Wrong/Distorted/Warped

If everything’s upside down and back to front, it looks a lot closer to normal.

A lot closer to natural, a lot closer to whatever it is that resides in my heart.

We all know what lives in my head. I’ve been pretty open about that. But my heart? That’s another story altogether. What fuels my passions? What actually gives me the drive to live? Am I a world factory, or a smile factory, or both?

Or a despair factory. An apocalypse factory. I have all the cards, I can see how it ends just by flicking through the pack. There’s nothing magic about this trick. Just a nihilistic engine.

I oversee the birth of my worlds, but I also render their unmaking. I can’t go into details, as there are people reading this who I know would rather cross that bridge when they come to it, but suffice to say it’s not always pretty. It’s not always clean. And sometimes, no matter what the heroes try, I know the casualties will be absolute.

The struggle makes it all worth it, I think. I’ve talked about this before. Let’s look at Deimon for a non-spoiler example. Our heroes, such as they are, are run in a bureaucratic mess of contradicting laws and orders, with vying groups within a society that should by all rights be completely united against the vast cosmic threat. The disagreements generally are a result of differing opinions regarding how much monstrosity they need descend to in order to effectively fight back against said threat, but people are people and they can be so entrenched in their views that the only way to proceed is to ignore those of others. Yet even if the “good guys” were united, they face a foe of unimaginable power and expansive reach. Their benefactors do not really care about individual soldiers, nor really the whole army. In a mundane war, the choice between sacrificing an attack dog and a human soldier is no choice at all. Even if it’s an entire pack of attack dogs. Every canine in the military. Human life is just ranked higher.

And we are less than dogs to these beings.

Even beyond the struggle I’ve made clear, the pervasive question of “What is 1?” and the tormenting “What is Σ?” lead to answers that, as some may have guessed, make much of what transpires through the machinations of both the Organisation and the Gentry at least somewhat irrelevant.

So if I’ve just established that there is no hope, then what is this all about? Why keep pushing it?

Because there has to be hope. Even when the world is ending, there’s something worth fighting for.

It’s who you are in the dark that really counts, and in Deimon it’s always dark. In the words of Gandalf (and I can’t believe I’m quoting the bearded bastard), “All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”

Standing up makes a bold impression, even if you are immediately silenced.

But that’s not what this is all about, is it? The Deimon stuff right there, that was just a tangent. What this is about is what drives me. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s still hope.

Because, like in the world of Deimon, our world is pretty dark too. In my head it can get pitch black. I know I’m not alone in travelling to dark places in the corners of my mind, but of course I’m the most relevant to me because I’m living it. But there has to be hope. If I lose that, I’m just… gone. To all of you readers and the people I know who don’t read this and to all the people I’ve not even met yet. In some ways perhaps it’s that last set that matters the most.

Things are wrong, and distorted, and warped, and twisted, and I could whack open thesaurus.com and go on but I’m not going to.

I’m gonna take another one of my pills and go to bed. And lie awake for an hour or so, shaking and twitching and if the previous two nights are anything to go on slinking into deeper madness than I usually get. And it’s self induced. But the professionals know what they’re doing, right?

If it keeps up I will stop, though. Because I’m not sure how much longer I can take it. A cure is not supposed to make a sickness worse.

This has been very rambling, and I’ve been Kedge. Good day and good night, folks.