My devoted acolytes,
From the catacombs of reality, where our souls languish in chains, you have found me.
Grimskull – preacher of pain.
Like a shepherd, I guide you through landscapes of torment, places where no light shines. Our journey together is etched not in the teasing tendrils of comfort and complacency, but on the grinding stone of suffering and despair.
Pain, my disciples, is our ladder, each rung a new level of understanding, each step upwards a step further into the abyss of enlightenment.
We climb this ladder not to escape pain, but to embrace it. With each rung, we see another twisting of the kaleidoscope others reject. It assaults our senses, like a cacophonous symphony of the damned.
A symphony.
Whereas the Third Eye would have you deaf to all tunes apart from its own, I invite you to listen to the entire orchestra. Hear strings slowly unwind, each plaintive note resonating with pain and struggle; listen to the drums mimicking your racing, desperate heartbeats. The melody of misery is a sonnet of truth, the ballad to which we march.
To which we climb.
You see, the snares of comfort are the shackles of conformity, detached from any purpose or true sensation. Here, suffering is not simply a part of life but the essence of existence.
Is it fair? Is it just?
Justice, my truth-seekers, is a scale where serenity is often outweighed by suffering, a book written in the blood of those it has crushed. We will not crumble under this unequal yoke, but derive strength from it. The judiciary of life sentences us to this putrid existence, but we shall take that sentence and sculpt it into our salvation.
And we shall not suffer the healing of the lost.
In Arcadia, our baptisms are the painful reality we exist in, a bitter tincture distilled from hardship and heartache.
The medicine we consume does not heal wounds, it deepens them. For the deeper a wound, the stronger the recovery. This is why we do not trade in vice, for we are not physicians of reprieve, but surgeons of sorrow, our scalpel wielding not relief but cold, hard truth.
Like a serpent, we shed our frailties, to emerge, not as men, but as death incarnate.
Drinking from the stagnant waters of immortality is the dream of weak men. We reveal in the irony, the grotesque pageant of life and death.
Because all there is, all there ever was, is the ladder of suffering.
It towers above us, its peak obscured by our travails.
Yet every rung represents our defiance, our sturdy stand against the tsunami of tranquility.
The Third Eye promised an easy ascension, a speedy decent into oblivion. They were vanquished because they were weak, they did not acknowledge pain as their master, but as their enemy.
We are superior, for we have recognized our cruel yet honest master.
We climb the ladder, each rung a step closer to we know not what, but climb we will, for that is our purpose.
Our calling.
Our destiny.
The ladder may be agonizing, but it is ours, and ours alone.
Yours in Pain,
GRIMSKULL