It’s like a wise man once said: “Battle not with monsters, unless you become a monster”. I’ve lost track of how many people I’ve killed over the years. When I was younger, I believed killing was immoral. Even in my hungriest state, I’d avoid taking a life. I feared what it’d do to my conscience. But as the nights grew darker, as the fights grew meaner, I learned something very valuable. My code meant nothing.
You start with a code. You hang on to it with every self-righteous breath. But then you take one life. Then another, and another, and another.
It all becomes a little easier. That life you once held so sacred? It looks a lot more unsacred when those hunger pangs take over.
You let your self-righteousness slide just a little, and the violence and hatred begin flowing. Like a dam with a crack, it all breaks.
That monster you were fighting? You realize it wasn’t an enemy at all. It was just you looking in the mirror all along. You denying what you really are. Once you accept that, once you take that mask off, you realize the mask wasn’t hiding anything. It was you all along. The true you, the monster that lies deep beneath the surface.
Once I accepted that I was no longer a mere mortal, but a depraved beast of hunger. Accepted that I was nothing but the monster beneath, it all became so much easier.
I no longer feared taking a life, because it meant mine would continue. You fight yours. You think your mask has changed you, made you different from what you really are.
You deny what it has done to you, like I once did.
You believe you’re more than the mask, more than the demons that it’s brought with it. You think that you’re different, that you’d be free if that mask didn’t have it’s hold on you.
But it’s not. That mask just lets you be YOU.
No hesitation, no thinking. Just what you are deep down, bringing your deepest desires to the surface. Letting the true you that we all like to keep buried deep beneath the surface, in the darkest corners of our souls that we think nobody can see.
But when you’ve accepted that you are indeed the monsters you fought?
You see that deep dark place in everyone.
I can see beyond your mask, Impaler. I know you’re not truly some scared child afraid of what the mask makes you do.
You’re the violent weapon of fate.
I’ll show you what you can do when you let your true self, your monster, go free. Because I have let mine free.
I became the monster that wise man said you’d become when you fought monsters. And I need an army of monsters.
You’ll see, when you are looking up at the lights the true power of a monster set free.
So gaze into the abyss.
And I’ll be sure to gaze back into you.