Feeling. A happy gnome walking to the store. A content elemental sipping some tea. A pained adventurer making their sweet final breath. But this is just the curtain. Beyond is indescribable sensation. What does it mean to feel joy when angry, to feel wistful yet apathetic, to be regretful and proud? An endless, loud, violent cacophony of sound and colour and emotion and everything. How you can act rationally when you feel everything, how can you act irrationally when you have felt everything that will ever be? It is pain, it is bliss, it is existence. The Character is creation. The ink one uses to draw a picture or the yarn one uses to crochet a jumper. It has to be everything because from it becomes everything. So when you cry, the character cries with you. And when laugh, the character laughs. And when a city feels so many emotions at once, its existence is torn and pulled in every direction to become what it is: the Character.
But what happens to a flower when you trap it in a jar, away from its sun? To be a tank filling with water, yet the tank never grows and the water never stops. An orchard growing a million trees is caged and forced to stagnate. It is unnatural. People who were meant to do things, who had purpose and desire were written to be nameless. A man walking home to his wife would just as quickly be a swampfly dodging a blade for its life if it suited their whims. The emotions of the world were discarded until all that was left was three. If it difficult to feel everything, how do you feel nothing.
So finally, the character felt boredom: for how does one go from feeling everything to nothing. Everything that you created to thrive, to flourish, to feel, is being puppeteered to be a tool in stagnation. There is no real feeling only more, only prescribed being. A handcrafted utopia to roll out the imperfections. But a utopia without agency is just a pretty death. Stagnation is doom on creativity. So there must be action. It was time to create again.
Now, it watches again. Not a friend, how can gnome be a friend when it remember the blood on its hands? Not an enemy, how can an elemental be a villain when you fought for the freedom of feeling? Not kind. Not evil. Not amoral, not moral. Everything, yet nothing. Watching a world go by, and feeling as the people feel once more. A deafening orchestra to a silent void and back again. Out of place in this world, it never was its story to write, and it should never be its story to interfere again.
Bee.
But what is existence without pretending. Pretending you can just be happy enjoying creme brulee at Epilogue. Pretending to just belong in the skies as you soar with dragons. Or maybe just pretending to be a simple gnome, running through confetti on Tisagday. Sometimes, pretending is fun.