The Impermanence Of Sand

Fleur got undressed, and was briefly annoyed that the alicorn hadn't stuck around to watch. Ponies had once paid a lot of money to witness Fleur removing clothing -- and, in a society of near-nudists where concealment equaled enticement, would often nose over larger amounts to watch her putting it on.

Most of the layers were folded and placed on the floor. Those which had absorbed the most sweat got a quick scrubbing, followed by setting them out by the fire to dry. And then the Protoceran returned to the main level, chose the largest bench and table from the current selection of All, and settled in to read.

Time travel. The article has to go into the past, because that's where all of the horror is. But it also jumps around a lot. We start with one of the victims (and there are so many more). The author himself doesn't come in for a while. In fact, the first person the featured victim meets is his spouse.

It's... supposedly an open marriage. Those do exist. Not a group marriage: that's legal in Equestria, and you can add members to the miniherd after the initial ceremony -- but every pony in it must agree to the presence of every other, and that's a factor which makes them rare indeed. By contrast, the open marriage is the one where partners don't have to maintain monogamy. You found somepony who was that interesting? Go ahead. Have sex with them. Just make sure the one you married knows about your little adventure, because she's sure going to be telling you about hers. And maybe you'll even share. Some open marriages turn into miniherds.

Most don't.

More than a few won't last.

Also, you get the cheaters who claim everything's fine because the marriage is an open one and you just can't get the direct confirmation from their spouse right now. The former escort's talent is very good at sorting those out.

The article jumps around a lot. Easy enough to track in spite of that: it's well-written. All of the nightmares are delivered with precise timing and measured meter. But the mind wants to organize. And the article starts with one of the victims. The one who eventually talked the most, who fought the hardest to bring it all out.

The story of the future is always about the victims, because they're the ones who have to go on.

But the past begins with the rapist.

Maybe there are monsters which didn't start out that way.

There was a colt once.

He lives in Trottingham and for the whole of his life, every word he speaks will be touched with the charm of that accent. Not that he has a lot of vocabulary yet. He's only five years old. If he's working on stories, then it's probably the kind which kids tell themselves as hooves shove dolls against each other. The child's job is to decide who won the fight, and why. If they're doing it with a friend, then it's figuring out why the other pony's doll lost.

Did the colt have friends? Was he already nosing through age-appropriate books, while beginning to weave his own bright dreams? Because at five, they would have been bright. There are those who say it takes a core of inner darkness to create, and that's an insult to all those who tap the best part of themselves and channel that flow into words. You don't need personal pain and trauma in order to write. You just have to understand it. Basic empathy.

She can't say what the writer was like at that age. All she has is what's in the article. He lives in Trottingham, he still has both parents and when he's five years old, his father joins a cult.

It's not a religion. The immigrant, who tends to see any organization which tells others how to live as attempting to exert control, personally feels the difference can be rather fine. In this case, you still get a book of holy commands. It's just that the party who wrote it is still around and, in the event that anypony starts to question things, can make a few edits.

The cult believes a few things about children. For starters, it says they can manage all of the responsibilities of adults. From the start. There's no excuse for acting like a foal, even if you're a mere four moons removed from being one. And any kid who acts like a kid...

The colt's father rises high in the organization. It doesn't take long before he's in charge of the entire Trottingham cell. And of course, he must be able to show that his son is living by what the cult believes. Acting exactly as it dictates.

Religions. Cults. The former escort sees commonalities. For example, they're both very good at punishment.

One of the recommended methods for dealing with a misbehaving colt is to lock them in a tiny closet.
For hours.
Moderate offenses upgrade that to 'days'.
Advanced disobedience requires running a bath.
It's advisable not to hold the colt's head under the water for too long. Some things are hard to cover up.

Cry for the colt, if you like. For pain and torture and that which no child should ever experience.

But it's about what the survivor does with the pain. Strike back against those who directly hurt you? That's one thing. Any griffon would understand it, and most would help. When it comes to those who hurt the young, that number turns into 'all'.

But when it comes to targeting anyone else... simply having experienced it? That's not an excuse for lashing out at the world entire. There's nothing approaching a justification here.

It's about what you do with the pain, and the Protoceran found a personal answer to that.

So did the Trottingham native.

It wasn't the same answer.

The colt is gone. Dead, really. (For the former escort, you can say the same thing about the filly.) Passed too soon. Murdered by suffering and the recognition of agony.

