Take it easy
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Once, not too long ago, in a sleepy, forgotten island in a distant sea, there was a village. This village worshipped strange idols, disembodied heads of non-eulcidian geometry from which one could sometimes hear fearful sounds, cries both human and not, of distress, agony and rapture, and from which a mysterous eldritch power could be felt. A wind constantly flew from these idols, as if the air itself feared their presence and tried futilely to escape, a wind of madness that carried with it the minds of all men and women foolish enough to live near them in an unending frenzy of terror and madness. All of them, that is, except for a single old man, who spent his life sitting at the base of the idols, and laughed. At others, he laughed, as if their very existance was nothing but a joke. At all things, he laughed, as if there was nothing in this world but a gigantic farce. At himself, he laughed, as if his own existance was the punchline. Certainly he himself was mad, a madness so deep it developped into a deranged sanity none could understand.
There one day came a young man, full of knowledge and confidence, who came across the madman, and the madman's laughter grew stronger than it ever had. Nettled, the young man spoke.
"And what, pray tell, amuses you so? What do you see that I do not, that I know not? What could someone like you have to teach me?"
The old man's cachinnation only grew stronger. As the young man was about to dismiss him as a madman, he finally spoke, calming his guffaws.
"What could an old man like me have to teach you, indeed? A man such as you could not possibly learn anything from me, yet I will and I must try, for you will not understand."
"Then speak, elder, and I will keep an open mind."
And the old man laughed.
"Then listen, young ignorant, and know the truth of the universe, and of the infinite power of the Head Gods. At the top of the world stands the 9, the idiot savant who guides all things. None but the mad and the unthinking can understand this being, for its mind is unfathomable and inhuman. It, perhaps, does not even register than anything exists beyond its simple world. Acting as its messenger is the angel with a thousand eyes, who shifts all things on her wings of obsidian and leads all to death and insanity for her own amusement, and overlooking everything is the Devil of the infinite void, who does all and cares for none, for none of this world belongs to her."
The young man scoffed, dismissing all this as the insane ramblings of a madman. Yet the old man continued, never stopping, and the young man could not bring himself not to hear it, finding, to his horror, that the frail mocking voice of the old man was searing itself into his brain.
"Then who does this world belong to?" He found himself asking. Yet he had never as much as considered the thought. The old man laughed, and the young man saw in his eye a glint of desperate dementia, of something both human and beast, and something else.
"It belongs to The Thief, who holds the universe she stole away in her infinite, destructive love. And holding The Thief, supporting the mass of the universe on herself, is The Reimu, mistress of all and posessor of none. All respect her, and all love her, and all answer to her, and all fear her, for, you see, she holds the world on her head, over the infinite void."
"But then," the young man's voice asked, independantly of his trapped, terrified and dying soul, "what holds The Reimu?"
And the old man laughed.
"Oh, no... It's Reimus all the way!!"
And the wind blew. And the young man laughed. And the old man laughed.
And in the village, a young boy tore away at his laughing mother's womb with his bare hands, all the while chanting in a demented scream:
"'ri! 'ri! Yu'kuri shee'teh y't'enneh!"
