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It is not difficult. Your backstory is glorious. You not only survived it, you thrived in it. Those who have difficulty with such things are weak and should be discarded for their weakness.
You are proud. You are skilled. You are a member of a race superior to all others. You were raised to understand your excellence and your duty and you have never once doubted it.
You were raised to recognize and fight a terrible foe. You know that the only way to ensure that your great people triumph and prosper is to have perfect faith in your leader. You hold in your heart that she is wise and acts for the betterment of all her followers.
It would take a rather significant, life changing event to alter your worldview.
You try to have faith. You try to believe that this is how it needs to be. But you keep slipping.
Life is dark, and it's cruel, but that's how things are. That's how the world is. You put your faith in your goddess of darkness and cruelty. She will guide you through this world made in her image.
And the people who believe in other things? In soft, bright things? Like moonlight? Fools. Fools who deserve what's coming to them, when the darkness of the world comes home to roost.
And when the darkness bites you, you tell yourself it's for your own good. To make you strong and harsh. There is a war happening, and this darkness and this harshness is on our side. It means we will win the war against the moonlight.
'Look at the night sky,' mother superior tells you. 'Look at the vast canopy of black. Look how paltry the little stars are. Look how she kills the moon, once a month. Winnowing it into nothing.'
You believe her. You try to believe her. You try very hard. But sometimes you slip.
Once you find a small mouse. It's soft and sweet, and so dear. With little black eyes and small, small ears and twitching whiskers. And you're patient and careful and save a little bread every day. And after a week it's eating out of your hand. And after a month it lives in your pocket. Every time you need, need, something soft all you have to do is reach into your pocket and it's there.
You know this isn't right. It's not the way of things, to waste time protecting something small and helpless. But its fur is so soft. And it trusts you.
And when you look out the window, and see the moon and stars, sometimes you can't see what the mother superior sees. Sometimes you look and think that in this harsh dark world, how miraculous it is that there's any light at all. How each star looks like an accomplishment and the moon looks like a miracle. A miracle, that something so beautiful managed to rise out of the black and keep shining every night.
You try to forget this sort of heresy. But you never quite manage it.
You throw yourself into the fight.
You grab every problem you can get your hands on. Every goblin attack, every dire-wolf haunted wood, every lost cow. There are a surprising number of lost cows on the frontier. You become a dab hand at coaxing them home.
Sometimes there are problems you solve with your blade. Sometimes there are problems you solve by talking them out. You've defended farmsteads and resolved old feuds. Often you are thanked. Admired. Heroic. But you do it even when no one is there to thank you. And you do it even when it makes the people around you spitting angry. People don't always like the right thing being done. Particularly people with power.
Doing things helps. It helps you forget the things you don't want to think about. It helps you ignore the itch behind your eye. Looking forward is the only sensible thing to do. There's no use in second-guessing decisions you know you would've made a thousand times over.
And when you're not doing something, sometimes you feel you don't quite know who you are.
She's starting to understand this, you think. You can feel her watching what you do, an itch behind your right eye. She likes to mock your work. And the longer you spend together, the better she gets at mocking it in ways that actually sting.
But the longer you spend together, the more you understand her as well. You know that what she sees through your eye annoys her. You can hear it in her voice, sometimes. And when you use her powers to save lost cows, you know it pisses her off.
Some days, the prospect of pissing her off is the only thing that keeps you moving forward.
You continue to breathe.
There is something wrong with your chest. Regardless, you keep breathing.
You wander from room to room, picking up things that used to mean something to you. Trying to playact being the man you used to be.
You pause to pet your cat. That helps, a little.
You make food, because one must eat, just as one must breathe. You don't feel hungry. Not for food. You still eat. If you don't, your cat will become upset.
The thing in your chest is heavy with the weight of your failures. You ruminate often on things you could have done differently. Precautions. Other paths. If you had been more careful, smarter, better. Perhaps it would have been better not to try at all.
You try to think of what to do next, but all paths seem to lead to a precipice. A sharp cutoff beyond which you cannot conceive further progress. And when you stare too long at the precipice breathing becomes even harder.
Your cat crawls onto your lap and demands you pet her. That helps. Again. A little.
There are things you used to do. Things that used to be important to you. Responsibilities you used to have. Some of them have fallen away in the wake of this disaster. Some of them are merely beyond you right now, weighed down as you are by the thing in your chest.
You narrow your ambition. You no longer want fame or achievement or love. You want to keep breathing for another day. For another hour. For the next five minutes.
You manage to breathe, for another five minutes.
You do not survive your backstory.
But somehow, you're still here. Still moving. You have to. It's not a choice.
And somehow, it is still possible to die more. Become a more dead undead. Become a passive sycophant, like Petras, or an extension of his will, like Aurelia.
Survival is small things. Secret things. It is pieces of yourself stored in cupboards, and hidden under floorboards.
Survival is silently picking apart your master's stylistic choices in your head. Judging his clothes, and his tiresome speeches, and the extremely tacky still-lifes and portraits he hangs everywhere.
Survival is going out into Baldur's Gate and pretending at being a person. Survival is sometimes pretending so well that you forget you're dead for a while. For a moment.
Survival is snapping back at Godey, even though it's going to hurt. Even though you're going to be begging, apologizing, and bleeding for it after that moment. Because in the brief moment that you are insulting him, you're real.
Survival is spending time with the tiresome, bitter, violent, insane people who are the only people who understand what you're going through. Survival is getting in a tooth-and-claw brawl with Violet over who gets top bunk, and then watching her back at a new flophouse when you go out hunting at the same time. Survival is blaming Dalyria for the wine stains, so that the master punishes her instead of you, and then, the next night, fixing her hair before she goes out, because no one can use mirrors anymore.
Pieces of you survive between the cracks. In hidden moments. And no one can take that away from you. Not even him.
Survival is walking. You never stop walking. You know what they say about Hell? If you're going through it, you want to keep going.
It's not going to be easy. I wish I could tell you it was gonna be easy. You seem nice. And it sure would be nice if it were easy.
The sky is either dark or on fire--one of those two. The ground is either mud, or jagged, or blood slippery, or bone dust that gets everywhere.
It's lonely. The only people to talk to are devils. And they are not fun to chat with. They're all just bullies, you know. They like to go on about all the nasty stuff they're plotting to do. How they're going to get one over on the other guy and grab his stuff and his souls. I'm sorry if you're in a place where there's only devils around to talk to.
On the bright side, you do get to kill devils. And I am real good at killing devils. And if you get to do something you're good at, well that's satisfying, isn't it? That's something. Hell never runs out of devils to kill.
If you keep walking, things keep changing. And as long as things keep changing, things might get better. So I keep walking, and I hope that things get better.
It helps when I've got friends to walk with me.