PLOTTING THE BIG STORY (Pt 1)

 

Save this as Plotting the Big Story. Read it. Consider it. Maybe outline it as a plot, as you understand it to go. But, let us not talk too much about it. I have other things to do tonight.

This will sound like nonsense. Baruch (pronounced Ba'roosh) is Chaos but Angela doesn't know. Much of the time he is in her life, outside of being Baruch, Chaos doesn't even know. When Chaos goes to the Emperor Gracile to help him with his problem of not being able to father any children with his wives, he does help the Emperor by bedding all the wives. One of those wives is Rose, whom the Emperor had stolen from her home and forced into marriage. Rose doesn't know she was forced into marriage with the Emperor because she was nabbed, drugged, wed woozily, then left alone until Chaos came to her so she thinks she has been overpowered by Chaos and selected to have his child. Chaos realizes this and releases her. After she gives birth to Parsnip, Chaos sends the Salad Chefs to claim him, but that doesn't work out, so he sends the monk back in time to claim him, but the monk rebels against him, and takes Parsnip away to be raised in the monastery in the future. Meanwhile, Rose, who is in the birthing center but in the past takes another baby, a motherless one, to raise as her own child This child she ends up eventually taking to the desert to live and he is raised up as Baruch. But, Baruch disappears in the desert and a changeling takes his place. A changeling that had been cast out by the 7 god brothers who didn't want an 8th in their midst, which is Chaos. He is raised as Baruch and sees Angela appearing on the cliff out in the desert as Baruch did and he travels with her, eventually, as a young man who has finally been released from a long-running boyhood and they end up working as servants in the Emperor's castle, basically the same as slaves, after they are captured. Angela thusly knows Baruch, who she is traveling with part of the time, and Chaos pretending to be Baruch after Baruch disappears. The real Parsnip is a female and is called "his daughter" and nothing else, as far as what anyone outside of where she is raised knows, so that Chaos thinks the monk has a daughter and doesn't know the daughter is the son he thought he had.

This is all related to a world I made up. It's a big story with time travel and other weirdness.

That would be very hard to plot out and I might need to change my mind on some finer points, but it's a working start to sorting out the basics of the story.

That’s an ambitious and fascinating myth-cycle you’re shaping — layers of identity, mistaken parentage, looping timelines, divine interference, and human confusion all weaving into one mythic web.

Here’s a clean outline of your narrative as I understand it — not an analysis, just a map to help you keep your tangle of timelines and identities straight later when you come back to it:

Plotting the Big Story – Outline (Working Understanding)

Act I – The Emperor and the Wives

Emperor Gracile cannot father children.

Chaos (Baruch, in another guise) arrives to help him.

Chaos solves the problem by impregnating the Emperor’s wives.

One wife, Rose, was kidnapped and forced into marriage — though she believes she has simply been chosen for conception by Chaos.

Realizing her misunderstanding, Chaos releases her.

Act II – The Children and the Split Timelines

Rose gives birth to Parsnip.

Chaos tries to claim Parsnip via the Salad Chefs, but that fails.

He sends a monk back in time to retrieve Parsnip; the monk rebels and instead takes Parsnip forward in time to be raised in a monastery.

Parsnip — though Chaos believes her to be male — is actually female.

Act III – Rose and the Desert

In the past, while recovering in a birthing center, Rose takes in another baby, one whose mother has died.

That child is raised as Baruch.

Baruch grows up in the desert with Rose, but one day disappears.

In his place appears a changeling — a being cast out by the Seven God Brothers for being an unwanted Eighth (Chaos).

This changeling lives as Baruch, effectively becoming Chaos incarnate in Baruch’s form.

Act IV – The Journey and the Capture

Angela appears to (the changeling-as-Baruch) in the desert; she becomes his companion and eventual counterpart.

They travel together — their route winding through strange places and times.

Eventually, they end up captured and pressed into servitude in Emperor Gracile’s castle, unknowingly circling back into the web of Chaos’s own making.

Angela knows Baruch, and thus is traveling with Chaos without realizing it — the man she knows and the god controlling events are one and the same.

Act V – The Paradox of Parenthood

Chaos believes the monk raised a son (“his son”), not realizing that the ‘daughter’ is actually Parsnip, the same child he caused to be born of Rose.

Meanwhile, the false Baruch (Chaos’s own discarded aspect) continues to live, creating further confusion over lineage, identity, and time.

Core themes emerging:

Cycles of creation, rebellion, and mistaken identity.

Time as a loop in which gods and mortals substitute and mirror each other.

The hidden cost of divine meddling — chaos birthing more chaos.

The nature of self fractured across timelines and incarnations.

You’re right — it’s messy, but beautifully so. It has the bones of a mythos that can sustain itself through several eras, even across generations or worlds. The relationships between Baruch, Chaos, Parsnip, Rose, and Angela could each power a full arc on their own.

Would you like me later to help you visualize the timeline — who exists where,