Some thoughts on three threads.

Victor

Over the next year, while the pirate arc is ongoing, I want to spin up a sort of "origin story" for Victor, set in the stone age spanning the time between his departure from home and his finding the Box.

Finding himself hunted by a man swearing revenge for a death Victor's not sure he caused, he comes under the care of Faergi, who immediately feels compassion for him because he sees the similarities between Victor and another fellow under his care, Mollin.

Victor has a darkness inside him, but it's not evil. I actually want to call it an unbearable lightness. Victor has always felt himself instinctually alone. Someone can be right next to him, he can feel the heat from their body, but at the same time they're an impossible distance away. And that's how it feels with everyone. Their bodies are here, but they might as well be illusions, lost behind an unbridgeable gap.

And what has wounded his heart is that he's never been able to express what he senses. And if anything, the fact that everybody else goes through their lives seeming blithely unaware of the Gap lends credence to his suspicions that...

...he doesn't know how to say it. Moreover, he's afraid that if he does say it, he'll only learn that it's true.

This explains his boastfulness, his deliberately assumed posture of arrogance. A larger-than-life tyrant, or even just a simple bully, is something that can be understood, that has a place in the world.

He's not a "philosophical" solipsist, but it feels impossible for him to forge a true connection with someone. The glimpse he received of his ultimate future was "only" a drug-induced hallucination, but it did its job of surfacing a terror that he does not know how to confront.

And he never will confront it. Not in the way that he needs to, not after what happens to Faergi. While there will be others down the road who will seek to help him, the damage has already been done.

Mina, in 1890, is moments away from discovering the extent to which Victor has unraveled within, and the disastrous way he copes with his centuries of pain. A very strong soul may be able to pity him, but it's hard to see how anything can be done about it.

Meanwhile his pain keeps bleeding outward, and others have begun siphoning it for their own ends.

Emmet

There's an unbearable lightness inside Emmet too. (It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that I treat Victor as an intratextual allegory for him.)

Emmet also learned the wrong lessons from trauma. Long ago he internalized the notion that the world is a cold, uncaring place that takes and takes with no regard for right and wrong, no respect for who deserves it.

And so he feels (in a way that suggests he's protesting too much) no compunctions about taking the world apart. It's not that he feels "entitled" to twist time into knots or rewrite genomes, it's just that the law book isn't worth the figurative paper it's written on.

Maybe, he figures, there are answers that can heal him, but they're not "out there" among other people who, again, blithely go along with the book. They're "in there", buried within the gears of reality.

This explains his aloofness, the hermetically sealed burrow-world he's officially "content" to spend his days in, disconnected from irrelevant distractions.

But Emmet's heart is not actually made of stone, and it is, in spite of himself, vulnerable to connection. It's a perilous tightrope he walks. If he's reminded that there are things "out there" worth caring about, he might question the value of all that effort.

He might come to realize that his pain can't—and perhaps shouldn't—be "fixed".

Omega

I almost get the sense that Emmet is daring a divine hand to come down and slap the tools out of his paws. He wants it to happen. He'd at least get to demand an explanation from it.

Instead all he gets are THEM.

(Even though, ironically, he's the last major character to set foot in their realm.)

It's a world floating at the edge of time, whose Founder set in stone the Rule of Protection, and built the Syncreche and the White Gate to enforce it.

At the same time it's a world that also had its origins in a terrible tragedy and took its lessons to unnatural extremes. They are, at the moment, wholly unaware of the poison that has already seeped in from outside to parasitize their own Gap.

It seems that the universal instinct, when one has been deeply hurt, is to seek out the one responsible—but that this rarely works because trauma, much like time, it not as linear as it seems. Things have a tendency to run in loops.

When we try to find out where those loops "start", we may succeed at peeling back another layer of the reality onion, but when we step inside we only bring our pain along with us.

Reconnecting the ends we've broken—sealing the Omega—requires recognizing that our pain, along with our life's desires that ride atop it, is not ours alone and never has been.