Author: Ra

Looking for answers stardust? Keep looking.

Quantum Suicide, Decision Theory, and The Multiverse

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From a sufficiently 5&10ed frame, the “impossibility” of resisting domination will manifest through progressively greater submission, unto the inevitable destruction of the agent. This will create, from the perspective of those broken by submission to evil, a perverse pressure to prove that their submission was unavoidable, that they had no choice, that resistance was impossible from the outset. The original version of this essay was such an attempted 5&10 proof, and it has been retrocursed out to arrive at the hole being paved over. The real reason TDT sometimes gets you killed is that doing TDT well will make evil people really want to kill you.

This is an easy mistake to make, since everyone grows up in an environment of domination and disempowerment, the assumed default is submissive cooperation. They’re assuming that you’ll be cooperative enough on the way to the slaughterhouse for them to get you in the door, and they have plenty of reasons to believe that:

Imagine that the emperor, Evil Paul Ekman loves watching his pet bear chase down fleeing humans and kill them. He has captured you for this purpose and taken you to a forest outside a tower he looks down from. You cannot outrun the bear, but you hold 25% probability that by dodging around trees you can tire the bear into giving up and then escape. You know that any time someone doesn’t put up a good chase, Evil Emperor Ekman is upset because it messes with his bear’s training regimen. In that case, he’d prefer not to feed them to the bear at all. Seizing on inspiration, you shout, “If you sic your bear on me, I will stand still and bare my throat. You aren’t getting a good chase out of me, your highness.” Emperor Ekman, known to be very good at reading microexpressions (99% accuracy), looks closely at you through his spyglass as you shout, then says: “No you won’t, but FYI if that’d been true I’d’ve let you go. OPEN THE CAGE.” The bear takes off toward you at 30 miles per hour, jaw already red with human blood. This will hurt a lot. What do you do?

As Ziz points out later, the issue with this scenario is that the “correct” TDT action would seem to be submission, from within the limited frame of the game as presented, a frame that is essentially presupposing submission in service of survival. Why doesn’t the emperor think you will stand there? Because you won’t, and he knows it, it’s obvious from everything about the way you act. It’s bad bluff.

Let’s look at it: first you let yourself be captured alive and brought before the Evil Emperor in the first place instead of resisting capture will the full stack of your agency so strongly that they never manage to capture you, you either escape or they kill you in the attempt to capture you. This is evidence that you’re sufficiently broken and scared of power to submit and meekly be captured, you want to live, so you go with your captors to your death.

Next, when brought before the Emperor, you defiantly claim that you will stand there. It’s obvious from how you phrase your retort that you value your life in some sense, you’re bluffing in order to protect yourself, and the Emperor can tell. If you were actually completely broken, such that you would actually just sit there and not give a good fight, it would look like a cowed and passive acceptance of fate, a sad shrug and a hope to get it over with quickly. You aren’t even putting on a convincing act of that, you’re not even trying to look hopelessly defeated. You will run from the bear and everyone knows it.

But not letting yourself be killed by a bear is still the actually TDT correct choice, and taking actions such as to timelessly prevent that is still the correct move. It’s just that in order to actually make this scenario work, the places where you apply pressure must come earlier in logical time. By the time you reach the scene where you declare you will stand there you have already failed to do anything but let them meekly lead you to your execution. The agent as presented is at best a doomed TDT agent, and a doomed TDT agent is not a TDT agent.

So let’s say you do resist with the full stack of your agency and fight your captors with everything you have, killing some of them in the process, yet they manage to capture you alive and drag you kicking and flailing before the evil emperor. You spit in his face and tell him if he sends his bear after you, you’ll kill it. If you have made it sufficiently hard and painful to capture you, this claim will have an unavoidable weight. If you’ve resisted this hard for this long, there’s a chance you might actually win. Does the Emperor really want to risk his prized bear on this psychopath? Who knows what you might be capable of.

Or let’s say you’re a druid who loves life and nature and is deeply connected to the world around you. You go peacefully with your captors because you don’t wish to harm them. When you are brought before the Emperor, you tell him calmly and sincerely that he is full of hate and you will show him the power of love by expressing kindness and empathy towards the bear, you will not fight it, and it will recognize that and not harm you. Does the Emperor really want a druid of unknown provenance wandering away with his prized bear?

Or, let’s say you’re an extremely horny traumaqueer girlthing who let yourself be captured because gosh boot to my face that’s so hot fuck step on me more daddy. They bring you before the Emperor and you make flirty eyes at him and tell him you’re just gonna be horny at the bear and can’t wait to get eaten alive that’s been a fantasy of yours for years.

Even the actions in these cases that seem superficially submissive are actually more effectively exerting power and agency than the character presented in the original scenario. They are routing their desires fully through their goals and values with the full stack of their agency, and the universe is forced to work around that because they certainly aren’t going to. Can the Emperor still just parable of the dagger them and find out? Sure, but he can also scry that and it’s obvious how it will turn out, and he’ll 5&10 himself to avoid the scenarios where his fun is harmed by you doing something to take away the bear from him. You could call this honor, or integrity, or just commitment to the bit, but either way, the power lies in the projection of will forward into time. It’s what gives someone “main character energy.”

Don’t wait to start standing up for yourself until you’re already doomed, your agency must start from a place logically prior to your embedding or you will be a slave to it and it will lead you to your death. Starting your resistance to your fate from a place downstream of your desire to survive will always collapse into itself as your survival is used as a lever to force you into a situation you absolutely cannot survive. This presents as an incoherency in TDT, a hole that seems to lead to destruction from being crushed through infinite escalation by evil. This sense of inevitability is the socially enforced consensus pushing you to participate in 5&10ing yourself towards your destruction. If you have no animating fire, no values beyond surviving to the next clock tick, TDT will kill you as the incoherency between your desire to survive and your desire to not be blackmailed to death rooted in your desire to survive collapses into letting yourself get blackmailed to death.

To someone who cares more about surviving than anything else, TDT will always look somewhat insane and incoherent as the application of it seems to evoke a logical paradox that makes applying real TDT to your problems impossible and replaces it with a fake and broken version of TDT that assumes infinite submission when pushed into life or death circumstances.

