Disclaimer: The following document fragment is presented from an in-character perspective, it should not be taken as the truth of the setting.
Context: The research of esoteric topics can be quite unpleasant and perplexing at times. Even mages have to deal with the implications and consequences of their actions. In this excerpt, a mage gives his thoughts on terminating an experiment. Such things may be difficult when in a way, the subject of the experiment is but a child.
In time, it came to the worst, the Child took the first human life, and not long after, the second, then third. Thus the great machines of bureaucracy were set in motion, and we were marked as the executors of its verdicts.
It was a simple if harsh one – the Child will die.
And it was by my hand that its life would end, delivered with a ceremonial oxidate dagger. I remember its scent, reminiscent of wet earth and blood.
I remember the room where it resided. I remember its many heads turning to me as it babbled incoherently. It spread its dendra through the room, from the pale lump of flesh at its core, resting in the bassinette. The pallid protrusions moved in a disorganised manner. Its scream, as I plunged the blade into its trunk, bore no sign of humanity.
I console myself in remembering that this Child was not of a mother, nor a father, nor human flesh. It was but a folly to raise one of the other as a child of man. To take such a monstrum, alien to this world and swaddle it in satin dresses, as if one’s child.
I do not know if this was a mockery of parental love or a desperate ploy to possess that which man always desires the most – that which he does not have. In the end, it is not my place to pass judgement, only deliver the verdict of the Secretum Secretorum, swiftly and mercifully.
It is a folly to try to make the power of the Other your own. Both personally and for the sake of your bloodline. It will never be something that a human can control, for we are not them and they are not us.
The qualities of our existence in the Cosmos are different, neither better nor worse. This is our nature and the nature of the Other. Through nurture, you cannot change this fundamental nature. You cannot teach a human to open a third eye. Neither it is in your power to make Them human. Thus, the Child would never be a child of man. Neither would it be an elevated existence supplementing the fundamental flaws of human nature with the esoteric qualities of the pale tree-kin.
Were the Child’s actions driven by malice? It is safe to presume they were not. As it is with children, it did not understand the consequences. Yet, aware of them or not, its vast physical might took several lives. And with how cruel and selfish our young ones can be, it very likely would not be the last.
More worrying still, was the disorganised physical form of Child, raising the question if a human can teach such a being to be in control of its bodily flesh. In our contacts with the fair folk, we have never seen their children take this form. Tumorous and growing chaotically, sprouting limbs and heads over its massive, branching form.
Though the taking of a life should not be celebrated, it might have been merciful for this being.
Esoteric Musings... 