It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
I wish things were different. It should not be Us vs. Them. It should be Humanity vs. the Slender Man. All of humanity against an enemy so inhuman, it causes us to be sick in its very presence. And yet, there are those who serve it, willingly and unwillingly. And so we must turn this war into Us vs. Them.
And the first lesson of every war is this: know thy enemy and know thyself.
The enemy knows many things about us, for it has an advantage: what we write. We write what happens to us, where we go, what we do. We record for them to read. And, if you believe in the Compulsion, we have no choice in this matter. We record our lives because it is what we do.
Most of Them do not do so. Yes, there are some, scattered here and there, recording their daily kills and keeping scorecards of death. But we vastly outnumber the proxies who blog, don't we? And yet, there must be many more proxies who do not blog, whom we know nothing about.
As for the main enemy, the Last Enemy, the Slender Man, well, what we know can be held in a thimble. There have been experiments (lately with the interesting and amusing experiments by the Gargoyle) and yet true answers have never shown themselves. Where did he come from? Why is he here? These answers still (and probably will continue to) remain a mystery.
And so we come to knowing ourselves.
A face that had a story to tell. How different faces are in this particular! Some of them speak not. They are books in which not a line is written, save perhaps a date.
Here, I have a confession to make. In the interest of full disclosure, of knowing myself, I tell you the truth:
I have an unfortunate disorder due to a particular damage I sustained in childhood. When I was fifteen, there was an incident where, to make a long story short, a nail was pushed into the back of my head.
It hurt. It hurt like nothing I had ever experienced before. I would get help for the hurt and, eventually, the nail would be removed, but it resulted in two unfortunate side effects:
- I get occasional headaches. Sometimes they are mild; other times, they are grand affairs, where I clutch my head in pain and anguish.
- After the incident, I found I had a peculiar disorder called prosopagnosia. I am unable to recognize faces. Every face is a blank canvas. Including my own.
Needless to say, with such a disorder, my first sighting of the Slender Man was not of the norm. I thought him merely a pale businessman. His facelessness went completely unnoticed by me for the longest time, since, to me, everyone is faceless.
And yet, even without that to clue me in, I could see something was off. Other people had certain gaits, certain ways of swinging their arms, certain ways of talking or muttering to themselves. The Slender Man had none of that. It was as if the world moved around him, but he was not a part of it. He was behind the curtain of the world, able to peek in and snatch up whatever he wanted whenever he wanted.
But that story is for another time.
Now we must learn more about our enemies and ourselves.