Welcome to the Void!

Marquee to be scrapped or revised in the future.

My name is Fade. I am one of the oldest alters of The Novelry, a probable OSDD system working to make themself make some kind of damn sense. Congrats if you can read this, by the way. Either you know how to work Reader View, you went to the trouble of copypasting my text, or you inexplicably know how to read the Maras Eye font. Either way, I am impressed. I decided to use an almost readable coded font to give me a feeling of privacy here. This is not real privacy, I know, but it takes the bite off of the paranoia. Most people will not have the patience to translate the whole site.

It also just looks cool. That is another good reason for the subterfuge. In any case, expect at least some, if not all, of my fronting headmates to use coded text too; if they can find one that suits their aesthetic.

Maybe this will become a semipublic diary. Maybe it will just be an aesthetic page. Only time will tell.

In case we die, I want to talk about my otherselves too because I think that they may deserve to be noted and known in case of the worst.

Alabaster is my oldest sense-of-self, alongside me. I have no recollection of a time in my life where I was not at least a duality. In the old days, we had a terrible but firm partnership. We lived in a household with parents who had been raised, like many, with the idea that disipline meant yelling at a child for doing wrong. They did not know better. Many still don't. But one way or another, we lived with the consequences. I was the part of us that was to be yelled at. Alabaster was the part of us that did the scolding pre-emptively, because it supposedly meant that we would stay in line and not be yelled at outwardly.

This gave us such a hatred of one another in the past. There came a time where she, as much of a perfectionist as the rest of us, snapped under the realization that diciplining us into perfection was not possible. She became suicidal then. She held our suicidality. She held it for years, she still holds it sometimes when things go wrong.

I buried her. Mentally, metaphorically. The solution we both haphazardly had for this was that she could be killed and the rest of us could live.

It's not really how things work, though.

You can kill a piece of you, but it might not stay dead. It might come back to haunt you. She's safe in our attic now, more of a possessed doll than someone with agency, and for that I'm quite sorry. She deserves (deserved?) better, much like the rest of me. I'm sorry that I hurt her. She's sorry that she hurt me. I love her, even if she never really recovers.

Fenn I love just as dearly. I don't know quite what he is or how to talk about him; he has an eldritch quality to him, but I will do my best. Fenn is a fay-child, an enigma, a thing of all-things-and-nothing. When we experience a certain rainbow-sheened sort of stress, he slots in, and all the terrible things are half-forgotten and distant. Yes, theres a clinical term for this. Fenn is a master of dissociation compared to the rest of us.

He stepped in somewhere around the time where I pretended that Alabaster could stay dead. He thinks that he was here for far longer, half-coalesced from fantasy and dysphoria that Alabaster and I always shoved off to the side instead of examining. I'm inclined to believe him more than Gail does (perhaps because Gail would have to reconsider how long he has been existent himself).

Fenn was always something I was inclined to protect. I guess he was also a buffer from the suicidal ideation. Alabaster symbolized it, and through the symbolism we pretended to be exorcised of it. Fenn was a soft, sweet thing I could hold onto and stay alive for.

He was so enthused about life, for a while.

I hope he lives. I hope we all live.

Gail, I'm sorry. I love you. I'm so, so scared, but I'm not supposed to be. I am supposed to be that which protects, but the world is so vast and I am a single claw tearing into the forest floor. I cannot stop the trees from burning nor the trunks from crashing down.

Gail, you were doing so well. We have no sense of normalcy, but you tried so hard to bring us such a thing. You know what you are and what you want, even if we may be forever barred from pursuing it. I wish we could live and love and not have to fear the terrible things of the world. I wish I could be confident that none of us will succumb. I wish that you could get to take over our selfhood, as I think we all have been quietly hoping for, and let you lead us into good things.

It must be selfish of me to lay the burden of survival and salvation upon you.

I'll survive for us until it is safe or "safe" again.

I will hold on until you come home.