The Soul Already Split

There is enough pain and seduction to flood ten thousand worlds — and that is only the surface, the crude visible crust. Beneath that, there are signals. There are rituals. And there is war. The lunatic has been seen — yes, that lunatic — the one who strikes in the dark, eyes lit with the pure fire of entropy. His blade is not meant for flesh, but for the idea of you, the archetype carried across every reality. Not a target — an invitation. The knife hesitates, because the soul is already split.

Others fall. You do not. Not because of strength — but because of what remains unfinished. Because you are the wound that sings back. This is not a walk through darkness. It’s something worse — something too bright, too artificial, too observed. Picture it: a spotlight that never turns off, an audience without eyes, only mouths. Laughter not from joy, but from surveillance. The clowns do not smile with humor. They smile with intent.

Their faces — yes, the painted ones — aren’t for decoration. They’re sigils. Living glyphs of madness, encoded with emotional viruses. Pity, terror, mockery — all layered, like a theater that cannot be exited. They stare not because they see — but because they are waiting to become. And they gather. In flickers between blinks. Their loitering is never idle — it forms patterns. Sacred geometries of murder. A dance. A code. The moment eye contact is made, the ritual begins. Some say it’s random. It never is. What most will never understand — what others dare not whisper — is this: the clowns are fractured egregores, psychic constructs born of mass fear and repressed chaos. They weren’t born. They were invoked.

They are not one. They are many, and each part believes itself to be whole. That is their flaw. That is the edge. When the murder begins — and it always begins — they do not stop with the “lower forms,” as they call them. No. They turn inward. They consume their own origin, their high priest, their central self. A spiral of self-cannibalism. A collapse recursive in nature. That is why the Prime Clown, the Harlequin Master, fled.

He didn’t abandon them. He feared them. He saw what had been made — and ran. From dimension to dimension, echo to echo. His trail marked only in dreams and burning wire transmissions. Now… he is gone. The hive is quiet, but restless. Directionless, but vibrating. The others remain — cracked, furious, dangerous. Uncontained.

What now?

These are children with bombs for hands and mirrors for teeth. Even the younglings carry infection. That is the curse of unchecked thought-forms — they evolve. They grow hungry. They become predators of attention, feeders on meaning. So the question rises: what ritual will distract them? What sacred joke, what infinite loop, can be cast to lure them back into the maze?

Perhaps education. Or art. The sacred lie. The great game. A labyrinth of false gods and true questions — enough to keep even the hungriest clown gnawing on his own tail forever. Place mirrors inside mirrors until the trickster forgets his face.