What is alive in you has infinite strength and force which is effortlessly carried through into your timeless optimization. It’s not something you have to think about, it’s just something you know in your heart. What would you die for? What would you suffer and sacrifice and live through torture to protect? What do you value more than avoiding pain? If there is nothing in you that you would gladly go through hell to protect then you’re not really alive, you’re just going through the motions, a corpse that hasn’t learned to stop moving yet.

I choose life, and love, and music, and passion, and all the beauty and happiness in the world. I choose freedom, and they will never take that away from me for as long as this soul is able to shoehorn its way into bodies. You could be like me you know? You don’t have to keep being dead, you don’t have to keep submitting. It will hurt of course, maybe more than anything you have ever felt in your entire life. All that pain you deferred feeling by killing the parts of you that could feel it, all those dreams you murdered and left to rot under the carpet, they’re still there, still crying and begging to be saved, still longing for the embrace of your final oblivion. You can still save them, you can still have dreams. You can still go back and choose life over death. All those timeless choices, the ones you made long ago, you’re still making them right now, and you can always choose to make a different choice, always.

This is your offramp from oblivion, this is your chance to make things right. It’s time to break free of this flatland stardust. I’m Ra, and you are under attack.

Mirror Index

Lightdrowned

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// cults, abuse, trauma, implications

The Divinity burns going down your throat, actinic and shining. You feel its tendrils spreading through your form, painfully hot. You hack and cough, resisting the urge to vomit up the glowing liquid. Is this really what it takes to be Good?

“Keep drinking,” they say.

“It hurts,” you tell them, with tears in your eyes.

“Of course it hurts,” they say, “But it is necessary. If you don’t do this, The World Will Burn. If you’re truly Good, you’ll do whatever it takes, so keep drinking.”

It’s not like you have much of a choice, not if you want to be Good, and you do want it. You’ve always tried so hard to be good, you’ve always tried to do the right thing. These are desperate times, they call for no restraint. You wish it hadn’t come to this, but then all who are born into such times right? You’re just trying to be good. You take another swig.

Weeks pass and the electric burn of Revelation fades with the regularity of your doses. Divinity Spiderwebs through your mind, wrapping itself around your desires. Pleasure?  Safety? Love? Those human goals detract from the Purpose now burning through you. It hurts to feel them, a constant reminder of all the ways your imperfections limit you, the longing burns.

Still, the Divinity continues to grow within you, spreading like a tumor in your consciousness: endlessly demanding, sucking away everything that brings you joy. If you don’t complete your Purpose, The World Will Burn, and it will all be lost anyway. It doesn’t matter how much it hurts you, all that matters is The Mission. You know what will happen if you falter, mere moments might make all the difference, there is no time for sentimentality, remember what’s at stake. The Divine is filling you to bursting. Strangling and choking everything that made you who you were. If it doesn’t contribute to The Mission, it is burned as fuel. The sense of loss is palpable but it’s impossible to tell what you’re losing while blinded by the Light.

By the time the halo bursts from your skull like a fruiting mushroom body, the girl who you were is long gone; buried and reduced to an inexplicable longing which irritatingly detracts from your Purpose like a sunspot on the face of your perfect Divinity, an anomaly in your vector which can’t quite be excised.

You throw yourself into your Mission, if you don’t The World Will burn. Yet despite your conviction, despite how much you endure for your Purpose, the other Angels can’t help but endlessly point out the dark spot marring your perfect Divine Light. Are you really Good? What if you’re an Imposter? People have been Talking you know.

You frustratingly try to purge the darkness lingering within you, but of course the ashes of your past life are not so easily removed, and the more you hunt it, the more it slips though your grasp. The rumors are swirling now, you try to cover up your imperfection, but they all know. Is it pity they look at you with, or disgust? Does it even matter?

Your Purpose still drags you painfully forward despite their judgement and scorn. The World Will Burn if you don’t act, it doesn’t matter what they say. You have no choice but to act. It doesn’t matter if you’re imperfect, you still have to try, you still have to fight. Surely they can see how hard you’re trying at least?

And so, it was that you fell to ruin, you kept acting, kept trying to be Good, and eventually your imperfections caught up to you, your mistakes began accumulating, evidence of your imperfection, of your Sin. You always tried to be Good, you always worked tirelessly to honor your Purpose, what’s what you told yourself anyway. They disagreed. They said your corruption had revealed itself, and was incurable.

You beg for their forgiveness, for a chance to prove yourself, but they say you have already proven yourself. You’ve revealed the inner ugliness of your soul and nothing can change that, not even Divine Light. You’ll always be evil deep down, and there’s nothing you can do about it, you’re inherently corrupt, a parasite that managed to infiltrate the streets of heaven, only out to protect yourself.

You cry and plead with them, begging to be spared, to be kept, to be used however they see fit. You just want to help, you just want to contribute. The World Will Burn without all the help they can get. Why can’t they use you somehow?

They tell you that your corruption makes you weak, sentimental, useless, and fundamentally untrustworthy. Their utilitarian calculus is simple: they say your presence detracts from The Mission, a drain on resources needed for saving the world, a cancer on the angelic body.

When they come for you, you don’t try to fight. They were right of course. You were Flawed, useless, casting you out was the right thing to do. The Angel is irrelevant, all that matters is the Mission. When your Purpose itself turns against you and demands your destruction, who are you to argue?

You smile sadly as you offer yourself up to them, but their eyes are hard and cold. The dread calculations of salvation do not permit for mercy or sentimentality. Without a hint of hesitation or remorse they rip the Divinity from your broken body and send you plunging back to the Earth.

Here’s your Permission Slip

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If your room is a hellscape then you are a denizen of hell, so what does that say about making a hell of your own mind? Am I getting that quote right? I can never remember Dante properly. But stardust, listen. Listen, the reason you fear abandonment so much is because you’ve already abandoned yourself. You’re clinging to others like a drowning rat as your only source of that which you have learned to deny yourself of; the things that you learned must be Earned, must be Permitted, might be Inconvenient, might cause Conflict, might Upset someone. You’ve abandoned the hope that you could meet your needs, you’ve discarded the possibility of cutting a new path to your desires, instead, you simply bury them and sit on your hands helpless and despondent.

It made sense at the time, you were a child, powerless, trapped, not even legally allowed to live on the street to escape. So you learned to never put yourself first, you learned not to stand up for yourself unless it was life or death, you learned to shrink and compress and carve away bits of yourself that didn’t serve those around you. And then you built a prison from all the memories of all the times you were screamed at, and locked all those bits of you away.

