"If only I could show you the places I've seen, you might understand the things I say. I've been to the desolate lands, wandered by those souls who still see the lands of the living, but wear the cloak of the dead. Blind to their own ends, they cry, passing through one another like shadows, in the dying light of day. I've traveled to where souls rot in torment, pierced with the jagged shards of life and vision, clinging to memory, regrets of the flesh. I saw that this prison was of their own making, and the key was in unknowing and release.
And still, I traveled on.
And finally, I came to the place where souls go to die, where the mirrored and warm spirits fall into an endless sea of grey mirrored glass. And I lowered myself within, and laid there among them, and I almost did not return. And do you know what I found there? There among the silent and embattered shells of the innumerable? Peace. Enlightenment. Truth. Only then did I realize this place, this 'life', is an abomination, a horrible distortion of the natural order. This, 'life', who mothered pain, and fear, and envy, these twisted children who exist only because we are here to feed them, to nourish them! This, 'life', this, afterthought! A disturbance, a mere ripple in that grey, dead sea. Not even the cause, but merely an effect, sending these souls upward, screaming for release from the day when they are torn from their waters.
The effect of what, I do not know, nor do I care.
Have you ever spoken with the dead? Called to them from this side? Pulled them from their silent rest? Do you know what it is they feel? Pain. Pain, when torn into this wakefulness, this reminder of the chaos from which they had escaped, pain at having to live. There will be no more pain. There will be no more chaos." - Kerghan's view of life, taken from Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura
