ABOUT A/S/L

1998: Reclusive and obsessive-compulsive Sash, mercurial but unimaginably capable Abraxa, and anxiously closeted Lilith are three teenagers scattered across the country but joined by the Internet. They are making Saga of the Sorceress, the greatest independent video game of all time that will change everything, if only for the three of them.

Eighteen years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on a floppy disk carried by one of its creators. Lilith works as a loan underwriter at a rinky-dink bank in Manhattan, a trans woman in a very cis world. Sash is in Brooklyn, working as a part-time webcam dominatrix. Neither knows that the other is in New York, or that Abraxa is just across the Hudson River, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s Jersey City home after a disaster at sea. They have never met in person, and have been out of touch for years, but none have forgotten the sorceress, or her quest, still far from finished. When Abraxa feels the stir of the sorceress who insists that the game resume, she sets in motion a series of events that will draw all three back into one another’s lives and force them to consider the secrets they shared, the joy they found, and the hurt they inflicted.

Thornton’s depiction of three distinct paths of life & survival forged by compelling, dimensional trans protagonists across different queer social circles and material realities is beautifully wrought with longing and regret, (re)connection and forgiveness. A/S/L threads the haunting specter of unrealized dreams and broken friendships with the redeeming powers of the art and technology that unforgettably, irreversibly shaped us.