Hello! Yay, new chapter! OK, this one will be a tad bit different. You will notice, at the beginning there are two poems. The poems are interludes in the album that mark an undefined period of time where important events take place. Just in case you don't get the really vague symbolism me and my fellow poet (Jacob) use, I'll give a brief explanation of what happens in Opiate Soul part 1 and 2.

Part 1, basically when good old Ariel sails and contemplates life as he does so with a voice outside of Ariel's talking about reality, demonstrated archaicly with the metaphors and crap. Not a solid event, but it takes 'place' during a solid event. Part 2 isn't any physical event, but Ariel's state of mind crossed with an overreaching fate mixed with foreshadowing. I wrote part 1, Jacob wrote part 2, and his part owns mine .

Enjoy!

Opiate Soul

Part 1

Riding on the waves of time,

Who can tame the vast sea?

Who can reign over the erosion of reality?

As the sea carves trenches in the earth,

So does time carve swathes in idealism.

Just as the sea goes with no concerns for men,

Time will also exact its own veracity on us.

When a wave crashes down on you,

Be reminded of how time will eventually erase.

Part 2

….can you see me now?

Wander.

Caught between worlds?

Torn.

Dark against Light,
An all out fight,

Twixt good,

Twixt bad,

Twixt the things I never had.

Dusk.

Hell's flame, just a game,

Dance with death, play the dame.

Occult.

Lost and trapped and floating here,

Separate from all that's dear.

Regret.

Search for truth, finding lies,

Once I find, pieces die.

Pieces of, my shattered soul,

Look around, for my own role.

Broken.

Seek to find, but never will.

Not this life, not yet at least..

Continue the journey,

Twixt dark and Light.

Edge of Paradise

Ariel leaned back and raised his head, murmuring softly toward the ceiling, his hands tracing a pentagram in front of him. Easy to do this with his eyes closed now. He gasped slightly when the effects of the drug he had taken began to take hold, his vision clouded even behind his closed eyelids. He saw bright, colored spots, and he groaned at the initial pain, then sighed, releasing the negative energy.

His hands hovered over the pentagram, the book sitting next to him, open, notes scrawled in the margins. He opened his eyes and watched as the blurs before him took form, laughing in pleasure and crying out in pain, Ariel himself shivering slightly, his extremities tingling with an erratic energy. "Kiraaa…." He let the name fall from his mouth like a pleasured moan, once again pleading the dark angel to make an appearance.

Ariel was laying back on his bed. The memory came back to him like a dream, but the pentagram to his right and the open, scrawled in book next to him disproving his theory. It was always like this when he woke up from one of the ceremonies…

Ariel had left his home several years ago. He boarded a ship and traveling to somewhere called Napaj. It was a small, removed island colony with one megalopolis in the center, near the main water supply. The rest of the towns were small and spaced far apart along the various rivers that stemmed from the main water supply roughly in the middle of the island.

Ariel had chosen an island because their cultures tended to not reflect the mainland's so much… they develop their own unique tastes, tastes that Ariel was longing for. He spent the first two years just wandering the island, getting to know it's basic heritage and people, reveling in everything new he was learning.

It was in his third year that he was starting to become dissatisfied. The deeper you went into the islands history, the more it reflected where he had come, since the diversity arose a few generations after first settling the island. Thus, the more he worked to understand new things, the more familiar things became. He faced a problem. He could leave the island and go somewhere else, of course, but he had grown an odd sort of attachment to the people.

He had underestimated how much he would miss Helena and his friends, the comfort of home. Almost every night he dreamed about his old life, almost, but not quite, regretting his decision to leave. Thus, the attachments he had formed with the new culture to distract him from his old ties. When that was insufficient… then he would turn to the book.

That book was perhaps the only thing stopping him from returning to his old life… whenever he touched it, the emotions he felt right before he left would surge again, and he would be disgusted at his weakness, that he would even be tempted to turn back to his old life.

However, his new life hadn't been as satisfying as he had hoped. When he did reach that wall around two years, he nearly committed suicide in frustration, and for a while considered becoming a killer…. the taste of blood might sate him if nothing else.

He restrained that urge for some time though, partly because some form of morality was still in him and partly because if he was caught he would rather die than spend a lifetime in the prisons (the people on the island had no death sentence). Instead… he turned to the occult. The taboo.

Drugs.

Ever since he had come to the island he had become acutely aware of the dark undercurrent, underground, if you will, of demon worshippers, blood drinkers and cult members that populated the smaller villages. He had been exposed to it in almost copious amounts, but he had always brushed it aside as a darker mirror of the God he had left.

All of that changed the first time he tried the drugs.

Even if the religion wasn't real, the drugs… the drugs were certainly real. Real and pleasurable and intensely desirable…. That first taste marked his downward spiral, his back- and-forths between neutrality and falling into the dark.

It had been a few weeks ago when he had stopped resisting the call of the clean and succumbed to the drugs. If not the religion, the drugs. But the drugs were part of the religion. The cult. The demon worshipping. So he took both in stride.

