Dear _,
Every suture line and scar on this useless body aches, but the pain is proof that I'm alive, whatever that life is worth. In my desire to flay and flense, to slice and dissect anything that possesses that elusive quality called life, many people would say that I've proven my failure to make meaning out of my existence. What those people fail to grasp is the utter lack of meaning that surrounds them. They seek warmth, love and human companionship as proof that it all means something. I've seen the depths of depravity that exist inside and outside of this miserable world and I can tell you that so-called human emotion is a delusion.
Given this fact, you might wonder why I persist as a Meister. The answer is simple and unambiguous: I persist because I was gifted a conscience. I don't mean the feeble human notion of a moral compass, but an actual physical embodiment of conscience in the form of Marie Mjolnir. The shreds of sanity and decency that I call my own only exist because she is my Weapon. The razor-thin path that I walk between madness and sanity, darkness and light has only been provided by her. I would've thrown myself into the abyss many times over without Marie. Her soft voice in my ear is the last buffer stopping me from casting the spark of humanity away and embracing darkness with open arms.
Of course, even she can't truly prevent my real madness. It bubbles and roils there, as it speaks to me in sibilant tongues when I close my eyes to sleep. It flows like the sluggish, chemical blood in my veins. Why else would I have peered inside of myself to see how I could change this fragile flesh? Oh no, even Marie can't stop the need to look inside. All that she can do is weep when I open my skin and hold out the thin thread of a little hope to pull me back from the edge.
Perhaps I should have given up a long time ago. Perhaps I should have drowned in the velvet arms of the dark gods that hover in wait like vultures over the corpse of the failing world but first Spirit and then Marie held me back. I sit balanced precariously on the edge of destruction every day and without them I'd simply have reached the point where I could do nothing else but kill anything that came near me.
Why am I telling you any of this? Perhaps it's because I want you to understand that I'm not really a monster. We label as monstrous the things and people that are too alien for us to look at my mutilated flesh and cringe, you judge what I say as morally bankrupt and you hear the stories of my obsessive need to dissect and experiment and call me evil. I am not, by most standards, a good man but evil is not something that I can be called either. I merely do what my intellect and my insatiable curiosity tell me is right. I leave the ideas of good and evil to the philosophers and the priests.
After all, most of us who affiliate ourselves with Shibusen have undertaken actions that might be judged as evil. How could Death have flayed his own son alive, contained his soul in that flayed skin and buried it under this place? WIthout understanding why he did it, the act would seem as depraved as anything undertaken by the most twisted murderer. As we are often told context is everything.
The context in which I place my actions is simple. If we don't understand the most intimate workings of our bodies and their interactions with our souls, how can we combat anything that wishes to take our souls? I seek to understand the myriad tiny reactions and interactions that cause us to function and even give us the tremendous powers held by Meisters and Weapons. I seek to know how our enemies function and how their souls and physical beings interact. I can't do this unless I put aside morality, human emotion and meaning. My research must be dispassionate, even to the point that people say I'm insane, but the end goal is not to cause harm or pain. The end goal is to prevent it.
I suppose that you could consider this a sort of apology. I don't say many of these things aloud very easily, but I think about them constantly. Although we exist in a meaningless void, not all of us see it in the bleak terms that I do. I hope that you'll understand that I don't hate people as a whole. I merely hate your inability to see things as I do. However, I do know that some of you care for me, so I want you to realize that whatever I do, the intention is not to hurt you. If I didn't understand that I owe you all a certain duty, I would have fled to live a solitary existence. It is likely the best existence that I deserve, but now I can't abandon you.
S.
S.