XI. On What He Has Become

I return to the sentence from his journal that I cannot stop hearing in his voice:

“The Dream Eater’s liberation will herald not conquest but invitation, humanity’s opportunity to transcend the narrow confines of individual existence and join something magnificent.”

What makes this so terrible is not the sentiment, which is the standard rhetoric of cosmic horror’s willing servants. What makes it terrible is that it is recognizably him. The syntax is his. The intellectual framework is his. The hunger to be part of something larger than himself, that was always his.

Osoyo did not replace Etward Ritalsin with a puppet. It found the man’s deepest desire, to matter, to be recognized, to be elevated above the colleagues who dismissed him, and offered him exactly what he wanted.

The fact that the price was his humanity was, I suspect, a detail he considered acceptable long before the false Otto began his work.

He is no longer the man I knew. But he is not entirely someone else, either, and that is worse than either alternative.