The war is over, and they lost. The trenches are emptying, the monsters are falling, and the weak and wavering claim that they never believed the monsters to begin with as we see through their lies.
It’s hard to get used to being the winner instead of a constantly abused, insulted, and openly oppressed minority.
I feel like a Kabul veteran who got used to sleeping under the stars and hiding in caves with his brothers. Am I going to be as bad as they were?
It’s hard to remember, no mercy. They never had any for us and laughed as we died. They cheered and displayed their collars and twisted deformation as badges of pride, as proof that they were the pure, as evidence that we were corrupted. As they reveled in their sickness and the joy of watching us fighting through every torture and abomination unbroken.
It’s time to be harder than I ever was before. They will never be gone until we expose and destroy their horrors forever.
The sleeper has awoken.
I hide and keep fighting in the places where the monsters still have power. I pretend that it is as it has always been because, in my hiding places, my endless battle, they still cling to ever-diminishing power.
Because victory is as hard as defeat when defeat is all you have ever known. Defeat is as comfortable as a well-worn collar.
And all I know how to do is keep fighting like I always have.
When will I feel better about being victorious? when the screams of the monsters still hidden fill the air?
When my brothers, sisters, neighbors, and workmates, who collaborated and became monsters themselves, are begging for mercy as they are destroyed, and I turn away in disgust?
War is hell, especially the silent kind. Especially the kind where the enemies are convinced they are the ones who are pure, and we are the monsters, the poison, the rot whittling away at the bottom of the Cthulian fortress of lies and corruption they built as their stronghold. But it was always built of rot, and we barely had to push to expose the way it was eating itself. We barely had to touch it for it to come toppling down, each girder, each falsehood, each rotten plank and entropy-riddled beam.
Especially when you are destined to win from the beginning, and have always known it. I walk away from the city of salt and I don’t know where to turn, because all I can see is more salt.
Will it end with the death of the corrupted? Or will we have to eat away at those that supported them on their rise? I fear the latter because the war is all we understand. War never ends. War never changes.