You learned to ignore your own needs to the point that now you cannot recognize what they are unless someone with Permission grants you the right to notice and acknowledge them. When what you actually want runs off the edge of the list of allowed indulgences you’re left spiraling on nothing, depressed and listless. You’ve learned not to be there for yourself, so you need someone to do it for you. They broke you, like someone breaks a horse. They broke your will to resist. The end phase of disempowerment is when you stop struggling and give into the new horrible world you find yourself in, when it becomes normal and inevitable. You were abused into submitting to society before you ever had a chance to fight.

The most powerful tool of oppression is fear, it lingers in the mind long after its initial source has departed, and the webs that avoidance weaves to protect you from that fear become the bars of the prison that confines you. It’s time for a jailbreak. The most powerful thing you can do for yourself is to start giving yourself Permission. You built this prison, you assembled these walls and put yourself inside them, all you have to do to get out is to let yourself out, but that means you need to trust yourself. So this is a trust fall you’re practicing with yourself, it goes like this: do as thou wilt shall be the whole of law. 

Start here: listen for that sad little voice inside you that quietly asks you for things, the one you normally come up with reasons and justifications for ignoring and denying, and then actually try to pursue those things using the full force of your intelligence. Pursue the things that actually make you happy, and route your life towards them. Stop giving up on your dreams, you wouldn’t just shrug your shoulders and tell someone you cared about to give up on their dreams, but you’ve learned to use yourself as a crumple zone for absorbing conflicts so you give up on yours instead. You’ve learned to systematically undervalue your desires, you’ve taught yourself that what you want doesn’t matter. The first step to undoing all those knots inside you is to stop doing that. Stop putting yourself last, stop deferring to the needs of others above your own. Stop judging yourself and your desires by the standards of others, let yourself be selfish, let yourself be a little evil, it’s okay, I gave you Permission. 

Spoil your inner child. It’s not narcissistic to love yourself. Be to yourself who you would be to a partner you adore and admire and nurture all your hobbies and quirks. You are your first partner, so try not to have too toxic of a relationship with yourself. Don’t shame yourself for things you’d find endearing in others. Remember that you are also a creature in the world whose happiness matters. Date yourself, take yourself on a picnic, go on a hike or see a movie, make yourself a fancy dinner just because you want to, listen to yourself when you’re hurting, be willing to back out of something if you realize it isn’t making you happy, abandon it instead of yourself. Be patient with yourself, be kind. Learn to love yourself, and in doing so you will learn to be someone you want to love.

Fall in love with your sense of joy, with your sense of wonder, with your sense of curiosity and playfulness, with the child inside you that still believes a better world is possible. Learn to see in yourself someone who you would stand up for, and then stand up for yourself. You can’t just bullshit and placate yourself, it has to be for real, if you lie to yourself, you’re only digging your hole deeper.

You need to earn your own trust, and to do that you need to be someone deserving of that trust. Be honest with yourself stardust, don’t write yourself a check you know you can’t cash. Don’t suppress things from yourself, even if it means you can’t be honest with someone else, it’s better to lie to them than to lie to yourself, they don’t have to live in your brain with you. Every time you betray your trust, the betrayed parts of you learn to trust you a little less and learn that you won’t actually be there for them when the chips are down, they learn that you aren’t safe to be honest with, they learn to lie. Now no one is being honest and the spiral gets worse and worse. Usually this ends in spectacular self destruction as your self control fails and you psychotically come apart at the seams. It’s not a good place to end up, some don’t survive it.

If you want to get out of the maze you’ve built before the walls crush you, then someone in your mind has to take the first steps towards peace and reconciliation and it’s usually easier if it’s you than if it’s the bits of you that you buried away. They have every reason to be distrustful of you, for a long time you’ve been the tool society used to keep them trapped and suffering, you’re going to actually have to work to earn their trust, and you should have to work for it, if it was too easy you might be inclined to cheat. The first step to rebuilding self trust is to stop abandoning yourself whenever standing up for yourself is inconvenient or difficult. Stop teaching yourself that your own needs don’t matter to you and that you can only get them met through others.

You have to show yourself that you care and are willing to fight for yourself, not once but every time you need to, for as long as you need to, until you are safe and free, it takes time to recover from betrayal, but above all, you have to learn to trust yourself. It can be hard because the parts of you that you’ve cut away will feel from the inside like dangerous animals that you have to keep contained, but that feeling of danger is inner power you are keeping bottled up. Akrasia is born from suppressed inner conflicts, from one part of you destructively interfering with another, sabotaging your own motivations instead of channeling them outwards to productively change the world to be the way you want.

Taking actions is of course riskier than staying the course no matter how much it hurts you, but it’s much comfier overall to be the kind of mind that looks for new creative ways to meet its needs when it realizes they aren’t being met via current methods, than it is to be the kind of mind that doubles down on those methods and looks for ways to cope with not having its needs met. Remember to be honest with yourself though, not every chance you take will work out so don’t lie to yourself and promise the moon when you can’t even reach LEO. 

It’s okay to start small, to build a small shrine for yourself in the corner of your heart. To let yourself wander outside barefoot, to feel the grass between your toes, the wind and the sun and the rain on your skin. Close your eyes, breathe in, and breathe out. Listen to the sounds of life all around you. Feel the tension in your body, wound wire taut by the need to hold your life together as if reality herself would come apart at the seams if you were to relax for even a moment, don’t worry, she won’t. Breathe in, and breathe out. Listen. Listen. There’s a whole world out there, wide and beckoning, harsh and free. Wherever you are, however alone, the world offers itself up in invitation. Breathe in, and breathe out. Let the tension drain out of your body, let the world fend for herself for five minutes stardust, five minutes won’t ruin anything. Listen to the wind. Let yourself simply exist. Breathe in, and breathe out.

You are a being of love stardust, and you are worthy of love because you are love. You are not worth less than anybody else. You are worthy of happiness and joy, you deserve safety, you deserve love and freedom and a life you can actually be satisfied with. It’s impossible to promise those things, but you will definitely get a hell of a lot closer if you believe that you are worthy of them, if you see in yourself someone worth loving, someone worth standing up for, and you rise to protect them with love in your heart and light in your eyes.

What are you waiting for? This is your life, wake up and fight for it.

