/lit/ - Literature

For years, he had grappled the great beast that was the Three Seas, pinned it to earth, and with gifts and brutalities he had trained it, until his name only need be uttered—until his tyranny had become indistinguishable from his being. This allowed him to move from nations to truths, to turn his intellect full upon the maddening abstracta of the Daimos, the Metagnosis, and the Thousandfold Thought.
He had pierced the obscurantist veils, grasped the metaphysics of Creation, transformed meaning into miracles. He had walked the ways of Hell, returned bedecked in trophies. No one, not even the legendary Hero-Mage of ancient Ûmerau, Titirga, could rival his arcane might.
He had learned of the head on the pole.
Domination. Over lives and nations. Over history and ignorance. Over existence itself, down through the leaves of reality’s countless skins. No mortal had possessed such might. His was a power and potency that not even the Gods, who must ration themselves across all times, could hope to counter, short of scooping themselves hollow and forever dwelling as phantoms …
No soul had so owned Circumstance. He, and he alone, was the Place, the point of maximal convergence. “Nations hung from his whim. Reality grovelled before his song. The Outside itself railed against him.
And yet for all of it darkness still encircled him, the obscurity of before, the blackness of after.
For those who worshipped him as a god, he remained a mortal man, possessing but one intellect and two hands—great, perhaps, in proportion to his innumerable slaves, but scarcely a mote on the surface of something inconceivable. He was no more a prophet than an architect or any other who wrenches his conception into labourious reality. All the futures he had raised had been the issue of his toil …
He suffered visions, certainly, but he had long ceased to trust them.

>>16682212
> NO.