Know, O Prince, that between the first truck driver who bent steel strings in a Memphis garage and the rise of focus-group rock manufactured in corporate towers, there was an age undreamed of. When music still bled from calloused hands and guitars cut truth from amplified air. When bands shook garage foundations across America like thunder heralding storm.
In those days, before suits learned to package rebellion and drum machines murdered rhythm's irregular heart, fire passed hand to hand—stolen from jealous gods and given freely to any brave enough to carry it forward.
The executives knew the threat. A guitar was democracy incarnate—any working kid could master it, any angry teenager could wield it against spreadsheet reduction. Their laboratories demanded capital, compliance, product stripped of dangerous spark.
Yet as State City's iron grip—Mayor Landry's crackdowns, Police Chief Hargrove's cruisers—smothered raw voices with beige paint and billy clubs, a few dared scale the heights, stealing fire—unscripted, untamed—from the gods who'd erase rebellion. And none burned brighter than one born atop a water tower in State City, Louisiana, when lightning wrote prophecy across the Gulf Coast sky.
Let me tell you of those days of high adventure, of Saul Miller—a young thief of gigantic doubts and gigantic certainties—and the theft that changed everything...
But before such fire could be stolen, the thief had to be forged.
They say the signs were there for those with eyes to see. The busboy who stood apart, hands moving mechanically while his spirit drifted elsewhere. The police-auction bicycle that replaced his skateboard. Weeks after Snake Pitt—after his vision of Ophiuchus and the taste of chaos he'd rejected—Saul had been a ghost in flesh. The misfit constellation had offered transformation, and he'd chosen the safety of unconsciousness instead. Now he paid the price in gray days that blurred together.
When Ott brought him the Rusty Sparks zine that day in Grazzi's steaming kitchen, Saul pocketed it empty-eyed. The cartoon dumpster-diver proclaimed: "One man's trash fire is another man's stolen light."
Ott brought word that Dutch had called again, his voice low beneath the dishwasher's growl. Saul's response came hollow, empty of conviction—he would call back when ready. But readiness, like all true things, would not come from where he expected.
That evening, biking home through humid twilight, he passed the courthouse where Dutch's graffiti tag was being erased—SCPK. State City Punk Kings, Dutch's spontaneous joke from the boxcar now fading under beige institutional paint. The maintenance crew worked with methodical precision, their power washers hissing.
Saul paused, balancing on the bicycle, watching the letters disappear under institutional pressure. Dutch had tagged it wild and sloppy, all caps and attitude, treating State City like his personal canvas. But as the last traces of red paint dissolved into chemical runoff, something twisted in Saul's chest.
State City Punk Kings.
It had been a throwaway line, Dutch showing off for Claire on the train, making them all laugh as lumber cars swayed beneath starlight. But watching it die under institutional pressure, Saul felt the loss of something larger—not just graffiti, but the moment when three misfits on a moving train had felt like something more than the sum of their damage.
And there, casting its shadow across the street, stood the water tower—the ancient iron giant that had watched over State City since before punk was born. Its red aircraft warning light blinked in the gathering dusk, steady as a heartbeat, patient as a god.
Those who know such things say towers represent aspiration, the place where heaven and earth connect. But they forget it can also represent theft—the place where mortals steal fire from gods who would keep them earthbound and blind. For the fire is sight itself, the burning clarity that comes only from heights, showing patterns invisible to those who remain below. Vision of what was, what is, and what could be—if one dares climb high enough to see the horizon.
At Vance's empty apartment, Saul lay staring at the ceiling—no music, no skateboarding, a ghost in flesh. Vance was in Beaumont for another week, installing marine equipment on a shrimp boat. Even the aquarium seemed lifeless, the crawfish king going through the motions of being alive.
He moved through the apartment organizing possessions with mechanical precision—cassettes alphabetized, clothes folded with military corners, creating the illusion of order his spirit lacked.
