Hello, my lovelies. It's been a looong time. Ah, yes, I have been struck with a writing muse yet again. If you follow my Tumblr, fangirlingoverfezzes, you've likely been repeatedly bludgeoned in the face with Mabill, Bipper, Bill Cipher, Billy Mischief, the triangle guy... I've maybe gotten in eyebrows-deep in the Bill craze and thought to myself:

"Hey, no one's gone along with mairzydotes' absolutely GLORIOUS headcanons about human ! Bill. This needs remedied immediately."

So, I tossed a few in alongside my own theories and BAM, a story where Bill finds himself in an ironic situation: he's slipping. This is a preview for my new multi-chapter story, How The Mighty Have Fallen, a darker story than my typical fare, already up to two chapters as of 9/19. Enjoy!

Empires inevitably fall, and when they do, history judges them for the legacies they leave behind.

-Noah Feldman

The thought's just at the very edge of my mind, about to tip over, but somehow there just isn't enough energy to pull it into consciousness. I let out a sigh. Sighs are a lot easier to come by when you have a mouth. Sure, that statement sounds out of place and a little deranged, but if you're used to being a one-eyed two-dimensional triangle, which I doubt you are, you would see my point. Or, uhh, lack thereof. Literally speaking.

You see, I used to be human back in the day. Long story short, I was killed by a bunch of imbeciles. They basically sucker punched me, betrayed me, and eventually burned me to a pile of ash, but my triangular form survived. Apparently, though, where my earliest memories begin is right smack in the middle of my story. It's probably actually a lot more skewed toward my later years. I remember growing up, having to wear a lump of turquoise around my neck to keep me in check, and after a few fights, moving out, eventually to this weird town. This same weird town where I inexplicably feel at home. But, I was just told that there was time before that time. That I had existed before I existed. That my human body was more or less a fleshy cage. That I had changed after I accepted my prison.

Coincidentally, not too long ago, I used my power to retake over a near-perfect replica of my body from the past. It was fantastic! I could exist on your plane again, use a small subset of my power on the physical world. My conscience, unfortunately, returned along with it and it snarled and snapped at the back of my mind every chance it got. I hate to admit it, but the thing affects my actions, steers me in the right direction, keeps a steely vigilance on my thoughts…thoughts…what was I saying?

Oh, right, of course. What does any of this have to do with my current situation? Well, you might as well sit down. Sitting? Good. I actually survived a second exorcism. The triangle part of me disappeared without a trace and now it's just me. I'm a human just like you. No powers, no mystic mind magic, no nothing. Now you can see the problem. I was never not Bill Cipher up until this point. I was simply a cage, an empty shell that he could be housed in for a few decades. I always thought of myself as special, a diamond in the rough because I had superhuman abilities, but now I sorely realize that that wasn't me.

It was the demon. And he used me.

It just came to the center of my attention that the person I thought I was all my life and afterlife was a lie. If that won't get your thoughts in a mess, I don't know what will. Now, I'm a hollow tube of a lanky blond guy, a six foot four chasm. More and more of the triangle's memories drift away each day and I wonder what parts of me are me…Or if there truly is a 'me.'

It's getting harder to function and recall anything here lately and trying to keep up the charade around my now-close friends (his close friends?) is driving me up the wall. First I was the master of the mind and now, it seems without him, I've lost every ounce of control of my own. A simple 'remember that one time' turns into a fleeting mental rush to find anything remotely resembling the memory. Sometimes the thoughts are almost in reach, but others, it seems, have disappeared completely. The feeling's foreign and uncomfortable and I would do practically anything to have a perfectly aligned mental order again, to return the shape to my form.

The person closest to me noticed though, right off hand. It was something simple I'm relatively sure, but I, for the first time, drew a blank. They looked me up and down, questioned if I was okay, the works. Even they knew something was unnatural and wrong and I still cannot to this day remember what that memory I was searching for was. So, this is why I'm writing it all down, so that one day, when I'm barely into my physical twenties and have the combined memory capacity of three elderly women with their skulls beaten in, at least someone will know where I started to drop off. At least someone will know how the once-mighty William M. Cipher has fallen.