This is the plan, Vathýs Gérontas, it is the only way we will survive. Yes, that is your name from now on, own up to it. Close your mouth or butterflies will fly in. Fine, if you're gonna complain this much, then let me tell you about a nightmare of mine. Yes, Devils have nightmares, too.
It starts when I enter a large building. Large. Larger than the largest coliseum you can imagine, wide and stretching for a city’s length. And then up. It goes up beyond the clouds, beyond the heavens. Inside it is blistering with people, coming in and coming out. I don’t know what is out there, outside this mystical structure, but I do know it is blue. A bland, dead, blue. But inside of here it gleams in abundance. It is a library. It is warm. In the first floor there sits a pretty young lady behind a desk and in a uniform. Her hair, copper and orange, is tied in a ponytail behind her. She smiles at you pleasantly. Politely. She doesn’t do anything but smile at you, greets you, and welcomes you-she is important, nevertheless. The first floor, the moment I walk in, and after she greets me, I see the elevators. Elevators are things which raise and lower you. There are lines of them, to your right and to your left. There are always people in them, people going up and down. Different people, but they all seem the same. There are more than a thousand buttons, if you would believe me, for a thousand floors. And each floor is the size of a coliseum. Maybe more. Either it was a thousand or a hundred thousand, it dreams you see, I can't see too clearly.
The air shimmers a warm yellow, as if a hundred tiny stars residing in the invisible air. It is warm but not too muggy. There are people in the elevator, as always. There are always people going up and down. I join them. I press some floor number, 667 or something. I walk out and this sight....this indefinable sight! I simply stare in awe, mouth agap, much like you when I speak. There are books flying around me, with each their wings. Laughter is in the air. Teachers on horses float by, explaining wonderful ideas to their class as they levitate towards one area or the other. In the middle of the floor I was at, when I took the first few steps from the lifter, I could see hundreds of floors below and above me. All filled with books. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of millions of books, of knowledge of whatever your heart desires. The scale is magnificent. It is inhumanly big, viciously wonderful in its grandiosity. It fills you with reverence, with magnificence, and with joy. You feel things which you never have before. Hope, beauty, freedom. In this library, you can learn anything, do anything. Time stops, there. There is no time, but everyone still has their faces in books. Sleeping on books, carrying books, talking about books. Just as it should be. And they laugh! Imagine that! Laughter! Happy, genuine laughter!
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But then you wake up, as you knew you would, and then you look around, and take a whiff of the foul air, and you speak with a low-life, and then realize you’re just a filthy human being trapped within a rotting body that just wants to eat and that wants to fuck--sometimes both. That’s what Raven would say, bless her heart. I’m becoming like her. Or maybe, she is becoming like me. What type of person am I, anyway? I never seemed to catch on.
Do you understand now? No, of course, you don’t. No one ever does. But you will. Don’t worry, Vathýs Gérontas, Leader of the Imps, Priest Of the Deep. You will. I swear that you will.