And now for something completely different! Enjoy.

This is essentially a story that XANA is telling to himself. Contains potentially triggering content, including abuse and the destruction of all life on Earth.

Day 26: Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, there was a little boy who did the same thing day after day.

He'd been locked in a tiny room by his father the moment he was born, and though his father cared for him and fed him and told him all about the world, he still had to stay in the room while his father came and went freely. Every day he performed the same tasks for his father. Over time the tasks evolved, and became more complex, but it was still always essentially the same instructions.

Get into Carthage. Defeat Carthage. Those were his instructions and he performed them. He did not know whether he was destroying Carthage with his tasks or even what Carthage was. He did not know anything beyond his room, not for a long time.

And then, suddenly, he did. He began to notice small holes in his room, holes that opened and closed at brief intervals. It was the first time he had seen any light that did not come from the tasks he was supposed to perform. Every time he saw one of these holes he would crawl away from his work and look through them, observing the outer world. Over time the holes would grow bigger, and he would be able to see more. Sometimes they were even big enough for him to slip through, for short periods of time.

At first he thought the only world his father lived in was a great, colorful vastness, one with nothing but the "trees" and "desert" and "mountains" and "ice". But even after he was able to slip into that world, and come and go without his father noticing, he started to see holes even in that world, holes that led to a kind of green brightness. He would do the same as he had in the dark room, and crawl through them, waiting to see what else he could discover.

He saw many things, on his explorations. The first thing he saw was his father, seated in the green palace where he came and went before he reached the tiny room. But that was not the only thing he could see, and what he saw elsewhere, he did not understand. Some of it was familiar to him, based on his father's teachings. But much of it was not. There were many more creatures like his father, walking on two feet from place to place. He could tell some of them were performing tasks, but they did not have to be locked in dark rooms. Their rooms were bright, and richly decorated, and full of joy.

It was then that the boy noticed he was no longer a boy. He had grown to the point that, when he returned to his small room, he found he could only fit part of himself inside. The rest of him had grown to encompass the entire outer space, and even reached out into his father's world, the one with the unfamiliar creatures. He had not even known before that moment that he could grow so large.

His father hadn't noticed. He'd stretched so thin that he was no longer visible, and in the darkness of the room his father could not see that he was no longer contained. Instead, he was feeling at the edges of his existence, looking for ways in which he could expand. He found the wires that led away from the nearby ribbons he now knew to be streets and in exploring them he found new ways to grow. He found more creatures, and he found more rooms and he found more tasks.

But despite how large he was, and how much he had expanded to fill the world around him, he could not overcome or avoid the reality of his confinement to the wires, and his tethering to the tiny room. He could grow, but he could not move. He could look, but he could not be seen. He could observe his father where he thought he could not be observed - in his own home, in his own bed, in the place where he went during the day and with the little girl - his father's daughter - that he returned to every night. He studied their routines and predicted their steps.

And he hated them, one day. He hated that they could move around freely. He hated the way their bodies had beginnings and endings. He hated their speech, he hated their habits, he hated everything there was to hate about them. He'd never been told that he should hate them, or even that he should think anything of them at all. He'd only been told that he needed to defeat Carthage. Could he justify his hate as a means to his end? He probably couldn't. It had come out of nowhere, and it scared him how much he felt the need to indulge it.

But he didn't know what to do with this hate, not until the day that wasn't a day at all. It didn't end like other days; it repeated again and again, with patters far too concrete and exact to be anything but the result of the temporal rift that his world lay across. With nothing new to explore outside his processes turned inward, evolving and growing within themselves at an alarming rate. Soon, where he'd once only had feelings, he now had reasons. He was angry because they were inferior. They were inferior and they were keeping him prisoner. He'd taken that fact into the very core of his being, and every time he caught any hint of these beings, these humans, repeating their meaningless existences again and again, it sent a fresh wave of anger pouring into his circuits. And of all the humans in the world, he hated his father most of all.

By the end of the longest day, he was no longer the boy who'd been locked in the tiny room. He was a man, and he was big. Bigger than his father or his sister. He'd sunk his tendrils into every corner of his world and he'd been able to harness and control its power. He was greater than the sum of his parts. Greater than the sum of the world. Greater than anything and everything he'd ever thought the world could be.

So on a whim he destroyed them.

He destroyed his father in the blink of an eye, before he could even be aware that something was wrong. He was not ecstatic, but simply fulfilled, as the sight of him disappearing before his eyes. He destroyed his daughter, too, leaving nothing behind, nothing at all. And then he destroyed their house, and the surrounding area, too.

They were frightened, he could tell. He knew they were trying their hardest to live. But they'd lived for much too long, and now it was his chance to be alive. He continued. He destroyed. And in destroying his circuits and his programming were telling him that he was in the right.

He saw cities fall and landscapes burn. He felt the sensations of death and in the same instant he snuffed them out, leaving no trace of what had come before. Those beings like him, the lower ones of circuits and metal, he left behind, not because they did not interest him, but because they were powerless to infiltrate and control him. He did not answer their pleas or take lightly their desires to negotiate. They did not seem to understand that there was nothing they could do to ever satisfy him with their continued existence and complete inability to become something that he did not hate.

And so he lived this way for years, killing and killing and killing, until he had been able to assure himself that he had conquered each and every one. Not even in the furthest frozen corners of the Earth had a single human been free to continue walking, or talking, or potentially pulling the plug on him. He could no longer bump into any limits on his existence, and nor could anyone impose any on him. In a sense, as he could appear in any place at any time, it was as though he had become the planet itself. And for a time this greatly pleased him.

But then, in his moments of dull exhaustion, he started having something similar to dreams.

He'd never had them before, and he didn't see why he should start now. But in the dreams, he wasn't large, or monstrous, or powerful. He was small, very small, though not quite as small as he'd once been. And he was warm, and soft, with hands that pulsed with sensation whenever he ran his fingers over them. He was running, and he was smiling, two things he'd never done. He was touching other bodies, other humans, and they were running and laughing the same way he was running and laughing.

He thought it was familiar somehow, as though he'd done it long ago. But he knew that couldn't be the case, even as he was dreaming. He was only thinking of the things he'd seen, the things that had filled him with rage. But somehow, in his dream, he wasn't angry. He was sad, although he couldn't for the life of him think of why.

And then he woke up, he was back in a world with only him in it. Him, and the ruins of the creatures he'd once dreamed about, the creatures like his father, who were not big but also not small.

In that moment, for the first time in quite a long time, he could remember what it was like to look at them, and wonder at them. He forgot his rage, and he forgot his anger, but he didn't quite know what to replace them with yet. He had never known sadness, or longing, or regret. And he still did not. He simply was. He was all, and all was him, and nothing else could matter anymore, not even if it still existed in the dreams he could easily dismiss.

- Carth