#ok anyways *scurries away like a frightened prey animal*

[nbmudkip]

was thinking out loud about act 5 earlier, here’s a snippet from discord dms that my friend encouraged me to post

siffrin made a wish and fell so deep into despair they gave up on their wish. but his wish had SO MUCH energy behind it. not only did he follow the correct rituals, but it got merged with the pure combined intent of an entire country's population wishing for the country to be saved. hundreds of thousands of peoples’ aimless wishes had combined with sif’s own wish, creating a reality-bending amalgamation of desire, stuck building up more and more power with each new cycle to sustain itself. it looped again and again and again and again and again for all the infinite tries both wishes demanded, and for all the times one or both failed, using a disgusting amount of craft in the process which just kept growing.

and see, there was an essential difference between loop!siffrin’s timeline and our siffrin’s timeline. loop made their initial wish, and then went through the loops so many times that they fell into total despair. they did a very special kind of giving up on their wish and channeled all the excess wish craft into a) utterly destroying themself and b) making their new wish. siffrin made that same initial wish, and then went through it all so many times that he too started to lose it. they overheard their friends decide to leave them behind and started to give up, and that's when the world started breaking apart. reality around him began to splinter because he had taken the first step to give up, to give in, barely holding onto "belief" in a lie he was knowingly telling himself in a futile attempt to keep going. and then later, after mal du pays, after facing their own sadness given form after all their deaths across timelines, they were right there, on the precipice of total despair. they did that same very special kind of giving up. they let go.

but just as he did, his friends arrived, because loop led them to him. and his friends refused to let him fall, refused to let him destroy himself alone and unhelped. they’d still already gone too far. they’d still already given up on their wish, still already let go. yet the wish was now unable to destroy siffrin themself, because their family was acting as an anchor, something to keep them from willingly disappearing. loop hadn’t had that. loop hadn’t had someone who was aware of what was going on, to get help to them before they could destroy themself. siffrin did.

despite that, reality had already been breaking from siffrin starting to give up earlier, from the sheer power of this wish that was starting to slip out in those few terrifying moments where siffrin briefly lost control of himself, stopped repressing everything for just a moment. beating the king, being surrounded by his friends…that wasn't able to fix anything, because when the journey ended everyone was still going to go home, and siffrin knew that. they were feverish and delirious and exhausted and could barely think, let alone stand, but they knew that, and the wish knew that it was going to fail yet again, and they were getting closer to the point where it all falls apart. more wish craft starts to leak out. reality starts fracturing more. the splinters widen into chasms, spreading outside the house into the skies above. siffrin’s delirium makes him less able to contain it all inside himself.

and then the head housemaiden lets those words slip. "your journey is over. you can all go home now." and siffrin. he’d been half consious this entire time, trying to process the fact that his friends didn't despise him, that they came despite his disgusting behavior the day before, that he was loved. their mind had been distracted enough to keep things in a fragile balance. but when euphrasie says it out loud, right in front of him, there's no dodging the truth anymore. it's an immutable declaration, to both siffrin and the wish, that they have failed once again. and all that power? all that craft, built up from days, weeks, months of repeating the same doomed days over and over and finding the same failed conclusion every time? all that raw energy, which had already started to escape that morning as siffrin entered the house alone? it had to do something. it had to go somewhere. but it couldn’t destroy the person that brought it into the world. his family had reawakened his desire to live, and he was clutching desperately to them like a lifeline. so instead, it spilled out and out and out until the entire world went from fractured to ravaged. reality started collapsing in on itself as siffrin and the power of their wish combined into a being of pure desperation and power and need, of yearning for an impossible conclusion, and made one final desperate anguished call to stay with them

it's like odile said. sif loved them all so much he was subconsciously willing to trap himself in an insanity-inducing cycle over it. he loved them all so much and wished so fervently to stay together that his love and his wish almost destroyed reality itself, that it split open the heavens with a radiant hue that pierced everyone's minds despite them all having forgotten how to see it. whatever force or wish or being erased color from the world, it must have been incredibly powerful to perform such a drastic change on every human on the planet. but when siffrin’s wish folded in itself and started destroying everything? when it brought red into the skies? it went up against that other force, and it won. it managed to bring a color back into the world with the sheer amount of destructive power built up within itself and its cycles of failure. and that must have been a genuinely terrifying amount of power