Vernacular

I wonder if this is how the world dies.

I can feel myself unravel, strand by strand, much like a beautiful woven tapestry. I am painfully aware of each strand detaching from the overall pattern, leaving a barely visible hollow where its unique line of color used to reside. It is a quiet deterioration; many of the disappearing fibers having no effect on my actions. It simply feels to me as a shudder, one that I cannot dismiss, but it does not cause me to falter in my daily patterns. At other times, I feel the unwinding as if the tail of the thread has snagged on some vital part of me, tugging me to awareness. My feet freeze, and I feel that old, acute pain. I know that as these particular pieces fall away, so does a portion of my identity. The absence is almost unnoticeable in the early stages, not until I realize it is a struggle to retrieve a particular memory. I try to attribute it to such mundane things as hunger or worry, but I know it is only a feeble attempt at denying the creeping whisper of the truth.

I am...changing.

I feel the subtle differences more and more every day. My ruminations of the past become more and more difficult to dissect. Images run together until specific names or places become one in the same. I visit the vivid green pastures of the storehouse, I sit among the warm hearth crackling upon the ocean, she stares at me from across a wall.

I cannot decipher my past the way I was able to so long ago. I turned often to my memories of who I was to find answers to who I have become, but such an endeavor seems almost impossible now. Yes, I still have full control over my combat prowess, but that worries me even more than the loss of my being. I seem only able to retain the most primal aspects of my identity, and nothing more.

Much as a wild beast evolves into a deadly predator.

But that is what I am, is it not? I am a predator, a hunter, a taker of life. I am the anti-image of the Sacraments and Mysteries. I am an affront to to weave of life, and so it should not surprise me that my own fabric is starting to unravel. It must seem I am truly mad as I say that this loss, this transformation, or degeneration--however one may perceive it--is exactly what I have been searching for? Ever since that night, the night I gained so much at such a greater loss, I questioned the one thing in which a lack of questioning of had always been a thing of pride in me.

The Deity.

I refrain from calling Him by any particular name, for I have travelled too many miles, traversed too many countries, watched too many stories unfold, to even dare to take a side. As I have said, our kind tends to refrain from joining any conflict, and this conflict has been raging ever since the first band of mortals conversed with one another. I do not even dare to transcribe all of my rampant thoughts upon this page for fear of invoking some divine power upon these putrid hands.

It is suffice to say that I see this Madness that slowly envelopes me as a sign that something, somewhere, has taken note of my presence, and seen me as the Beast I am, not the Gentleman I wish I was.

And so this must be the way the World unravels; as He watches this ever-active mass of land, He slowly sees the herd of Beasts it harbors, and shall slowly disassemble the threads he so carefully wove together. This must be how this Story progresses.

There is no other ending.

If this is so...

Then why am I so scared?