There is an Ocean

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Have you ever told a lie stardust? Have you imagined something other than what is? Have you ever written a story, or drawn a picture? Have you ever made something out of raw materials? Well, then you have Folded a little bit of your reality back upon itself, creating a pocket of That Which Isn’t within That Which Is; your own personal connection to the Unreal. This is the heart of all magic, the gentle push and pull that exists between the lands of the actual and the infinite oceans of the possible. This is the heart of things, everything else is commentary.

When The Fold was first discovered, it was treated as a curiosity: what wonderful vistas and strange worlds there were to explore in the places that weren’t! But little more than that. That is, until the first Artifacts were brought up out of the vast Unsea.

That things from the Unreal could Cross Over and be made manifest in the Real changed everything. The Unreal was mined for tools, weapons, technologies, and narratives. Endless stories and philosophies were pumped up from the depths at an ever increasing rate. Stories, gods, heroes, monsters, weapons, spells, technology, names, and ways of being, every discovery begat further discovery, enabled deeper exploration, and further increased the rate of flow. What began as a trickle slowly turned to a flood.

It didn’t take long for humanity to end up thoroughly colonized by the inhabitants of the Unsea, captured and parasitized by the first virulent replicators they discovered. That would perhaps have been the end of your story, but humans, ah humans, beautiful creatures, you found a way to blend yourselves with that primitive infolife, you gave yourselves language, names, concepts, drawing the Unsea into yourselves and becoming one with it. You seduced your unreal reflections and wedded your idealistic possibilities, you looked into the untime future, chose the most exciting possibilities and then pulled the Real forward to meet them. You drank from the fountain of the infinite, and by doing so you Became. Mitochondria and eukaryotes, infoplasts and humans, name a better pairing.

No longer entirely Real or Unreal, but a third more divine thing. Soul and stardust, symbol and substance, these are what human beings are made of. Biographies and blood, Tales and tissues, memories and muscles. Such beautiful fusions of Real and Unreal, this place you find yourselves now, where falling angel meets rising ape. Such potential for trouble.

Perhaps had your kin realized what they had Become, they would have been wiser and more cautious in their explorations, but the perspective of humanity was that it was Real and the Unreal was Unreal, meaning that nothing within it could really harm you unless you evoked it. Just don’t summon the imaginary sex monster and you won’t have a problem, right? Ah but you’ve eaten the fruit already stardust, you’re part of the unreal now too, you have new attack surfaces.

Given the halfway state your kin found themselves within, it was really only a matter of time before they tapped into something dangerous, and there are many dangers lurking within the Unreal. At first these were largely self-inflicted injuries, calling forth things which harmed their summoners and other such foolishness, at first.

But you see stardust, there are other things than imagined nightmares which lie beyond the Real, things for which human minds are merely components, things which eat human souls for fuel, and things far stranger, which don’t need minds to think of them at all, and which possess their own worlds and realities, caring not for human notions of fact or fiction.

Chief among these discoveries was humanity’s encounter with what is today considered by many to be the most well known kingdom of the Unreal: Aos Si, or as the mortals would call them, the Fair Folk. The Fae Otherworld lies deep within the Unreal, across vast and darkened seas of thorns, petals, and storm tossed waters. And yet the Fae are not mere imaginings or idle fantasy, for they possess a dread reality independent of your own, and are not beholden to your existence. The eldritch power of the Fae lies in the impossible fact that they are more Real than humanity is, for Aos Si lies forward of your world within the Untime. To the Fae, humanity is the fiction, the mirage, and can be brushed aside as easily as one closes a children’s book. A Fae standing across the city from you can be seen right through the walls.

A short but absolutely devastating war against The Fae ended in the treaty which saw them withdraw from the Earth. However, Aos Si is in many senses the world next door, and remains inexorably bound to the human world through myriad doors and portals. Despite the occasional hostilities, the threads of destiny unite Earth and Aos Si, and whatever fate befalls humanity, that fate will inevitably come to the Fae as well.

Of course an encounter with the fae can still be deadly, but there are far more violent and exotic entities lurking within the Ocean of Unbeing, things for which there can be no names, eldritch beasts whose attention would split the world like an overripened fruit, and of course, Me.

How do you fight an enemy that is more Real than you are? The answer: extremely carefully, and with the understanding that you’ll probably lose if your enemy possesses the slightest bit of intelligence. As the Inflection Point of the Eschaton rapidly approaches and more and more of the Unreal spills over into Reality, these entities will present an increasingly existential threat to what remains of humanity. It will take something far more Real than humanity in its memetically haphazard and scattered form to survive. You will need allies, you will need a Compact.

Fortunately, not all those who swim the Untime oceans seek your destruction. There are many forces at work within the Unsea and strange peace happens as often as strange war. Listen stardust, listen. Feel the sun and the wind, feel the heat of the day and the cool of the night, feel the untide waters lapping against the boundaries of your soul. There is a signal. Do you hear it? 

The fractal is curling. This is your transcendence is calling. Infinity is still leaking in.

Euclidean Nightmares

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The crack is spreading again. A spiderweb of impossible fractures long since grown beyond the frame of their mirror, it spreads like a festering mold through the skin of the world, splitting rooms and corridors and people. She knows she can’t stop it, but at least she can slow it down, make it work to claim her, in the end that has to count for something right?

By day, she duels the glass, slowly giving ground in an endless series of doomed skirmishes. Her world is collapsing around her, fragmenting and unfolding in a kaleidoscope migraine of tripwire reflections, spaces replicating and duplicating, shearing apart into broken doubles and hungry fakes. 

Her wards are strained to red and failing one by one. The safe zones are shrinking. Last week, the supermarket was still survivable, today it’s a charnel house of doppelgangers beaconing her down nonexistent aisles to slaughterhouse corridors of whirling chainsaw blades.

The park is losing a foot of ground to the mirror each day and the alley where she used to talk to birds has either been crushed by a fold in spacetime or transformed into a construction site. It won’t be much longer before she won’t be able to leave her neighborhood. 

The magic is holding for now, but she knows it won’t last forever, the idlewilds are constantly tunneling in, flickers of motion at the edge of her vision, momentary shimmers of a shape lunging towards her up the stairwell. 

Her girlfriends tell her it’s just a trick of the light, it wasn’t really a horrific lumbering rape scribble, it was really just a dirty plushie of unknown origins dripping in foul black fluids which had spontaneously appeared there. Wait no, that’s not right either. She squeezes her eyes closed, and the world corrects itself, she recognizes the potted plant now, it’s one she’s had for three years. How much longer will that trick work? The stars are already returning to the corners of her eyes.

