Kaelen stepped out into an eternal hallway of blacked obsidian mirrors that tore his one entity into a thousand distorted bits of himself. Every step Kaelen took seemed to crack on the floor as would the sound of breaking bone; it bounced into the void, consumed without end. The figure materialized before him; it was neither alive nor dead-but in that awful place between. His eyes are bottomless pits, windows to the abyss, and Kaelen can feel the edges of his sanity being tugged upon. "Reality," it breathed, the words crawling along his skull like spiders of ice, "is merely the most insistent illusion. How many times have you awoken, only to realize you were still dreaming? Or maybe. you only ever dreamed that you were awake."
The words die in Kaelen's throat, choked by unspoken truths. "What am I, then? A consciousness trapped in meat and bone, or just another lie the universe tells itself?"
The fingers of the being twitch, and reality hemorrhages around them. Time runs like watercolour in rain, dragging Kaelen through moment fragments that cut his mind asunder. Through the cacophony of broken time, the thing's words cut into his mind: "In this labyrinth of fractured thoughts, where does the mask end and your true face begin? Or are you nothing but masks, all the way down?"
The grip of the Regime begins to slip like water through cupped hands, and Kaelen watches as people around him dissolve into writhing shadows of consciousness, their minds open wounds spilling fears and desperate desires into the void. Some claw at their thoughts in desperation to break through the bars of their mental prison, only to sink deeper into the quicksand of their own madness.
"The Regime," the entity muses, its voice dripping with dark amusement, "it built its foundation on the screams of broken minds. Now, watch it drown in madness it created. You stand at the precipice of chaos, Kaelen. But freedom?" A hollowed laughter echoes. "Freedom is the sweetest lie we tell ourselves while our chains grow heavier."
Kaelen's mind splinters under the weight of doubt. Reality bends and warps until truth is poison, and lies taste like honey. "If everything I know is fabricated, then what's left? Am I just a thought that learned to scream?"
"Think deeper," the being hisses. "If your mind is not your own, whose puppet are you? When you peel back the layers of your consciousness, what writhing horror will you find beneath?
Again, the world fissures, and Kaelen's tenuous hold on reality starts to slide. The shades around him are not people anymore, holes in reality, each mouth screaming silent screams. He can't tell anymore whether he is watching them or if he has become one of them, yet another void howling into the darkness.
"Guide the lost," it ordains in pitiless serenity. "But remember-you're just another broken compass pointing toward oblivion."
A terrible comprehension blooms in Kaelen's brain like a cancer-a thought on the real nature of power, choice, and the beautiful lie called free will. But even this realization withers away, leaving him stranded between question and madness.
Kaelen's Descent:
Alone in the twisted remains of reality, Kaelen's laughter hovers on hysteria. His words spill out like black ink, staining the void around him.
"We're but meat puppets dancing on strings of delusion, aren't we? Knowledge isn't power-it's poison. Every truth I learn is another nail in my coffin of consciousness. The more I comprehend, the more I realize we are all but rats in a maze, thinking we make choices while we press on upon the only path available. It is not the ignorant that are damned-the damned are those who can see the strings."
His voice breaks, hoarse with desperation and dark revelation.
"I used to think enlightenment would set me free. What a fucking joke. The more you know, the tighter the noose gets. Every revelation is another bar in this prison of awareness. The fools, the blessed fucking fools – they still think they're the protagonists in their own stories. But I see it now. We're all just side characters in a cosmic horror story, and the punch line is that we thought we mattered at all."
He presses his forehead against the cold glass, watching his reflection fragment into an infinity of versions of his despair.
"Maybe madness is the only sane response to an insane universe. Maybe the only way to win is to break so completely that reality can't hurt you anymore. Because in the end, we're all just thoughts pretending to be people, aren't we? Consciousness is the universe's cruelest joke, and self-awareness is the punchline that kills you."
His laughter dissolved into sobs and back into laughter, until there was no difference between the two.
"So here's to the blissfully ignorant, the happily deluded, the ones who still think their dreams mean something. They get to sleep at night while the rest of us drown in the truth. And me? I'm too far gone to dream anymore. I'm just. awake. And god, I wish I wasn't."