It's The Real Me.
Ancient blog title references aside, it really is me JP.
Or Veigar if you prefer. The situation is horribly complicated to be perfectly honest.
When I..."died" for a lack of a better term, I ended up in what at the time I thought was simply a part of The Path of Black Leaves that Veigar had never seen, or more likely never talked about.
Neither of those were correct OR wrong however.
I've come to call this place my Clearing , a section of The Path that fundamentally acts differently than the rest of it. As many of you know from either personally experiencing it or through the accounts of those who have been there, The Path is a pocket dimension physically located in The Black Forest in Germany but is accessible from anywhere by many Proxies. It is generally used as a "fast travel" system (albeit a dangerous one) as it allows you to pop up anywhere in the world at anytime as long as you know the correct locations in the forest to leave from. The trees, leaves, water, foliage, and even the dirt are various shades of grey and black. Monsters, colloquially known as Denizens, roam its paths looking for anyone and anything to rend apart.
The Clearing isn't like that.
Everything here is like someone superimposed the forest from my home in rural Virginia over the drabness of the path.Other than the rare splash of dark foliage, spindly pines, massive oaks, tall grass, mossy rocks, and flowing clear water exist in a place where they have no right to. I can't leave the Path from here and no matter how hard I try can not directly appear in it. As far as I can tell
Denizens however do wander in occasionally; but it seems as if something becomes wrong with them once they do so. While they heed me no attention as I've inherited Veigar's ability to be treated as a non-entity towards them, they still enter seemingly looking for someone. As soon as they leave, they are immediately torn apart by the first other Denizen they encounter as if they were no longer considered one of their own.
So that's my living situation summed up for the past while. Now you may be asking "Hey JP/Veigar what happened all those years ago and what have you been doing since?" The fist half will be answered later but the second I can do now.
I rediscovered myself.
After those events five years ago I thought everyone and everything related to my "saga", including myself, was dead and gone. I was wrong.
At first I believed myself to be free of Veigar's influence and I was finally just JP in a twist of irony. I was proven wrong after about a month of sitting in the Clearing however. Memories starting popping up in my head.
Memories of action, of fighting for life and limb against those in the same organization less competent than I and deserving of punishment, of rescuing a fleeting curiosity turned debt repaid towards an old business partner, of struggling against my own nature and not giving in to and eventually dominating the substance that had replaced my blood.
Memories of caring, of pleasant conversation with an old man in some kind of lab, gently pushing the purple hair out of a girls eyes after she read me poetry, of friendly sparring with a standoffish yet reliable comrade, of infectious laughter after a bad joke told, of taking in a broken young man and leading him towards something greater, of looking after a scientist in her hour of need.
Memories of spite, of a brutal execution of one of my own for betrayal, of a mercy killing to another before they came too close, of a searing hatred towards a being more powerful than I, of a willingness to give up everything for even a Pyrrhic victory against that being.
These were not my memories.
Except they were.
I thought Veigar to be dead. Instead, we are one now. His mind has now fully assimilated into my own and we are now a different whole than the two parts that once made it up.
Veigar's courage must have been the last thing for me to get because I now feel ready to put into words what happened all that time ago. Expect the recounting in the weeks to come.
Oh, and you can call me Jeremy now. It's what I was called back in a simpler time.
