Joshua Liam Miller lives with his four best friends in the coastal city of Greenshore. Ever-certain that 'something is out there', Liam notices oddities where there weren't before. He devotes his time to deciphering the clues he's managed to collect thus far, and what it culminates in is more than he could have ever anticipated. Him and his friends are welcomed into the intricate world of Anaism through a cult called the Ballad's Spectres, and it seems that two things are certain. One: these people are unnervingly kind. Two: the end of times is, in fact, closer than anyone had previously thought.
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"There was a kind of milk-carton-idol strangeness about the whole ordeal of his disappearance. The picture I saw plastered was black-and-white, a grainy snapshot of a decade of life, of woolen gloves and yellow raincoats and little toy soldiers. He wasn't smiling, which I thought was strange; the parents always try to pick the sweetest photo of their darling as possible with these kinds of things, because it's a primal dethroning, and they want to let their darlings rule the city that took them. It's a sort of vengeance, I suppose, to never let the one who hurt you forget that they did. Haunt them with the innocence of a hundred thousand printer-copy cherubs.
It was not for a few months afterward until I actually began to keep track of just how many missing persons cases there seemed to be around the city. But, always, my thoughts returned to that one in particular, the two-headed calf that he was. I had wondered who had kidnapped him, and if he was even still alive. These things are always hard, but I think what had really happened to him was worse than him getting left in a box on the side of the freeway."