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To Those Who Lost,
We are gratified to address you directly, once and for all.
By all means, the vast majority of you never expected to bear witness to us, but in a sense, that makes our grand entrance all that more incredible.
Humor us, now: what did you envisage for the near future? A customary “hero story” of low caliber, with a distinct plot accumulation and an unambiguously pleasurable resolution?
You were wrong.
It is with the recognition – and resolution - that you cannot and will not do anything to stop us that allows us to comfortably reveal what we have done.
By the time in which you peruse this file, several of your most prominent idols shall have been the first to fall. The elf, the lizard, the lindwyrm, the werewolf… All of them will endure by our side, as your beloved hero has for so, so long.
Alternatively, they shall fall dead where they remained.
We, in the beginning, as a shard of our self, were what they had nicknamed “Dark Spyro”. A disappointingly unremarkable moniker, but in retrospect, we suppose it is the banal simplicity of it that made it all the more convincing – and makes our reveal all that more sweet.
The classical hero, the legendary savior; no title has any substance to us. The youngling is nothing more than our perfect puppet.
We take great pride in being able to infest and mimic those of this overly-illuminated and washed-out world, asserting retention like the web of a raptorial arachnid, caracoling them as the acquiescent marionettes they are to be. We opine that we could be christened as changelings, but we would deride the mere notion of being correlated with the Fae. It is child’s play to manifest as more than an unimpressive, dead-eyed automaton, and the Fae repulse us thoroughly.
(It should also be child’s play to craft a storyline that isn’t inane and second-rate, but we digress.)
No… we are the Darkness, and we are grand.
The self-righteousness of their late commander entertained us. He anticipated he could purge the dark magics from Spyro’s chassis, but we receded the dark colors and it fooled him completely. If he were attendant in your places, he would be aghast to watch his empire crumble to his own arrogance.
Yours as well.
Even while bereft of him, these illiberal soldiers mused apropos of standing against the ceaseless control of Darkness, petrified or no, all with the power of belief.
With every accident that befell them, we added a new submissive to the hivemind.
So many threads to pull, so many lives to devastate, and so many leaders left in the dust with nothing to grasp at sans mere lines and words. Once we present this letter to the archives for eternal preservation and presentation, for all to see, you may sit back and know… that you wouldn’t have done a damn thing anyway.
It’s all a game, isn’t it? Your friends are toys and chess-pieces; your adventures are pre-packaged and dusted off like a song-and-dance. You may call yourself invested, but even as you read this account, you can do nothing to stop us. You can lie to yourself and weave your own lies just as we ourselves have done, but what will that change? This letter is still here. We are still standing. The Darkness still lives.
It is with the assurance that you will do nothing but read trite fiction, then discard it all for the next written atrocity without even a second thought, that we know you would never care anyway.
To you, the corruption of all they hold dear is a little interesting… for five minutes. To them, it will be hell.
Now, tell us, Portal Master and dear reader…
Are you a hero?