There are many stories to be told.
Some of them are significant. Some of them are quaint.
Others are old, musty and brown at the edges, faded, forgetten relics of civilisations past their prime. And still others are brand new, leaping into existence with every passing second.
This is not a story. In fact, it is nothing like anything at all.
This is a dream.
Or maybe not.
Maybe this is real.
Or maybe not.
You don't know. You can't know.
But this is a dream, and maybe also, in some way, this is real.
You are standing on the edge of a precipice, looking out over a vast gulf. Beneath you, there is only dust, and infinite darkness. A crater has sprung up on the dirt of the soil, and you are looking into it.
You think you should jump, but you don't know if you should. You think you can walk away, but you don't know for how long.
You are fragile, frail and flimsy. You are to one gust of wind what one falling leaf is to the storm, blown hither and thither about; and soon, you know, that wind is coming.
You are standing in the path of a freight train, and the tracks are juddering with the scream of its approach.
You think you should step off, but you don't know for certain. You think you should stay on, but you don't know for certain.
And the train is coming closer.
Soon, you know, that wind is coming.
You are a vegetable: trapped in a coma for seven years, all but reduced to cerebral cogitation. You think you cannot go on living like this, but maybe you think you should.
But you don't know for certain.
Nothing is certain.
Not even you.
And therein lies the murkiness.
You are standing on the deck of a ship lost at sea, and you know that you are its captain.
Sickness rages among your crew: one man's wife is on her deathbed, and one man more knows a cure, whose administration will ruin him forever.
There is no food: there is famine. There is no choice: there is inevitability.
Sooner or later, someone must die.
Who will it be?
And you stand on the train tracks and watch it come steadily closer.
You are a man lost in a crowd, uniformed without rank, and you must set aflame a building with the enemy's wives and children still within.
You must gun down any and all survivors. You must watch the enemy emerge, on fire and shreiking, clutching at her - his - its children, eyes terrified and wide open.
You must demolish a home, and consign a family to oblivion.
You must dream nightmares of this event decades and decades on. You must find guilt weigh heavily on your conscience night after night, and you must spend your life thereafter horrified by your own hands.
And you must do this because you have been ordered to by uniformed men with rank, so that the war that has crippled your country will flare, and by consumption, consume itself.
Only you know the price of your own humanity.
What do you do?
And you are lost at sea, and you know not all of you will survive this journey.
You are the novitiate of an art that has no god, the scion of a line that has no root. You make things that others despise, and craft items items that have no purpose beyond the mundane. In the corner of your heart there fumes a leaking canker of futility, a lost patron for the magical. You have come to despise the things you make.
You have lost the will to live.
You yearn for your last breath.
You are a phantom, and this is your cage of mirrors. Tomorrow will always be like today.
What do you do?
You are born.
You must die.
Everything that happens in between is upto you.
What do you do?
All the answers are true.