This is about the stallion.

The one who took his own screams, and made them erupt from another's throat.

The colt had no control. The stallion seizes it.

The father is still in the cult. At adolescence, the son starts to work for it, and will continue to do so for a few years. But the parent is acquiring too much power within the group. The founder notices and since the most important thing to a cult leader is keeping total control of it, the family is quickly classified as Undesirable and turned out.

The parent, perhaps to his extremely belated and rather pointless credit, seeks therapy.

The son does not.

The featured victim in the article is a lifelong fan of the author. That's why she's so happy to meet his spouse. Why the potential chance to greet the stallion himself feels like a dream.

Her work situation is... poor. Low income, hoping for a better job. Struggling on her own, with family distant or lost, and friends... who knows how to make those? But the author's spouse likes her.

(The spouse has yet to speak on any of this.)
(It was an open marriage.)
(There are likely those still arguing that she didn't know.)
(Perhaps she knew just enough to keep the predator away from her own door.)

A meeting is arranged.

There's this thing about reading. It's not just being told a story. It's an attempt to place yourself within it. To see things through the character's eyes, taking on their life instead of your own.

It's escape.

How did the colt's mark manifest? The Protoceran can't know. Perhaps he started telling himself stories, to pass the time in that lonely closet. But by the time his family is expelled, he has his icon and is well on his way along the career path of -- journalism.

Not what he wants to do. Not truly. But this charming, charismatic young adult talks his way into a position where he's the one who goes out and interviews authors. And that's part of the plan. Meet those who had already broken through. Do all of the research so that they'll know he was a true fan. Smile, laugh, and once the interview is over, keep in touch.

Within the first year, a dozen Names in literature count their interviewer among their friends. That makes it very easy to break through. To get that first job.

In the silliest of places.

A corner of the publishing world which no one respects. The reigning capital of those who just want a few quick bits.

He's about to make it into a recognized center of literature.

Fantasy. Dream to escape from your life. It doesn't actually work, but you can pretend for a while.

He offers a different world to those who can't stand their own. That's going to attract a certain class of readership. Once the writer catches on, this starts to include more of the intellectuals, historians, critics who aren't quite sure they want to believe what's happening and eventually, the notice goes all the way to the top.

But you're also going to get the vulnerable.
Weak.
Isolated.
Because it's a pretty safe bet that if you're turning to books as your source of comfort, you're not in a position where you can do the same thing with ponies.

The lucky ones will find each other. Here's a meet-cute: let's say they try to check out the same library volume. Common interests are discovered, and from there...

Not everypony is lucky.

Magnum modicum.

That's the base term in Protoceran. But if you're going into a griffon bookstore to look for this category of publication, use the shortened form: magmodi.

In Equestrian, call it -- biglittles.

They can potentially be of any genre. Quality level. There's nothing about them which inherently eliminates certain plots. And yet they're seen as something for children. Because the defining feature of a magmodi is they're books which have text on every other page. The others are for illustrations, which generally show you a picture of whatever the text just talked about. Presuming the artist bothered to read it.

Only for the young. Because the art is typically fast quillwork and rough doodles: a magmodi illustrator has to be capable of cranking out thousands of little drawing per year, and the results suffer. Writing tends to be at that quality level where the art is doing most of the work and since the art generally isn't interested in doing any work, just try to imagine where that puts the text.

A magmodi tends to be an extremely thick book: that's the 'big' part of the name. The 'little' is for the typical quality. And don't get caught reading any once you reach secondary school. Not in public.

Except... the magmodi isn't the story.

It's the medium.

The story...

The spouse introduces the victim to the rapist.

The author has a warm smile. A charming voice. And the victim is a fan. She can't believe that she's talking with somepony whom she's spent much of her life admiring. The one who took her away from every trouble, at least for a time.

They talk. He smiles. And over the course of what feels like a perfectly normal conversation, he carefully learns that she's far from home. Can't really contact her family. She's on the shy side and doesn't make connections easily. Reluctant to speak unless it's with someone she already knows, and she certainly feels she knows him! She says that part directly, and they both laugh.

She's... isolated.

She doesn't have friends.

But maybe she has one now.

He helped her through so much. And now he's offering to do it again. Only instead of words, it's going to be bits.