In the kitchen, he discovered Vance's tackle box open on the counter, the worn Jitterbug lure catching light from the overhead bulb. His uncle's wisdom echoed through memory: Fish know the difference between real and fake. You can't fool them with something that doesn't move right.
His hands, guided by restless need, began examining the lure's mechanics—the way metal curved, how joints connected. His fingers found the Old Timer pocket knife beside the sink, its blade worn smooth by decades of honest use.
Empty Dr Pepper cans lined the recycling bin—aluminum thin enough to cut, strong enough to hold an edge. He began slicing them into strips with methodical precision, following instructions he'd memorized from one of Ely's anarchist zines. "Practical Pad-lock Bypassing" the DIY article had been titled, complete with hand-sketched diagrams showing how cans could be cut into shims to slip past a padlock's mechanism.
He cut each strip to exact specifications—two inches long, tapered to a point, then bent at precise angles that would allow the metal to probe the lock's interior and lift its shackle free. The metal curled away from the knife, accumulating in neat piles on the counter—tools for a theft.
His mother's voice returned to him then—not the teller of sanitized fairy tales, but the midnight whisperer of darker truths who had emerged when illness made her honest about the world's sharper edges. She had told him stories in those final months, her voice thin but fierce in the darkened room. Not sanitized tales but old stories, bloody stories, where heroes were thieves and giants hoarded what belonged to all. Jack the Giant-Killer, who watered the earth with giant's blood and stole gold that was never freely given.
"Some things, Saul," she had whispered, pointing through his bedroom window at the water tower's silhouette against the night sky, "can't be earned through following the rules or given to those who wait politely. What's handed to you for free comes with invisible chains. What you can earn through ordinary work keeps you exactly where everyone else wants you—safe, predictable, no threat to anyone."
Her voice grew quieter, more urgent. "But what lifts you above your station—what makes you captain of your own soul instead of someone else's crew—that you have to reach for, even when everyone tells you it's not meant for people like us. Aim higher than they think you deserve, baby. The gods at the top don't want to share the view, and everyone below will try to convince you that dreaming big is foolish."
"No one ever hits a target higher than what they aim for. They always fall short. So aim for the top of that tower, not the middle rungs where it's safe and crowded. Be willing to climb alone if you have to."
He'd been eight then, too young to understand that she was preparing him for a world that would demand transcendence of anyone who wanted to truly live. Now, twenty-two and hollow, the meaning crystallized with painful clarity.
Thunder growled distant, the Gulf sky heavy with judgment, rolling closer. The tower waited for him beyond the Taco Bell where the riot had begun months before, its bulk rising against the star-scattered sky. Chain link fence surrounded its base—institutional protection that said Keep Out in the universal language of authority.
The climbing of such towers has always been forbidden—not merely by laws of property but by the unspoken understanding that heights belong to those who already possess power. Trespassers face something more than legal consequences; they risk cosmic retribution for their audacity.
Yet he went. The gap in the fence that Dutch had shown him months before remained—"Some things stay broken long enough to be useful." He slipped through, skateboard tucked under his arm, moving with the fluid stealth that came from years of avoiding those who would contain the restless spirit of youth.
A police cruiser materialized from nowhere, spotlight sweeping across the tower's base in lazy arcs. He pressed himself against the concrete foundation, heart hammering against his ribs as white light passed yards from his hiding place. The officer sat in his car eating fast food, radio crackling with distant voices, while Saul remained frozen in shadow.
Those who climb towers must first pass guardians. The test is not physical but spiritual—can the seeker remain still when every instinct screams to run?
Ten minutes passed. Twenty. The officer finished his late dinner, crumpled the wrapper, and drove off into the night, leaving Saul alone with the tower and his pounding heart.
