Curtain up – Ogrest cracks the head of a champion against the wall of a citadel, he grunts. Before him, an army of mercenaries trembles, their hair fluttering in the breath of this mythical throat… A horn sounds. High upon his rock, Ogrest bellows and the few survivors who remain run off screaming in terror, across the broad plain, into the forest, the sea and the waiting ships. Satisfied, the ogre descends from his rocky perch and lurches towards the yellow mass of a wounded Tofu. He takes the animal in his great, pitted fist, this little yellow ball, and his eyelids quiver.
Ogrest cries.

*

A black Eca laughs, squints towards the sun. Placing a hand on my shoulder, she says, “if you seek to understand Ogrest, you must first come to know something of his heart.”

*

Exhausted – panting
Sweat upon my brow.
Shadow.



Where am I? I am in Ankama’s toilets. A high ceiling, and a mirror which doubles the sense of space. I hear the dogs bay in the hallway, my Chapka was given to them to sniff on, they weren’t long tearing it to pieces. I lock myself away in the third cubicle, I know there’s a hideout, behind the cistern, a square of PVC left loose by the workers. I slide in with my laptop, my Activebook and my torch. In the guts, the intestines of Ankama, I go on crawling, looking for a place where I can wedge myself into a corner and concentrate for a while. The entire building shook as though it was growing. I am buried. After the last post on Stasis, my situation has changed. I know they want to get rid of me. I’m too much trouble. I have this note in my shirt pocket, written on a paper tissue during my last dinner with Tot at the Portuguese place: Stasis only exists in the heart of Ogrest.



I have never felt such a strange sensation of mingled terror and joy. Yes, I was wrong. They were wrong. What does it matter now? To stop me revealing the true nature of Stasis, they told me a few fairytales, gave me broken files or mould-pocked archives ruined with time and damp down in the cellar of the factory. I had been reading forged report books all along! Traitors! ‘Read it,’ they said, ‘do what you want with it.’ Faced with this mountain of paper, what else could I do? I threw myself into a void I could never broach; I believed I could hold the truth of the cosmos in a human grasp. But truth does not exist, those who lead us to believe in objectivity want us to swallow their vision of things – and me too, I was becoming like them, unable to let silence speak. All must change, all is shifting always. The very elements which we take to be many are but one. Always dividing, we arrive nowhere. All must unite.



I think of Ogrest, of this terrible demon I knew from legend. The myths of the beast’s gratuitous cruelty had long been whispered down. I think of the woeful burden he must carry, of all that suffering expressed in his clumsiness – why would I not believe that Ogrest was the destroyer of whom everyone is terrified? He cries, and by crying, he ruins the World. And yet, he’s not manic-depressive, he’s not a dishcloth, he thinks and doubts, tossed from within by jolting emotions – like all that lives, Ogrest sometimes crumbles. If the choice were given him, should he let the world perish? I picture him upon his rock, I can get so close, I can almost stroke his shabby coat after so many hours of fighting. If Ogrest is sitting on the Zenith of Wakfu, after the power brought by the six primordial Dofus, and he changes the world, our world, why would he not change the cosmos, its energies, its structure? I was so pretentious to believe that one could conceive of a cosmic system without taking its point of fixation, its anchor point, into account. I did not realize to what point that aspect is important, despite the brutality, the monstrosity and the radical nature of the beast… That’s where the true order of the universe is to be found, and around this, the cosmos are structured. It is in his injured, bruised heart that the key resides.

(Thanks to Crounch for the drawings!!!)