The White Moth, Its Majesty of Agony

The universe was born with a wound, and over time it grew blighted. Within this revolting pocket of oozing misery, dark fates and demons were born; among the first of these was the White Moth.

You see, the White Moth will bring the end of all things, and it starts with you.

The demon's visitations begin in the lone hour of the night, in a moment of dread isolation. It does not yet make itself known, though moths will materialize in great numbers in the devil's invisible presence. When the White Moth comes to you, you will lie awake as it begins twisting your memories and turns all good things into misery. It burns love like oil, and it will use the resultant flames of self-hatred to bind you. Even if you manage to will yourself asleep, it will haunt your dreams in the form of beautiful things--and, just as soon as you come to hold them, you will awaken in your cold and quiet bed, meaningless and alone.

As your most cherished memories warp, night after night, you will become forgetful, bitter, and eventually unloved, for the White Moth's insidious corruption turns you against all things, even that which you most love. And it is when you are deeply and truly alone, having cast away all that had mattered to you, that you will at last turn against yourself. Only then will it make its presence known.

Moths as we are familiar with are only the closest approximation we have to the White Moth's true form. The demon appears a terrifying specter, larger and paler than any man. It possesses colossal white wings that yearn towards the starless sky, and its eyes are bleeding open sores. It does not speak with its own voice, but instead uses the whispers of your mind to communicate, causing great terror and confusion. Choir-like, the whispers will urge you to undergo the demon's ritual. You may attempt to flee the White Moth, but it follow you wherever you go. Only in the presence of love will the devil disappear--but, by the point that it makes itself known to you, you will have been forgotten and there is no love to save you. By the time the White Moth has revealed its presence, you will be weak and alone, and its only a matter of time before you succumb to its hungry pleas to ceremony.

When you finally accept the ritual, you will immediately awaken in a calm field of fragile white flowers in a land of perpetual twilight. You will be naked and, save the shadow of the White Moth, alone. The demon's shadow will guide you through the field and into a thick forest of dead trees. It is frigid and eternal night here; the wind carries the distant and incessant weeping of your loved ones. If you attempt to follow the wretched wailing, they will only sound further and further away, and as your desperation grows to find them their pitiful cries will become inhuman shrieks. You will, as all others have, turn away in fear and disgust.

In the woods is a path, and you will follow it. If you try to turn back or to forge your own way, you will merely find yourself back on the path. The path you will walk was decided on by something much greater and older than yourself, back when the destiny of all things was being weaved. Just as your anguish was willed to attract the White Moth, so too was the White Moth born to penetrate and abuse the depths of your misery.

You unfortunate soul. There will be no choice. There is no choice, and there never was any. It is over, because it was always over.

The winding forest path will lead you to the Black Grotto, wherein you will hear your loved ones' final lamentations in increasingly distorted echoes, as if their mourning were being played back on a chewed-up and stretched-out cassette tape. The White Moth will take its throne, and its wings will spread and quiver erratically, As you approach, ceremonial runes will appear as fresh wounds on your body. You will kneel and pray for one last time, in the name of the Moth, and then the ground will open up beneath you.

Before you even begin to fall, you will catch a scarlet vine hanging down from the cave ceiling by your neck. As endless shadow and nothing open up beneath you, the vine will tighten. A bittersweet ecstasy will take you, wracking your entire self from soul to matter like an orgasm--but still your body will attempt in vain to save you, gasping, choking, clawing at your seized neck in pathetic desperation.

But eventually there will be no more fight left in your body. It will exhaust itself, only given to spasms and lurches, and you will begin to die. Dying this way takes around twenty minutes. During this time, your consciousness will gradually trickle out, spark by abhorrent spark until your body is finally dead and only a fragment of awareness remains.

The jagged shard of consciousness you will become is just aware enough to know time and suffering. Indeed, a passing millisecond is perceived by the withered soul as a millenium, and even such derisory awareness is cognitive enough to go mad. Such agonizing design is intentional; your madness is but a mechanism to turn the essence of your sick soul into a seed.

The White Moth will collect you and plant you in the wicked field of calm in the endless twilight. You will sprout in six-hundred and sixty-six seconds as a white flower. A mere breeze crumbles your petals to ash, and your ashes will be carried by the winds. The winds will carry these ashes back home, and they will fall on all you had loved and left. Such ashes spread hatred, apathy, terror, confusion--the likes of which you had known in your bleakest moments, the destined moments which were born of a universal wound; the destined moments which had drawn the White Moth to you.

Even after it has taken you, your sickness will continue to take, and so too in time will all you love become pale flowers.