All roads lead to ideas here. Sitting on a grassy knoll off to one side watching the endless parade of lonely travelers trudging along a thousand roads, it's easy to believe that they lead to nothing at all.

Both statements are completely true.

The roads only lead to where you expect them to go. And some of these poor bastards can only expect the worst. The roads serve a dual purpose, it seems. They are archetypes of all types of byways on the universal consciousness of Subreality.

The beaten dirt paths lead to dark menacing forests and perilous mountains so beloved of the fantasy addicts. Some days, you can't get five feet without tripping over a swarm of grim dwarves or some impressionable youth of great potential chasing a magic pig or something. They always have the smell of high adventure, oiled leather, and determination on the surface; bright winds of dreams and goals and mighty tasks to be conquered.

Hidden beneath that bright and heroic veneer is the real smell of fantasy's origins. The blood and excrement smell of close quarters combat. The stink of fear in an execution. The brute realities of a world before steam power, sanitation, and industry.

A world where a twelve year old girl was sent into marriage with a gouty man three times her age for lands, condemned by the first spots of blood. Where the average life was weary, drab and mostly short. When power was held by being the biggest bastard with a sword.

The veneer is the easiest seen, but its roots go deep into the solipsistic soil of Subreality. Almost to the very core.

The newest roads are of concrete and neon, brilliant gashes of light through the green countryside of Subreality. They are dark and rainswept, lit up only in the garish colours of streetlights, neon reflections and headlights. The tight confines of urban living close in on all sides in them, despite the greenery inches away. Oil, smog and exhaust hangs in heavy swaths, so thick as to almost be solid in the lungs.

Chrome reflects everywhere, from car fenders to hard wired headjack ports in the shaved scalp of an organ booster. The people are like knives, edged and unforgiving. The entire place is perpetually caught on high speed, driving to an edge finer then that of the monofilament blades favoured by its travelers.

Cyberpunk, and the ideals of mad futurism are the newest children of the realm, but not without the same deep foundations as the others. Rooted in Descartes and Spinoza, the ultra-rationalism technoworship is incongruousness amidst the soft idealism of lush forests and grassy plains. These are ideas ramped into power, hardwired at the spine to live on the tick of a second.

Motorbikes and warhorses pass unknowingly within feet of each other.

There are roads of childhood, with messy crayoned trees and laughter on the wind. Snowy trails in northern wastes, alien tracks shrouded with toxic clouds, hidden steps into forgotten pyramids, and even a yellow brick road.

And in dark lines, like rents in the earth, sit the roads to damnation. The roads of the long walk and the lonely expressway. Roads that end in terror and pain, in places where soft things die. The reek of fear is almost tangible, to the point of stifling hope. These are the roads traveled by vicious predators, innocent victims, and the sick fancy of the horror writer.

Roads leading to life and death; redemption and oblivion. Each packed jowl to jowl over verdant green fields and gentle spring breezes. Each traveled a million times in a million ways, and hungry for another to set it's foot on the path.

Ideas travel down these roads. From the depths of Subreality and writers imaginations. The interconnected routes are more than just representations of the quest motif in fiction. There are the pulse of the realm itself; the connections to its deeper past and long hidden roots.

I'm watching ideas go by, so close that a sidestep would intermingle them all, yet always separated. Robert Frost was wrong. In Subreality, there are no roads less traveled. Only ones less imagined.

Walk on.