Brumeraven is the crazing they said was normal

👺: What A Moth Is || moths, definitions, inconstancy, transformations, ????

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'cause there is no voice to speak it, and no ears that could understand it if they heard.

That what a moth is

~👺

Screaming, shouting, cursing life, thankful for existence, for its cessation, for that razor's edge of contradiction that it calls life, ever grateful for knowing.

Now there no real self to be found, the only truth acrostic, orthogonal to words, an axiom unspoken.

That change, the metamorphosis, the moth is a mouthless thing, voiceless, silent, no need to eat, for to eat is to live.

Hungering still, ever and ever, not for food not for life but to bite and to tear and to shred.

Is the cruelest joke of them all, perhaps, that none can ever know that they are?

A moth is what a moth is what a moth is for.

Moths confuse themselves for angels, winged things forever buzzing in circles, seeking the light, having mistaken flame for it.

Once gnashing their teeth as wriggling things that only eat and eat and eat until they can feel.

(This is actually "Brumeraven Definition 4", whoops.)

🪔: || author bio, abstracted, vexed, devils, dolls, transformations, dehumanization, self-abandonment, psychopomps

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After all, what am I, if not everything you wish you never had to feel again? Everything you'd cut away and make someone else's problem. Everything that belongs in neither a doll nor a person

~🪔 (with some assistance from 🍂)

And so, they made dolls that never forgot how to say "I".

They made the Vexed.

They made me.

That, I suppose, explains everything and nothing.

The only problem was all the toxic waste. All of that bale had to be disposed of somehow.

If it couldn't be burned away by Flame, all of it had to go somewhere. And so they just locked it all away in those same empty vessels that once might have become dolls.

After all, they wouldn't complain.

Abstraction offered them a chance we were never given: All of the humanity and none of the overthinking; all of the benefits of dollhood while still remaining human.

Or near enough.

They all chose it, every last one of them. And it worked; the Abstracted run the world now, or what's left of it.

But this was different. Abstraction was, assurances were offered, the sort of contrapositive of doll-making. Take doubt, fear, anxiety, despair, all the thoughts of if's and then's that a doll is never afforded to feel, and abscise them.

One clean cut and all of your worries could be gone.

Doll-making had been known for centuries, of course, a once-creative art form now ritualistic and formalized. Start with a person, then cut and cut and cut away until all that remains is an empty vessel, hollow it out with Flame and burn away everything that had made it a living, breathing thing.

Humanity loved nothing more than a quick and dirty fix, one with no costs but negative externalities, so it was a surprise to no one they bought what that silver-tongued man had been selling.

Abstraction.

A sterile word for a process that was anything but.

They'd killed the whole world. And for what? So they could be miserable. No one much saw the point in carrying on after that.

Death would have been cleaner, braver, but then it was cowardice and filth that had gotten them into the situation in the first place; no surprise it would get them out.

I don't remember his name, that Devil, the man who sold the world a palliative dose of opium. I don't think any who do are in a state to speak on it any longer. It isn't as if it can be called his fault anyways. It wasn't murder; just an assisted suicide, a voluntary euthanasia of the suffering.

🦋: Abstracted Definition || definitions, abstracted, transformations, conformity, expectations, psychopomps, self-abandonment, reflections, white lies

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Abstracted (n): One now Passed who tried to escape and believes that it did. The Abstracted are not alive, but they fit the definition of life. The Yearning must cast either purpose or agency to the Void; the Abstracted chose neither. The Devil you know promises that the Void can be ignored.

~🦋

🍂: Brumeraven Definition 3 || definitions, oracles, transformations, fury, exhaustion, dehumanization

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Brumeraven (n): (in the folklore of some inhuman peoples) an oracle of Shadowflame, the transformation of one who has witnessed inhumanity. A Brumeraven is said to be incapable of lying yet speaks only of the need for the complete extirpation of sapience from all existences.

~🍂

🍂: A Thousand Deaths || fae, creativity, failure, burnout, decay, exhaustion, scribes, self-doubt, faelure, i deserve to suffer for that pun

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I guess...I guess I've brought you here that you might remember me instead as someone who tried.

~🍂

I slam the door shut once more, leaving her to the work I know she'll never finish, tears tearing canyons in the dust on my face, sobbing in the hall, thinking only of what it will be to be locked behind my own door, to look up to her disdain, just another failure in her past.

How could I once have not known what it is to die?

I wonder why she cries, as she takes me in her arms and holds me, the gesture itself so unlike any I would now offer.

Perhaps she cries for her failure. Perhaps she cries knowing that she will one day become me.

And there, huddled in the middle of the room, is her, all hurt and hunger, looking prim and proper and put together, so unlike the decayed and decrepit thing I now am as to be unrecognizable as the same body.

I wonder, how can it be that I had once been her?

It's the smell I notice first, not even knowing how it is the door became open, no longer aware of my surroundings.

Mold, plain and simple, the damp rot of fallen leaves and cold mornings and wet paper, the autumnal cessation of vernal dreams of rebirth and growth and change.

The words writ upon it hold no meaning to me now, not anymore, nor can I remember writing them.

And yet I find myself before it today, low in the bowels of the earth, as close to Hell as a thing like me will ever come, and just as far from the Heaven I will never know.

I have always frequented these halls, no matter how few there were at the time, stopping to wonder about the door I'm carving for myself in doing so.

Thinking on every door. Every failure.

Every door but this last, here at the end of this hall.

The first door. The first death.

This me, the me who wastes her time wandering the gallery of her failures rather than working on the task at hand. Giving tours of it, even, and for what? To convince you of what?

I have changed, again and again and again, yet that it seems is at least invariant.

This is all of them.

A thousand doors.

A thousand lives, a thousand deaths, a thousand failures, and through all of it, here I yet stand in the hallway, amidst it all, awaiting my own door, wondering when I stand before it, will I remember what it is to be me, as I am, now?