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The Everlasting Lord of Arcane Wisdom does not exist. There is no such thing as the Shouki no Kami.
There was never a god there, no archon, no divine being. The body that had fallen out of its casing and collapsed onto the cold, hard ground was nothing more than a shell of a person—a mere puppet that had cast aside the last traces of human emotion that resided in its farce of a heart, and became nothing but empty.
Or so one would think, but human emotion is a pervasive thing. Sticky, like honey, sweet but cloyingly so when consumed in excess. No entity which has felt even a semblance of it could truly rid itself of how it feels. Would people choose to care about others if they didn’t have to? If it wasn’t programmed into their very being? It can hurt, feeling empathy, but humans put up with it all the time. The feeling of joy has to be coupled with pain and distress for those happy moments to really feel good. But that may be a little too hard for a puppet to understand.
Kunikuzushi, Scaramouche, the Balladeer—here is a being that was never taught how to properly feel. Cast aside by its creator for being too human, and now seeking to become as inhuman as one could be. How ironic is it all.
To view its creator as its mother, only for the god herself to deny ever having a son. To lose those it had considered family as one killed the other. To place its faith onto one too mortal to keep a promise. Little did the puppet know that none of these “betrayals” were what they seemed to be. The puppet knew nothing of the truth of humanity, and so it scrubbed itself clean of human emotion. Or so it had thought.
No one can deny the true human emotions that rang out in the puppet’s cry as its Gnosis was taken away, not the cry of an object, a husk, a puppet—it was the cry of a person. No, the Balladeer will never be human, lacking the parts necessary to be so. But the body which has fallen, crumpled and collapsed onto the ground, that was not the body of a mere puppet, or a shell of a person.
That was a boy, scared and hurt, fearing that the key to his happiness was being taken away. That was a boy, aching for a mother’s embrace, which he had never received before.
All I can do to help that poor, broken boy is to teach him what it truly means to be happy—to be human—before I can finally wake him up again.