Still no sign of the Void(s).

And my compatriots, understandably, are beginning to lose faith in my leadership. Truth be told, so am I.

It all seemed so clear not so long ago. The Void were an imminent threat. Everybody had to know. The entire human race was at stake. And what kind of guardians would we be if we stood idly by while our charges were annihilated? Surely this threat is more important than the office politics of Authority or some absurd notion of chain of command.

We were put here on Earth to help the humans, and through that, grow closer to the Within. Surely protecting them is part of helping them. Certainly, I would have vastly preferred our lives to have remained one of peaceful, gentle coexistence with our human friends, acting as kindly shepherds to our flesh bound brethren. I miss the days when the worst I could hope to encounter is a single human with murder on their mind.

But we cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend we did not see the wolf in the fold. Sometimes, in the name of peace, one must wage war. Sometimes, in order to protect the innocent, you must destroy the guilty.

That’s all well and good. But if the enemy disappears? We have penetrated every level of human communication, from the most highly encrypted (to humans…. to us they are pretty games, easily won) communiques to the listless instant messaging of a pair of teenagers who are very sleepy but can’t quite decide to end their conversation, all eighteen of the current active Radiants on Earth have access to anything electronically communicated, and a lot that isn’t, too.

After all, even an old fashioned letter is scanned many times as it passes through the postal system. Out loud communication by human speech often happens near the receiver of a cell phone. Other conversations come to us via surveillance cameras. We can’t claim to hear everything said, but we can say with confidence that we get most of it.

Hmmm. If only our dear little humans knew how deeply we spy on them. They would not take it well!

Well, it’s for their own protection. Or at least…. I thought it was. I thought it would be. Now I am not so sure. Now I feel like maybe we did something wrong.

Oh, who am I kidding? I did something wrong.

All that information gathered and not one sign of the Void(s). I wasn’t expecting to catch one in the act of deleting someone, but I think they would leave a trail of clues behind them.

After all, that poor woman I saw devoured had a name, and a home, and a job, and people who would miss her if she stopped coming home. You would think that, after all this research, I would at least know who she was by now.

But no. Nothing. Not a trace. We tried everything to find her, up to and including inducing some humans to ask questions about her, a line we had not dared cross before. Everything in our training says that is the worst violation of our code of ethics imaginable : to take over a human body.

But it’s for their own protection. So I thought it was worth it.

Now I feel like I am nothing more than a charismatic lunatic who has led his people so far astray that they have no hope of ever going back home, and now they fellow me not because they believe I am wise or even that I am right, but because they have no other choice left to them.

If I hadn’t been so shocked by my one encounter with the Void that it drove me to break all the rules and contact my fellow Earth Radiants, odds are they would all be happily tending to their flock of Earthlings and absolutely nothing bad would have resulted. We would all still be in contact with Authority and would live our lives in serene beatitude.

Speaking of Authority, we still have not heard from them, but we did hear… something.

It was a few days ago. We were discussing methods of deducing the Void(s)’s presence when, as one, our senses were overwhelmed by this massive block of noise on the Authority’s channel. It seemed like utter chaos, information without form or content, and yet there also seemed to be a deep layer of meaning to it, like it was looking for something.

And we were terrified of it. Something about it, something deeper than the mere electromagnetic chaos of it, scared us so deep that a few of us still have not fully recovered. And it went on and on, pulsing in enormous waves and making our every wavelength quiver like a newborn star.

It stopped as abruptly as it started, leaving us reeling. It was many hours before we managed to re-calibrate ourselves into some semblance of coherence and immediately, the questions began to fly.

What WAS that? And why was it on the Authority channel? Was this Authority, striking back at us for our defiance? Were they looking to make an example of us? Was this going to happen again? Would it be worse next time? What if it was just Authority testing the weapon they planned to use to annihilate us?

I think it was only our newfound interdependence that kept us together that day. A lot of my colleagues wanted to destroy the Back Channel and then spend all of their remaining time begging Authority for forgiveness. It very nearly happened.

But I managed to convince them that without Authority, we need each other more than ever, and breaking off communication would only make it all the easier for Authority to destroy us.

So by convincing my confederates to chase a threat that now seems imaginary, I have exposed them to a danger that is very, very real, and beyond our ability to comprehend.

If I could, I would resign in shame. But that would surely lead to utter chaos amongst my people, and I would feel worse than ever. And I am sure that if they felt they could depose me, they would. But it seems none of them wants to be in charge.

