Carpe Diem?

New song. For a day we may have in May? Need.. sleep.. 

Onward and up we go,
Shooting to the sky like canonballs.
See the footsteps glow, and light
that great white satellite.

All that we've left behind,
Has fallen into straight lines.
Float away from the signs
and designs in our minds,

So we can have tonight.

The stuff of stars run through hands,
We won't have long despite how far we ran
before we land, so see the sights,
They're all we'll keep when we set things right.

And everything we left behind
Has fallen into straight lines.
We'll float away from the signs
and those designs in our minds,

We've got tonight.

Behind Eyes Closed

‘Have you ever wondered what it would be like, if we were a molecule of water?’ she asked me. I shook my head, looking down at our reflections in the puddles as they quivered with each drop of rain that hit them. In my hand was a wet cigarette, soggy with its unfulfilled destiny, and in her hand was an unopened umbrella. 

The rain was unrelenting. We walked on nonetheless.

She took my hand in hers, with the one that was umbrella-free, and with the umbrella she gestured expansively. ‘We could see the whole world. We could fly with the clouds, swim in the rivers and streams and lakes and seas,’ she said. I smiled and nodded. I hadn’t seen much of the world. It would indeed be good to travel. I hoped I left the rest of the cigarettes at home.

She leapt, trying to reach for a couple of leaves that drooped lowest from a tree. I glanced down at the footpath, wary of stones that jutted out or of missing pieces that betrayed the gutters underneath to the eyes of the world. I could hear water gushing, meandering, indifferent to the path it couldn’t choose even if it wanted to. It flowed to wherever it could, from high to low, from full to empty.

We found a bench. It was painted green. Its metal peeked in places, black as night. We took a seat. She put the umbrella aside and put her head on my shoulder. We watched the clouds for a while.

‘Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to kiss in the rain?’ she asked me. I kissed her. She tasted of strawberry chap stick. She tasted like tears. She tasted like the sun appearing between darkened clouds.

After a while we got up and walked again. The rain seemed a little hesitant then, a little uncertain perhaps, as so many endings began. Leaves hung down trees like a sodden green beard of a giant. Our clothes were soaked through. My shoes made squeaky noises. We didn’t know where we were going and we didn’t care. Her umbrella lay forgotten on the bench.

I looked at her, her long dark hair plastered to her face, and felt strange for having thought of forgotten things. She looked at me with brown eyes so dark were almost black. I put my hands into the pockets of my jeans.  

‘Have you ever wondered what it would be like, if you were someone else’s dream?’ she asked. I clutched my wet cigarette tightly, my chest ached, and there was a lump in my throat. I heard her words, I felt them, but try as I might, I couldn’t understand them.

I hoped I left the matchbox at home but I knew somehow that I would never know. She looked at me, with tears trickling down her face. I wanted to comfort her, to tell her that when she came back I would be there, but suddenly I realized I didn’t know if I would. How could dreams know?

She closed her eyes, and all was light.

   

  

A Soul without Windows

My prison has two rooms.

One of them has four white walls with no windows and a floor of Italian marble. This room has a teak bed that creaks, a table with books piled on like skyscrapers reaching for the starless sky of a city, and currently, me. While there are other objects in this room, none are as dear to me as the teak bed that creaks, the table with books piled on like skyscrapers reaching for the starless sky of a city, and, well, me.

The other room consists of a shower, a toilet, a sink. There are other objects in this room. None of them are dear to me, just as the shower, the toilet and the sink are not.

Now, we return to the important room of my prison. The objects that I mentioned as being dear to me, I regard so for very specific reasons.

The bed is an heirloom. It holds my past like a time capsule that none other can open. In each of its grains it holds a memory. It has been passed on through a great many generations of my family, until it is now in this room, here with me. The bed is where I dreamt, you see, and that has seeped into its teak. In my bed, there is safety, there is solace; there is the comfort of things gone by that shall not return. Precious and sometimes ugly stones in the rough ground and polished by the wear of time. This is the bed in my prison.

 

Now we come to the second object in this room. You see, reading, to me is like breathing. No, not because it is indispensable to the cause of keeping me alive. Well, it is, half the time. What I mean though is that often it is something I do out of habit rather than of desire. Every thought that went into the writing of a book becomes fuel to the engines, and the trains of my thoughts move along the tracks anew. That is just the way it has been, is, and will be. The table holds my books as it has done for a long time. It bears the burden of their weight, as do I, and when I do so indifferently, I find the kinship I share with the table. This is the table in my prison.  

When you read this, you will perhaps wonder of the other things that I have in this room, the room of importance. What of that glint of metal you see there, in the corner of the room, isolated and shunned? Yes, that is the key to my prison, and yes, the door is locked from the inside. 