A job. More money than she's making now. She can start to build up savings. She won't even have to pay rent any more: just live in the guest house. Some light cooking, cleaning, running errands, doing the favors for the spouse which the victim was already doing anyway...

(Like the favor of not being the primary target?)

...and looking after the kids now and again, as the couple has children.

It's a dream.

So of course she says yes.

What's the story about?

It's a dream.

Imagine that certain aspects of sapient life exist separately from the living. Those who exist as thinking, feeling, somewhat alien incarnations of concepts, embodied as solid spirits. Beings which are eternal, endless, and unchanging.

In fact, if they change too much... if they try to depart from what the universe told them to be...

...incarnation. The original series will follow the final years leading into the death of the one who incarnates creativity. Dreaming, if you like. And yes, they can die. Ageless and endless... but any could be struck down, if you had the power. (Few do.) This kills the incarnation, but not the concept. Creativity continues to exist, and so a new spirit will form. But the one who was lost will be truly gone.

They can all die. And as in so much of life, the greatest risk to their existence is the rest of the family.

Seven of the most powerful are... related. And some of them don't like each other very much.

An incarnation of creativity sits with a rather small, exceptionally slender mare, who's pale-furred and smiling and friendly and happy to meet everyone in the world. She also happens to embody the shadowlands and the passage into the place beyond mortal existence. Death has a face, and it wishes to comfort all those who see it. And there's an incarnation of destruction. (That's a yak. What else would you use?) Of personal agonies and the power of want and madness and a future which can't be changed. Those are the siblings. The spirit who embodies want mostly wants to see all of the others dancing to a tune of that one's composition.

Call it a family drama. But it's also one where the author has put in the research. The main character has been present for all of recorded history, and so a story can be set anywhen. The Protoceran recognizes a number of background personalities, and suspects most of the pony readers felt the writer was making up everything. The default Equestrian approach to history often breaks down to 'Celestia exists, and we'll worry about anything else when it bites us in the ass.'

It's still a magmodi, though. So every other page is an illustration. And what the author did was commission artists. A new one for each volume. Thousands of little paintings. Detailed and, once the books made enough money for a better printing, colorful.

Every book is a gallery. It's... beautiful.

So much of the art is incredible.

Quite a bit of the writing is better.

The newest victim moves in.

She has no friends outside of the rapist's spouse, and that party isn't speaking with her as much now. (Eventually, that stops entirely.)

She doesn't get a lot of time off the property. Hardly any, really.

She is isolated and completely reliant on her new employer for housing, food, and income. The income is currently late, but take him away from the focusing act of writing and he's a little on the absent-minded side. He'll catch up.

The estate is large, for the writer has become rather wealthy. There's a private bath in the gardens. She has full access to it and one day, she decides to try it out.

The writer trots in on her. And for ponies, washing up can be a social thing -- but she doesn't know him that well. She's a little embarrassed when he tries to join her in the small pool. He points out that it's an open marriage and if each partner is comfortable with the other having sex outside of the union, then some casual splashing doesn't even need to be reported. And she gets that, but she was washing up alone and --

-- he's in the pool now.

She... doesn't feel like that's right.

He wants to make some small talk. He asks if she's ever heard of something called BDSM. She hasn't. He starts to explain.

...all right. She knows he's done a lot of research for stories. He'll be writing about this soon, if he hasn't already. But he's watching her eyes as he speaks, and -- she doesn't know what he's looking for. Just that the observation is becoming more and more intense, she doesn't like this subject, she's not interested in any of the described acts, she tries to change the subject several times as he drifts closer across the water, she's about to ask him to leave and then his horn ignites.

The corona surrounds her jaw. Clamps it shut.

Then it starts to pry her buttocks apart.

The incarnations are powerful. Still, it's possible for a mortal to hurt one. To defy. And should that mortal do actual harm -- bring an end to the endless -- then they will suffer for eternity. And beyond. That punishment is built into the very universe. Good luck finding a higher court for appeals.

But that's happened -- once? And beyond that... they can generally do whatever they like. The only controls on them are esoteric cosmic laws which few understand, and -- each other. Otherwise, they're unstoppable.

They exist beyond frailty.

Beyond consequence.

He rapes her.

He talks to her during the violation. About how he was told that he couldn't have her, not within the open marriage. And that just made him want her all the more.

