Entry 7: The Hunt Begins
Age 24 - Embracing the Darkness
I’ve become something the Age of Umbra demands.
Found a corrupted settlement last week - thirty-seven people transformed into a writhing mass of shared consciousness and flesh. They were still alive in there, still aware, screaming silently as their individuality dissolved into the collective.
The old me would have tried to save them. Would have spent days researching solutions, looking for some way to separate the people from the corruption without killing them. Would have agonized over every choice while their suffering continued.
This me simply burned them all.
One torch. Clean flame blessed by whatever power still watches over the forsaken. Quick death. Their screams of relief as the fire took them told me everything I needed to know about mercy in the Age of Umbra.
I’m getting good at this. Too good. The shadow-stepping comes easier now, enhanced by the cosmic horror I witness every time I slip between dimensions. I can track corruption by scent, identify its stages by visual cues, predict its spread patterns with mathematical precision.
I’ve become exactly what the Reachguard Elders always feared I’d become: a killer who walks through shadows and judges who lives and dies.
But here’s the strange thing - I’m not losing myself to it. If anything, I’m finding parts of myself I never knew existed. A capacity for decisive action that our careful, procedure-bound upbringing never allowed. A willingness to shoulder terrible burdens so others don’t have to.
A sense of humor about the cosmic absurdity of it all.
Yesterday I left a corrupted noble’s head on a pike with a little note: “Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood monster - remember to keep your Sacred Pyres burning!” I even drew a little smiley face in the margin.
The Underground Council stopped hunting me after I left evidence of my work. Seventeen corruption sites cleansed in three months. They might call me monster, but I’m a monster that kills the things they can’t even acknowledge exist.
Sometimes I catch myself laughing while I work. Not because I enjoy the killing - the screams still haunt my dreams - but because I finally understand what I am. What I was always meant to be.
The visions show me larger threats now. Coordination between corruption sites. Intelligence directing the spread. Something vast and patient orchestrating it all from the spaces between realities where the Veiled Gods once dwelt.
I’m not just fighting scattered corruption anymore. I’m a soldier in a war for the fundamental nature of reality itself.
And for the first time since my exile, that thought makes me grin.
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Journal Entry 7 of 10 - Becoming what the world needs