[DirectorBright]

---

He's gone.
I knew he would be eventually.
Now, Mel has left for New Atlantis, gone from my life as well.
The others... in seclusion.

All my children are no longer with me.
Nor is their mother.
It feels... empty, still.

And it hurts.
It hurts...

... I'll be okay.
I just need a moment to catch my breath.
I'll be with you all in- just a moment...

Tap...

... Tap...

---

---

A world without You.
Is a far nicer place.

It won't bring Tiche back.
It won't undo the things you've done.
It won't take the scar from her form.
It won't banish fully the nightmare.

But it did put a smile on my face to watch you die.

Even if it took a while to stop jumping at shadows.
Even if it took a while to accept that you're gone.
Even if it took a while to believe that I'm safe again.

Some may be afraid forever.
Believe they're no longer safe in their own home.
I will not let you rob me of my peace, even in death.

I have something to return to, better than this.
Someone that waits for me there.

As sweet as the revenge I wrought in violence was,
I have one more act in it's pursuit.
My last vengeance on you...

... is to live happily in a world where you no longer exist.

---

Everyone has their demons.
I've just killed one of mine.

[DirectorBright]

---

Time was my ally, and now it has abandoned me.
Every day the clock ticks closer.
And every day, something else is ripped away.
The one thing I cannot bear is the idea that the next will be her.
Or me.

I never want to see her cry.
Never again.
She is what holds the broken pieces of me together, just enough to take one more step.

Not everything was lost when the Vigil fell.
The work continues.
I must endure.
For her.

---

---

((This is a little out of date and would normally have been two posts but it took a lot longer than I thought it would to make. Still thinking over the more up to date one.))

[DirectorBright]

I haven't touched pen to paper in a while.
Writ down my thoughts.
I don't really understand what the purpose of it is outside of just letting them out, it isn't as if anyone is going to read these records.
I feel like I'm going to explode if I don't at least say it. 
Find some release for all this bitterness inside.

---

The world feels a foreign place to me now.

Shocking, isn't it? I've enough to satisfy most men several times over. A wife. Old Friends. I have great-grandchildren. Hel, I've even got worshippers, after a fashion. Devoted followers. They Idolize me. Offer up their lives for my cause, and yet that cause is not something their lives can ever give me. They say it could be my home, they say that I am welcome, and yet over and over I feel out of place. I feel like a guest. Like a tourist. Something that clearly doesn't belong there.

Even in a city full of those adherents, I feel like a stranger. I do not feel like I belong there. I don't feel like I belong in any place, now. Entire generations of people that I knew and loved simply no longer exist, aren't remembered. There's no evidence they were ever even real. Do you know what that's like? 

To look back at a lifetime and have nothing to prove it even happened? To know the most important people you ever knew are less than fairy tales, to know that the world that built you ceased to be? To know that when you finally do forget, nobody is there to remind you?

To know that someone burned away everything that made you who you are?

---

The nation of Aetius marched on Goldlight, burns it to the ground with the explicit aim of humiliation, then genocide. Not some retaliation for perceived wrongs, but the explicit goal of erasure.

For what? 

Because some fucking demon is pissy he lost a war? That's what he is, after all, it's not hard to put two and two together on that... no, a little cult of egotists are hand picked by this asshole, raised from childhood, and send to strike while we were weakened. While the youth were still growing, and the old had retired and stepped out. He gets to be a malicious, problem-causing shitheel for decades, and yet nobody moves on what was so obviously the problem brewing. I told them it would be a problem, but did anyone listen to me? 

Of course not.

Sin after sin, crime after crime, league with the very enemies we fought for a hundred years to destroy, and in the end-

Nobody cared. Nobody remembered. People forgot about us so soon after we were destroyed.
Nobody gave a shit. More fuss was made about Enos kicking the bear and getting bitten for it.
There was never any justice for what was done. Never any retribution. Never any wrong righted.

Did anyone mourn? Was there outrage? No. I see people walk arm in arm with them and it makes me sick. Impudent little bastards who don't have any respect or care for what was done, for the lives lost, for what it meant. For what they're being so casual alongside.

We are already forgotten.

---

Every morning, I put on that uniform again. I walk into a lab just like the one I lost. Better, arguably. The forge hums its tune, the foundry resetting after it produces the kinds of things I was tasked to make long ago. 

Too late, now, I suppose. Little use for them except as trade goods... the first and last two bars, spent or bartered for some other purpose. What was the point of them now? What is the point of most of my works, when none of them are for the cause I used to follow, none for the man I used to serve, none for the home I used to have?

I suppose I should just count my blessings the forge survived that at all, that I was able to get the pieces out and reassemble them.

I have many blessings. One finds me waking up frequently. Another bad dream, and another. We gaze at one another until I fall back asleep. For a little while, I know peace. The warmth of that smile. The way she looks at me, at me.

... I can't stand the way the others do.

