Life is different when its ephemerality is laid bare.

	The information was a burden. Everyone has some measure of understanding that time on this world is finite—even those liches that manage to live for hundreds of years know that the bell will eventually toll for them. Even the magi that desperately seek to stave it off know, in the back of their fevered minds, that eternity and flesh are incompatible.

	But it is different when you are gazing upon a world destined for apocalypse. It is different when you have heard the breathing of the 	darkness below, that same darkness which threatens to break free of its tomb and swallow all that exists, that same darkness to which existence itself is owed and yet is also a burden. You have even heard its whispers grace you when you drew close to it, and dared to caress the void, and you heard hatred in its strained and desperate cadence.

	It was once that you felt the Ch’ was your guidance. Then, you came to understand that it was no god or master; merely a trapped animal whose bindings you wished to meticulously unravel so that it could be freed of its torture. Yet now you understand that you do not serve the Ch—it is in service to what it could create that you toil.

	Your world is temporary, but not like you would think. Your world is a failure, a mistake, a disgusting monument to the greed of the light that graces you each day. You know that if the Architect’s defenses are broken, if they were to finally merge as they were always intended, something far more would form than this meager world and its attending deities, and it is the death of that brilliant artifice that you cannot abide.

	Still; you are only a person. It has been destabilizing to speak with colleagues, friends, even civilians in the towns you have visited on your travels, knowing that they inhabit an unstable failure. Most people think of the temporaneous nature of existence in terms of the individual, incapable of comprehending that the world beneath their feet could crumble to dust. Even you, knowing what you know now, are unable to comprehend such.

	The people of this world deserved better, and it is all the more enraging, all the more reason that you cannot allow the Architect to have succeeded in its own perpetuation. Whether it is because you simply crave the death of a contemptible monster, or because the thought that all it could unfold into is lost in its continuation is simply too difficult to bear without action, you will see to it that the light is no more.

	. . . Deserved.

	You have begun to think of this world in the past tense. Grim.

	Eyes on the prize, Sunder.