A Coming Storm
The moon is waning. I know that because I had ventured up to the surface today for the first time in what seems like a life time. A life time. How can one even measure such a thing? The very idea is an absurdity. To bear in mind a conception of one's own assigned length of life? It would imply foreknowledge of one's own demise, a maddening notion if ever there was one. But perhaps that is just what this is … madness.
My experiments require more and more of my time. I have almost forgotten what the light of the sun feels like on bare flesh. I should think it would just fade with the rest. This, however, I believe comes simply from secluding myself down here in this dark hole. My work has progressed; slowly, it has progressed. I must accelerate my successes, and eliminate all failures. The drive is simple, and all consuming, but I could do no less.
The instinct to life is too powerful, too desperate. This cannot be my own accursed affliction. Others must feel as I do; others who feel the icy grip of death closing around their throats. Perhaps they do not. Perhaps they are too blinded to their own pitiless destruction, being as they were never blessed with the faculties to comprehend such a thing from inception. Death is so seldom the end, but in this instance, I very well fear that it must be. Perhaps that is the difference between us. They know not the true extent of the fate I am made to suffer.
The latest group of subjects has failed. I have tried to tease the secrets of life out of death so often that I am beginning to wonder just if there is such a thing at all. Life … it is a remarkable concept, at once everlasting and perfect, again as brittle and flawed. Its existence seems a spiteful mockery of itself in every occurrence. Beyond these cold stone walls that have kept it at bay, it only consumes. It devours itself and then regurgitates. It is excrement. It is fodder. It is a pitiless, self-murdering cycle of vivacious death and decay. I fear only that it will come to an end and I will be cast out forever, and I reel at the absurdity of the thought. It is, at heart, some kind of desperate lunacy.
It has grown quiet down here in my solitude. Or perhaps I have forgotten just how to listen. It is so basic a thing to unlearn. But the world outside has been all too restless. I can almost feel it shifting in this prison I have formed about myself, this cocoon. Time is slipping past, but with it, I must believe, will come the answers I seek. And so, I believe they might very well have.
Something has happened. I have learned of vague rumors traveling south toward the festering cesspits above. Something has happened back where they came from, and it has caused no little stir down here in this blistering realm of self-gorging gluttony and greed. Some among them have spoken of a great catastrophe averted; something that might very well have had them butchered in the streets before long. One could only pine for the silence that might bring.
But I digress.
The short-lived and short-sighted vermin do not see past their own petty concerns, desperately protecting only that small spark of life and ostensive contentment they think they might have gained. I have seen past it. I look at these great and monumental tidings and see them as the whisperings of things to come. I have read something of those things to come. I believe, in them, I might have found an inkling as to the answers I seek.
I will be watching with great interest.
Third of Uktar, 1368
Dale Reckoning