Puppet vs. priest round 2

“How?”

The man twitched. It was a cascade of movement that started at his fingers and, like a worm crawling under his skin, went up his arm and seemed to terminate with a spasm in the left eyebrow. “I know this because your god is one of thousands who claim truth.”

The priest shuffled back a step, moving slightly closer to the bronze altar of his god. “Yes, but Throm walks the earth! His power built this church. His lightning fills the sky in a storm.”

“Storm gods come and go, no more true or false than ants in a hill.”

The priest seized the holy book of the clouds from the altar and shook it in the man’s face. “Laws! Prophecy! Look here, in these pages and you will find truth, demon!”

“Hollow words for hollow men.” The man swatted the book onto the floor and spit on it.

Puppet vs. Priest

The man did not walk. He moved, yes, and his legs propelled him, but it was not walking. The movements were those of a doll being yanked about by an unseen four year old puppeteer. His knees pulled up nearly to his chin, glancing off his chest at odd angles and then flaring outwards in femur wrenching ways. His feet flopped like fish, long dead, pulled from the bottom of a rusty barrel.

And yet he moved. Forward he went, closer and closer to the silent white clad priest.

“Are you lonely?”

“With my faith in Throm, I am never alone.”

“You look lonely.”

“Throm speaks to me.”

“As a master speaks to a slave.”

“He is my guiding light, he is my truth.”

“He puts you in darkness and feeds you lies.”

“What do you know of the truth?”

“I know there is no truth.”

Monochromatic terror

The gray cloud floated just above the floor, like an ice skate without a skater, a rink, or a blade. June watched it glide down the fiction aisle of the library, her eyes drawn to the unmottled color, the impossible single gradientless shade.

She stumbled in pursuit.

The thing slowed, allowing her to get closer, allowing her to fully perceive the hovering lumpy thickness that left one wondering just what would it feel like to touch. The visual presentation gave contradictory clues. Would it be soft? Sharp? Wet? Fragile? She reached out and a darker gray spot appeared somewhere in the cloud?

“Are you lonely,” a voice pried into her skull.

June startled backwards and clamped her ears shut as if they were on fire.

“You feel alone,” the gray spot pulsed in time with the words that dropped into her mind. “There’s no running from loneliness, is there?”

June ran.

That means I’m justified to end you, right?

When the villain discards morality and ignores law, what does the hero do? The hero stands tall, plays by the rules, and ends up dead.

The practical man sees the villain and sees what will happen. He doesn’t wait for a proper moment to speak his mind, he shouts down villainous lies. He doesn’t follow the rules of engagement, he attacks whenever the villain is vulnerable. He lives, wins, and saves the day that the hero lost.

But at what cost, you ask? What is left after all these dictums of the past have been discarded? Life. Life is left. To deal with villainy, one momentarily dons the cloak of a villain, then when villainy is gone, one simply takes it off because the hero doesn’t wear a cloak, that fool wears a straight jacket.

Sword of virtue

Virtue borrowed is not virtue at all, but dogma. Virtue abandoned is nihilism. Virtue created, crafted with the hammer and anvil of life and forged in the fires of challenge, this is virtue.

Without virtue, Nihil can smell you. He can infect you and control you. The fool who welcomes dogma becomes a slave of Nihil. The idiot who embraces nothingness becomes the host for Nihil - a temporary skin, used and discarded.

What is virtue in the face of a meaningless universe? How is there purpose without a grand design? Throw yourself in the fire. Your fire. Seize the hammer. Your hammer. You are what is to be forged.

Big old cloud of nothing

Nihil floats. A cloud of gray. His nothing infects a host. He can not stay long. The body dies, kills itself. So Nihil floats on, drifting with the purpose of instilling purposelessness.

If you were nothing, wouldn’t you be lonely? Wouldn’t you want someone or something to joint you in the emptiness? Nihil wants more emptiness, more of himself surrounded by himself.

The crown is a means. He could command crowds. Instead he immolates individuals. Command them all to immolate. Self immolate. Maybe one will become a cloud like him, a cloud of emptiness, spreading itself.

The doorway he enters by is loneliness. Only those who brood. Only those who suffer alone. Only those who cast themselves out, or are cast out. Only those can be entered by Nihil.