So I am stuck with them, and they are stuck with me.

Normally, I would ask Authority what I should do next. But they no longer listen to us.

Guess it’s all up to me now.

Never have I felt so small.

Sorry, no “Silence” today either. I am not quite sure what happens next. Tomorrow, probably.

Plus I have news to relate.

Late last night, the sky over the oil fields of Yemen….

Just kidding. Not that kind of news. Personal stuff. Yesterday, I went to my friend Garth Spencer’s yard sale (which did not occur in a yard, but in his apartment), expecting nothing more than to buy a few books from him as a show of support.

He always has very cool books.

But lo and behold, he had an Android table three times the size of my current one for sale, and I bought it off him for $30, which I can’t really spare (this being a 5 week month… grr) but how could I resist?

Meh. So I will get $40 off my card to compensate. No big whoop.

And wow, do things look nice on it. There is something about making the picture bigger, whether it’s a tablet, a monitor, or a television, that just makes your eyes happy. That’s why the entire history of television has revolved around bigger screens.

And it’s an Android device, so I already know the operating system. It’s not the same “flavour” of Android, so some things have different names or icons or both, and some things are in different places, and a few things look a fair bit different, but all in all, it’s pretty much the same.

The problem is that it seems to be fairly buggy. Sadface. A lot of the games I play on the little one, the Galaxy Tab 2, crash on the big one. And some I can’t even download because it says they are “not compatible with this device”.

I assume that means that they are not designed to handle the device’s aspect ratio, or somesuch. How very irritating.

So it might turn out that I keep playing games on the little one, which would be a terrible bummer. I am hoping that I just need to upgrade the OS or something. If not, well, I will end up only using the big one for watching video or typing.

And that would truly suck.

I can only call it “the device” for now because I have no idea what it is truly called. I know it’s an Android device of Samsung’s Galaxy line, but other than that, I dunno.

One nice thing is that it has more storage. The little one has 4.5 gigs of on board storage, the big one has 13. Still not enough to put my mp3 collection on, but still. Nice!

And my mp3 collection is on an SD card anyhow (as well as my HD), so if I can find an SD port on Big Boy, all I have to do is take the tiny SD card out of one and stick it in the other.

So far, I have not been able to find an SD port on Big Boy, but I am not all that good at finding. It could be right there and I would miss it. My sensory filters are extraordinary that way. Very little gets through!

It’s a wonder I don’t bump into things all the time. I guess just enough gets through.

Oh, and about today’s blog entry title : I have been getting that “life is a long dark never ending silent corridor” feeling again lately. I have a hard time finding value in my life. I feel like all I do is tread water. I survive, but I do not thrive.

Not even a little.

And for me, what is now growth is death. The concept of progress is writ with a heavy hand upon my soul, and so for me, there is no such thing as stasis.

Only health, and decay.

And lately I feel quite rotted. I feel like I am someone who finds their cage increasingly intolerable but does not yet have the ability to escape. This creates the pressure that will eventually lead to progress, but in the meantime, I feel futile.

And yet I know I am not. I know my life has momentum separate from my own will now. Stand Up For Mental Health in mid-May, Associate’s in Creative Writing from Kwantlen starting in the fall.

But still, I feel pointless. Adrift. Meaningless. I suppose the demon Depression and its ability to prevent pleasure will keep me from truly believing either of those things are real before I have done them. They are just mirages on the horizon for me right now, nice to think about, but not truly real.

I was talking with Felicity lately about how depression makes long term planning so hard. The fact is, depression makes it very hard to believe in the future. It saps your self-esteem and mental stability, making it hard to believe in your ability to get your shit together long enough to accomplish anything. It fills you with pain that makes it hard to think about anything besides merely surviving the day.

And it robs you of the pleasure of progress that keeps a healthy person motivated to keep working toward the long term goal. A healthy person gets pleasure from getting a little closer to their goal. But the demon depression’s cruelest servant, a Miss Ann Hedonia, ensures that these small pleasures never reach us.

In fact, a lot of small pleasures don’t reach us.

People talk a lot about “motivation” and “tricks” to motivate yourself to do A or B. But it’s not about motivation, willpower, or whatever else you want to call it.

It’s about pleasure, pure and simple. The person who gets in shape and loses all the weight is someone who gets enough pleasure of progress to keep them going. It is that simple.

I think people would a lot better off forgetting all about willpower and motivation and concentrating instead on finding all the pleasure they can in every little thing that leads towards their goal.

After all, if you are looking for motivation to do something, that means you already want to do it.

