Killing my inner Necron

6 min read Original article ↗

Published on , 992 words, 4 minutes to read

On surviving surgery, confronting mortality, and finding peace on the other side.

Hey everybody, I wanted to make this post to be the announcement that I did in fact survive my surgery I am leaving the hospital today and I want to just write up what I've had on my mind over these last couple months and why have not been as active and open source I wanted to.

This is being dictated to my iPhone using voice control. I have not edited this. I am in the hospital bed right now, I have no ability to doubted this. As a result of all typos are intact and are intended as part of the reading experience.

That week leading up to surgery was probably one of the scariest weeks of my life. Statistically I know that with the procedure that I was going to go through that there's a very low all-time mortality rate. I also know that with propofol the anesthesia that was being used, there is also a very all-time low mortality rate. However one person is all it takes to be that one lucky one in 1 million. No, I mean unlucky. Leading up to surgery I was afraid that I was going to die during the surgery so I prepared everything possible such that if I did die there would be as a little bad happening as possible.

I made peace with my God. I wrote a will. I did everything it is that one was expected to do when there is a potential chance that your life could be ended including filing an extension for my taxes.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I want to explain why I named the lastest release of Anubis Necron.

Final Fantasy is a series of role-playing games originally based on one development teams game of advanced Dungeons & Dragons of the 80s. In the Final Fantasy series there are a number of legendary summons that get repeated throughout different incarnations of the games. These summons usually represent concepts or spiritual forces or forces of nature. The one that was coming to mind when I was in that pre-operative state was Necron.

Necron is summoned through the fear of death. Specifically, the fear of the death of entire kingdom. All the subjects absolutely mortified that they are going to die and nothing that they can do is going to change that.

Content warning: spoilers for Final Fantasy 14 expansion Dawntrail.

In Final Fantasy 14 these legendary summons are named primals. These primals become the main story driver of several expansions. I'd be willing to argue that the first expansion a realm reborn is actually just the story of Ifrit (Fire), Garuda (Wind), Titan (Earth), and Lahabrea (Edgelord).

Late into Dawn Trail, Nekron gets introduced. The nation state of Alexandria has fused into the main overworld. In Alexandria citizens know not death. When they die, their memories are uploaded into the cloud so that they can live forever in living memory. As a result, nobody alive really knows what death is or how to process it because it's just not a threat to them. Worst case if their body actually dies they can just have a new soul injected into it and revive on the spot.

Part of your job as the player is to break this system of eternal life, as powering it requires the lives of countless other creatures.

So by the end of the expansion, an entire kingdom of people that did not know the concept of death suddenly have it thrust into them. They cannot just go get more souls in order to compensate for accidental injuries in the field. They cannot just get uploaded when they die. The kingdom that lost the fear of death suddenly had the fear of death thrust back at them.

And thus, Necron was summoned by the Big Bad™️ using that fear of death.

I really didn't understand that part of the story until the week leading up to my surgery. The week where I was contacting people to let people know what was going on, how to know if I was OK, and what they should do if I'm not.

In that week I ended up killing my fear of death.

I don't remember much from the day of the operation, but what I do remember is this: when I was wheeled into the operating theater before they placed the mask over my head to put me to sleep they asked me one single question. "Do you want to continue?"

In that moment everything swirled into my head again. all of the fear of death. All of the worries that my husband would be alone. That fear that I would be that unlucky 1 in 1 million person. And with all of that in my head, with my heart beating out of my chest, I said yes. The mask went down. And everything went dark.

I got what felt like the best sleep in my life. And then I felt myself, aware again. In that awareness I felt absolutely nothing. Total oblivion. I was worried that that was it. I was gone.

And then I heard the heart rate monitor and the blood pressure cuff squeezed around my arm. And in that moment I knew I was alive.

I had slain my inner Necron and I felt the deepest peace in my life.

And now I am in recovery. I am safe. I am going to make it. Do not worry about me. I will make it.

Thank you for reading this, I hope it helped somehow. If anything it helped me to write this all out. I'm going to be using claude code to publish this on my blog, please forgive me like I said I am literally dictating this from an iPhone in the hospital room that I've been in for the last seven days.

Let the people close to you know that you love them.


Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

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