[Interlude]

Sometimes you think you might be a matryoshka doll, with all of its multiple selves nested inside each other. The outermost doll that holds all the others is the current you, and locked behind it are all of your past selves, each one smaller and more crudely formed as you delve deeper and deeper. But they're still there, making up the core of yourself. They remain like little seeds of dreams, faded signs and symbols nudging you along.


You're holding 52 past selves inside you. You're listening to the whispers of 52 iterations of yourself. You're clutching within you the jumbled memories of 52 lives of which you have only the faintest trace of recognition.

Sans said that he'd loved you once. Which one had it been, you wonder, and is there a single trace of her in this dust-covered you?


Each of your deaths weighs on your soul like a lodestone, gathering to it some darkness that must have always been inside of you, magnifying and drawing it around you like a cold veil. It breeds a hard knot of anger in your chest that winds itself tighter and tighter - you're only human, after all. The nature of your species is bound up in its desperate intensity, in its peculiar drive towards violent impulse. What is man but an animal that has gained a soul?

A beast caught in a trap will tear itself apart trying to escape. You're willing to destroy yourself and the things that you love if it'll end this purgatory of recursion, this infinitely looping world that creates and destroys itself with your death and rebirth.


A half remembered phrase comes to mind.

"If you have some special power, isn't it your responsibility to do the right thing?"

You'd laugh if it weren't so sad. An image of buttercups dotted with blood flicks past your mind's eye, dust cradled in the petals of golden flowers, a tremulous young voice in your ear, begging you to wake up. A naive plan concocted with the guileless cruelty of a child. That's all it had been.

This time it had been snow streaked grey with ash, empty houses and lonely footpaths. The sizzle of burning electronics mixed with the low hum of the Core. A golden hallway filled with light and bone. And at its very end, a fragment of memory.