>>6066181“Then is Ayla the original Izirina?” challenges the vision. “The you who keeps your soul, and spirit, is the real you. SHE kept the demon-taint, which made Izirina what she was.”
“N-no,” you say, squinting. “That’s not… That’s not right. The soul isn’t the self. The self is built out of experiences, memories, choices… Changes. I’ve changed, and grown, into who I am!”
“So before you made those choices—five years ago, ten years ago—were you not Ezreal?” asks a jackalope—one of the jackalopes, speaking with a voice you can no longer identify as Zith-ZI or Carazzi. “Before the Rite, before Holy Luna, before Banelight… Were you not yourself, until today?”
“O-of course I was,” you say, but with less confidence.
“So who was the ‘real’ you?” the vision demands of you. “Which you is more ‘you’? If you had never hosted the energy of the Bonum Chaoticum… Would you be Ezreal Mious?”
“If you has never undertaken this great quest for esoteric knowledge… If you had never taken shirin… If you had never met your friends… Would you be ‘Tips’?”
“If you had never met your father… Traveled to the Goblin Wastes… If you had never KILLED… Would you still be a Van Houtzmann?”
“I… I…” You stammer and struggle to formulate an answer as suddenly two jackalopes become four, then eight, then sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, one hundred and twenty-eight, a thousand, a LEGION! “I don’t KNOW!”
With one booming voice, speaking in defeating unison, the aether-spanning tide of antler rabbits asks a question which threatens to drown you:
“How can you create a copy of yourself when you don’t know where you begin and where you end?”
It’s a question you hadn’t fully considered, and can’t truthfully answer. You can speculate, hypothesize, experiment with extrapolations from all you’ve experienced… But at what cost? All those enitites which you have <Cloned> without then ensouling in some fashion have been empty things, devoid of all but basest instincts. In time, even those failed. They had ceased to eat, to move, to function. None had displayed affection, excitement, passion, or direction. The only way you yet know how to create such animation is with the use of a soul—‘natural’ or arcane-artificial.
One by one, the tide of jackalopes transforms before your eyes into… You. Versions, iterations, of you. Some are young and some are old. Some are Elf, and some are Man. Some are touched by Banelight’s energies and transformed; some are as you were before….
And all their faces are placid. All their eyes, though they live, are as those of a half-elf already dead.
A thousand experiments. A thousand dead versions of Ezreal Mious ‘Tips’ Van Houtzmann.
Art by draw_with_genie 