Chapter 78: Chapter 76: The clock strikes twelve. The hour of the blackbird arrives

For a person stuck inside the confines of civilization, it is often very easy to think that the outside world — nature — is a chaotic place of anarchy. Forests are full of swarms of violent goblins and hungry slimes, the likes of which would love nothing more than to eat you in your sleep. Caves are the dens of massive beasts that lumber into their dark holes to hide away until the sun starts to vanish and the night comes once again. The ocean is teeming with unimaginable horrors, just waiting to snatch anyone who would wander too close to the shore at the wrong time.

— But this is simply the way we have been conditioned to think about the natural world.

Yes, it is dangerous in the wilds. But that is how it is supposed to be.

Nature isn’t as chaotic as it seems; it is its own refined series of intricate, interwoven mechanisms.

The goblin tribes that hunt through the forests do so in order to protect the woodlands that they live in, under the guidance of what they refer to as a ‘wood-mother’, which is a matriarch of sorts of yet another species, the dryads, that governs over their tribe in this form of symbiosis.

The things that bite and gnash and tear do so not because they are mindless, howling monsters, but because that is what life is for them. A bear must hunt to eat.

This thing here, these walls of our cities, and these houses with doors and windows — this is the chaotic, unnatural presence in the world. Anywhere where there are no men, there are no houses — So is this chaos then not the default? Is it not the desired equilibrium that nature itself strives to achieve?

The great joke is that in our attempts to insulate ourselves from the chaos of the outside world, we ourselves are acting as the most chaotic, unnatural beings there are.

Civilization is not of the natural order of things.