7/21/2024 Everything is so tiring sometimes. I just get so tired. I'm 23 now and I don't really know what I'm doing, or why I'm doing it. I get so tired sometimes. I just want to walk out into the night forever and never see the sun again. I don't try to hurt others or cause trouble, even though as a teenager I know I was a troublesome, deranged person. I guess I will say my thoughts. At the moment, I just feel like a clown of a person. Or a joke. When you feel like a joke, you don't even feel like people see you as a bad thing or a bad person or this or that. Just kind of a vulgar character suited to the sidelines of human consciousness, something cut out for a comedy in poor taste at best. I don't know if that's really how people view me or not. I suppose it does not really matter. I don't think they do. I'd like to enter some thoughts regarding my life. As a child I had a lot of contradictory ideas imposed on me, or so it felt. Really I liked to be alone and with my toys. That was my favorite time and I would spend all day in my room with my toys for many days. I wasn't entirely opposed to socializing, but I was lukewarm about it. Socializing has always seemed to get the better of me. I feel as though I turn into a vulgar joke of a person. I was very vulgar amongst other kids. I'd use any curse words, and I was not a godfearing child, my mother encouraged skepticism of both God and authority, except for hers of course. I just get tired of being everyone's piiece of paper to stamp things on. Vulgar child, rude child, intelligent, precocious, arrogant, sweet, kind, mean, villainous, saintly, it just makes me tired and sick. I get quite tired all the time about it. Why did people put so much stuff onto me as a kid? I was always smart enough for everyone to put these things onto me and just childish enough to not be able to do anything about it or make sense of it. I just get so tired. I'm always dirty and vulgar and shitty. Just always having all this stuff put on me. I could never just be a kid or just be me, it had to be this stuff people wanted to put on me. My mother always wrung me dry like I was a piece of meat to satisfy herself. Nobody cares and nobody did care I don't care that no one cares. Even if nobody could imagine I could feel violated or even if I'm beneath being violable, I just get so tired, I'll always know it's really bad what she did and how bad it made me feel. Even writing that I imagine being someone else reading this and how stupid and pathetic it sounds. Who cares? Nobody cares. I don't know. I know this sort of thing is stupid to read. I don't really know why I am writing it. I guess just as a diary. I don't know. Well, I guess I just want to think the dirtiness I feel wasn't all my fault. I just don't want to think I'm so dirty. I guess because of that I am really fixated on innocence and images of innocence. I always like to hide away and just not worry about other people having to deal with my stupid thoughts so I don't worry about being subconsciously manipulative or a self victimizing thing. I just wanted someone to believe me and believe in me, I guess. Well, it never happened for me as a kid. Not to bitch and moan. Fiction 7/26/2024 It was pressing. They were pressing. I was faster than them all, but the numbers were setting in. Seven of their house, hand picked to counter every possible weakness and strength of mine known to the realm. The weight on the ball of his right foot pressed into the earth and a few moments later, as expected, a thunderous bolt launched from the heavens. From behind, I felt the air tinge, his ally intended to use his strike as a diversion. Speed compelled me to so hurry an incantation as to move my hands, and quickly I formed and manipulated an iron rod from the earth, launching it into the air and following it by a great splash of water all around me, sparing my immediate vicinity. It was the sort of elaborate idea I did not like to resort to. Art conceived of in lower terms, it possessed no higher elegance, instead consisting of an excessive use of basic resources. Nonetheless, I found myself needing an unexpected retort, and it would suffice. His bolt drew to the rod, and the water conducted his electricty all around me, catching his allies in the strike. Another rushed incantation and I sought to impale each of the four I had struck with earthen spikes. My mana was highly carved, engraved with long lasting effects, something like a mechanism which would trigger in response to certain driving frequencies from the energy. Lucky chance, this time. Great bolts of fire assailed the area around me, but more importantly, the flow of mana near me had been perturbed by subtler, driving forces. My impalements were obstructed, an ally had moved all of them. The oldest magician's trick! Farthest from me was an adept spatial manipulator, and they were constantly thwarting any straightforward attacks. It was then that their greatest straightforward attacker set in upon me while those middling elementalists attempted to court my attention and efforts. The fool didn't know what had happened at all. His striking power was decent, and he struck out with great, searing bolts and streams of mana, yet they were diffused, fading and weakening as they curved far off target. The flames in my program were not meant to merely attack an opponent, but covered the manipulation of the surrounding mana, which would obstruct straightforward attacks until a mage had adjusted to "the wind," as it were. Responding in kind, a quick red beam of my mana tore out across space, riding the curved mana field in an unexpectable manner and striking one of the flanking elementalists. It was over for this one. Mages of this