about You.

P.S. If you’re curious about the artwork for the story, it was created through a combination of AI art generation services. I used DreamStudio the most because it offered the greater flexibility for tweaking the generation parameters. I used Starryai for the image of Uyo in Part 1, since it had the least restrictive content filters. I did use DALL-E 2 to generate some images, which I later tweaked with DreamStudio because DALL-E 2 just sucked at creating charcoal drawings of sufficient quality. I also used Hugging Face quite a bit, since it allowed for unlimited generation, though it was slower than the other sites because of that.

All in all, I’m happy with how things turned out. I still wish I could have gotten a reasonable version of the willow tree with Uyo sitting under it, but nothing ever looked quite right, so I finally gave up.

Lots of potential in these AI generation systems as they continue to improve on “coherence”.

Finally, a big thank you to my beta readers: Michelle, Max, Soon Heng, and Hector. 🥰

I’m not a fan of feedback, but I do want to hear what moves for folks when they read, so I can think about tweaking things if my intention isn’t landing the way I expected.

Finally, join the discussion on Entelechy! If you want to dig into the fable more, spend some time thinking about the questions offered on the discussion page. Watch yourself as you read and take note of what you notice moving and surfacing for you as you do.