Somnium semper remotum: chapter 7: That old mate called madness

Madness.

It’s a word we throw around like confetti at a funeral—colorful, meaningless, a distraction from the rot underneath. It’s the guy on the subway preaching apocalypse with spittle on his chin, the woman who waters her plastic plants with religious fervor. We point, we whisper, we feel a thrill of safe superiority. Their reality is a funhouse mirror; ours is polished glass. We’re certain.

We are, of course, idiots.

 Because that’s the amateur league. The petty, small-time madness of broken wiring and chemical misfires. The madness I’m talking about, the professional-grade, ontological kind, isn’t a distortion of reality. It’s the act of seeing reality for the naked, screaming, absurdist joke that it is and deciding to laugh in its face. Or better yet, to tell it a better joke. It’s the understanding that the only sane response to an insane universe is to become a more compelling lunatic.

I guess it could be said that it is the the look in a god’s eye when he sees a kindred spirit because was there anything madder than a god?

Madness, it is the quiet, complicit smile shared between two people who have both read the last page of the book and found the ending a tedious, predictable farce.

The Big House was a study in curated normalcy, a quaint wooden structure that tried very hard and failed at it to look like it hadn’t been present at the birth of Western civilization. It smelled of lemon-scented cleaner, a thin, acidic veil over the deeper, more permanent scent of millennia of poor life choices and tragic destinies. A summons. Not from the centaur, but from the other one, the one I was cautious about meeting since entering this camp. The manager of this particular asylum. I found him not enthroned in glory, but collapsed into a leather armchair so old and worn it had likely molded itself to the shape of his divine ennui. Mr. D. Dionysus. His divine scepter was a can of Diet Coke, held with the limp resignation of a man chained to a monument of his own exquisite boredom.

He did not grant me the courtesy of his attention at first. His eyes, the color of a day-old wine stain, were glued to the flickering, phosphorescent glow of a television screen. A game show. Contestants shrieked and jumped with a plastic, pre-packaged joy that was more unsettling than any scream of terror. Their ecstasy was a product, manufactured and sold, and he was its most jaded consumer. He took a slow, deliberate sip. The sound of the can’s contents fizzing down his throat was obscenely loud in the quiet room, a small, wet punctuation in the sentence of his immortality.

Then, he turned.

His gaze was not an inspection. It was a dissection. It was a scalpel sliding under my skin, peeling back the layers of mundane flesh and bone to examine the wiring beneath. It traveled from my scuffed shoes, over the unremarkable line of my trousers, past the ordinary hang of my arms, to the carefully neutral set of my mouth, and finally, it settled. It lodged itself in my eyes, and it saw. It saw the two-month clock ticking behind my retinas, the cold calculus of my plans, the absolute, unshakeable certainty that I was, for this brief and brilliant window, the most dangerous thing in any room I chose to occupy.

And he laughed.

It was not a sound of mirth. It was a physical event, a seismic release of pure, unadulterated recognition. It was the sound a lock makes when it finally, after centuries, meets the one key that fits its unique, twisted tumblers. He laughed until his shoulders shook, until a single, genuine tear traced a path through the perpetual disinterest on his face. The canned laughter from the television was a pathetic, tinny echo of this real, terrible delight. My presence was the punchline to a joke he had been waiting eons to understand.

“Oh,” he choked out, setting the can down with a sound like a period at the end of a world-altering sentence. “Oh, that is… exquisite. That is perfect.”

I simply stood there, my hand finding the familiar, cool metal of my lighter in my pocket. My heart beat a slow, steady rhythm against my ribs, a calm, biological metronome. Fear was an abstract concept, a word in a language I no longer spoke. Before me sat a god, a fundamental force of the universe given flesh and poor fashion sense, and all I could think was that he was just another piece on the board. A queen, perhaps, to my pawn. But even a pawn can topple a kingdom with the right sequence of moves. I had my sequence. I had my two months. The thought of a god, this god, being an obstacle was almost amusing. Obstacles were for those with the luxury of time to go around them. I preferred to go through. My spear, my sword, my sheath, my essences—they were not tools for negotiation. They were the language of my intent, and I was fluent.

It was the quiet confidence of a surgeon holding a scalpel to the throat of the world, knowing the incision point with absolute certainty. A man looks at a mountain and sees an insurmountable challenge. I looked at this god and saw a fascinating geological formation that I might, if the mood struck me, choose to rearrange. It was the kind of certainty a man would have looking at a star and think yeah, I can solo it.