Also, there's a spell on her now. Something unique to him. It detects when she's trying to tell anypony about what happened, and... well, she won't last long enough to finish the first sentence.

He rapes her until he's satisfied, then tells her that he's already decided to do it again. She's fun.

He orders her to call him Master.

Why doesn't she run?

It's an easy question to ask. The answer just has a couple of requirements, starting with a place of safety to reach. The pay required to escape by train still isn't coming. In that sense, the rapist controls just about every way off the estate. And the victim is in shock. There's a sort of emotional numbness which can completely take over...

...why didn't she run?

It's easy to tell yourself that you would have run. Struck back. But unicorns... the magical abilities of all but one sapient species are known and fully defined. Unicorns are the wild cards. Any working. Any effect. Unless you know a given unicorn well enough to have their full casting list, you can never be sure. The victim was just raped. Now she's been told there's an invisible axe made of spellwork hanging over her neck, and the only way to test whether it's real is...

Fear compounds on fear.

The books... catch on.

Call it the power of friendship. It's hard to call it anything else. The writer has so many among the published ranks who count him as exactly that: a friend. Obviously you're going to do what you can to promote a friend's work, and it doesn't exactly hurt when the work is brilliant. The hardest part is convincing people -- very much including the critics -- that it's now okay to be seen with a magmodi. In pubic. But the magmodi is just the medium, and the stories...

...once you start reading the stories...

The characters are flawed. The best ones sort of have to be. Reading about the perfect gets boring.

The most relatable one in the group is the incarnation of shadowlands passage. A real people person. She goes out and meets everyone. Once each.

She's the most powerful of them, because even the eternal can die. And she's small and thin and pale and looks like she could be taken out by a strong breeze. Appearances are deceiving that way.

(The body type...)

The characters are flawed.

The writer...

There's nowhere else for the victim to go.

There are more rapes.

At one point, he slams her down in the kitchen, while the children are just a few rooms away. He doesn't do it directly in front of them, though. If they're in the room, he just rubs up against her. Directly in youthful view.

The oldest colt begins to address her as Slave.

Ultimately, you could say the master arc of the original ten books is about change. The main character recognizes his flaws and has to deal with them. Common enough in literature.

Except he doesn't.

He can only change so much. And when he starts to go against his own nature, when he discovers little things like mercy and empathy... that is when the consequences begin.

How does the spirit of creativity die? He tries to be a better person. That means doing something vicious and cruel and...

...and...

my sister

...something griffons would understand.

Mercy.

Release.

(The Protoceran doesn't move for three minutes.)
(Breathing resumes after a mere one.)

And that's why he dies.

His base nature is to be cold. Distant. Detached and uncaring. Once he starts to come closer to warmth, a little of the facade melts. And what's underneath is too soft to survive.

There are two choices. Finishing changing, and see if that takes the form of something which can get through the storm unleashed by the so-called sin of empathy -- or die.

He presses a forehoof against that of his oldest sister and in doing so, chooses death over change.

And then, in what might be the strongest sign that the author was a pony, it's all someone else's problem.

The rapes are more violent now. He'll kick her a few times while he's clamping her mouth shut. Sometimes the edges of hooves get shoved into other places. The bleeding doesn't stop for a while.

One of the violations makes her vomit.
He forces her to eat the steaming mass off the floor.
Some of it splashed onto him. She has to swallow that back too.

The former escort reads the article, all the way through.

She also reads every story which the librarian bookmarked for her, and a few more. (It's magmodi. Even the best ones don't take that long to finish.)

Two of them stand out.

The victim spirals.
She considers suicide.
She comes close, over and over again.
She's trembling in bed one night, wondering if this is the first time she'll sleep alone in a week. Or sleep at all. And in her terror...

"He raped me."

A whisper, if you want to elevate it that far. In the article, it's remembered as more of a squeak.

And nothing happens.

...the fatal spell was supposed to activate if she ever told anypony. By any means. Vocal, written, the ear-and-tail movements of sign language if she knew them...

...maybe it doesn't count if she's just talking to herself...

"He raped me."

No sparkle. No corona. No glow. No consequences.

Well -- what if she yelled it loudly enough to reach the main house? Let the spouse (who won't acknowledge her any more) hear that. Then again, maybe it only kicks in if she's telling somepony who doesn't already know.

Obviously no point in telling the children.

...she wants to die.

