Sarluva Bairgahai, whom Love Kills
Even the most beautiful parts of Creation - the ones people oft point to and say ‘isn’t that enough to make it all worth it?’ are broken, ugly things at their core. Take the story of Sarluva Bairgahai, who dies of Love.
Once upon a time there was a monster. A sickening thing, of claws and fangs and slimy tentacles. It was a monster of all monsters, a truly unlovable thing.
The being who was not yet Sarluva Bairgahai (but always was Sarluva Bairgahai) was entranced all the same, helplessly in love with the monster in all it’s terribleness.
In stories like these, the power of true love is transformative - redemptive, curative. In stories like this, true love overcomes all.
In this story, true love does not. Perhaps it should’ve. Perhaps true love was meant to overcome all and restore the beast to a ‘true’ form and yet it impossibly failed. Perhaps it was the love itself that was impossible and that the beast was simply not incapable of being loved, so terrible and sickening was it. Perhaps Sarluva loved so greatly and so deeply that Reality simply went too far by mistake and overflowed back into hate.
What matters is that love was just... broken. Wrong. And as the beast tore the person who was not yet Sarluva Bairgahai apart, that painful broken love, that poisonous jagged hate, it seeped into them and they fell from Reality into the Not.
You’d think it might be hard to destroy Reality - to carve away at it, to break it down and annihilate all that it is - when it has infected you with Love for Reality. And in some ways it is, because Sarluva inevitably loves all that which will destroy them and Reality is no different from that. But ultimately, it is because Sarluva loves Reality, that they kill it, in the way that mothers murder their children.
It is because Sarluva loves Reality that it pains them to see it like this - sick and broken and twisted and wrong, and so they take a pillow and do what to them seems like a kindness. It’s better for everyone this way.
