"Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!" - Max Stirner

I didn't think I'd be able to sleep that night, but even the worst insomniac reaches a point of exhaustion so intense that they'll drift away on a stormy sea of broken dreams at some point. In my dream, I rose up from my well-sprung little cot and drifted through time and space on a current as irresistible as an ocean tide. I watched with no small amount of interest as the lands of earth moved under me, and then I soared past the moon and flew among the stars. The universe was vast and lovely. I found joy in the beauty of it all. But the feeling of joy began to ebb and something cold and lifeless pricked at my heart. I wanted to stop, but I was helpless against the relentless pull. There was no way to stop until, quite apart from any doing of my own, I found myself settling into a new place, unknown and familiar at the same time. This was the realm over which Acedia ruled. After all that had happened, the time had come for me to meet the enemy face to face.

His realm was nothing. It was swirls of red and yellow vapor on a ground which did not exist, under a sky that opened into eternity. The lost souls were fog; gray mist rolling across the landscape of the void. The creatures that dwelt there paid no attention to us or to anyone else. They were broken, hunched distortions of something once good and they existed with no purpose whatsoever. That they still existed at all was a mystery and a misery. They paid no attention to themselves or to anyone else including Acedia or me.

He appeared in the same sudden, unsettling way that Raziel so often did and he looked not entirely unlike Raziel. He, too, was much taller than any man with huge wings that sparkled under even the smallest bit of light. The resemblance stopped there. His peeling, snake-like skin glowed in horrible mustard yellow. . His eyes were a dark scarlet with no pupil at all.

We stood, facing one another, two solid forms in a land of the ephemeral, and he smiled at me. His grin sent stinging scorpions of dread crawling along my spine. "Welcome to my home, Simone. Do you like it?" He moved as he spoke, so that he stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders. "Perhaps you'll come to live here with me some day, eh?" he said, leaning in close to whisper in my ear. "Wouldn't that be fun?" His voice was a familiar soft hiss, and I knew he'd been near me since I'd first agreed to listen to Raziel, if not longer.

I tried to find what was real and root myself in it, but in this place existence itself was darkly translucent. Acedia brushed his nose against my hair and breathed in the smell. "Mmmm. You're a lovely woman, Simone. I always favored women like you. Not those obsessed with flash and glamour but pure and smelling of innocence and naivety. We could be friends, you know."

Was it my imagination, or were the swirling eddies of one-time-conscious beings moving closer? Vertigo threatened to overwhelm me. I felt so insubstantial that it seemed as though a gust of wind would scatter my atoms, shattering my form forever. I couldn't move. I couldn't walk away. I couldn't even respond to him.

"Well, probably not now. Maybe too much has already happened. You probably don't trust me and, I confess, I've been fairly hurt by you. I mean, you preach love and acceptance for all creatures, but you haven't loved me, have you? Not even a little. You've railed against me without even knowing me. You've spoken out to my detriment. You've attacked those who I call friend. That's just not nice, Prophet." He moved away from me a little and spoke with his back to me. "But you know what? I figured out a while ago that you were a simple creature. You're not some extraordinarily wise sage set above the masses as a ruler. You're nothing--a puppet of that righteous fool, Raziel. You think he's on the side of 'good', whatever that means, and so you're willing to do whatever he tells you. And all that holy purposefulness gives meaning to your pathetically drab and boring little housewife life. But how far are you willing to go, Simone? Will you walk away from your mission when your friends betray you? When your husband begins to fear you?" He turned toward me once more. "Will you walk away when you see your sons suffer and die before your eyes? Hmm?" He smiled and his eyes actually looked a little sad. "Such a shame when the young ones go before their time, isn't it? And when they are gone what will you have to live for? What will keep you from looking at the chaos all around you--the utter destruction of everything that ever was--brought on by men who just didn't give a rat's ass and saying, as people have said for millennia, 'I don't care anymore?'

"You're not so special. You can't withstand that kind of tragedy. You almost offed yourself over a bit of otherworldly teasing. And let's face it, you're getting twitchy already. So far you've been able to hide it. Even your dear husband hasn't noticed how bad it is yet. But the lines between fantasy and reality are getting a little blurry, aren't they? Nightmares creeping into your days, are they?"

The demon sighed and swirled his hand through the mists surrounding him, creating a throne made of bones with cushions of red velvet and he seated himself directly in front of me and stretched his long legs out in front of him. "You can't win, Simone. My kingdom grows larger every day. You are just a weak, pathetic mortal with a handful of misfits at your side. You're trying to force people to care about something and it just isn't working. Maybe the fact of the matter is, there really is nothing worth caring for. You haven't seen that yet but I'm sure that it will be easy enough to show you. Of course, if you quit now, all that trouble could be spared. Your family could be spared, Simone. They could be given a few more sad, pathetic years to scrape around upon the surface of the earth in search of things that hold no real value. But if you persist, know that I will crush you more completely than you can even fathom in your sweet, stupid, tiny, little mind."

He gestured, as though it was my opportunity to speak, and I felt my invisible bonds dissolve. Yet where could I run to? I could speak, but what could I ever possibly say? I opened my mouth to speak, and closed it again. The forms curling around my body were icy fingers pulling on my very soul. A great helplessness, and an overwhelming shame filled me, and Acedia laughed out loud.

"I thought maybe you would really be a lot of trouble for me but you are nothing. Go home, Simone. Go home and live your pathetic little nothing life. Stop trying to over-reach the lowly station you were created to fill."

And just like that I was awake in my own bed once again. The flowers I'd picked yesterday, now slightly wilted, shared their gentle fragrance with me. For the second time in less than 24 hours, I did not know if any of what happened was real or if I'd imagined it. And if I had imagined it, did that make it less real? I was gripped with nausea, and dashed to the bathroom where I retched and wept. I had no idea what to do.