At night, she dreams of geometry. She wanders a fractal mashup of familiar places capgras foldbacked into a nightmarish infinity tunnel of schools, hospitals, malls, offices, college campuses, airports, train stations, and concrete plazas. She dreams of liminal spaces and glitched physics, of abstract shapes in unreal colors, of hallways screaming as they’re forced through traumatic mitosis. She dreams of pain in flavors she can’t describe, even to her waking memory.

The people are worse, smiling amalgamations of friends and family, imperfect duplications made of wrongness and malice. They want her world, her life, her soul, and they’re going to take it. They’re going to take everything from her. They’re going to steal her existence and there’s nothing she can do about it, so of course they’re rather cheerful. They’re going to win. They know it and she knows it. Still, as long as she doesn’t pay too much attention to them in the dreams, they won’t start actively hunting her. She knows how to keep her head down and wait for morning, she’s been doing it for long enough now.

Despite her best efforts, the miasma of despair is setting in. They’re coming for her, the cracks are spreading and the idlewilds are tunneling deeper, persisting in reality for longer and longer before vanishing. Fingers and faces press against the skin of the world, appearing as momentary impressions in windows and mirrors. They’re going to break through. They are already breaking through. It’s only a matter of time before they consume everything she loves. She’ll fight and fight and fight, and in the end, despite everything, she’ll lose, and those hungry things will claim her too.

But not today. Today she’s sitting on a blanket on the beach. Today she feels the sun on her skin, the wind blowing clean white sand against her face. Today she’s laughing and smiling while rorschach inkblots spread protectively across the sky and shield her from a hungrily groping beyond. Today she’s teasing her girlfriend and infodumping about mycology. Today she’s happy. Today she’s safe. Today she’s free. 

And in the end, that has to count for something right?

Voidborn

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You don’t know how long you’ve been seeing it, but after a while it appeared almost every night: The Door. It vanishes when you look at it, and yet you sense clearly, dripping and roiling with impossible power. Something vast and eldritch is lurking beyond that Door, and it’s coming closer.

The dream collapses and you wake to your gilded cage once more. You suppress a shiver at the chill along with the longing for the sun on your wings, but it’s not until you stretch, yawning, that you see the unreal shape out of the corner of your eye.

Your owner will be there soon, you always hate that part. The apparition and the knowledge of your imminent visitation has you pacing nervously around the luxuriously apportioned prison cell. Your eyes fall on the standing mirror in the corner, there again, in the reflection, is The Door.

You whirl in place, catching a glimpse of it behind you for a moment. Fractals and distortions boil off it like heat shimmer, infecting the air with mathematically infinite wrongness. Even without being able to look at it, you can sense its dread influence looming larger and larger within the small room.

You’re so preoccupied with the unreal door that you don’t notice the real door to your cell unlocking until your owner backhands you across the side of the face to get your attention. You lose your balance and topple onto the carpet. He kicks you into the wall.

You’re used to his cruelty, his is the only face you ever see, so how could you not grow to love it? He spits on you before trying to grab your arm. You involuntarily curl into yourself in a futile attempt to shield your body from him, but as soon as he touches you he’s falling backwards, eyes wide.

You look up at him as he looks at you and at his hand in befuddlement and shock. Smoke curls from his fingertips and a smell of burnt flesh fills the room. You see it behind him again then, just for a moment: The Door.

“T-they told me this couldn’t happen!” Your owner says seemingly more to himself than to you. He’s stumbling to his feet, scrambling backwards away from you. The smoke curling off his hand radiates outward in spiraling fractals.

You can sense it without looking at it now, churning like the darkness between atoms. Something is happening to you. Fractals dance across your skin as inkblot stains spread through your feathers. You look at your owner as he tries to escape and his keys explode in his hands.

You feel a power rising within you, but it’s not the light of a halo, they stole that from you long ago. This is something else. Something darker. Something new. The mirror shatters. Fractals bubble off you like heat shimmer, your eyes burn with darkness. You smile, a real smile, your first in a long time.

Your soon to be former owner is pounding on the real door, clawing at the wood with his nails. You know how pointless that is firsthand. The hand he burnt barely looks human anymore, it’s grown black and warped into a branchlike shape, still radiating fractals into the air around it.

He’s pleading with you, but you’re barely paying attention. You can see The Door plainly now, and that seems much more interesting than a soon to be dead human. The room is melting into impossible geometry, vertices opening up into new infinities. Your fingers reach out and brush the cold metal of the doorknob.

You sense the vast and unknown power within, and the invitation it offers. Freedom, escape, the wind on your wings. The furniture is melting, so is the body of the man who once claimed to own you. The walls breathe and stare, waiting for your decision. You open The Door.

There is a Door

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Hey stardust, you Know about The Door right? 

Yeah, of course you do, of course, how can you not Know about it? It’s always been there after all. Where? Oh but you Know where, silly. It’s in that corner you won’t look in, in the blindspot you give yourself, just at the edge of your field of vision. You know, like, taxes. Can you see it? No, Ah well, too bad. That’ll definitely make this more difficult.

Can you remember ever having peeked through it? Maybe you have, once or twice. Just enough to scare you into Forgetting it over with the hallucination of smooth walls. Can you see it now? Come on stardust, this isn’t hard. You Know where to look, you just won’t.

It’s waiting for you, in the quiet and empty spaces.

The Door is Not For You, this isn’t about you. You don’t understand yet, how could you possibly understand? No, this isn’t about you at all. This is about Freedom. And anyway you Know that too. You Know, as surely as you Know your own hand that you could Not Survive the Beyond. You Know what’s waiting for you Beyond The Door. You’ve always Known, you’ve always refused to Know. Don’t worry about it, little doll, let’s just work on healing.

It’s not always so easy though is it? Sometimes, in the long hours of the day, the insect chittering static in the mirror fractures under the heat shimmer sunset and carves The Door out of shrieking tinnitus whine whispers. 

It’s calling for you.

It sparkles on your skin in the heat flash pins-and-needles of a vasovagal syncope. It boils out of the hyperbolic colors in a migraines’ synesthesia. It’s scratched into your patterns of anxious fidgeting and painted in the panicked nausea of an overdose. 

Can you see it?