“I expected many things,” he said, his voice a dry rasp that smelled faintly of fermented grapes and cheap soda. “When Chiron’s report landed in my lap. An upjumped miracle child. A walking, talking anachronism. The scent of old divinity on you, that brittle, sanctimonious light… like a seraphim got frisky with a bastard from the line of that insufferable king. Arthur, was it? Once and fucking future king. King of cucks I think would be more precise. All principle and tragic destiny. How… derivative.”

“I’m no-“ My rebuttal was cut by the guy cutting me.

“Please don’t deny it. I’m not stupid. There is as much chances of me being wrong than my annoying golden haired of a fool brother succeeding in fucking his twin sister and our eldest aunt.”

That guy was truly hit with a misunderstanding field the size of the one of Tanya Degurechaff because what did dude even mean?

He was completely wrong not that I would tell him. Let him believe his misconceptions are true. The less the god of madness knew about me, the better.

Still, did he think I was some sort of descendant of the real King Arthur? Did King Arthur now that I thought about it was even mentioned in the PJO books?

Also did that guy called me a miracle child? Weren’t miracle children the nephilim children born of a pure angel and a human being in DxD? Wasn’t I supposed to be in Percy Jackson?

All of that meant I either misremembered a lot about the books or this world was a crossover which if it was the case would mean that my knowledge could be faulty at best and dangerous to myself and my plans at worst.

I knew about DxD, the I could have been the best mythological anime ever if the plot and the protagonist wasn’t figuratively and literally fuelled by lewdness and boobs. I knew about it, about how in some forms, all myths were supposedly real. I had stopped reading it where that arc tournament between gods, devils, angels and the like happened.

It is good one would say. Problem was that it had been years since I had read which meant that everything that came after Issei unlocking Triana was fuzzy.

I would have to try to adapt my plans. I could already feel a headache.

He leaned forward. The atmosphere in the room did not become charged with power; it became thick with presence. The air grew sweet and heavy, cloying, like the moment before a fruit rots on the vine. The sunlight through the window took on a sickly, purple hue, pulsing with a slow, vegetative rhythm. “I expected a confrontation. A glorious, foolish little tantrum. I thought I might have to make an example of you. Turn due to our fight this entire state into a glass-lined crater. The paperwork would have been a nightmare. Maybe, you would have been enough trouble that I would have had a reason to call for my siblings or my father. A tedious chore, but a change in the routine.”

His bruised-plum eyes held mine, and I felt it—not an invasion, but an acknowledgment. He was not breaking down a door; he was simply nodding at me from the other side of a threshold I thought was mine alone. He saw the calendar pages burning in my mind, felt the pressure of my limited time like a tangible weight. “But now… now I see. That would be a waste. A vulgar act. Like using a complex, aged wine to disinfect a latrine.”

A smile spread across his face, slow and knowing. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever witnessed because it was not the grin of a monster, but the serene, utterly sane smile of a critic who has just found a work of art that finally, finally meets his exacting standards. “I see your eyes, boy. And the shape of your mind… it is so much more compelling than a simple threat. The other gods, the ones with less refined palates, would have obliterated you on sight. A clean, efficient solution. Good for the cosmic status quo. Boring.”

He sank back into his chair, reclaiming his soda. The pressure lifted, leaving behind only the scent of ozone and a profound, unsettling irony. “But things here are so dreadfully stagnant. I am tasked with administering this camp. Herding the gifted children. Ensuring the great, grinding machine of fate doesn’t get any… interesting grit in its gears.”

“And I am the grit?” I asked, my voice flat, a stone dropped into the well of his amusement. I did not move a muscle.

“You’re not grit,” he corrected, taking a sip. “You’re a whole new quarry. You have the stink of mortality on you even though you are as a divine as a minor god. The real kind. The frantic, decaying, beautiful kind. But you also have… a deadline. I can smell that too. I can see it in what you’ll wrought into this world. It’s the most intoxicating part of your bouquet. Most of these heroes,” he gestured vaguely towards the window, towards the camp, “they think they’re immortal as long as they have the attention of daddy and mommy, they do until the moment a monster’s teeth close on their throat. You? You walk in here knowing the hour of your own end. It’s written in the tension in your shoulders, in the way you look at the sky like it’s a closing lid. And yet, here you are. Not praying. Not begging for a reprieve. You’re… planning. You want more.”

He lingered on the word ‘more’, savoring it on his tongue as if it were the rarest of vintages. He said the word ‘more’ like it was the most obscene, most delightful concept in any language.