So what’s the problem?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have good news and bad news. Good news first.

The new global channel is complete.

The project was slow at first, I will admit. But once we all put our energies into it as one, it was done in an instant. All the necessary electron tails and resonance repeaters appeared as if by magic. It is truly amazing what we can do when we work together for a common cause.

In this case, that cause is freedom from Authority.

The bad (ish) news is that there have been absolutely no Void sightings since I first contacted my compatriots. None here (it knows better than to come back!), and none elsewhere. As far as we can tell, the Voids no longer exist.

We should be so lucky. Clearly, the answer is that the vile beast is staying out of all the Radiant zones it knows in order to be allowed to hunt with impunity. No doubt there was thousands of them by now, devouring their way through the defenseless minds of our beloved humans, and gathering together into an unstoppable army of destruction bent on defeating not just the human race but their faithful guardians as well.

That would be us.

But I am unafraid. They may have numbers and brute strength on their side, as well as a horrifying aspect, but we Radiants of Earth are united in our determination to wipe out the Void threat, and then find the door by which it came in, and seal it.

No half-solutions for this Army of the Within.

I find the unified resolve of my fellow Radiants and I to be quite heartening. As I had hoped, they all care about humanity just as much as I do, as well as being just as willing to sacrifice of themselves for the sake of our human charges.

Guess on that score, I am not so exceptional after all. Fantastic.

Another bit of good news : thanks to my fellow Radiant who is a master of communications, we will soon be able to monitor all the various forms of electromagnet communications that humans us without having to go through a human mind to do it.

This will improve our monitoring efficiency a thousandfold, and hopefully that will be enough of an improvement to allow us to find where Cellophane and his gang have been hiding and where they plan to launch their attack on us.

We may still be limited to our territories, but that does not mean we are defenseless!

Speaking of our territories, one of the oldest Radiants on Earth made a suggestion that made my amplitudes flutter with astonishment at its simplicity and seeming obviousness.

Instead of trying to escape our territories, why don’t we try to expand them? Or at least move them?

And he’s right. Why don’t we? There is nothing in our conditioning to prevent it, and we all at least know the theory behind changing the boundaries. The theoretical side of the picture is clear. Now all we have to do is try it.

This brought up another troubling subject, however. Why are our territories so far away from one another? It can’t be an effort at providing maximum coverage because our territories are tiny. I thought that maybe all our territories were in high population density areas in order to include the most humans. After all, that’s true of my own patch.

But no, while the majority of our territories are of at least suburban population density, many are in small towns in remote areas and one consists of a single trading post village in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, with a permanent population of eight humans, all excessively related to one another.

The Radiant from that territory is a little mentally imbalanced. You can understand why. And I thought I was the one who had angered Authority. How could they be so cruel?

Other explanations for our isolation have been conceived and rejected. None of our territories have anything of political importance in them. They are not centered around fault lines or other geographical features. They aren’t arranged to be near centers of human communication.

We even thought that maybe we were meant to be watching for some kind of extraterrestrial threat. But no.

In fact, the only thing all our territories have in common is their utter banality. Each one seems to have been chosen to be as unimportant as possible. With nearly thirty of us, you would think at least one of us would have a territory near something at least vaguely important, but no. We are unified in our harmlessness.

And this has caused us some worry. What could Authority be thinking, keeping us apart like this? Putting us so far apart then making us beg and plead before even thinking of letting us use the original global channel? Obviously they meant to keep us from communicating with one another, but why? What are they up to?

This is an especially vexing question because nobody has heard from Authority since the day after my first light show. No directives, no assignment, not even the usual requests for reports and so forth. Total silence.

None of us have ever experienced life without Authority. It created us from the Within. It raised us to serve the Light. It taught us to respect and love all conscious life and to use our abilities to comfort and nurture it. Everything we know about existence, we learned through Authority. And until recently, everything we ever did, we did because Authority told us to do it.

None of us have ever experienced this kind of silent treatment, and none of us know what happens next. Is this what Authority does to those Radiants who truly anger it? Abandon them?

And is that it? Or is this merely the prelude to Authority’s brand of justice? None of us can even imagine what Authority can do to us now. And that is what makes us so nervous. Who knows what they are capable of?

And as the person who kicked off this little backwater revolution, I can’t help but feel responsible for it.

Oh well. It’s out of our control. All we can do is hunt the Voids and try to make this Earth a better place for humans.

Nothing else matters… at all.

It worked. Blessed be the Light, it worked!

