Kinoko Nasu

From this moment forth, my sword shall be with you and your fate shall be with me.

Two years of oblivion have reduced me, if not to emptiness, than to something that sits closely beside it. It laid waste all that I was inside, and severed what connection existed between my memory and personality through two years of __iving_ like a shell, on the boundary of emptiness. And though there was precious little drama here compared to actual societal rejection, it drives me to worry all the same. All my memories are just reflections on the water, and I don__ know whether I__ the reflection or the real thing.

I no longer looked to the future or lost hope in it. The past and the future are, from the view of the present, nothing more than a distant paradise. As one who can never achieve divinity, all I could do is ponder that with all of my might.

Different minds perceive different things, but all are imprisoned, asleep in a paradigm of material reality. Awakened minds bearing a more malleable paradigm, such as those of mages, can bend its rules, but never truly break them. To cross that boundary is to become something more and less human. A god, but absent the restraint.