Our past is a shackle. It is the worst kind of shackle: the immaterial kind. How does one break free from chains that cannot be touched?

  And yet conversely their grasp on us is absolute. We who are nothing more than a collection of frozen instances configured in a manner that believes itself to be real. Our future is a merely a product of the amalgam of moments that is our past. We live our lives in the narrow paths of predetermination. Not guided by the heavy hands of a higher existence like Fate or Destiny, for those can be resisted. Fought. Struggled against.

  We are much more pitiful. Our collars of iron are forged from ourselves. Our past has no choice but to march ever-forward, for each foot can only land in front of its predecessor. The location of each step determined by those that came before, stretching past the distant horizon.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  The past will always only ever become more of itself. Expanding forwards endlessly, subsuming the limitless future into its grotesque linear mass.

  In such a display, there is no space for choice. The actions we take are fixed by the momentum of our own existence. The stronger our drive to escape, the greater the strength of our restriction. It is...the perfect prison. Designed such that the jailer and the jailed are one and the same.

  To weaponise causality like this...did we truly deserve such a fate? Were our transgressions so great?

  How ironic it is, in the end, that it should come to this. Perhaps we should thank you. A closed loop that cannot be broken from within nor without.

  In the end, the truly pitiful ones were you. So, our warden and our saviour, we curse you and we thank you. And we shall, in the place of this unforgiving universe, remember you.

  For no-one else shall.