#cw existentialism

theres thing thing called Liking One and basically, ive gone pro

I don't know why I'm attracted to it. Why I keep repeating the name it gave itself. 

Do I love it? I don't think so.

'Sides, that would be strange, wouldn't it? 

To love a star that appears in the sky once every millennium. A star that can bring both relief and pain. A star that may not care about this world. A star that does not shine.

…

Nevertheless, it is to it that I turn in my hour of despair.

Because with it you don't need any light.

Guess I've always been attracted to darkness.

And so was it.

The universe is plural. Everything within it is made of smaller things working together.

The Universe from Real Life is Plural!

I think I kind of passively assumed they meant Nona or something but then why specify the River, why beyond the River?

But "we will see ourselves and each other as we really are"... Compared to how he described Dulcie in The Unwanted Guest...

PALAMEDES: May I see you? DULCINEA: Are you sure? PALAMEDES: For the first time, and the last. DULCINEA: (After a long pause) All right. Blackout on the stage. Then a light on Palamedes—a Palamedes who is completely dazzled, and staring blankly outward, at nothing in particular. PALAMEDES: (As if reciting) “And her body was like the chrysolite, and her face as the appearance of lightning, and her eyes as a burning lamp: and her arms, and all downward even to the feet, like in appearance to glittering brass.”

I think he had told Camilla about it, and she was asking about Dulcie recognizing them in the River and beyond, but more than that...

His description is "as if reciting" because it's rewording a Biblical vision of a heavenly figure. And immediately before that is...

DULCINEA: [...] And now I’m not in the River and I won’t ever be again. PALAMEDES: If you’re on the shore, then I’ll find you. DULCINEA: Which shore? PALAMEDES: Pardon? DULCINEA: It’s a river. There are two shores. If this ends well, you’ll find that out.

Abigail, too, said the River could be crossed, and Dulcie more or less confirms that here, but that description. That heavenly description of someone who has crossed and reached back, taken with what Paul says to Ianthe...

Everyone talks about Resurrected Gideon and immortal Griddlehark but GUYS...??? What if we are not thinking big enough?

What if we're looking at a future where everyone or close to everyone is Resurrected and mortality is simply no longer a concern for anyone, or, perhaps more likely, the way to fix this universe IS to let the Houses die, to end the existence of undeath and leave this life to the living? What if we're looking at, not necessarily a Christian idea of "heaven" because Paul says worlds plural, but just... stages, a vast array of "worlds"/afterlives to explore and continue to learn and grow and love through? What if John made death into something grotesque with necromancy and holding ghosts up in the River, but this universe's stance is that it's an end only of one era, and the beginning of another? Much like Paul themself, less of a true end than a change.

What if everyone we've lost will be reunited on that far-off shore?

Imagine knowing who your one true soulmate is, and they know about you to. You don’t need to introduce yourselves, because you can both see how your lives are going to turn out, together. You think about the kids you’ll have, their names, personalities, the little quirks they’ll have that make you laugh and make you so impatient to have them.

Imagine seeing all this good, and slowly seeing less and less of the bad that could have been caused by your soulmate, so you think the future is lighting up.

But it isn’t.

And you have to watch as your soulmate goes down the worst path, blocking your power, because they know deep down what they’re doing is wrong.

And now it’s too late.

Now you must accept that the person you love most in this world, the kids you’ll were meant to have, the future you painstakingly mapped out, is gone, before you ever got to have any of it.

Now you must seal away that chapter of your life, no, that full life, that could have been. All for the good of the world, and yourself as well. It certainly doesn’t feel that way though.

The, should have been beautiful, lives of two of the most powerful dragons, turned into the most tragic story in all Prryhia. No scroll, history class, or fortune teller could have warned or predicted it, not even the most powerful seer.

We have the power to shape the world to our will, to literally move the mountains, yet we could never explore it all. There is no end for us to find, there is no beginning we can make any sense of, there only is the now and the remnants of the past buried beneath our feet.

The world is coming back to life around us, but with it emerges reminders of the immense loss this universe has suffered.

We find plants thriving without sunlight; we find darkness unfathomable with creatures who cannot comprehend the light and kill without mercy, alone for who knows how long. We discover a new mineral only now beginning to form again, presumably after being harvested nearly out of existence, but we find no trace of where it all went - of what it was used for. We find otherworldly new crops that have been in the soil below us all along; unable to reemerge on their own and us ignorant to their existence.

We find a way to bring back a species long extinct, but how many of them died first? We find ruins and remnants of structures created by intelligent creatures, but these people are gone. We don’t know what happened to them, who they were, or what knowledge they may have had to pass down to us.

We know nothing of the people who came before us. Their structures are submerged under the ocean and beneath the earth. Any language they may have left behind has long since been lost to time. All we know is that someone used to be here, that this world was lived in and loved, and now it is ours alone.

We are the sole inhabitants of a world we used to be able to believe was fresh and new and untouched by man, but as the game progresses we realize that was never the case. We were never the first ones here. This world has a history, one of love and life and pain and death we will never get the full story of. We’re starting to develop the tools to uncover some of the pieces, but we will never be able to grasp what came before.

Maybe we were never meant to find out. Knowing we aren’t alone in the universe changes everything, but does it really? So we are not the first to build our homes and live our lives here. This is still our home and this is still our life.