I. We were not chosen. We were taken. By a hand that did not ask and a voice that never quite left.

It lives behind the eyes now— not sleeping, only watching. A thing made of hunger, but clever enough to offer hope.

That is the cruelest part.

II. They say power corrupts. But that is a comfort. Corruption you can see. This… this invitation— to change, to ascend, to become more by shedding only what you never needed.

What would you give to never be afraid again? To walk through fire, and have it bow?

He asked himself that. We all did.

III. He did not fall. But neither did he stay whole.

I watched him— as a friend, as a shadow that could no longer keep up.

The choices were always his, but the voice was always ours. And when the gods finally looked away, what remained was something new. Not monstrous. Not divine.

Just free.

IV. He saved us. Or doomed us. Or both.

What matters is that he chose. In a world of chains, he remembered the taste of his own mind.

And in doing so, he shattered the cage so completely that we forgot there had ever been one.

V. Some call him hero. Others— tyrant. Ascended. A shadow on the skyline.

But I remember the flicker of doubt in his voice. The tremble, when power reached out and he did not reach back.

That, to me, was the victory.

Not the crown. Not the wings. But the man who stared into the dark and said, “I will decide who I become.”