Soze. Chapter 1: The hunger and the growing darkness.

KermyWormy

Well-known member
May 29, 2020
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California
If you’re reading this, there is only one thing I need you to know:

I am not a violent man.

I am not a violent man, yet I’ve felt the last strained breath escape through the mouth of another with my hands tightly gripped around their throat. I was overcome with desperate grief and excruciating guilt for what I’d done, for this man whose life I had just so feverishly and instinctively snuffed out. But It felt as if I really had no choice, I was merely going through some prescribed motions, that this hunger that was growing inside me knew exactly what kind of violence I was capable of, and in that moment the hunger possessed my body....because that wasn’t me, that has never been my nature!

But now...in the end I have learned to accept what I have become, and that there are consequences for staring into the unknown.

And it has come at a great cost.

I grew up living a simple life, nothing special, and though my illusions of grandeur were ground down by reality with every passing year, I never lost my curiosity for the unknown.

I spent innumerable nights looking up at the stars in the sky wondering, “Who hung them there?”, or “Who arranged them in the heavens just so?” I’ve stared for hours at Nave’s two moons imagining what they were made of.

I've spent most of my life cataloguing various plants and minerals, observing them under a lens begging to see much closer the un-seeable fibers of creation. Something that could explain the patterns, the principles, and properties. I refused to be some naïve creation of some unknowable God, and so I sought out the answers in the world around me.

But in the end, I found only more questions. As time passed the desperation in my heart grew along with the desperation outside, something was changing in the land, you could smell it...something... acrid was in the air.

We are capable of good things, good thoughts, good deeds....or at least we used to be. Now it seems as if we’re falling apart, being torn asunder by the growing wickedness of everything around us. What was once good is now beginning to rot and I could see the evidence all around me

I could see it in their eyes!
Anger, Anxiety, Fear, Dread....I could see it all in their eyes, of everyone around me, growing by the day.

And in the looking glass I saw glaring back at me a thing I no longer recognized. In the days of my youth, I recognized my reflection, there was a look of optimism, an effervescent energy, but in these dark days it is a ravenous stranger who stares back at me.

Overtime I became obsessed with the mixing and brewing of concoctions, seeking to find the elixir that could help me understand the ever expanding universe, the organizing principle of all things. To make possible the impossible, to be able to reshape the immutable. Bend the rules set by some uncaring engineers who we can hear vague stories about but cannot ever see.

However, that kind of vision is never free, it always comes with a price. For me it took just one glimpse into the unknown and I was forever changed.

At first I could only describe it as pure bliss. A simple rose, its edges burned vibrantly the deepest crimson I could ever even imagine. The air was full of shimmering particles which would bump into one another and bound off in all directions. A bird singing, the vibrations of sounds echoing and reverberating off the ground and the trees, into my ears and caressing my soul.

My eyes became the lens I used to observe the world through, only now I could see things closer and in more detail, I could see the very bonds which hold together all things and it is of a beautiful design....So beautiful that it made my heart ache.

Why were the wonders of the universe hidden from us?
Why could I only see them when looking through this veil?
Why are my eyes so useless to see the beauty that is all around me?

I ought to gouge my eyes out and never see again than to see this dark, acrid, and rotting world I spend my waking hours in.

But my hunger only grew worse, and my thoughts more untrustworthy. As I came to rely on this certain cocktail of herbs and alchemical pastes which made my mind spin and expand in all directions at once, I began to lose more and more of myself in the process.

I once thought these visions, these fever dreams, to be some engrossing religious experience, some communion with the makers who were finally allowing me to see beyond the veil. But in time I concluded it was just the creeping madness, the insatiable hunger growing within me.

But here at the end I wonder, are these memories even mine? Can I trust anything at all?

In my more lucid moments I often considered perhaps it wasn’t the drugs at all that were the perpetrator of my growing delusion, my insufferable dissatisfaction with all things. Maybe I was just like every other desperate and vile individual I see walking the streets, maybe we’ve all been infected with the rot.