Date A Live: Red Crown Vessel

29.1 - Fruitless Vessel

I'll start from the beginning.

I was something like a counterintuitive recluse, choosing to live alone yet getting a job requires good communication. I've spent quite an amount of Divine Inspiration to get the skills I thought I needed when I only needed to know how arrogance kills the moment you underestimate your enemies. I also took in a kitten, Narinder.

At the time, I was free from the tyranny of the consequences I've yet to see.

While one might think that this intention of being a psychologist as another one of my facades, in truth, I actually have an interest in it. I've been fascinated by how the mind's defense systems and ways it tries to cope with distress, so when I saw the opportunity just to observe students in their natural environment. I taught them lessons too, yes.

However, there's this one theory that... weirdly grew on me. I saw it in the library while browsing just for the fun of it—the Existential Theory. It suggests that we have a choice on who we want to be because of free will, thus allowing humans to create meaning in their lives through said free will.

I thought about it and then left, as one usually does. The idea sat in the back of my head for... so long now.

But as I walked the arrogance and prideful life that I led up until recently, I encountered strange anomalies that, honestly, made my skin crawl.

The inability of my death, the imbibed quest from that shadow in my mind to search for answers, my torture at the hands of Taliah, the appearance of the Yellow Crown, and... the ones I had been having just a few weeks ago but then stopped—these Dreams of Utopia, where "I" was happy with... someone.

It seems this psychological theory applies not to me, because everything that's happened is leading me to become. Free will might as well be a myth if all I am is a character to be told what to do.

I tore myself off that ichor of anguish and reserved my fate to this... this monster in the nebulous abyss. Power was all that mattered to her. I refuse to address that thing as human, or Spirit for that matter.

But for what reason have I left to blot out the thoughts that first appeared in my head upon surfacing in this world? The arrogance I have left behind... I feel the traces of pre-cognition of a mind that wasn't my own.

I have to look back even more.

The Crown is mine... was mine. Power? Futile. My soul cannot afford it, this fractured soul of mine. Foolish soul. 

Pain of purpose, failure to provide. However, I saw the tree...

There was a tree in the eldritch void. Its branches stretch out across many streams, fluid and radiating with essence.

A newborn, ripe from the tree grown by the void. A different void, not from Spirits. It was a chasm blacker than the decay of dying stars, more profane than the sacrilege dripping ichor from the corpses of dead gods. A wretched caretaker presided over it all as its roots.

There were many fruits, and yet the tree was shaken, causing the ripe to fall and the rotten to decay. Its fruits, once numerous, cascaded into oblivion. The caretaker's outstretched tendrils recoil and quake as it hurled in anguish as it was attacked.

As the fruits break off, they disintegrate, crumble to something less than ash—almost as if they were never supposed to exist... Except for one fruit.

All that remained... was my mind, yet it was not my mind. It is a prismatic fracture of violet splinters. Am I born of consciousness? Or is this a twisted inheritance grafted upon a mind not my own?

She desires me, my connection to this world. Why can't she tear through? Has something halted her, restricted her? Maybe...

I exist upon this cursed, desecrated precipice where free will is but a cruel joke, and there, a malignant realization strikes me of what I truly am.

Cursed is the scarlet hand of fate, and no amount of psychology can ever stop that.

I am a Vessel of Taliah, fallen from her unholy tree, but bound and reshaped by a consciousness foreign.

Think no evil, for perhaps I am...