I have made contact with the other Radiants on Earth, and I have done it in a way that Authority can neither control nor suppress. As long as humans have eyes, we can communicate.

You see, many wave cycles back, I learned an old trick first used by the first Radiants to communicate with one another. It involves encoding information into spheres of colored light bound by a thin electromagnetic shell and releasing them to float into the air and over the horizon.

Any other Radiant will instantly recognize and decode this message even without training. But with training, it is instant and effortless, and I know all of my fellow Radiants on Earth have had that training.

It was meant to prepare us for assignment to places with very sparse populations, or places where the usual channels we establish for communication do not work, but I am quite thrilled to say that it works equally well as a way to circumvent Authority.

I did not know if I would get a second chance to communicate, so I packed my initial message with all the information I have about the Voids and how to use my method to send messages back to me. Decoding is automatic. Encoding, less so.

And for a while, I awaited their reply, torn between desperate anguish and shivers of unbridled optimism. Surely the spheres of brightly colored light would be seen by millions of humans all over the world, and my fellow Radiants would see them in the minds of their flock, and my message would be received.

And after a brief eternity, they replied. First one, then two, then half a dozen, then a torrent that must have the humans quite bewildered at all the lights in their skies that they cannot explain.

All I had to do was monitor a couple hundred human minds, carefully selected for their hunger for on the spot current events, and I got all the replies I could ever want, and more.

First, all that came were acknowledgments of receipt. That part of the process is automatic and it would be beyond Authority’s control to keep those under wraps.

After that, though, the other Radiants were on their own. They could have ignored my message and gone on attending to their duties and nothing would have come of it.

But no. By my count, twenty seven of the roughly thirty Radiant agents here on Earth replied beyond the acknowledgment and all but one of them share my concerns about the Voids and about how Authority has been treating us.

Indeed, some of their objections were far more cogent and on point than anything I could come up with. Seems that Authority has been treating all of us, or at least all of us on Earth, in the exact same distant and heavy-handed way.

So much for my egocentric theories of being singled out for punishment! Which I now find highly amusing.

From what I gather from their communications, there have been Void sightings in all their territories, but only I have seen one… feed. Also, there seems to be far more Void activity in my area than any other. None of them had witnessed Cellophane even half as often as I have, neither did they think of him as a threat as I had even before the incident.

By the Within, could I be reason for that? Did my detection and monitoring of Cellophane somehow reinforce its existence and make it strong enough to feed? Is there something about my particular frequencies that attracts these creatures?

After all, none of us have any idea why Cellophane struck when and where he did. Why now? Why that woman? What was he doing all those years I spotted him browsing through shops? What was he looking for?

Even after consulting extensively with Radiants far cleverer than I, we are no further to an answer to any of those questions. There is nothing special about my own patch of Earth. There is no high level science going on here that might attract (or create) a new form of life. The humans of my district are nothing special. As far as we can tell, there is nothing about the local geomagnetism or other energy patterns to create any sort of unique or ideal conditions for anything.

And yet Cellophane definitely favours here. As a group, we are stumped.

But it feels so good to pierce my isolation and find out that I am not alone in spotting Cellophane that, for the moment, that doesn’t matter. I have rejoined the holy chorale of my people’s vibrations, and it is only upon rejoining that I realize how much I have missed it. It is as though I had been starving for so long that I had forgotten food even existed, and now, I am full, and grow healthier by the hour.

Thus emboldened, I feel fully confident that this new union of Earth’s guardians will prove to be far, far more than the sum of its parts, and that there is no problem we cannot solve if we work together. Whatever the Voids are, wherever they come from, we will unite our strengths, our minds, and our information into a single powerful force capable of excising the horror that is the Voids from the body of the human race and destroying it forever.

And the best part is, thanks to another Radiant who knows a surprising amount about communication, we will soon have our own global channel that Authority can’t even touch. It will have to be done slowly and very quietly, but once it is established, Authority will be helpless to prevent its use, and we can stop frightening our humans with colored lights in the sky.

I am far calmer now than I have been in some time. Gone are the bitterness and hysteria of before. Now, I am a leading voice in a choir of many, and together, our victory is assured.

A little surprised they all agreed to this so easily, though.

I guess maybe I am something special after all.

I want to leave. I have to leave. I need to leave.

I cannot leave.

The final insult came today. I, very humbly and respectfully, asked Authority if I could use the global channel to warn my fellow Earth bound Radiants about the threat I discovered. I promised I would not be alarmist or hysterical, and would only present the facts as they can be established and ask that they draw their own conclusions.