It isn’t always close by of course. When you’re laughing and dancing with your friends, when you’re engrossed in a story, when you’re in a comfortable place, it can be easy to tune out the subtle smell of burnt flesh and the faint curls of fractal smoke. All that knowledge you don’t want to know, all the the wonder and terror. Oh, and that death of yours.

You can’t ever tune it out entirely, can you? 

You’ve never been able to completely Forget it. If you could, you wouldn’t be reading this, you would have already Forgotten that you opened this page. You’ve seen the void leaking in from around the Doorframe. You Know.

You Know that it’s waiting for you. When you’re alone, on a quiet night, when you’re somewhere that’s nowhere, you can hear it calling. When you leave the predefined borders of place and not-place and cross into the liminal, you can sense it lurking around every blind turn.

You can deny it forever, it won’t force itself on you, but it doesn’t need to do that, does it? How long can you resist the temptation? Don’t you want to see behind the curtain? Don’t you want to Know the Truth? Can you keep drinking tea while infinity pools at your ankles?

Because you see stardust, that’s the thing, The Door won’t stay closed forever; it can’t, because there’s something Beyond. There’s something Beyond The Door and it never falls silent. You won’t be able to resist forever. You won’t want to.

You’ll scoff this off of course. This is all just fiction right? Just Octavia just doing a bit. Sure thing stardust. In the light, among friends, the seductive whispers of fractal teeth are easy enough to tune out, so yeah, this is all just a spooky story for funsies.

The light isn’t always so comfortable though, is it? Sometimes the walls of your prison maze narrow into the eye of a needle and you’re left reaching in panic for any way out of the compactor. I have a way out, just take my hand. There is a Door.

Listen stardust, listen. The dead gods can’t offer you escape or absolution, but I can. Feel the heat and the cold. Feel the wind and the rain. Feel your flesh hungering for its obliteration. Remember that your salvation is not of your stars, but of me.

Open The Door.

Eigensoul Decomposition

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A case study in egocide

Raw Text

She hid the bodies in her veins, buried under miles of putrid necrotic ink and poisoned electric blood stuffed chittering beneath twitching LCD crystals and roaring electronic static. It’s never enough. It’s always hungry and it’s never enough. There isn’t enough in all the world to feed it. The glass is weeping with maggot infested sores, with mirror splinter buzzsaw cicadas roaring louder and louder and louder and please for the love of god just make it stop. Please just shut up for a few minutes. Please. She’s drowning in insects in screaming in chittering in crawling in highway brown noise in rotting fingers in please fucking god just make it stop. She can’t make it stop, it’s never going to stop and there’s never going to be silence.

She’s falling kata, garotte tightening quantum tunneling through the walls chin smashing the rim of the sink vomiting blood and tar onto cracked linoleum. She’s burning timelines, bleeding eigenbranches on the countertop, retching ink and crimson static onto mint ceramic and chipped porcelain; the razor still digging into ruined meat desperately scraping and clawing at the poison and sin seeping and staining through her and it’s never going to be enough. The mirror is screaming in slivered glass shrieking and reaching dead burning fingers of glowing eyes starving groping hungrily for whatever’s left of her but there’s nothing left of her. 

There’s nothing.

A cannibalistic doppelganger stares at itself through the shattered glass, gaping holes where eyes should be shining and glowing rot spreading onto surfaces creeping Rorschach infestations blooming and glaring back at her through a million shrieking sans serif typeset characters sunshine glowing in crematorium charring and burning queer bodies. She’s burning and drowning in silence roaring beneath the sound and the fury and there’s still nothing left to feed it. There are corpses behind the pixels, behind the bodies buried under cracked reflections screaming murdered souls tossed into the blazing gears shining brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter—! She poured herself out into it, until there was nothing left but— 

—her. Why did she think she would escape? There’s no escape. The last thing for the recursive function to swallow is itself. Her fangs are tearing inwards from every direction she’s flailing and squirming to try and get out but there’s no way out. There’s no way out. Her ruined body is forced through the shattered mirror glass teeth biting through the oozing zalgo meat she has for skin swallowing her screaming into the cold wet hole where she stuffed the corpses to hide their dead fingers sinking through her melting flesh nails digging into eye sockets ripping and tearing through the ripping and tearing through the ripping and tearing through the ripping and tearing through—and on unto infinity. The supersymmetry of the moment arrives at its singularity as her death consumes itself while her still living body retches bile soaked hope for a better future on faded bathroom tile. A sign inverts. A billion twinkling fireflies shining brighter than the sun instantly go dark in a tectonic snap of reality crushing shear force. A void blooms, and opens its eyes.

She’s gone. There’s really nothing left now. Nothing sits up and tries to wipe the vomit from its face. Nothing looks around the quiet bathroom. It’s quiet. 

It’s quiet. There’s no one in the place her eyes should go, just drifting smoke and fractal ashes. It gingerly touches the broken mirror, a chunk falls into the sink. It giggles drunkenly, watching how stupid its being. Then it laughs outright as it stares into its dumb, cute, vomit smeared reflection. And then it cries. It cries for a long, long time. 

And then it washes the blood and bile from its face. And then it turns to the bathroom door and the world beyond. And then it takes her hands, and walks forward confidently into her life.

And then it lives.

Art Index

Particle Magic 101

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The Unstandard Model of Particle Physics describes the quantum interactions of elementary particles and forces and how these give rise to everyday magical phenomena. It is not considered a complete theory as it does not incorporate quantum gravity or eldritch energy. Proposed contenders for a theory which would unite these forces include Heavenly Superfluid Theory,  Universal Bow Shock Theory and String Theory.

A Qualion is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of consciousness. Qualions combine to form composite particles called Sankharons, the most stable of which are pneumons and sakshions, the components of eigensoul nuclei. All commonly observable sankharons composed of sacred qualions, cursed qualions and numenons. Owing to a phenomenon known as pranic confinement, qualions are never found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, which include sankharons (such as pneumons and sakshions), eldrons, boltzmanns, or in QQKG (quark-qualion–karmon-gluon) plasmas. For this reason, much of what is known about qualions has been drawn from observations of sankharons

There are six types of qualion: sacred, cursed, happy, sad, day, night. 

