Lachrymae.
I.
Flow, my tears; fall from your springs.
Exiled, forever let me mourn
Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings;
There let me live, forlorn.
…
You were never good at dissembling. Fortunately, you no longer have to.
Few men are quite what they seem, but your sins are limned in flesh, plain and true. Your subordinates, your enemies, your master, and the nightmare-harried children of the galaxy can all apprehend you at a glance. The past faces were never wholly your own. Among those many masks are the trembling coward rumored to know no fear, prophesied savior who proves to destroy—murderer in the guise of lover. Now and at last, you are precisely what you appear to be: monster, demon, and living corpse. An avatar of death, perhaps, who turns to crumbling dust everything he touches?
You are your own disfigurement; the true face and the false one are death's-heads both.
Having been reborn as what you always were, your exile is complete. Few still live who could recognize you as a fabled hero, or even a fallen one—certainly no former friends to intrude upon the communion of sinner with shame. The false self from whose ashes you arose has been eulogized and laid to rest, along with most of those who ever loved him.
Three men remain who know who you once were. One you pursue, though even the thought of vengeance proves a sorry incentive these days. You know you hated him once, but the years have fermented that emotion into a nameless confusion tainted with remembered affection and respect. You maintain an ambition of killing him someday, because he will expect it of you. The second has always laughed in your presence. It took years, poor thing, to realize he laughed at you. Maybe he recognized your inhumanity from the start and thus savored the opportunity to align form with content; maybe, like the monarchs of antiquity, he always fancied his jesters deformed.
The third levels at you a hatred of almost dazzling purity and it is in his presence that disgrace stings coldest. On those infrequent occasions when you forget to be sad, he is always ready to oblige by reminding you of everything you threw away, and how little you got by the bargain. You have never been able to deny the accusations of this last. Though the closest of all your old acquaintances, he offers no comfort, cloaking himself within a blackness that marks despair as well as darkness, night so deep that it swallows all hope of dawn.
It is at these times that you frighten yourself the most.
...