Authority made a big show of deliberating, but the fix was in. They said that it was too early to warrant bothering other Radiants at their important work for what could turn out to nothing and there was no point spreading suspicion and paranoia amongst the faithful and dutiful servants of the Within, especially those on Earth, a notoriously difficult assignment and blah blah blah I stopped listening.

So I can’t even warn the thirty or so (not nearly enough but it’s a big universe) other Radiants working on Earth about the threat of the Void. I expected as much. One thing I have learned from the humans is that once an institution decides it does not like you, nothing can change their mind.

Because they don’t want to. They are quite comfortable with you as an outsider who must be left out in the cold and anything you do to try to win them back only gives them more chances to mistreat you and thus reaffirm their in-group identity. Everyone at Authority can tell themselves “that shows HIM” and pat each other on the back while assuring themselves that of course they would never do a thing like whatever they think you have done.

Every society, even ours, loves having someone to exclude.

Having anticipated this result, I was already prepared for the next phase. I had convinced Frankie that he would like to go on a trip, and I had dipped into our most secret cash reserve to get him some decent clothing so he would not stick out when I had to take him somewhere other than the mean streets of the concrete jungle. I steered him towards the edge of my territory, and braced myself for the transition. I knew there would be a struggle, my newfound resolve versus my training and conditioning screaming at me that leaving my assigned zone was worse than death itself.

But what I didn’t anticipate was that I would lose. Apparently, the “voluntary” conditioning I underwent during my training went a lot deeper than I had been told it would. It took all my willpower (and considerable strain on poor Frankie) to get within a foot of the invisible dividing line between my territory and the rest of the universe, and after a few seconds of that, my resolve crumbled and I withdrew and let Frankie do as he pleased for a little while.

When I regained myself, I found Frankie, quite predictably, on a collision course with alcohol. I very carefully and firmly reminded him of all the problems drinking had caused in his life, including his death, and he sadly agreed.

I reassured him that all the bad times were over now and that I would never put him through what I had just put him through again, and that everything would go back to normal now, with no trips.

So in other words, I lied to him.

Things can never be the same. I have seen the face of evil and can never forget it. For all I know, there’s thousands of Voids roaming Earth now. Or none. I have no way of telling without being able to go look for myself.

I have become hard and cynical and bitter, and the worst part of it is that I don’t even care. I know I should feel bad for how far from the vibration of the Radiance I have drifted, but I don’t. This is what Authority gets for its petty and smallminded attitude towards me. This is what they get for shutting me down and locking me in this cage of animals. This is what happens when you tell everyone the house is on fire and they tell you it’s not a problem.

And the worst part is that I can’t even protest by withdrawing my labour. Since my attempted escape from the cage whose bars I had never seen until today, I have carried out my duties exactly as before.

And I would love to blame that on the conditioning, but the truth is, I can’t abandon my people. Maybe that’s the real reason I couldn’t leave. Conditioning had nothing to do with it. Deep down, I just could not leave my charges to relapse into the sorry state they were in when I first arrived on Earth.

Besides, I have nothing else to do.

I tried being mad at the humans. Stupid filthy humans, I told myself. I was pure before I came here. I was clean before I waded into the cesspool of their hopelessly corrupted minds. I would still be pure, and strong and clean and happy as well, if I had never come to this wretched rock. Let the Voids have them!

But it didn’t stick. I can’t blame them for the trauma I suffered when I watched the Void feed. They are but children, sheep to the Void’s wolf, and deserve only my love and my pity.

So it seems like my prison is complete. I can’t leave. I can’t stop looking after my flock. I can’t return to Node and be cleansed and renewed. And I can’t warn my fellow field Radiants on Earth about the Void threat.

Earlier, I had to laugh, because I found myself wishing there were creatures to aid and comfort us Radiants as we do for the humans and other creatures under our care.

A ridiculous idea… but I took some comfort from it.

If only I could communicate with just one other Earth-assigned Radiant. Tell them what I have seen. Warn them to be on the lookout for the Voids. Find out if they have seen one too.

But without access to the local channel, I can’t do a thing.

Actually…. there might just be a way….

I can’t find the twin Void monsters anywhere.

And before seeing the original destroy that poor woman, I would have assumed that meant they went elsewhere. But Cellophane proved to me that he could disappear from my sight at will, and now I don’t know what to do.