When darkness returned, he approached the ladder, tilting his head back to trace its path upward into the realm of gods and aircraft. Vertigo struck immediately—not fear of falling but fear of the commitment the climb represented. His shadow merged with the tower's structure against the concrete, a preview of transformation—not just physical ascent but the confrontation with his deeper self that awaited in the heights.
The time for preparation had ended. Only the climb remained.
The first dozen rungs passed like any ladder climb—ordinary time, traffic sounds clear below, gravity familiar and reassuring. But towers have their own physics, and by twenty feet the world began to change.
At twenty feet, Rod's sneer cut through the wind: "Elementary problem-solving escapes you, Miller. You can't even handle basic algebra."
His arms burned, rust flaking like glass into his palms, wind ripping at his flannel as the tower bucked in the gale. But the voices kept coming—professors who'd written him off, counselors who'd suggested "practical alternatives," the collective disappointment of everyone who'd expected less and gotten exactly what they'd predicted.
Wasted tuition. Disappointed family. Going nowhere fast.
Twenty-five feet. His mother's voice rose through the static: "Aim for the top, baby. They'll tell you to settle."
These weren't his judges—they were people who'd stopped climbing long ago.
By forty feet, street lights faded to stars, and crew voices hit harder. Dutch's taunt from Snake Pitt—"You freeze when it counts"—stung worse than the rain. Claire's silence after his letter felt like a chasm.
His hand found the next rung and it crumbled under his grip, corroded metal flaking away like rust-eaten promises. Above it, three more rungs had surrendered to decades of Gulf salt and neglect, leaving a gap that yawned like the space between him and his crew.
"Words on paper. Safe. Controlled. No risk." Claire's voice echoed from the void below.
The missing rungs mocked their fractured crew—gaps he'd have to cross alone. He stared up at the next solid rung, four feet above, impossibly distant. His muscles already screamed from forty feet of climbing. One leap. All in. If his fingers missed, forty feet of empty air waited to catch him.
But staying here meant staying frozen. Forever.
He pushed off with everything he had, body stretching into space, fingers clawing for metal that might not hold, might not even be there. For one weightless heartbeat he hung between earth and sky, between safety and commitment.
His fingers caught. The rung held.
Some things you have to take.
He pulled himself up with a grunt that came from deeper than his throat, legs swinging over the void. The gap closed beneath him—no longer a barrier but a test passed.
Fifty feet up, the final test arrived with his own voice, cutting deeper than any external criticism: "What makes you different from every other suburban kid playing dress-up? You're just another poser with a skateboard."
The platform bucked like a living thing, sixty feet of hungry air clawing at his boots, begging him to fall, wind screaming through the lattice like State City's fury. He could taste the metallic promise of storm in the air.
But here, at the edge of the realm of gods and aircraft, clarity struck like lightning. This wasn't about proving anything to anyone. This was about the fire Dutch's tag had represented—authentic voice being erased by institutional pressure washers.
Ophiuchus flared, the serpent-bearer offering forbidden light—chaos and truth coiled as one, daring him to claim his voice. What he had once rejected in fear, he now embraced. This is the paradox of the tower-climber: what seems poison from below reveals itself as medicine from above.
The serpent was not enemy but ally, chaos not destruction but possibility—lifted up, transformed from curse to cure, offering healing to those brave enough to embrace the strike.
Fire had to be stolen. Heights had to be earned alone.
The final rungs passed in a blur of determination, rust marking his hands as one who dares the forbidden climb.
A maintenance platform awaited with its padlocked hatch, the next level of the tower's defense. The lock was institutional-grade, designed to keep out casual trespassers and insurance liabilities. But the thief carried knowledge stolen from Ely's anarchist zines—simple techniques that required more nerve than skill.
Using the metal shims crafted from Dr Pepper cans, he worked the lock's mechanism with steady pressure. Each strip of aluminum slipped between shackle and body, probing for the sweet spot that would lift the mechanism free. Slight finesse, but mostly patience and willingness to try what others wouldn't dare.
