He had to fill himself up. He had to remember. When he remembered he could quit, satiated, and lie down and return to the quiet.
That's what he'd been telling himself. There is the stir of fear, now, that the hunger will never be satiated. That the hunger is part of him, and always had been, and it was only in his ignorance of himself and the world that he'd thought it was a small and temporary thing.
He found himself at the top of the ascent, staring out over the yawning gap.
He began the careful trudge across.
His goals were shifting rapidly. First he'd wanted to go back to the void. Honestly, that was still there. Then he'd wanted to trust and have faith, even as a niggling voice told him that he couldn't, that faith in the Goddess was a foolish and shameful thing. Then there'd been the incident in Rico's, and it had flipped over again and faith was never an option any more.
So next--he mapped his shifting mindset to the steps of the bridge--he'd decided to go rogue, to rebel, and to start laying down his own memories. This was the point at which he had realized that he could not simply
make the hunger go away--it was a hunger that required
feeding, and Amity was doing his best to feed it. He'd thought--still thought, a little--that maybe new memories would feed it as well as old ones might. So began the slow memorization of everything around him, and the careful pursuit of goals. Things to stay busy.
But instead, every step he took to gain more of himself to pour into the cavernous belly of curiosity had raised up more questions, and now here he was, with great tumultuous masses of memory shifting around on the edges of his consciousness and threatening to break free, and yet the gnawing need to know would not. shut. up.
It felt like something else living in his head. It felt like part of him that wasn't him. It was the first "blessing" he'd been given and it was overruling him at every turn.
So maybe he had to know
everything. And that was a frightening and powerful and exhilarating thought. He had looked in the eyes of the Goddess and he'd seen madness instead of evil, but Amity was sane.
Amity told himself he was sane as he picked his way along the crumbling bridge towards an inevitable terrifying fight, to collect a prize he didn't understand on his way to a goal that he couldn't articulate, while sorting out his directly-contradicting emotions. Nothing about this seemed wrong to him.
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