“Shouldn’t you, a god, be warning me about the dangers of wanting more?” I said, flicking my lighter open and shut. Click-clack. Click-clack. A tiny, rhythmic assertion of my own agency in the face of his divine appraisal. The small, sharp sound was a needle pricking the bloated balloon of his pontification. “The original sin. The apple. The stolen fire. A life that refuses to be a mere prelude to fertilizer.”

“Sin?” He snorted, his eyes following the movement of my lighter with genuine interest. “A child’s word for a natural law. It is the engine of everything. Mortals want more life. Gods want more devotion. Titans wanted more control. It is the same desperate, grasping hunger. The tragedy is not in the wanting. It is in the breathtaking banality of their desires.”

He leaned forward again, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that seemed to slither through the air, coiling around me. “They want a longer leash. A prettier cage. A shinier ball to chase. You… I look at you and I do not see a boy who wants a prettier cage. I see a boy who is studying the lock, not to pick it, but to understand its mechanism so completely that he can build a better one. I see a boy who has decided that if he cannot have the garden, he will plant something so strange and beautiful and poisonous that it redefines the very concept of ‘paradise.’ I cannot tell which path you will choose. And that… that is the only thing that has held my interest in a thousand years.”

 This was not the flattery of a superior to an inferior. This was one predator recognizing the unique hunting pattern of another.

“So, you are not going to smite me?” I asked, allowing a thread of theatrical disappointment to weave through my tone. To show true disappointment would be to reveal a vulnerability. To show true relief would be to acknowledge his power. This feigned, petulant boredom was the only appropriate response. “And here I was, hoping to become a cautionary tale. A stain on the floorboards for the next generation of heroes to nervously avoid.”

He let out a short, sharp bark of laughter. “A cautionary tale? Please. Those are for children who need to be taught to stay within the lines. You… you are a live exhibit. A one-act play with a guaranteed, explosive finale. I am the audience. And I have just been given the best seat in the house.”

“No pressure, then.”

“All the pressure,” he corrected, his smile a sharp, bright line. “The finest art is born from it. The madness that is pure, unfiltered creation, not mere destruction. The kind that built our palaces, and the kind that will one day reduce them to elegant ashes. It is the same spark. I should know. I carried it when I was a mortal, bleeding and desperate on a riverbank, wanting so much more than the paltry death my own fragile body had planned for me.”

There it was. The ghost in the machine. The memory of the demigod, the mortal who had fought, schemed, and clawed his way into godhood. I could see it, how he wasn’t just a god who understood humanity; he was a god who was once human and was simultaneously humanity's worst, amplified to a cosmic scale and then left to ferment for a few thousand years. His boredom wasn’t a lack of interest; it was the exhaustion of a gourmand who’s been served the same meal for eternity.

“And what is your ticket price for this performance?” I asked, snapping the lighter shut and returning it to the sanctuary of my pocket.

 “A review? A critique?”

He answered with one of his own. “How long?”

“Two months,” I told him. The number hung in the air between us, finite and absolute.

“I want to be entertained,” he stated, as if it were the most obvious and reasonable demand in any world. “I want to see what you do with your two months. I want to see if your particular strain of sanity is contagious. I want to see if you can make the other, stuffier members of my family… squirm. That is a currency more valuable than any ambrosia in this stagnant age.”

He picked up the remote and the game show’s screeching audience flooded back into the room, a wave of artificial sound washing over the profound quiet of our understanding. The audience had spoken. The curtain was rising. My performance had been commissioned by the highest possible authority, and the only critic who mattered had already declared his vested interest.

As I turned to leave, his voice caught me at the door, casual and almost lost in the synthetic celebration.

“Do try to avoid a boring death, Allen. It would be such a profound disappointment. And if you are going to shake the foundations… do it with a sense of poetry.”

I stepped out of the Big House and into the brilliant, artificial sunlight of a Camp Half-Blood afternoon. The transition  almost felt jarring. The air was clean, scrubbed of the cloying sweetness of divine attention, and now scented only with strawberries and the sweet, dry smell of cut grass. Everywhere, children played at war and would be heroes, their struggles both real and somehow trivial, like actors in a summer stock production who didn't know the play was about to be rewritten. 

And I, the god of madness’s newest and most promising interest, felt a grin spread across my face. It wasn’t a nice grin. It was probably the kind of grin a man who’d just been given a divine mandate to be utterly, gloriously, and creatively insane would have.

Two months. A front-row god. And a world of fences to taste. Stupid god. As if I cared if he watched or not. As long as he didn't try to make things harder, he could be as much of a creep as he wanted.

Like once a Mad Hatter-like man had said, let the performance begin.