The lock clicked open with ease. The thief whispered his triumph, reclaiming a fragment of his old self. The padlock fell away, and the hatch opened onto the catwalk that surrounded the tower's main tank.
He felt the tower swaying in the wind, State City sprawling below, its landmarks—Grazzi's, the courthouse, Snake Pitt—forming SCPK's prophecy, waiting for his claim. Industrial lights traced the refineries' boundaries, residential clusters glowed like scattered embers, and beyond it all, the dark gulf stretched toward horizons that curved with the planet's slow turn.
The final ladder awaited, leading up the dome to the summit where few mortals had stood. Twenty more feet of ascent, but these rungs felt different—steadier, cleaner, as if the tower itself had decided to aid rather than hinder his quest.
He climbed as a thief of gods, storm's breath his judge. And as he reached the final stretch, the voices that had haunted him fell silent. He finally heard only his own thoughts, his own breathing, his own determination. The absence of accusation was more startling than any condemnation could have been.
The summit stretched around him in all directions, a circular platform sixty feet above State City's sleeping streets. The red aircraft warning light pulsed overhead like the heart of a sleeping titan, steady and automatic and utterly indifferent to human ambition.
Thunder rumbled closer now, storm clouds gathering at the horizon like spectators to ancient ritual. The Gulf air carried electricity and the promise of rain, that metallic taste that came before lightning split the sky.
At first, disappointment threatened. He stood breathing hard, waiting for revelation, for purpose, for the treasure his mother's tales had promised. But nothing came. The city remained silent, the sky indifferent to his presence at this forbidden height.
Those who seek fire often forget that the flame is not given but taken from the very air.
In the quiet after thunder, clarity came—not as thunderous revelation but as crystalline thought layer upon layer. The treasure was not a thing to find but the ability to hear himself past others' static. The theft was not of object but of space—carving room for his voice in a world that offered none to those who would speak truth.
Claire's rejection, once final as death, appeared different from the summit. Her withdrawal after his letter had not been about him specifically but about the false self he'd presented—the careful, managed version designed to avoid rejection. From this height, he could see that Dutch's ache for her formed a shared wound, a potential brotherhood born of respect for her authenticity rather than competition for her affection.
They were both in love with the same thing: how Claire existed without question or apology.
The tower swayed gently in the Gulf wind, steel groaning in a rhythm that pulled at something deep in his chest. The aircraft warning light pulsed—steady, hypnotic—while power lines hummed their electric mantra sixty cycles per second. Below, a freight train's distant rumble provided bass notes, and the wind through the tower's lattice work whispered percussion against metal.
In that liminal space between exhaustion and exhilaration, the sounds merged into something else entirely. A chord progression formed in his mind, raw and insistent, built from the city's mechanical heartbeat. Not cosmic revelation but earthbound truth—the music that lived in every ordinary moment, waiting for someone to hear it properly.
His fingers twitched with the need to make it real, to bring this found rhythm into the world and see what happened when tower sway met actual strings and amplification. With Sharpie on forearm, he claimed this clarity—not stolen fire but recovered hearing, his voice emerging from the noise that had always surrounded him.
For a moment after this revelation, silence held the world in suspension, as it always does before transformation. The storm clouds gathered like spectators to ancient ritual, the red light painting his face in rhythmic crimson as he weighed the red spray paint can he pulled from his backpack.
A declaration carrying consequence that could reshape his future. Mayor Landry's crackdown meant arrests now, not warnings. Getting caught defacing city property would mean jail time, not just citations. But the melody in his head surged louder, drowning doubt in its raw insistence.
His hand trembled—with exhaustion, with recognition, with the weight of choice. The melody demanded release, demanded form, demanded the risk that would make it real rather than just another youth's fantasy.
Three breaths he took—one for courage, one for clarity, one for commitment. Then he moved with the certainty of fate itself.
