Wake of Corrosion · Shadow & Static Productions

Feed Drop: The Sleep/Wake Cycle

May 21, 2024·21 min·2 clips

A flat, masked handler in a dark mill reveals a plan to 'reclaim the country' by assessing its hidden ailments.

The episode opens with a brief promo for the companion series Hollow Disciple, then introduces The Sleep-Wake Cycle as a Maltopia production set in the same universe. The narrator, Isaiah, drives through transitional countryside to a ruined paper mill, describing the landscape with a literary precision that establishes a noir atmosphere. He explains that he works for Nighthand, a covert order within the Esoterium, a secret organisation that steers major events. He waits in a darkened room for his handler, noting his habitual alertness against ambush. The handler appears: a tall, black-suited figure dimensionlessly flat against the dark, features unreadable, voice appearing to come from somewhere behind him. The handler opens by invoking a national reclamation and notes Isaiah's record of bringing in over a dozen exo-psychotics. He outlines a new role for Isaiah: not hunting individual killers but assessing the health of the republic — identifying holdouts who prefer what the handler calls the naked barbarism of the Great Darkness. Isaiah agrees with minimal enthusiasm. On the drive back, he passes neo-Noctum protesters — politically mainstreamed cult figures in black who venerate the Great Darkness of 1999. Isaiah is one of the few people who was conscious and aware during the Darkness, and he recounts its physical evidence: upside-down cities, mountains of anthracite, wicked statues built from human bones. He dismisses the scientific explanation — a solar EM event causing mass insanity and amnesia — as incomplete. Isaiah reaches his house, managing obsessive-compulsive tics: looking down from a bridge, counting to three, fearing the implication of furniture touching walls during a move. He explains that he has never slept in his life, not through fatigue but through a constitutional inability to shut his mind down. His hunts, he explains, are his substitute for dreams — encounters with exo-psychotics who warp reality provide the one release from the unending circle of his consciousness. He has recently started writing poetry as another substitute. At 4am, a note arrives through his mail slot: meet an old friend at Chris's diner at midnight tomorrow.

As heard by us

A tense, myth-heavy doorway into buried catastrophe, cursed family history, and streets where reality has begun to slip.

The Sleep-Wake Cycle opens on a charged, uneasy handoff into a world where ordinary life no longer quite holds. The Stroud twins, reunited after decades apart and tied to the Night Plague of 1983, stand at the center of a mythology built from blood bonds, old curses, strange…

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Why you'd press play

You press play for a feed-drop doorway into a world where old darkness has not stayed buried.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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