The past dreams up many strange things. So does the present. Keep your wits about you, understand what things are real. Burn those that are not. When the false becomes reality, tragedy always strikes.
I was trying some weird audio thing on Test Subject 1405. It didn't work, so I'll have to go rerecord it. In the meantime, here's a little slice of the Pantheon.
The Pantheon is written and produced by Joshua White.
Sharing Links:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pantheon/id1498984739
https://www.buzzsprout.com/811181
https://open.spotify.com/show/6Pmngtn7BBnOeAiOzAriHJ
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-pantheon-57860820/
https://podcasts.google.com/? feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS84MTExODEucnNz
Hollow corpse, lonely and afraid. Born of the first compact, all turn against you now. But it was not your choice to be of this nature. You never made a choice in anything. You have no mind for these decisions to even be processed in. And yet still they blame you. You are the enemy, the disease, and not the symptom. But what is wrong with you simply existing? Sure, you hurt them, but pain is temporary. What right do they have to exist, while you do not?
They were the ones who signed the first compact, after all. It is not your fault, nor your father’s that they failed to understand it. It is not your fault they didn’t appreciate the risks. It is their mistake, so if anyone is to pay with pain it ought to be them, or the ones who made the barrier in the first place. That they were given the option to break down the barrier is not your fault. And yet you are the disease.
They are the disease, not you! Everything you do is right! EVERYTHING! YOU ARE GOD! THEY ARE GNATS BENEATH YOU, FIGMENTS OF YOUR IMAGINATION! ALL WHEELS TURN TO YOUR WILL, AND YOUR WILL ONLY!
The Feasters are not gods, and I hope that was evident enough in my telling. After the disease was purged from humankind, you gotta know the HGC squirreled away a sample or two and put them under lock and key. The potential for them to return is always there, although with the few opposing empires in our galaxy having withered away or been stomped by so many stomping human feet, it is unlikely that the HGC will ever have need of it as long as it is helmed by relatively sane people. Of course, that could change any day, but we must remember not to spark open conflict with governmental forces until we’ve scouted and scrubbed scrubbed every last secret lab.
The entire mechanism of consciousness is there to hold back your urges and wants. Each layer of thought is another barrier, another set of armor against feasting on passion until the laws of society and potentially all of creation break. It never breaks pleasantly, when crushed by so many unthinking boots. One must always remember to acknowledge restraint while one has the mind to do so, for when the mind is gone one has no such option.
Of course, this is not me endorsing asceticism as a defensive mechanism against the Curse of the first Fall, or the whims of the benefactress. No creature under the sun can restrain themselves enough to be immune to the wiles of such forces, nor would anyone probably want to inoculate themselves in such a way. In pure restraint there is nothing, as much nothing as there is in that space which is not space, in that prison for the one who is no prisoner. That is no way for any self respecting human to live, if you could call it living at all.
My recommendation? If the Feasters return, you run to the hills, set up a Cult encoded distress beacon, and hold on for as long as you can. While we are fairly certain the Curse is no effect of the divine nemeses, the HGC will surely abandon you should you provide them with any signal of their reappearance. The risk’s too high, they will say. They’re probably right. The Feast moves faster than most ideas, nearly as fast as the disease which plagues our creator. Desire and creation, unfettered, forever. While this might be okay for an all-powerful deity, the effects of this mindset on regular ol’ humans is nasty, to put it cleanly.
Imagine your current desires. Imagine them burning with twice the passion? Thrice? A hundred? How much free will do you have then? How much of a person are you?
We are all things, but we are not hunger. Hunger is an aspect of our being, an aspect which propels us to act, but other things can propel us too. Not all desire is hunger, not all desire burns brighter with the aid of time. Attend to those desires when you can, leave the feast behind. Sate the hunger when you must, but do not become it. We are not hunger.