Dilated William · Soulverses Journal
Where It Started
a comic book idea, a magpie mind, and a language big enough to hold the answers
It started as a comic book idea, just me messing around with characters, giving them powers and backstories and little quirks, the way you do when you're young and your imagination has nowhere else to go. I wasn't trying to build a universe at the time. I was just trying to make something cool. I learned quick that characters have a way of demanding more than you planned to give them, and the more I built, the more they started asking questions I didn't have easy answers for. Where did they come from. What were they actually made of. What connected them to each other underneath all the powers and plotlines.
I've always been a bit of a magpie when it comes to ideas. Philosophy, mythology, art, science. I've never been able to stay in one lane, and I don't think I've ever wanted to. I'd fall down a black hole reading about ancient cosmologies one week and be obsessing over physics the next, and somewhere in my head all of it started talking to each other. Old myths and modern math aren't as far apart as people think. Both are just attempts to explain what we are and why any of this exists. So I started building my own language to bridge them, a symbolic math I called Soulmaths, where numbers and glyphs could carry meaning the way words do, the way old runes and sacred symbols always did before we decided math had to be cold and stories had to be soft.
Building that language changed something in me. It gave me a way to sign my own name to this work that felt more honest than my given name ever did, so Craaîdd was born out of it. Welsh for Core or Heart, built around the symbol for the Empty Set nested inside the Omega. Everything from everything and nothing all at once. Like the Taoist uncarved block. and my personal mantra 'Nothing, is possible.' That felt right. That still feels right.
From there the comic book idea kept growing all different kinds of sideways until it wasn't a comic book anymore. It became a whole universe with its own history, its own physics, its own family lines and eras and internal logic, all of it built out of the same mishmash that's always driven me... nature, science, old stories, new math, a genuine hunger to understand what a soul even is. I'm not a trained physicist and I'm not a trained mythologist. I'm just someone who kept pulling on threads until they turned into something bigger than I expected, and I decided that I would roll with it. Creating a Gordian knot of stories, and with that, I'd just keep going.
That's really what Soulverses is for me at its core, a lifelong attempt to raise consciousness a little, to remind people that they're capable of more than they've been told, that self love isn't a soft idea but a structural one, load bearing, the kind of thing a person needs before they can actually grow into anything. I think stories do that better than lectures ever could. Today's art becomes tomorrow's mythology whether we mean it to or not, so I'd rather be intentional about what I'm putting into that pile.
There's a lot more to this world than I can fit into one post, characters, family lines, whole systems of math and symbol I've built out over years, and I have unloaded it all here, in my blog I started in 2007 when I quit smoking. I still have about four million words to write. I wanted you to know where it actually started, not with some grand cosmic vision, just a kid with a comic book idea who couldn't stop asking questions, and a man years later who finally built a language big enough to try and the answers and pique the curiosity of humanity.