In The House Of Hope

From my intent there hides a seed

And from my aim there evades a deed,

In the shadows by a dying hearth of heed

Are Forgotten dreams of a forgotten creed,

Recondite beneath the sheets of need

Queiscent are those unsaid words not freed,

All the while the child that was me

Laughs irreverent, mockingly.

Its a game where none that meant to be found

seek those that were plainly always around.

Watch ever vigilant, lest they slip by,

As they tried when the path last went awry.

By the lake of sunset yellow

I found unassailable walls in your company; safety from legions of the could-have-been, armed with the stealth of regret and the could-be, armed with the ferocity of discretion. It was an exhilarating bubble of the purest kind of freedom.

Isn't that..?

Yes, that’s him.

Why is he here?

You've read his books, haven’t you? Genius always exacts a price. He walked the tightrope of sanity every time he wrote. The last time he tried to do it on a unicycle juggling elephants.

Do you remember that painting we saw on the sidewalk the last time we met, the kind that makes sense only when seen from one particular vantage? I feel like we stopped moving right there when we were together. Now you’re gone, and I’m alone, speeding away in a car that won’t stop. Life’s become a jumble of colors and lines that makes sense only in memories.

How are you feeling today?

(Silence)

Would you like to talk about her today?

That's all I ever do.

In the darkness, I can tell you, time passes different. Lifetimes in little chunks, served with a generous sprinkle of melancholy and a side of slow poison. Your absence has been my longest night.

He killed her?

Don't just watch the tapes, read his file. This one rarely allows coherence to threaten his insanity.

Now that you're gone the bubble is broken and I’m in a free fall. The world moves towards me at an alarming velocity, and I’m without weight, insubstantial until I’m crushed by it.

She didn't exist. She was in your head.

How does that make her any less real?

The Not So Grim But Maybe Slightly Melancholy Reaper

Grayscale:

Color:

The flames of hell were supposed to surround the reaper completely. Wasn't in the mood to complete it.

Random thought:

Satan's worst nightmare? A sinful masochist.

The Cycle of Faith Part 1

Note: I've written a lot of discontinued stories that have teetered off the narrow plateau of my interest, but THIS one I intend to finish in the next two months. Here's to hoping my resolve stands. 

***

An age of darkness loomed over the planet. Evil had emerged and in its thrall was a nation. The banner of the swastika was hoisted. Under its corrupting shadow, hatred was exalted. Cruelty was celebrated. Men treated men as vermin. Evil in its many forms spread forth its dark tentacles, and the crimson mist of war was ubiquitous. Even those that would be saviors cast aside morality and bowed to the cold tyranny of expedience.

So it was that the radiance of a thousand suns burst at once into the sky, and the world trembled to the will of mortals.

From afar the Ancients watched, from a place of banished terrors. Deities of old, their connection weakened without the worship and sacrifices of mortals. They recognized the danger of this new power man wielded. The destruction of humanity was imminent, and consequentially their own. The Forgotten would be set adrift in the void until they faded away.

A plan was conceived by the minds that birthed monstrosities. Though their power had waned, they still had their servants upon the physical plane. For millennia, through their creatures of darkness, they had gently plucked the web they wove to alter the course of man’s destiny as much as they were able. Those servants they would use to avert such an apocalypse, and

at long last,

to restore them to their former glory.

Suckling babes were stolen from their parents, orphans of war from uncaring caretakers. Children in thousands were taken away. With them as the forerunners, a new realm was created, where the hard-earned knowledge and wisdom of the past was lost to man. A realm where mortals

learned to live in terror of the Old Gods once more.

In time, the rest of humanity destroyed itself; a remainder lived on, as slaves to the Ancients.

***

Drey, of unknown lineage

November, 4286 AD

It was the coldest winter I had ever lived through, but that wasn't saying much. I was only twelve winters old. Kal, who was a veteran of fifteen, claimed if it got any colder you could grab a handful of winter and sculpt a God's heart. Kal was always saying things like that though. I stopped believing his tales ever since I found him earnestly trying to sell a pouch of ineffectually perfumed sewage as a divine nectar that bestowed immortality. Also learned that day was caution when offered anything he claimed safe to consume.

The Capital wasn’t far away, which was a good thing. I didn’t particularly like traveling on snow laden roads and neither did Gray. I looked over to the stall where Gray was put up and watched his shank rise and fall. He had the right idea, but sleep was being rather spiteful to me. The pony’s snores were oddly similar to Kal’s. Or maybe I just missed him a lot. I pulled at the hair on my chin as I reminisced.

