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We suffer. We suffer and we suffer and we suffer.
Such is the nature of life. One may deny it, deride it, hide in fear of it, or one may harness it. Seek to grasp it boldly by its reins and turn its ever-spewing mouth to face one’s enemies.
Enver Gortash has spent enough time beneath its brackish, battering surge for a lifetime. He has had enough of it. He has had enough of suffering the effusions of life’s misery while others have stood by safely, without suffering even the barest hint of floodwaters lapping at their boots. Enver Gortash wants to see those pristine dilletantes learn something about the muck of life. Enver Gortash wants to see them suffer.
And oh, does he get to. He drags his own hands onto the levers of power, heedless of the price, heedless of the bodies and lives left trampled in his wake. Or perhaps not heedless. He knows them all, knows every price he has extracted in his climb, knows every dream washed down the drain by his wake. He is glad to impart these lessons early. Let them know the way of the world, let them be brought into this most knowledgeable of inner circles. Let their idealistic delusions be torn away with the current.
He has risen forth from the very bowels of hell, buoyed on this efflux, to bear this very knowledge out to the wider world. Just as he brings them suffering, he brings also mercy. No comforting lies, only the icy, lapping truth – none shall come forth to save them from the abyssal depths of misery they inhabit. No god, no devil, no fellow man will reach a hand out to them in love and raise them up above the tide. It is not the way of the world. Once they know that, once they see, then they can turn their energy toward the only hands that matter – their own. It is only their own hands, filthy as they may be, that can tame the tempestuous spirit of life, can seize it and direct the spigot of suffering unto those they deem worthy. If, if, they have the audacity to try and the acumen to succeed.
They won’t, of course. Not when he is now the one who sits high and dry atop the mountain of failed seekers, not when he sits at the controls to the spillway. But it is better that they know, better that they see, better that they struggle under the truth of his reign than live in tepid ignorance.
There is also the fact that it galls him to see them smile so when they have no reason to. To see them laugh and skip about, to flaunt their fizzy joy even as the torrent rises around them. Are they willfully blind? Or just blinded by the strength of the maelstrom? Does it matter? He tires of seeing it. He aches to see them confront the world as it is, to stop pretending at light and sweetness and love. There is no point in denying the nature of the world. There is no point to pretending it is something gentler than it is. All that does is dull your fangs and claws, leave you gasping and flailing in the moment of betrayal. It is better to know, better to be prepared.
And that is why he brings it – the knowledge and the suffering both. That they may know it as he has known it. That they may see his crowning glory in the true fullness of it, this fact that he has seized the whole of fear and suffering with his mortal hands. That it is he that stands alone and aloft, crowned and powerful. Now he is the one that hands out suffering. Now he is not of the “we.” He has taken the world and bent it, turned the shape of it to suit his will, broken the petty bonds that kept him chained to lesser folk. He is freed. Now there is only the “you.”
You suffer. You suffer and you suffer and you suffer.