If the spell triggers, she'll die.

...is there a spell at all? Or did he just produce glow while telling her that a spell existed?

...it doesn't matter.

She wants to die.

So if she can get off the property, then runs all the way to town, gallops into the police station, talks as fast as she can before it takes effect... wouldn't a mare dropping dead in the center of the precinct house have to be something worth investigating? All she needs to do is get out his name, and the rest...

...and if the working wasn't real...

She gets out of bed.
No packing. There's no point.
She's still alive an hour later when she races into the station and begs to speak with an officer.
The same holds true by the next morning. That's when she's telling the truth for the fifth time, only it's in front of the judge who's about to sign the search warrant.

She talks, over and over. The denials from the writer's estate begin immediately: lies, jilted lover trying to ruin a sterling reputation, blackmail. But the investigation is ongoing, and word is spreading.

Then it starts to echo.

Another mare steps forward. Speaks.
Then another.
Another.
Another.
Another.
Another...

Two stories in the catalog stand out to the former escort. One is about rape.

There's a writer. A fictional one, this time. (Writers tend to create authors as characters: record what you know, after all.) He's had a fairly successful debut novel, but he's utterly stuck for a followup. Completely blocked. The publisher's advance payment is running out and without pages to deliver, money and career both stop.

He follows a trail of rumor to another author's house. A very old stallion, on the verge of death. One who wants to pass his legacy on.

The legacy is the incarnation which he keeps imprisoned in his basement.

One of the weaker ones. You could even call her a sub-aspect for the incarnation of dreams, who's sometimes called the Prince Of Stories. This spirit focuses more on -- writing. Stage plays, mostly, because that's what was most popular when she took her current form. But anything to do with the recording of words. And the old pony transfers custody to the younger one because the lie about freeing her upon his death was exactly that, and the newer author takes the spirit home, finds a place to imprison her, and...

You can't force an idea.

In the story, forcing one out of a muse via the medium of raping her turns out to be a viable strategy.

(Record what you know.)

He cleans himself off. Then he starts writing. The publisher has forty pages after two days, four hundred after two weeks, and then the bestseller rankings have a new permanent resident.

The younger writer continues the routine. (The older one commits suicide.) He rapes. He writes. Ponies ask where he gets ideas, because every writer gets that question and he's not going to give them a straight answer --

-- the muse, even as a separate entity, could be considered as a sub-aspect of the dream spirit. Eventually, she manages to get a message through to him. And an entity which is slowly learning about mercy (which is something which only makes you weak enough to be slain) comes to rescue her.

The writer begs for that mercy. But the incarnation only came for the muse. And this was about ideas. He couldn't have one on his own...

The incarnation of dream gives him... a gift.

The gift of concept.

...and there's a continent on the other side of the world which you can only reach by sailing through the center -- no, the stars, it's known that every star is a Sun and if that's so, someone's moving every last one of them, so this is the school which finds and teaches sapients how to do that... wait: what about a consortium of anti-geniuses? Those who are themselves intelligent, but dedicated to stamping it out in the populace so that they're the only ones...

...the writer is having ideas. One after the other, too quickly to record. And he runs out of paper. Then he runs out of ink.

Then it occurs to him that hooves can be used to scrape lines into paint.
And wood.
And stone.
By the time he's found, the problem of not having ink has been solved.
Ponies who grind away all of their keratin can always use their own free-flowing blood.

A tale of a writer, rapist, and revenge.

At the very end of the full arc, in the tenth book, when the incarnation dies... the effect ends.

The writer, who was simply assumed to be insane (because nopony believes in spirits), is released from the asylum.

Back to their life.

So much for consequences.

Another.
Another...

...the Protoceran immigrant pauses. Searches through dust jackets until she finds another picture of the writer. One which shows the mark --

-- a quill with bright sparkles surrounding it. Typical author icon. Of course, a lot of that is subject to how the pony interprets it, but -- she's seen the stories now. The products of a remarkable talent for creation.

She needed to check because up until she got a direct look, there was a chance that it was a mark for finding the perfect victims.

Except that... he didn't have to find them.

They came to him.

He gave them another world. Something they could use to escape their own.
Made himself accessible. So many fan events. Lecture tours. Always happy to speak with a reader.
A soft, charmingly-accented voice and ears which told everypony that he wanted to hear their story.

