No Villains

There are no villains. Not in the waking world. Not in the Bonelands.

Villains are creatures of story. Of fiction. Villains live in the Shadowlands. They cannot survive outside the world of story. Like all creatures of story of myth of Legend they are born with each "Once Upon a Time" and they die with every "and they lived happily ever after".

Belief and villains is necessary. It helps us hide every day from the nature of the people who do monstrous things, who commit unspeakable acts, who cross boundaries we considered unreachable. By giving them their own species, their own label, their own category, we are able to hide from the fact that they are us. They are just other human beings acting as best they can and what they perceive to be their own interests.

In stories there are heroes and there are villains. But there are no stories in the bone lands. And everyone is hero or villain of Their Own Story.

So if you brand another a villain, know that in some other story told by someone else, you were almost certainly the villain. And you will probably never be aware of the sin that you committed, the person you transgressed, the line you crossed.