In the labyrinth of life, there exists a shapeshifting beast. A beast as mercurial as the shadows at dusk, as eternal as the echoes of time itself.
A beast called Transformation.
All of us—we are all subjected to its distorted whims, confined within the constraints of its ever-changing form.
Whether it’s the monstrosity that Stubbins Doom became or the jovial puppeteer with a sinister red shadow that Foley hides behind, they all echo the same haunting refrain: transformation as a form of escape.
Look at Doom, baptized in an Odyssey Pool of his own design. The Pool returned not a man but a cruel and vicious version of his former self. A version that screamed of power, control, dominance.
Amid the chaos and complexity of machinery, he found his comforting disguise.
Parallel to this, Foley, the puppeteer, hid behind his dolls. His cheeriness, a toothy grin that concealed his family curse, a puppet master of darkness: ‘Scissors.’
The stage was his world, a world from which reality was a distant echo.
The beast conquered these men as they hide from their pain, disguising what they once were.
But what about the flipside? For among these twisted tales of transformation, there is Walther.
He took a different path, did he not?
My transformation wasn’t an escape from my failures or from a curse, it was a rebirth.
I had to accept the reality in which I lived, rather than reject it for a mask or a smile. Where Doom and Foley use transformation as an illusion, I have accepted it for what it is.
An inconvenient, torturous truth.
Pain.
In the depth of my voice, the murk of my past bruises every word.
I talk of pain and in its embrace, I find life. I’ve examined torment, tested it against my skull – a testament to the torture that robbed me of flesh.
To me, this embrace of pain is not the shadowed alleyway to evasion, but a torch-lit path to homecoming.
To conquest.
I’ve seen transformations, I’ve seen them all.
They come as cloaks, masks, puppeteer’s threads, or as the very flames that turned my face into a canvas of gnarled bone.
The refuge they offer is fleeting, a bold lie in the barren land of dread.
Yet, within these deceptions, there resides a question. A question that dares tip-toe on the thin line dividing reality from the maze of escapism.
Every transformation, every bite of the beast, every desperate attempt at escape leaves a part of us behind.
We wear different skins, mask our true faces, and form new identities.
But beneath the carefully constructed layers, beneath the polished facade, what truly changes?
Metal masks may cover scars, the puppeteer might paint a strained smile, and this skull of mine might chant a hymn of pain.
But do these external shifts ever manage to touch, ever attempt to rewrite, the core of our essence?
So why hide your pain, Scandium Sulfur, behind the beast of transformation?
I do not hide behind my pain.
I have embraced it.
I have conquered the beast.
Just like I’ll conquer you.