What is the point in living?
By the time I turned twenty, the question had already become too familiar to frighten me. It no longer appeared only on bad nights or after some obvious failure. I knew there was nothing special in that. Other people had felt the same thing before me, and better people had written about it more clearly than I ever could.
Once life begins to feel quietly wrong in a way that is hard to explain, it is natural to go looking for language that matches the shape of it. I had done that often enough, and sometimes I even found it, but being understood by a dead philosopher does not necessarily make a living day easier to get through.
Most people, I thought, did not keep going because life had revealed some grand meaning to them. They kept going because tomorrow was already waiting, because someone would be disappointed, because work still had to be done, because dinner still had to be made, because habit is stronger than despair more often than people like to admit.
Those reasons once felt too small to me. Later, I began to think they were probably the only kind most people ever really had.
If there was anything in my life that still deserved to be called attachment, it was a story. That sounds pathetic when said plainly, but I had long since given up pretending otherwise.
Lord of the Mysteries stopped being something I merely liked a very long time ago. I reread it too often and spent too much time following discussions about it. I learned Chinese because of it. Later, I even learned Hermes and Ancient Hermes, which was the sort of thing no reasonable person should admit without hesitation.
At some point, it stopped feeling like fiction and became a place I returned to whenever my own life seemed too thin to stand on. That world was cruel, secretive, and full of things that could destroy a person for understanding too much, but it still felt richer than my own.
Curiosity and knowledge mattered there. History had weight there, and even despair had meaning.
The night I died, it was raining outside, and my laptop screen was still lit.
I was reading a discussion thread in Chinese about pathways, boons, and outer deities, which was exactly the sort of thing I had wasted too many nights on. One line held my eyes longer than the rest because it irritated me by being true.
Readers always imagine that knowing enough is the same as surviving enough.
I stared at it for several moments and could not really argue. I knew the pathways, the sequence names, the hidden organizations, the broad outline of future events, and too many names that should not be handled lightly.
None of that meant I could truly live in that world and remain intact. Knowing where danger lies is useful, but enduring it is something else entirely.
I leaned back in my chair and rubbed at my eyes. The rain kept striking the window in an uneven rhythm, and the coffee beside my laptop had already gone cold.
Before I could think any further, a violent pressure closed across my chest and sent my hand into the cup, knocking it sideways over the desk and spilling coffee across my notes. I tried to stand, but my left arm had already gone weak, and my breathing had turned shallow enough that the room no longer seemed properly aligned.
I caught myself against the edge of the desk, tried to steady my balance, and failed.
There was nothing dramatic in it. I did not get a revelation, and I did not get time to regret anything properly.
I had pain, dizziness, a tilting room, and the absurd awareness that I was dying over cold coffee while a thread about outer deities remained open on my screen. Then I hit the floor.
At first, the room was still there in full. The spilled coffee was there, the hum of the laptop was there, the rain was there, and the ache in my chest was there.
For one brief moment, I could still tell what belonged to the room and what belonged to me. That distinction lasted only a little longer before something loosened, and all the knowledge I had forced into my head over the years began surfacing with a clarity so unnatural that I understood this had already gone beyond ordinary memory.
Pathway names, formulas, symbols, scraps of theory, pieces of Hermes, and Ancient Hermes, all of it rose together too quickly and too cleanly. It did not feel like a dying mind throwing up its contents in disorder.
It felt as if everything I knew had taken on shape.
Then I felt attention.
I did not hear a voice, and I did not see a face. The sensation was colder than either of those things, distant and enormous, like something had turned toward the outline of what I carried and was examining it without the slightest need to hide what it was doing.
It was not looking at my body on the floor. It was not looking at my life.
It was looking at the structure formed by what I knew.
That was the part that terrified me. Not hatred, not anger, not hunger in any simple sense, but interest precise enough to make me feel small in a way I had never experienced before.
Something sensed that there was an anomaly in me. It sensed that what I carried did not fit cleanly into the world I was entering, and it pressed against that strangeness with unmistakable focus.
There seemed to be another layer deeper inside, something sealed or obscured that it could not easily reach, but the knowledge alone had already been enough to make me visible. I understood that much instinctively, even if the rest remained unclear.
Then the pressure changed.
Something cold and dense settled over me, not like comfort, and not like pain either, but like a layer forced into place between my thoughts and the rest of the world. My mind, which should have broken apart under the weight of what I knew, did not split.
The knowledge did not burst outward into madness. My sense of self remained intact, though only barely, and the feeling that stayed with me most strongly was not relief but unease.
I did not know what had just attached itself to me. I only knew that it was not human kindness.
The world tilted again.