Some would describe Darkening Kaos as insane. But they would be wrong. So wrong.
That is. It might have been true at one point, but in accordance with the laws of the Great Essence, known on some worlds as Terry Pratchett, Darkening Kaos had dived so deeply into insanity that he had come out the other side as being intensely, efficiently, terrifyingly, SANE.
From the Diary of Darkening Kaos.
Date: Unknown. Well, it doesn't seem important at this stage.
A diary is a quaint idea, but I find that it does provide for some ordering of thought.
Once arriving at Modded Hell, there was a mercifully short …
conversation with the over-seer, Mottled Petrel. After reading the letter from our glorious monarch, he assigned me to installing the cage traps, and I must admit I found the task cathartic and physically fulfilling – trudging back and forth from the fields around the entrance to my new home, carrying mechanisms and then cages to the points marked on the map given to me by Mottled Petrel’s assistant, (I didn’t catch his name and it was probably forgettable anyway). It gave me the opportunity to think about the events that brought me here.
Back in the mountainhome, I was nothing, not that it bothered me. My time was taken up with hauling random stuff, often the same stuff as it went from place to place and back again – I’d get to the point where I
could say, ‘Oh. Hello, Frank the barrel of Whip Wine. How are you today?’ Of course, there was no answer, but I knew that barrel better than I knew my supervisor, so many times I had hauled it about. I guess I didn’t really know myself what I wanted to do with my life. That all changed one day when I was assigned to haul
Frank, sorry, a barrel of wine to the extravagant party of graduating mechanics, (they thought a
full barrel of wine was extravagant). Before the graduation ceremony itself, there was a tour by our most glorious monarch as he examined some of the outrageous and typically over-the-top trap designs put together by the senior students.
One of the last practical demonstrations involved a volunteer pulling a cart with a straw goblin on it through a hideously complex floor trap.
It went off.
Time slowed and in that one moment, I saw the synergy of chaos intertwined with order, and both fused with art in a deadly flash of copper, steel, granite and iron
(see footnote).
The straw goblin was shredded. So was the cart. And the rope which had got caught up in something. As did the volunteer’s hand. Up to the elbow.
That moment irrevocably defined who I was. I had seen my future. Unfortunately, the mechanics guild declared I was not of the right family and no-one would grant me a scholarship or the fees required to get past the front door.
It took months but my patience was eventually rewarded. A drunken student fell asleep in a tavern where I took my meals. His cloak declared him to be an initiate of the mechanics guild. Picking him up and shouldering his backpack, I took him back to his dormitory, getting past a guard who knew the student, but escorted me none-the-less. Once in his room, and gently arranging the student in his bed, I managed to secrete two books inside my shell without the guard noticing. Wherein, the next problem came to light – I could not read. Poor as my parents were and unable to afford even the simplest education, the books were meaningless to me. Well, apart from the diagrams.
After months of studying each diagram, and manipulating them in a fairly primitive way on a scrap piece of salvaged paper, I had the good fortune to deliver
Frank, apologies, a barrel of wine to our glorious monarch’s personal quarters. Breathless, with panic and excitement, I put the wine down and then showed him my plans for a simplified, but routine, trap experiment. I might have been a bit forceful in my delivery and I apologised, explaining it away as a reaction to the awe I felt at being in his …
august presence. He gave that plan a quick scan and beneficently nodded. I had permission to demonstrate my system.
Down in a dark, abandoned corridor where I had been teaching myself to handle mechanisms, I was surprised to find that a goblin had snuck in from somewhere and was completely caught up in one of my first, primitive, somewhat …
excessive traps – it had experienced a certain level of disassembly, fortunately for the goblin, it would have been quick. Or was it two goblins? I had never seen one close up, so I couldn’t tell whether they had two heads each or not. But, no. I had no time for that.
New parts were collected, the floor prepared and I began the laborious process of setting each part of the sequence. There had to be a live test. Which showed a few flaws, so I had to redo a few things. Another live test was performed and it was during this test that our glorious monarch stepped out of the shadows to inspect my progress – a feral goat was in the middle of interpreting a painting by the abstract painter Picasso, (a painter-koopa of little to no repute). Our glorious monarch’s widening eyes at my progress was a good sign. The copious vomiting – not so much.
At his incoherent screech, I was hauled away to a cell. Only a week later, I was granted the opportunity to gather my few possessions, then given a letter with the king’s seal on it and bundled off into one of a string of carts heading off into the unknown.
Along the way, a kindly old koopa taught me to read, I wished for the carts to travel slower for a whole new world was opening up for me. Both figuratively and literally.
I could now read the two books of introductory mechanics still secreted in my shell.
It took one moment. One startling moment of soul-searing clarity, an all-consuming epiphany overtook him as he witnessed the Fundamental, Absolute Truth of the Universe, (FATotU™, known conversationally as Fat Otto), the circuits traced in the air by the point of the spiked metal ball in the trap left an impossible afterimage of the words of the universe – no, not words, arcane conceptual thoughts beyond mere mortal comprehension.
To render it down to words would be to simplify it into irrelevance, and he had tried many times to make sense of it so it could be explained to others. The closest he could get were these two statements:
1: The universe is so unfathomably massive that it could not possibly notice your trivially inconsequential existence,
2: The universe’s one and only function is to fuck you over … as hard as it can … as often as it can.
And the problem for Darkening Kaos was that he had become aware that the universe had paused as it stared at him. And when the universe finishes reconsidering its options and goes back to ‘business as usual’, Darkening Kaos knows, beyond certainty, that…………………………………………………
……………………………………it is gonna hurt(and leave unsightly scars).