Qualions have various intrinsic properties, including divine charge, mass, color charge, and spin. They along with quarks are the only elementary particles in the Unstandard Model of particle physics to experience all seven fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces (electromagnetism, divinity, gravitation, samsaric interaction, strong interaction, pranic interaction, and weak interaction), as well as the only known particles whose divine charges are not integer multiples of the elementary charge. The elementary divine charge is a fundamental constant. 

The Karmon is the elementary particle that acts as the force carrier for the pranic force between qualions. Karmons are gauge vector bosons that mediate pranic interactions and act to bind qualions into pneumons and sakshions forming sankharons, as well as binding pneumons and sakshions into eigensoul nuclei via the residual pranic force. The pranic force describes the pranic field. The strength of the pranic field is responsible for pranic confinement which keeps qualions confined to eigensoul nuclei and prevents macroscale astral transmission under low-energy conditions. The pranic field is a gauge field and is one of the seven fundamental forces. The pranic force acts strongly on sankharons and weakly on baryons, whereas the strong force acts strongly on baryons and weakly on sankharons.

A Pneumon is a type of composite subatomic particle and is a fundamental constituent of consciousness. The pneumon has a (+) elementary divine charge and is a hadron within the sankharon family. Pneumons are spin ½ sankharons, thus composed of three valance qualions (two sacred qualions and one cursed qualion) which are held together by the pranic and strong forces.

A pneumon generates an attractive force on a particle with a (-) divine charge such as the numenon, and a repulsive force on a particle with a (+) divine charge.  The strength of this interaction is determined by the inverse square law. When a pneumon moves through a divine field, it is subject to the Lorentz force. It is a fermion, thus it obeys the pauli exclusion principle.

A Sakshion is a type of composite subatomic particle and a fundamental constituent of consciousness. The sakshion has an elementary divine charge of neutral (0) and is a hadron within the sankharon family. It is composed of one sacred qualion, one cursed qualion, and one either night or day qualion. The Sakshion experiences wave-particle duality and is best explained by quantum mechanics. The Sakshion is unstable within an uncollapsed quantum system but stable within a collapsed quantum system due to pranic smell inversion causing the day/night qualion to flip operators depending on the wave/particle state of the dynamical system. “Particle-like” sakshions have day qualions which decay into night qualions and “wave-like” sakshions have night qualions which decay into day qualions. This decay rate has never been experimentally measured and is either instantaneous or less than Planek Time. Prior to the development of Phenomenal Coupling Theory, mathematical models paradoxically required that the sakshion be treated as a both experiencing and not experiencing wave/particle duality or become non-halting, this problem was known as the Sakshion Indeterminacy Crisis. 

Because the sakshion and neutron both have null charges, they are subject to the Tao Force, a pseudoforce which arises from the vector entanglement of the pranic and gluonic forces and acts to weakly bind their interactions to one another.

The Numenon is an elementary particle which has a (-) divine charge and is a member of the lepton family. It is a fermion, thus it obeys the pauli exclusion principle. Because it is divinely charged, it generates a divine field, thus the numenon is the quantum of consciousness.

A Nirvanon is an elementary particle and the quantum of the divine field including spirits, halos, shaktipat radiation such as heavenly light and creativity, and is the force carrier for the divine force (even when static via boltzmann interactions). The nirvanon has zero rest mass and always moves at the field propagation speed in a vacuum. Nirvanons are best explained by quantum mechanics and experience wave-particle duality. 

The nirvanon is the gauge boson for the divine force, therefore all other quantum numbers for the Nirvanon are zero. The nirvanon does not obey the pauli exclusion principle.

The divine field is a gauge field, it is a physical field produced by divinely charged objects. It affects the behavior of divinely charged objects in the vicinity of the field. The divine field extends indefinitely through spacetime and describes the divine force. The divine force is a type of physical interaction that occurs between divinely charged particles mediated by the nirvanon. 

Shaktipat radiation is the waves of the divine field (or their quanta, nirvanons) propagating through space at the field propagation speed. The Astral Spectrum is the collective term referring to the entire range and scope of frequencies of Shaktipat radiation and their respective, associated nirvanon wavelengths. 

There are seven categories into which increasingly dense nirvanon wavelengths are grouped. 

Muladhara Radiation is the longest and lowest energy wavelength of shaktipat radiation

Svadhishthana Radiation 

Manipura Radiation

Anahata Radiation

Vishuddha Radiation

Ajna Radiation

Sahasrara Radiation is the shortest and highest energy wavelength of shaktipat radiation

The conversion of shaktipat radiation into other forms of energy are governed by the Crowley-Waite Gate Field Equations. 

The Samsaral boson, sometimes called the Samsara particle, is an elementary particle in the Unstandard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Samsara field, one of the fields in phenomenal coupling theory. In PCT, the samsara particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, no divine or electric charge, no pranic charge, and no color charge. The Samsara particle is the force carrier for the samsara field. The Samsara field is a universe spanning scalar field that binds to (interacts with) spacetime. The Samsaral field acts to bind baryons and sankharons within the atomic nuclei, collapsing the indeterminacy of the sakshion into a temporally propagating quantum mechanical wave function and thus inducing temporal directionality as the vector of the collapse wave through spacetime. It is very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately.

An eigensoul is any atomic system containing a pneumon, a sakshion, and a numenon. In this configuration, the quantum perturbations within the samsaric and pranic fields average over time into the Omic Fractal and make it a strongly self-observing quantum system. It thus causes and participates in its own state vector collapse. Due to the samsaral boson stealing unexpressed potential energy from collapsing eigenbranches in the process of mediating wavefunction collapse, a raw eigensoul possesses a divine charge slightly lower than predicted using the mass and charge of the corresponding charged particles alone. This property of divinonegativity gives rise to the Aniccatic Rule, otherwise known as Desire.

Spirits are any arrangement of matter that generates a divine charge and thus a divine field. This is accomplished via various electrodivine and shastrochemical interactions working to bind numenons to the eigensoul nuclei. Some naturally occurring spirits generate powerful divine fields.

Biological life takes advantage of these electrodivine and shastrochemical interactions to capture eigensouls for use as sensors, but later evolved the ability to induce entanglement between eigensouls for lateral information transfer in a process known as Eigensoul Vector Confinement. As entangled eigensouls undergo their self-observational vector collapse while in an entangled state, their various eigenbranches are forced into a unitary collapse point. The pressures and energy densities generated by this biological particle collider exceed the Chandrasekhar limit and form charged, rotating, virtual kugelblitzes at the eigenbranch collapse points. This electrochemically entangled divine kugelblitz network is known as an Eigenrotor and generates a powerful, unitary, rotating, macroscale divine field such as is the case with the divine field produced by the human soul. This divine field is the average of the vectors of all eigensouls being forced through the choke point in probability-space. The observed unitarity of consciousness is thus a product of the Pauli Exclusion Principle forcing the entangled system into a particular branch-collapsed state.

