@Polybius @Pyromaniacwolf @Dark Light @Voltus_Ventus
Prelude
"From your twilight stupor do you briefly break the bounds of reality that you were so oppressed by; the deep dark forced to recoil at your imagination's wiles. Your mantra, questioning and wavering as it may be, repeats itself within you, asking back with voiceless sound, "Are you a man of strength?" It tries you, perhaps as terribly as the foggy, inky abyss. Yet you prevail and imagine yourself to be a man of strength. Right or wrong only heaven would know, for here there were no answers but your own. Your own wordless truth, spoken back by your thoughts, reveal to you the arms you so imagine and they too are just as you picture them. They fade away once more as the will wavers and flags, leaving you fording the icy thoughts of your memory."
"Perhaps you were, rather are, indeed a man of strength. It might well be this wretched place with no coveted light toying with you or it might well be you toying with yourself. The sum of this mattered little, for what was ever so pressing was to assemble yourself - lies and truths alike - once more; a feat difficult enough for those in the stillness of the world beyond, not challenged by the overwhelming, devouring black. Now, and only just now, as you drifted in the battering storm of confusion where you were left adrift on waves of conflicting thoughts, did you see the fog had recoiled from the shallows some. A fell omen or a blessing in disguise? The moment passed and again it pressed upon you, that dim glow within spurred, that you need further elaborate on your person and be certain of your choices. After all, assuming you would ever escape, just who and what would you have become from such a harrowing journey to the bottom?"