calibur rarely acknowledge the offensive potential of a distorted field. It was then that it took me. This spatial mage, middling interloper, had closed the gap with astounding speed in the chaos, and every one of them managed to close in upon me. A storm of incantations and assaults proceeded from both sides, but I lost consciousness. How long had I been doing this? My eyes opened. I was some way away, and two of them were on the ground, my body ransacked and my regeneration handicapped. The spatial mage and their vanguard remained in my forefront as the others tried to tend to the bodies. I was some ways away now.. and I can't remember how any of it happened. My hands were searing, mana radiating off of me and forming solid streamlines in the empowered areas of the field. Still.. how long have I lived this way? Why? My life had always been these warring devotions. To the crown, to my family, to our legacy: to my duty. Insofar as this part of myself lived, my mana always kept that particular character. My blood shone through, distinctively reminiscent of my ancestors. This part of me knew that what was transpiring was only duty: only politics by another means, only a negotiation for who will rule the farmlands and the rivers and lakes and gold. A jarring frequency kept spiking my mana. Something disruptive, throwing my mana into fits of agitation, spiking the air around me. Was it all worth it? I loved my mother, my only living family. Our legacy, really.. her legacy, it was important to me. But I don't know. Something in me keeps agitating, restless, dissatisfied, uninterested in the world she has built for me to inherit. How much of my life was devoted to these arts? Precisely, the killing arts? Born within countless fading days and nights of refinement, a consciousness of something hidden. Conciousness of the very will of these arts coalesced inside my mind during those years. Locked away, dormant, I did not know what to make of this consciousness. Violent, apathetic, so restless. It sought nothing but the exercise of wonderful mana. It was tugging at me, pulling away the facade of my family's mana, overpowering the careful regime my soul was to embody. As I saw the two mages eyeing me up, satisfied with their progress.. I don't know. Maybe it had a point. At the end of the day, I can't say I find living this way more meaningful than living by, through, and for my art. Rather than a great snap, my consciousness faded away with a tired slip, giving way to something else. Something was wrong with the heir. They were moving so awkwardly a few seconds ago, and now.. I don't know what to call it. They were laughing to start. "Are you losing it..?" my partner inquired. They had killed our comrades most likely in our prior clash, although we did serious damage and our healers were working on the wounded. Maybe the heir really was losing it. They were so dissheveled, laughing, running their hands over their head and face, stretching their body as though they had just awakened. Their mana changed. They usually bore the distinct trace of their mother's frequencies, but now it was.. I don't know. I don't know what to call it. I took a defensive stance, but I knew what it'd take to seal the deal. The heir looked around, at the ground and sky, then over toward us. They cocked their head, eyeing us up and down, althoughthey didn't seem to be scanning us for weakness or aggression. Just looking. My ally and I had the same idea. It was time to go. We had to attack now, and we'd make a simultaneous assault now that the heir seemed weakened and even delirious or lost. Enclosing rapidly, I took the left flank, distorting space all around to wrap my ally behind them, then back to the right, and finally above, before my valiant vanguard (ha ha..) released an immense, searing output of mana, threatening to completely evaporate even someone as stalwart as the heir. For my part I tried to crush their leg and right hand so as to impair escape and incantation. "It's really beautiful. Do you know how complicated those guys are?" I heard, turning around to see the heir staring at the sky. "You know, I haven't seen them like this in a while. It puts me in a good mood. The way the light bounces through them like some big maze, it's beautiful to imagine all of it just comes from that," they went on. What the hell were they talking about? Furthermore, how did they escape that strike? I began to think it was an illusion from the start. Probable. It was a possibility and it made sense. Still, we could probably finish the deal still. I don't know why they'd give their real location away though, suggesting.. another illusion? I tried to crush them. "Not now! Look at the clouds," they said, staring up still at the shafts of light coming down from the heavens. I don't get it. "Your mana.. it's not strong enough. You aren't seeing with your mana. Look with your mana," they kept rambling. I was bewildered, suspecting a trap, but I complied anyway, sensing the mana field. What I saw, will change my life forever. A matrix of distortions, on such a small scale that it looked like space had been distorted pixel by pixel on a computer screen. It was like some convoluted maze.. reality was no longer made up of straight lines. "I figured you'd find it interesting. You aren't seeing me, and if you were, you wouldn't be able to reach me. I've scattered the light so that you could see me from a variety of different directions. Don't you know? You don't look to things, you see them from directions. I've been bouncing the light around to shift all of the images. I just wanted you to understand how beautiful those clouds are. That's what they do just by being there. Isn't that beautiful?"