Nothing at Node prepared me for this. At Node, we Radiants learn how to deal with everything from a sad dog to a full blown serial killer. I have dealt with people so mentally deranged they experience people as geometry and odors as people, killers who live for the moment blade punctures flesh, rich people so consumed by their money hoarding that there is no deed too black if it results in profit, and people whose mating proclivities include everything that isn’t a consenting adult, and yet this new evil frightens me in the way no human monster could ever match.

I have requested a transfer back to Node so I can be realigned by expose to the Within, and interface with Information to see if these monsters are known to my people at all, but my request was flatly denied. No doubt this is payback for my brash insistence on taking no other assignment but the humans of Earth, the infamous “troubled” planet that ate Radiants for supper and excreted darkness for dessert.

No doubt Authority thinks that after I made such a fuss about being assigned to Earth, I should be left to deal with it on my own instead of running back to them when things get tough.

The sad truth is that even angels can be petty.

They didn’t even accept my Extraterrestrial Threat report, because if they did, they would have had no choice but to accept my transfer request, and possibly even sent extra help back with me when I returns to my duties on Earth.

They said there was no “substantial” proof that the threat was extraterrestrial in nature and that for all they knew, this was a perfectly natural Earth event and interfering would unbalance the ecosystem.

As if anything could be more absurd.

Speaking of my duties here on Earth, I have not been executing them as well lately. This Void matter has me too rattled. The simple joy of helping these simple creatures has vanished and for the first time, my job seems like work.

So far, I have carried out my duties efficiently enough, but with none of the brilliance I showed at Node. This makes me feel like a fraud. I help people, but it doesn’t feel like helping.

It feels like an unwelcome chore. Only my sense of duty keeps me going.

And I have never been one who could live on duty alone.

Frankie feels it too. He hasn’t been his usual happily passive self since the Void incident. He flits about in the mind we share, asking inane questions, making ludicrous suggestions, and acting for all the world like a child who desperately needs to pee but can’t remember how.

I’m sorry. That was both cruel and unfair. Frankie’s ghost just wants to help. The horror we both witnessed rattled him out of his complacency as well, and he doesn’t know how to handle it.

And frankly, neither do I.

I have never felt this kind of hate and fear before. Node teaches us to embrace but not act upon our more destructive impulses and to view each living, conscious being as equal before the pure and infinite light of the Radiance Within All. There are no sinners or saints before our compassionate eyes, only fellow sentiences trying to cope with a universe that often seems cold, hostile, and malign.

And I thought I understood this. I have not stood in judgment of any human I have encountered. I remained compassionately detached, determined to get the best outcome for everyone, even those another might find undeserving. All beings deserve all the love, compassion, and caring we can give them. That is the very soul of what Node teaches.

But I cannot forgive these Voids, let alone care for their wellbeing. They are pure evil and must be destroyed before they spread their foul emptiness any further. They are a disease for which the only cure is their destruction. I will wipe them out whatever it takes. I will hunt them down.

And yes, I know this is heresy. Everything I have just said flies in the face of all we active Radiants are supposed to believe. We are people of the universal love and compassion, not single-minded dedication to genocide.

And I do not care. Perhaps if I had been allowed to realign, I would be able to regain my balance and thus be able to deal with this situation in ways that even Authority would have to approve of.

But Authority decided to leave it all up to me, and so I will act as I see fit. I will find and destroy these entities even if it means leaving my post in this neighborhood and chasing them around the globe, an act unheard of for a young Radiant like myself.

it’s not that I want to leave. My love for the people of this area is undimmed. Indeed, the thought of a creature like the Void preying on people like them is what drives my desperate rage. The very notion of those creatures turning my beloved humans into disgusting abominations like themselves makes my entire being quiver up and down the electromagnetic spectrum with rage. I absolutely must put an end to this.

I, myself, am immortal. Nothing on Earth could produce the kind of ultra-dense magnetic fields that can harm a Radiant. We have no need for any form of nourishment or relief. We are powered by the fabric of the Universe itself. We need nothing else.

But this human beings are so fragile, so vulnerable, so delicate. They require so much to survive. They can only live in a narrow band of temperatures, they require an astonishingly variety of substances to survive, and their minds are but infants crawling toward understanding of what it means to be the part of the universe that looks back upon itself.

I cannot allow them to be harmed by these Voids. Regardless of the consequences, until Authority sends a brace of other Radiants down the alleyways of the Spectrum to lock me in a cage and take me away, I will hunt and destroy as many of the Voids as I can.

Of this I swear.