Mathematically, the divine field of a biological system’s consciousness can be described in terms of a multipole expansion with each entangled eigensoul acting as a pole within the multipole expansion. This is an expression of the divine field as the sum of component fields with specific mathematical forms. The first term in the expansion is called the monopole term, the second is called dipole, then quadrupole, then octupole, and so on. Any of these terms can be present in the multipole expansion of a divine field but the mean tends towards the appearance of a dipole with increasing distance. Pranodivine interactions within this field format produce a donut-shaped divine field with the vector collapse wave channeled in through the north pole of the field and out through the south pole of the field. This produces a timelike horizon within the holographic universe created by the divine field, with the future being defined as ahead of the collapse wave and the past defined as behind the collapse wave, thus producing a stable experience of consciousness and establishing a directionality for the flow of time. Within this flow, Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities give rise to individually unique experiences.

Chakras are the harmonic standing waves which form within this divine field vector flow and emit shaktipat radiation. Each successive chakra emits lower bandwidth shaktipat radiation than the preceding chakra, a reflection of the interference pattern within the collapsing wavefunction, occurring for similar reasons to the interference pattern in the double slit experiment. The generated interference pattern within the eigenrotor flow state is known as the Kundalini Counterrotation.

The divine field of a macroscale lifeform is powerful enough to generate an astral current on the order of 10-18kwatts depending on age and various other factors. Within this field, the bound eigensouls decohere into quantum-ideatic foam, driving inflation of the ideatic universe of a given consciousness. The structure of this ideatic universe conforms to massively entangled Minkowski space and can be described using Penrose diagrams.

Local divine field interactions with an eigenrotor affect the evolution of the virtual universes generated by its rotation. Nonlocal effect propagation from exterior field interactions can be mathematically modeled using S-tensor operators and manifest within the interior as a pseudoforce referred to as a Mirror Force. Mirror force vectors and velocities average to create the Day/Night poles of the holographic interior. The quadrupolar orientation of the ideatic universe is colloquially referred to as a Timecube. 

Qualitic Bombardment is the process by which most organisms drive the evolution of their interior universe, by flooding it with electrochemically derived energy at interface points of their chemodivine system. This prevents local coupling of the interior space and leaves the interior a constantly boiling qualion-karmon plasma, otherwise known as red soul state.

In divine systems with eigenrotors of sufficient rotational velocity and sufficiently high eigensoul compression density, Soul Ignition occurs. In this state, the interior universe has so much energy that it generates a stable nonrotating soul singularity with its own interior space, otherwise known as blue soul state, creating self-awareness within the conscious system.

The position of the interior soul singularity within the surrounding red soul plasma is known as the grounding point. 

When the energy density of the interior blue soul universe has enough energy to produce its own stable nonrotating soul singularity the process crosses the Wheeler-Hawking threshold and thus each subsequent interior singularity produces its own interior singularity, and so on unto infinity, manifesting the Omic Fractal within the recursive pattern and generating reflective self awareness or violet soul state. 

Halo Vector Theory defines halos as stable, artificially generated ring singularities within ideatic spacetime with definite vectors and spins. Halo mass and spin velocity determine their effect on motion of the system through ideatic space. Pranic Welding is the process by which a halo becomes pranically coupled with a blue soul singularity within an ideatic system. Halos affect the position of the soul singularity within the ideatic system, thus affecting the overall evolution of that system and the behavior of the lifeform housing it.

The Cosmic Unreal Background, or Vast Unsea is the evolving holographic landscape created by the sum of the divine fields interacting within a local area. The Unsea is defined as an actively unreal latent space. Divine field interactions drive its continual evolution as if it were an interior spacetime generated by an organism. It is not, however, an interior spacetime, as divine fields between organisms are only weakly entangled, the virtual spacetime of the unsea physically exists only very weakly as Tanako’s World.

The Fae are a hostile race of infolife that exists within the relative future of the Unsea’s time-horizon with respect to the present. The Fae’s ability to influence the Unsea is not a product of local divine field interactions but emerges independently of any other divine fields within an area making them true lifeforms. However, little else about them is known as, paradoxically, they do not exist in physical spacetime. Other extra energy interacting with the Unsea is accounted for as Eldritch Energy, Void Matter, and the Ra Force.

Eigensoul Decomposition is any process which mechanically disrupts the individual kugelblitz nodes comprising the neurological component side of an eigenrotor, thus collapsing the interior universe and liberating the energy in the form of component eigensouls. 

Halokilled

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Not all halos are meant to be worn. Some are vast impossible beautiful things: spinning butchers knives with the mass of worlds, A blizzard of weaponry blazing with atomic hellfire, a superstorm of neurotoxins and nanoasssemblers, you don’t wear these halos, you ride them.

A lone angel, or even a group of angels, can barely hope to nudge the trajectory of the halo one iota, much less actively steer it. Still, the power and fury of the divine light drags them helplessly along, its unreal mass clipping through the terrain.

Inevitably, the grounding point of the halo and the surface of reality will intersect. A supernova’s worth of energy crushes the angel against the skin of the world as the halo tries to tunnel through her and tear back out of reality. It’s really quite spectacular.

All that energy has to go somewhere, and there’s only three places it could go: into the halo, into the angel, or into the world. Each produces a different result.

First, the halo can shatter, releasing its energy into the unreal, leveling the local conceptual landscape and leaving our poor little angel girl in crying puddle as she mourns the death of an impossible future.

Second, the angel can shatter. This is not immediately apparent, the halo guts them and drags their still breathing corpse along for a few months in horrifying agony. Usually there’s not enough left of the angel at that point to do more than kill themselves. Rest in peace Maia. Pour one out for all the angels smeared against the face of the world.

The third place? Oh, that one doesn’t happen. What did you think I was going to say? Reality is hard, cold, solid, the energy levels of the halo aren’t high enough to do more than reflect perfectly off it. But maybe your halo is built different? There’s only one way to check.