It was almost a year ago that I met Kalivaer. Kalivaer, he never did things the usual way. His way of saying hello involved knocking me out cold when I was asleep and dragging me off to the basement of a house that looked like it would collapse with a slightly forceful exhalation. I woke up to a skull that felt like it was split in two, and the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. Below them was a grin the length of the Griffin Road.

‘Finally if fleetingly freed from the clutches of the nightstalker! Excellent,’ he said with a clap. Questions about who the hell he was and where hell I was and if he wanted a fist knocking his teeth into the back of his head were forestalled by a dramatic wave of a scrawny hand. ‘Look around you, and remember how this feels my new friend, the nascence of a legend. Mark this day, soon we’ll be making history, you and I,’ he cackled as I clutched my head groaning.

He became the closest I had to kin.

A few weeks ago the Priests arrived; everyone in the city knew to stay low and pray that neither family nor friend was given the honor of their attention. But Kal, the stubborn fool, said ‘They only have as much power over you as you allow them. Ideas, Drey, are only as strong as our belief in them. Besides, empty streets, unattended carts. Tonight, we feast!’

He got picked off the street by the powerless idea when he was trying to sneak off with a pant full of radishes, of all things.

That was how I ended up on the trail to rescue him. Or at the least give it a try, even if it meant I wouldn't live to see those couple of hairs on my chin grow into the magnificent beard I knew they had the potential to become.

‘C’est la vie,’ I said to the thatched ceiling, rubbing my jaw.

***

Arkhanen, son of Terberon the second

August, 3157 AD

Unnatural breeze stirred the claws of leafless autumn trees, their branches raking the moon, leaving pale blue scars on its bloodless face. Restless fireflies lit the clearing, bound by the black cloaked shamans with rites that sanctified the earth upon which I now stood. All the clans of the east were gathered to witness with glittering eyes. Even the babes were silent, clutching at their parents with tiny hands.

In the midst of them all, at the eye of the whirlpool of fireflies lay the body of mine uncle. There was the man who raised my brothers and sisters and me, the man who taught me the ways of honor and steel. It felt like yesterday that I stood at this very place, filled with fierce joy, and my uncle stood to anoint me as Daeryon, an apprentice to the elite warriors of Moon-fire. Eyes that were filled with pride now stared eternally into the worlds beyond eyes closed.

From the fore of the multitude my younger siblings looked on with impassive faces as the eldest of us awaited till the shadow of the headstone to fully shroud the Chief. What I saw planted a seed of prophetic dread. Within my elder brother’s heart that I knew was a husk washed out by sorrow he felt a spark of anger.

‘As was, so shall be,’ he said, his voice drawing blood from the silence. The spark had been fanned to a flame, and his tone betrayed the fury he felt.

The grass around my uncle, my brother and me was sucked in and beneath us the features of a visage was formed from the bloodied mud. The earth opened its maw and swallowed my uncle, as it had swallowed generations of Moon-Fire. Never sated, never at peace, forever ravenous. The face then dissolved, yet in my mind I could still see it, betraying prodigious avarice and smiling with glee at the inevitability of the words that would escape the lips of my brother.

‘War,’ he whispered into the quiescence, and where a wound was once his voice dealt a deathblow, and the clans bayed at the cold uncaring moon.

***

Rya, daughter of Rebert the Fourth

March, 3963 AD

The walls of the dungeons were smooth. I had scratched the walls a thousand times, but there wasn't a single mark. Something in me was dying, and there would be nothing for it to be remembered by.

The single torch that lit the cell flickered. Shadows were written on the walls like messages from another world. A world where I was free. A world where I wasn't chosen. The fire laughed mockingly. A world out of my reach.

I couldn’t remember the last time I slept. I only remembered it was before my last visitor. He was dressed in black silk. When he moved he was like one of the messages. Grey flickers against the wall, like a promise of ancient terrors. A reminder of the darkness man learned to fear.

He came with a chalice. It had been days since I ate when he came. Back when I roamed the Throne, ignorant of the fetters they had placed upon me, I had been taught what to expect. I drank its contents without a word. It was sweet as poison, it was bitter as death.

No words, however, could prepare me for what I felt after. There was something dying. There was something dying, and there was something killing it, both in me. It was ravenous. It was strong. It made me afraid. It made me repulsively ecstatic.

In time, as I knew would happen, the door opened again. A naked man crawled into the room, chained and broken, on the inside and out. The rest was a blur of red.

When I came to again, there was blood on the floor. There was blood on the walls. There was blood on the ceiling. There was a human body ripped to shreds.

That night I finally slept.

The next morning I woke as a Goddess.

***