“Whenever you use this bow I will be there,” the Zen archery master tells his students. And he means there quite literally. He lives in his students and thus achieves a measure of immortality. And the immortality of a writer is to be taken literally. Whenever anyone reads his words the writer is there. He lives in his readers.

So every time someone neatly guts his opponent with my spring knife or slices off two heads with one swipe of my spring sword I am there to drink the blood and smell the fresh entrails as they slop out with a divine squishy sound. I am there when the case bullet thuds home-right in the stomach … what a lovely grunt! And my saga will shine in the eyes of adolescents squinting through gunsmoke.

— William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

I love this passage, but I sure as fuck don’t agree with it. Death is death, my friend. I’m sure Burroughs himself would trade all his written immortality for another hundred years of drug-addled bliss. All the wealth, fame, and fortune doesn’t mean a thing if you’re too dead to enjoy it.

This is why it’s important that I live forever. It’s going to take at least that long to finish this mod. Failing that, there needs to be a backup plan. Because even if the words on the page are immortal, even if the graphics and gameplay are revived like so many Draugr, that empty space, the unfinished business will leave a stink as foul as any wet corpse.

This is why I’ve been encouraging the community to make their requests and ideas happen. It’s a great way to give the characters in the mod new life beyond my limited existence. A costumed hero, for instance, does not live on in readers of a 80-year old comic book. He lives on in the works of modern screenwriters, artists, and re-imaginings of his tale.

With that in mind, nonoodles has finished making a beta version of Mazekial’s patch, which you can download by going to the fan patches page via this link or the optional patches area in the sidebar. Hopefully this will be the first of many patches that either complement the mod or create entirely new NPCs, quests, and experiences for you the player.