Beyond the Music: Welcome to the 'End Stage'

I've always seen American politics for what it is... the worst kind of theater imaginable. A system with two sides screaming into their own echo chambers, solving nothing, existing only to generate talking points and fuel fear. It's an "us vs. them" machine designed to suck people into a cesspool of groupthink until they lose their own identity. It's cultish. It's a mechanism designed to strip away critical thought.

I don't have the answers, but I know this... if we don't allow for real debate, we'll never solve the sickness we're in.

End Stage is my call to end this political theater, and a warning of the end stage of our society if we don't. Every dominant empire before us has collapsed. We're right on track to keep that streak alive.

The Factions

Manes Vox = Dummies

When I built the two factions for this story... Fila Nox and Manes Vox... I made sure they didn't map to Republicans or Democrats. The point was to create two parties built on nothing but grandiose claims and circular talking points. There's no real substance to their ideologies, and that's by design. It's all a ploy to drive a wedge between "us" and "them," delivered with a tone that crushes questions.

Fila Nox = Puppets

The names themselves are just Latin words that sound official but are intentionally meaningless garbage... Fila (threads), Manes (ghost), Nox (the night), Vox (the voice). I call them the Puppets and the Dummies because they're both controlled by a human hand, just from different angles. The most important part of the story is that the hands controlling everything are invisible, and they're both connected to the same source.

Words & Noise 

End Stage had to be more than just an EP or a book. It's one story told in two ways... each chapter has a corresponding song. The music can stand alone, and the book can stand alone, but together they create the full picture. My process isn't clean. I start with a vision for the story, then I experiment with sound until something clicks and the songs take shape.

The Reveal: Explore the Dossier

To bring all of this lore together, I've created an intelligence hub The Gillsaw Archives: The Rizen Dossier. It's a collection of declassified files on the key factions and figures from both the Fog Watch and End Stage incidents.