---

I find thoughts of incidents long since passed welling up alongside these. Things that make me sick. Problems, troubles from long ago, long since resolved. Wrongs committed to people I called mine decades ago. There's no real reason to be so. It's done, long since done. The very world itself has changed since then, the people involved don't exist anymore.

Yet still. Anger over what was done to Aricles, over Amnestria. It's not often I looked towards killing someone with eagerness. Not often that I wanted to do it. I can't honestly say I've every killed someone because I wanted to, or that I enjoyed the process. You could argue it for Astadora, but they're not... people. Not even alive, really. That one, though. That one I hated. One who held nothing but contempt for my granddaughter, then uses her name as an excuse for bloodlust against her father. A murderous cannibal sitting untouchable because of who she married.

I know were it not for either station, she would have tried to kill me herself. I know were it not for either, I probably would've tried it too.

The Office of Captain-General was a curse in some ways. In most ways. I was ready to march in and challenge her there, that day, before I was told I could not. By Her.

Because of my office.

---

That office.

That damned office.

I never wanted the position. To lead the Order. I recoiled at the idea of it. I was never a man for that kind of office, that was not my position, not my job, not my capacity. I am a doctor, an engineer, a mentor- these things I am good at, but that office was never one. The things it placed upon my shoulders were not things I wished to ever carry. The duties it demanded were things I despised.

And I was terrible at it.

The only reason I held that office at all was because He needed to retire. He needed some time off. And you know what? He deserved that. He did. I did it for him like I promised when I was recruited, because I said I'd do whatever he needed or asked. Even risking my life to retrieve Ascalon, I did because of that promise. Because I was loyal, and nobody could ever question that.

Yet that office was torture. All of the responsibility, the need to put out every fire, and yet none of the actual power. I was a puppet. A figurehead to take the blame, but it was clear from the moment we held council in Gloomlight that we had no real power. That we stood for absolutely nothing without Him in charge. All we did was bend the knee to someone who never should've been in charge at all.

I hated it. Every second of it.

---

There are plenty of things I hate in this world, when I stop to think about it.
I don't know if I can say this even helped.
It's not really clear if its just winding me up again. I could go into depths about how many more there were. Midpoint. The Emeraldi's Heirs. Loramelian. I'm sure I can find more if I really bother to look. Hel, I could rave about how much Felice pisses me off too. And you know what? None of it really matters anymore. They're all dead or irrelevant. They're all as forgotten as the things I loved.

Well. Not Felice. Not yet at least. I tried to be patient with her, tried for so many years- but I suppose even I can only be spat on so many times before I've had enough. Her petty slights aren't reason enough for the rage it sets in my heart. I don't know why I despise her so. Perhaps I'm just sick of it.

The sky is falling again. The heavens are coming undone. The voidlings work, the culmination of their efforts is revealed. Grains of sand on a heap. Do you know what I truly think at the end of it?

I think I really, truly hate this world.

I get older. I watch things change. I watch people leave. Yet over and over I see the same old story happen time and again. Over and over, I see just- wretches. The absolute dregs of humanity, no matter what cause or creed, banging the same drum. Witch cults are cut out of Meranthe, but the people who made them don't go away. One great evil is slain and another emerges shortly after to carry his torch. Maybe now things will settle down with one particular evil out of the picture.

How I hated them, too. There aren't words enough to describe.

Despite it all, do I lash out? No.
No, because I am tired. Because I have no place to vent that hatred. My enemies, such as they are now, are beyond me. All the power I've mustered works miracles, but not in violence... and...

And I love my wife. I love her far too much to break that promise we made. Decades turning to centuries... no, I cannot go and die on her, I cannot do that to her.

... that's not really what it is. That's part of it, I'm sure, but it's not why my heart beats so swiftly when I have to fight, even when those battles are relatively mild. The truth of the matter is, I think something in me broke a long time ago. I don't know when it was. I don't even know if it was any one thing in particular, or just a slow erosion over time. My daughter became a witch. My son was killed. My granddaughter, too, after all the hel we were put through trying to save her so many times. My people and home were erased. My children, my... first wife, all lost to time and the press of ages now. A book in my pocket that used to bring me comfort brings me nothing but pain, holds more ghosts than living beings. The dead outnumber the living. Maybe it was the battles to the death, being assailed in my own home like that. Maybe it was all the times I nearly died.

Maybe it was something older.

I don't know. I haven't had the time to reflect. I've been putting it off, really. It hurts too much, and I was saving it for that work. Whenever that gets done.

I just know I hate it here.

---

... she's waiting for me, down the stairs. I won't keep her waiting any longer.
None of this really helped. I just feel painfully hollow. I don't know why I even wrote it.
I'll just throw it away when I'm done... 

There is still one place I feel whole.
Where all the noise stops, and I'm at peace.
One last place I feel like I belong.

Next to my wife.

[DirectorBright]