“ You know what it's like to *lose* yourself in a story. We have brother and sister *souls*. ”
Michael: There's nothing here to fear.Lucifer: Well, there's always the truth.
~ Mike Carey
Fear is a serviceable tool, I suppose. Like the stalls in a battery farm. If you want to keep people from their collective strength, make them too afraid of each other to ever meet or talk.
Those heart-hammering nightmares that start to lose coherence even as you're waking up from them, but that still manage to leave their moldering fingerprints all across your day.
Because all the waters of the ocean won't fill a bucket with a hole in it. And that's their fall, and that's their fellowship. Desire. The hole in the bucket: the gulf of yearning into which the soul empties itself.