Serendaie Syldur wrote:On Immortality.
She who seeks immortality seeks with it her end.
There is no method, no history, no salve, in all our studies that does undo this tragic necessity. The mortal form was not shaped to endure the aeons; and the hands of Gods have long worked to ensure it does not. The present self might, at the best, be regarded as the caterpillar whose sole labour is to spin the chrysalis from which the immortal arises. The transformation is in no case less extensive, the destruction of the self no less complete.
It scarce needs to be written that this transformation, whatever its form, stands against the will of all the Gods in the heavens and all the fiends in the Hells; for it does deny to them their dues and their duties both. She who steps upon that path shall make enemies of all that lives, and much that does not.
The daughter must understand and embrace the foundational truth of her journey.
To achieve her apotheosis will mean the death of her present self and much of what she might have become and, when her end does come (as it shall, for immortality is not invincibility, and the path brings with it more foes than friends) she shall forever be denied the warmth of Arvandor. To seek immortality is no gift and carries with it much sacrifice. To do so without cause is worthless; for the cause shall be all that remains of her.
We do turn now to that most common and most vile of paths, that of undeath. The preservation it offers is a hollow thing and of all paths, it is this that is the most abhorrent to creation and the most sickening to the soul.
To follow the monstrous road that ends in lichdom is to squander the beauty and song the Gods have gifted her, and to condemn what shall remain of her mind to madness as great as her brilliance. It is to strip from her own mind that flexibility that a mage does require and remake it in the likeness of a monolith of stone; unchanging and eternal, but no more capable of change or refinement. She shall be preserved, but no more immortal than an insect locked in amber.
As so; the path of the vampirism, which does make of her a beast, and a slave to her hungers. To suppose that anything of the daughter that was shall remain is no more than a pretty dream. A monster shall emerge that wears her face and wields her tongue and uses them as the hunter does a trap. They are predators and beasts; and all likeness of awareness does serve only to bring unto them prey. Intellect without warmth, and power driven by no motive above the self.
These things are not immortality but contagion, a plague upon the world and a bane for fools gifted with more ambition than sense. They carry in their rotted hearts only destruction of the self and the world. By the appetites and the limitations of these forms is the daughter bent into a horror.
There lie open other paths, each burdened with a toll. We turn now, briefly, to the paths of service. By these paths might one ensure a brief respite from the advance of the aeons; though it shall cost her much, and bring in its end only misery, betrayal, and transformation beyond her desire or control.
Service to the demon or devil lords is a foul and cruel thing, it need hardly be written, and must surely end in betrayal – for the cruel lords of Baator do lust for the souls of their servants as surely as their enemies and shall shape their demise as inevitably as the coming of night.
Even if the daughter does elude this fate she shall become an instrument of forces vile, her own wants and ambitions subsumed by those of her patrons; until she does become a demon in the truest of senses. She may have immortality, but it shall be her own for only the briefest of times. It is the oldest and greatest folly of the mage, to suppose that she might outwit these monsters of the aeons, and that her power shall be shield enough against cruelty that was old when the world was young.
It shall not be, and never has. The devils did snare the souls of life when the High Art stood open to us, and in the Low Art of the present day they shall find no opposition. The scales tilt but one way, and the noble daughter that supposes otherwise is an instrument of her own damnation.
The Ladies and Lords of the Courts have their own wants and needs; and are as fickle as the weather. There is less intention to their cruelty; mayhaps, and in that they are like a summer storm, heedless of pain and suffering. She who serves them long enough shall become as they are; and forget all but the hollowest truth of her nature. She shall receive exactly what she desired and find that the taste of it is but bones and ash. In the end, she shall be transformed, and she shall not care.
These paths are hateful things, and extract as their eventual price all that the Seeker is. To walk them is to deny death; but to accept in its place a more complete destruction of the soul and the end of the true immortality that waits amongst her ancestors in Arvandor.
Shame upon she who thinks to tread them lightly.