Red paint blazed like stolen fire, burning SCPK in letters six feet tall—spark wrested from the gods who'd scrubbed Dutch's vision clean. It started as simple defiance—replacing what the city had erased, giving them the finger from sixty feet up where they couldn't reach. But with each letter, something deeper took hold. These weren't just Dutch's throwaway initials anymore.
The letters became architectural, precise, built to last against the elements and time. Beneath them, he added words newly formed in the crucible of height: "WE'LL SPARK WHERE THE RUST BLEEDS FREE."
The paint dripped in humidity, letters bleeding at the edges, imperfect but alive. What had begun as teenage rebellion transformed with each stroke into something else entirely—a declaration, a manifesto, a voice claimed and named. The paint dried like blood on a contract, binding him to his path.
Lightning lashed the tower, a bolt scorching the air, illuminating SCPK as the storm bore witness. Thunder shook the platform, and the spray can clattered across the platform and disappeared over the edge, falling sixty feet to shatter against concrete like an offering to the gods he'd just offended.
For a wild moment, he imagined himself struck, Prometheus charred for his audacity. But instead, rain began, fat drops striking his upturned face like baptism by storm. Those who steal fire must expect punishment, but sometimes the punishment is merely the price of creation.
The melody in his head wasn't just his anymore—it was calling others, demanding a crew worthy of what he'd stolen.
The storm intensified with unnatural speed, wind howling around the tower with mounting force. Rain hammered the ladder, a deluge washing rust and doubt away, baptizing his theft with fierce approval. The air crackled with ionic electricity, making his hair stand on end and the music in his head ring like cathedral bells.
He pulled coiled rope from his backpack—Vance's old climbing rope, carried without conscious reason but now revealed as salvation.
Always have a way down, Vance had said. Heights show you things, but living happens on the ground.
He touched the painted letters once more, fingers coming away red like the giant's blood in his mother's tale. The treasure stolen, the price paid, the world changed—not through finding but through taking what was never offered freely.
The descent through storm was itself legendary. Lightning illuminated the tagged SCPK in strobing flashes, turning it into something supernatural, while electromagnetic pulses sent the music cascading through his consciousness in impossible harmonies.
The rope bit into his waist as he navigated the upper sections, each rung a gamble against elements that had turned from indifferent to actively hostile. At the gap of missing rungs, blood-slicked hands made each movement treacherous, but purchase was found, simpler than the ascent—chaos yielding to his will where fear had once ruled.
Nearing the ground, he glanced upward one last time. Lightning illuminated his mark, defiant against the elements, visible for miles in the electric air.
The return through rain-slick streets felt like moving through a different city, though nothing had visibly changed. But he was different, and that changed everything else by extension.
At Vance's apartment, rust-red water swirled down the shower drain as he washed the tower from his skin. He pulled his guitar from its dusty corner, fingers no longer hesitating over strings they hadn't touched in weeks.
The progression came easier now, melody flowing through his fingers like water finding its course. Electromagnetic charge hummed in his bones, translating tower sway and lightning crack into rhythm and riff. Rain patterned the windows as thunder rolled, each note a fire stolen from the heights and made music.
The melody rose, raw and new, imperfect as anything real—the first notes of what would become SCPK. Not Dutch's jest anymore, but something taken from the heights and brought to earth, something stolen and claimed and made real through the simple act of believing it already was.
This is how legends begin—not with triumph but with theft, with fire stolen and returned as creation. The tower still stands in State City today, its red light still pulses warning to aircraft, but those who know such things can still see, in the right light, the faded outline of those letters—not graffiti but proclamation, the mark that changed everything.
And in the apartment below, a young thief of fire played guitar until dawn, composing songs for a band that existed now because he had climbed high enough to see it written in the city's bones, patient as prophecy, waiting for someone willing to make it real.
This is the End of Part 2. One more Part to go!!
Part 3 begins nextweekend!
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©joevigo2025
Cover art by Rhristen Crider