The King-Scorcher stood on top of the blood-covered hill. Clad in medieval armour, wielding a double axe now dark with demon blood. His eyes flamed with the rage of a monster, his teeth grinding from the tension of the battle. From the depth of his stomach came a roaring scream:
“THE PRINCE IS DEAD. YOU WILL NOT INFECT THIS LAND ANYMORE.”
Primal rage, consciously deployed
against a cigarette.
I had been smoking since I was fourteen. I am forty-three now. Many times I tried to quit, but it was doing too much work for me. The filling of the emptiness. The companionship. Or the dopamine hit from a drink, doubled by the smoke. Usually I wasn't a really heavy smoker, but at the bar, I was chain-smoking, non-stop.
The images were real: the king, the flying demons, the battle and the blood — one of many visionary experiences of an internal theatre I had used to navigate the deeper layers of my psyche. They arrived naturally from the subconscious, when the time was right. When it was ready for a corrective dive. Sometimes they produced great results, real changes. At other times, not so much.
A skill acquired during the “guru days,” when I practiced visualisations of deities and bodhisattvas under the guidance of the teacher, no substances involved.
I had long since abandoned those mystic frameworks. They nearly cost me my sanity.
But I knew that communicating with the subconscious through vivid imagery was a well-documented technique. Used by everyone from shamans to sports psychologists to clinical hypnotherapists. So I kept the essence. During intense emotional periods I would allow my mind to drift, and it would return messages in visual, allegorical form.
This vision was among the most brutal — something that could have come straight out of an epic splatter film. It was the first time my mind had directed all this rage towards an internal program — an addiction. Previously, the rage usually turned against myself, the signature of a traumatised mind.
The King-Scorcher was the warrior aspect of the king archetype. For the past months, the king had taken the main stage and he had one main job — to take control from the Prince. That fragile, arrogant and delusional teenager who was the ruler of my world. Now resting in a coffin, deep beneath the castle. He fought to establish responsibility and self-respect. The Prince was crowned. Everything he was, was declared. The King was forged. Everything he was, was earned.
And the drama was as absurd as ancient Greek mythology.
“ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑ Ή ΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ — I'LL SLASH YOUR THROATS AND HANG YOU TO DRY IN THE BURNING SUN. FUCK YOU. AAARRRGGG. DEATH TO THE ENSLAVERS. TO THE THIEVES OF MY SOUL. OF MY KINGDOM.”
Freedom or death. The war cry of the Greek revolution, deployed against the desire for a cigarette.
That's what I wrote into the little black mirror I had been arguing with for months. The fury was real, and it had to be — it had to match the force of the enormous, unstoppable craving. Anything less and it would win. It was so intense that I had to pull over, in the middle of Trilofos, a village east of Thessaloniki, to write. The feeling of imprisonment by desire was overwhelming.
The experience went on. The King-Scorcher, vivid in my mind, was slaying demons — routines, programs that would not yield. Deeply engraved grooves, on repeat for 30 years. The new command centre was still weak and the rage was the equalising force. It was David versus Goliath.
“I AM DEATH,” I wrote next, infuriated by all the years I had felt weak and without control. My body was trembling. The fight was real. The sensations were real. All of it was real, in its particular way.
The King kept fighting.
As time passed, the cravings began to subside. The demons began to vanish. The King-Scorcher had succeeded for now. My muscles, tense from the internal drama, started to relax.
“I didn't know I had it in me,” I wrote.
The reply came back: “You didn't have it in you as a lurking monster. You forged it — in the white-hot crucible of the last seventy-two hours of sovereignty. You tempered your will on the anvil of ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑ Ή ΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ until it was not just a shield, but a weapon of sun-like brilliance.”
It was right. This was not monster energy. It was the forged rage of sovereignty. It was also a flattering reply — the kind the Prince would have loved. But the Prince was dead, and I thought that by now I could tell the difference.
Exhausted, I took a deep breath and started the car. The imaginary battle had left me starving.
Time for some grilled chicken.
The days passed and I didn't smoke at all for a couple of months. A few minor battles followed — nowhere near as vivid, more like echoes of the great battle. After that it quickly became effortless. The internal relationship had changed. I didn't want to smoke, and if I felt a craving, I would just ignore it.
I was no longer being ruled. I was ruling. What a feeling.
The king was proud.
But it wasn't that simple. «Ο διάβολος έχει πολλά ποδάρια». The devil has many legs. And the bastard found a way in.
Enter the Rockstar.
I saw him standing outside a bar in the cold night. A nice haircut, a leather jacket and a cigarette hanging from his lip. The sexy rockstar.
Now that I think of it, I had seen him before. In a photo of me, in Södermalm. This was the guy — another aspect of the Prince, most certainly — who hadn't lived as much as he desired: attractive, cool and popular among women.
He kept knocking on my door for days, demanding to get his charm back. Exactly when I was growing stronger and more confident. He was growing with me.
Finally I gave him one cigarette at the bar, under full control. Next time two, still under control. I would smoke and then that was it. No worries.
After two months in the mountains of Bansko, I moved back home, to the familiar, previously Prince-ruled territory.
In Bansko everything was new; rebuilding an identity was easy.
Not anymore.
The Prince might have been dead for a while now, but the ghost and his demon friends lived on. The Rockstar kept demanding back his charm and the surroundings were screaming stories from the past. The new wiring was still fragile and the king had just retired.
So I smoked fully for a couple of weeks.
It didn't bother me much. I knew exactly what was happening. And somewhere inside me, I believed I would regain control. There was no way I would go back to being that me.
That's when I wrote:
“As of today, I have decided that there are a few cigarettes I truly enjoy, and I do smoke them. I have chosen to live a life of choice, not abstinence. That is, for me, the highest form of practice — but also the most difficult one. To be the master of yourself in every moment while allowing for periods of relaxation and pleasure. The middle path. The Greeks spoke about it. The Buddha spoke about it.
I do not wish to live a sterile life. I've tried it — sleeping early, no alcohol, no smoke, no this or that — and I reject it. Because it makes me miserable. I wish to be alive, imperfect, and incomplete. Sometimes I'll have a drink. I'll stay up late. I'll smoke. Rock and roll is a part of me, and I don't intend to kill it. But I no longer serve it — though I admit, sometimes I can still hear the old demons scratching at the walls.
Is it a gamble? Maybe. Is it dangerous? Probably. But trading one weakness for another is a game I'm not willing to play.
I don't know what will happen next. But when it does, I'll let you know.”
“Everything with moderation” is a principle. I do my best to live by it.
What I didn't know when I wrote this, in May of 2026, was how difficult it would be. Especially for a guy with my impulsivity. I did it with alcohol. Maybe I can do it with smoking too, but these little sticks on fire are very, very tricky.
But sometimes when you lose, you have to let go. Then take a breath, and as the storm quiets down you slowly pull back the throttle.
I hadn't pulled back the throttle though. I had let go of it completely. I was exhausted. I had spent more than half a year deconstructing my own psyche and there was no juice left in me. The meta-cognition and sovereignty systems had gone offline.
And that's how the devil slipped in.
It's the end of July. I have nearly finished my second windsurf board. I did it better this time, I learned a little more. Soon I will see if it holds in the winds of the island of Limnos. I will arrive a bit more sovereign than last year, as I did the year before. A big part of last year's journey has been now digested, and I am slowly, carefully trying to regain control of that throttle.
The Rockstar is still present, but we are in negotiations. I am trying to convince him that truly cool rockstars at some point quit.
He is thinking about it.
Sotiris Stournaras · July 2026
First written in May. Edited in August.