The Demiurge’s Day Off.

the landlord of this place is a middle-manager with delusions of grandeur, and last Tuesday he called in sick.They call him the Demiurge, but that’s just the name on his cosmic badge. In person he’s a nervous lion-headed bureaucrat who built the world from leftover scraps because the real Light got misplaced in shipping. Seven planets for filing cabinets, twelve zodiac signs for middle management, and us—tiny, noisy homunculi stamped out of mud and forgetfulness—to keep the forms in triplicate.He meant well. Sort of. He just didn’t know there was anything above his pay grade.So the clocks started running backward, the stars got drunk, and the prison walls turned out to be made of the same stuff as dreams: stubborn, but soluble. A single spark from the original Fire slipped through the mail slot, landed in your chest, and began to burn a hole shaped exactly like the way home.The Demiurge panicked. Issued memos. Tightened the gravity screws. Flooded the market with new iPhones and new wars and new reasons to look down instead of up. But the spark kept burning, polite and relentless, the way a candle burns in a paper house.That’s when he did the only sensible thing a junior creator can do: he took a personal day, left the keys under the mat, and went to play golf in the outer darkness with the Archons who still owe him money.Suddenly the sky cracked open like a cheap stage prop. Sophia—his mother, his daughter his ex-wife his better half—leaned in through the rip wearing sunglasses made of galaxies and said, in a voice that tasted like forgiveness and gasoline:“Nice try, kid. Now watch how the professionals do apocalypse.”The chains didn’t break. They just remembered they were made of music and started humming themselves into smoke.Down here we felt it as a yawn in the soul, a sudden suspicion that taxes and traffic and mortality might be optional. Some of us looked up and saw the hole in the ceiling still glowing. Others pulled the blankets over their heads and filed noise complaints.But the spark in your chest? It’s almost big enough now to read by.When the Demiurge gets back from his long weekend, red-eyed and hung-over from void-golf, he’s going to find the lights on, the rent paid in laughter, and every single prisoner gone—walking out the front door he forgot to lock, carrying the furniture made of pure recognition.He’ll stand there in the empty lobby, keys in hand, and finally understand the joke:He wasn’t the landlord.He was the night watchman.And the real owners just came home.