His audience spreads. The books effectively go mainstream. Magmodi attract better writers and artists. Still more is being done with the medium. Nominations come in for major awards. This is followed by wins.

But there's still that core segment in the readership.

The vulnerable.
Desperate.
Weak.
Isolated.

They come to him. And he'll always spare a few minutes.

To be more precise about it, he listens to their tales until he knows exactly which ones can be cut off from the real world. Those who will believe just a few more stories, like the ones about how the spell against talking works. After all, they've been carrying and trusting his words for a lifetime. Why not take in a few more?

A perfect feeder system.
But it still takes an incredible amount of luck to maintain.
And luck always runs out.

Another mare steps forward to testify.
Another.
Another.
Another...

This is the second story which stood out to the immigrant. Or rather, a character within that story. One who only appears in a single arc within the larger tale, and never again.

There's this yak.

...okay, if you want to get all biological about it, there's a pony. But the heart -- the soul is that of a yak. This is a pony who realized she was a yak fairly late in life and then -- this is the amazing part -- openly announced to the world that she was a yak. She dressed as a yak, acted as a yak, and lived as a yak. An existence centered on destruction, because that was the yak domain for magic -- but what Ванда broke was expectations. Barriers. She tried to shatter the walls which were built in sapient minds simply through existing.

She told the world that she was a yak. Expected to be treated as one -- no, demanded it. And she was a great friend who had more courage than any three other ponies because to live as a yak was to get laughed at by the whole of Canterlot as a clown. And she didn't care. Because a yak wouldn't.

The current reader of that story -- a griffon trapped forever as a unicorn, who could make her heart and soul match the majority population of her birth nation, but never her body...

...the former escort understood.
She cared.
There was a moment when she felt -- seen.

Just about nopony understood what it was like, not in Equestria. How could they? And this writer had simply taken the concept of 'the right soul in the wrong body' and -- brought it to the world. Made it so that ponies could understand somepony -- someone -- like that could exist. Deserved to exist. Deserved honor and respect and -- love. She wasn't sure any local author had ever done that...

Then she thought about the article.

She kept reading.

Ванда. A great character. There's one point where most of the group has to go on a journey through mystical realms, but she has to stay behind because the portal to those realms has rules about who can enter. It'll take a yak. But it wants a yak who's a yak right down to the blood. She can't go.

So she tells off the portal.
The rules.
The fundamentals of the universe, which are inherently unfair and thus need the occasional kick to the face.
She's a yak, and nothing can tell her she isn't.
She knows what her soul is.
Everyone does. And for that matter, everypony should.

...everypony who speaks to her. For a physical mare who does her mane in yak styles, dresses in yak clothing and talks with the distinctive rearrangement of sentence clauses while insisting she's a yak... that isn't a lot of ponies.

She still insists on her truth, in the face of something so much stronger. Lives it.

Amazing character.

She dies.

It can almost feel random, if you didn't know it was part of a script. She has to stay behind. So she remains near the portal, waiting for her friends to return. Something happens, and the room collapses.

Buried alive. Crushed.

She's not the main character for that story. And when the tale ends...

There is a mortal main character in this section. (Vapid at first, initially surviving on her own beauty and the way others react to it. The former escort isn't overly fond of that one.) She has a dream after Ванда dies, heavily implied to be a true one. And she sees the incarnation of shadowlands passage bringing her friend into the final pasture.

Or rather, it takes a split-second to recognize Ванда. The smiling spirit of transition is trotting next to the prettiest yak ever rendered in a magmodi. The way Ванда had always seen herself. The ideal dri. An illustration of... a soul.

Honor. Respect. Acknowledgement.

Except.

There is no rape in this particular story. Just someone (not somepony: someone) who had told off a entity which was infinitely stronger than she could ever be. Who had spoken defiance to power, saying the question of identity could only have a personal answer. Ultimately, it was her choice.

Brave words.
Inspirational.
Something a reader could carry for a lifetime.

And then the mare had died. Buried in rubble, without chance or hope. Crushed.

Defiance has to be punished.

The title of the story arc in which Ванда appears is A Game Of Thee.

It's all just a game for the writer, isn't it?

Create.
Manipulate.
Destroy.
...violate...

Every mare the author raped was a fan of his work. That was the first link. Their social situations formed a second.

The article's featured victim has a certain body type.

They all do.