For about a year it had been strictly about the drugs and the high they brought… but later he decided he would look more into the actual religion. To get the drugs he used to pretend to participate and to agree with the teachings of certain villages who taught various cultic religions, but about a year after his drug 'stealing', he started to actual listen to the sermons. What he found was that they were preaching a gospel of self-satisfaction, violence, and a twisted kind of love. He found the teachings invigorating, and so refreshingly different from the gospel of Christ, he decided to actively participate in the religion. When the village folk learned he actually had the book of Mephisto, he was heralded as a prophet, and he was welcomed with open arms to preach his story about how he came upon the book and how he forsook everything binding for his own pleasure, although it had been tenuous… his story was one of a gamble gone incredibly right (or horribly wrong)… and how he had found the Satanists, Kirans (followers of the oral teachings of Kira, or Mephisto), and the Utheranians (whose teachings were more centered around nature, but with the same basic cores as the other two) and how he found satisfaction in their drugs.

He was now a full-blown savior to these people, and due to his work he had brought people in from the city to his own little corner of the island. Literally his, he was honored as a king. He had every village military force at his beck and call, and the temple of Mephisto had been transformed into his palace by his demand.

He had lost his appetite for knowledge. He now only had an appetite for the drugs. For his religion.

For the power.

For his religion, he put on the guise of a savior, even a god, and… he tried to convert. He was a roaming lion, preying on the alone and bringing him to his side. When they refused him… he would slaughter them and drink their blood. Bathe in it and boil his food in it. That is what he had done at first… now, as powerful as a dictator, as hailed as a god, he had a vicegrip over more people than the governors in the more civilized cities. He no longer went after individuals, but people groups. Entire cultures, entire villages, subverting them or destroying them.

For all that was dark and evil, he had fallen completely.

Two things hadn't changed. One, his dreams. He kept having the same dream about him walking on the thin glass road, falling, and at the last moment turning and seeing Helena reaching for him while a faceless voice chuckled above him…

And two, thoughts of Helena herself. Whenever there was a moment of calm, Light would remember who he left and why he left her, and would feel a tinge of regret that he wouldn't be coming back to her. Then he would stroke the book and realize it had definitely been for the best that he had left the girl… left his chains behind.

Ariel was once again having those thoughts… those blasphemous thoughts of returning to Helena. He crawled towards the book, still weak from his recent ritual, and rested his hand on it.

Pain shot through his arm, cascading past his shoulder, up into his head and down his spine, causing him to gasp and arch his back, the long, filed nails on his fingers digging into the leather book cover. He could barely see, but the visions in his mind were as vivid, maybe even more so, as sight.

That same angel he kept dreaming about…. White hot hair, glowing amber eyes, like Ariel in every other aspect, lounging on a scarlet divan, holding a crystalline glass filled with the same carmine liquid Ariel had seen the very first time he had glimpsed the angel. The divan was only one piece of furniture in the extravagant hall, chandeliers swaying very slightly, causing shadows to dance around them. A long dining table made of exquisite polished yew was behind them, empty regal chairs silent and stately on its sides. The walls were garnished with more embellishments than Ariel could count…. Colorful shields, stained glass windows, decorative swords made completely of gold… it was nothing elegant…. It was extravagant, almost to the point of garish, very, very impressive and almost blinding. But the most blinding aspect of the entire scene was the angel himself, who was minus his wings.

"How are you enjoying yourself so far, Ariel?" His voice was deep and smooth, almost seductive, but not sinister…. Sickeningly welcoming.

Ariel was speaking, but he wasn't… he couldn't control the words that came out of his mouth. "It's been wonderful, Kira. I thank you for allowing me to enter here."

"So." Kira, as the angel's name was, took a long drink from his glass, his eyes closed from bliss. A whiff of the smell of the wine wafted over to Ariel, and he felt almost dazed from the amazing scent. It wasn't just sweet-smelling, it was intoxicating, beyond mere smell.

"Have you decided to accept the contract?"

And that's when Ariel's subconscious instinct wrenched his hand from the book, as well as the rest of his body. When he was finally fully aware of his surroundings, he was lying on his back with a tremendous headache, the hand that had touched the book tingling as if it had been asleep.

Unlike the first time, he could remember the vision clearly… down to every detail; the out of place hair that had been hanging in front of the angel's eye, splitting it into two amber half-circles, the small nick on one of his ears, the way his a single drop of wine had escaped his greedy lips, dripping down his chin and clinging still as it rolled down his neck.

He was shaking, shivering… the night was warm but he felt cold, even as he sat on the fine sheets on his bed. The kind of cold that seemed to slice into your lungs, a whipping icy wind that didn't come from nature. He felt undeniably attracted to the angel… Kira… the one he had pledged his life to (in a religious sense, not any sort of binding contract)… am I truly a prophet, that he would reveal himself to me like this?

He was frightened. Very frightened. The angel hadn't been sinister, no, and it hadn't been anything akin to a nightmare (like the nightmares the drugs sometimes gave to him), but that an angel… no, that a demon would actually reveal itself to him and leave a lasting impression, unlike the first time… it disturbed him.

True, he was now officially late to a gathering he had sworn to attend, but he figured now that it was inconsequential. Not like he would lose any respect for not attending one meeting, he could always say he was enthralled in a particularly rewarding meditative experience, and he would be praised all the more... but this vision… it required thought. And not the stationary kind offered by meditation.

He stood, his legs feeling like the lighter branches at the top of trees as they were being swept by the wind. He had to get out of that stuffy temple…

Grabbing something before he left, he ran down the marble halls and out the back door, into the woods, where he felt the call of Mephisto.

Barely able to stay on his own two feet. Circling the dead firepit in the middle of the camp, avoiding the book which he had set down on the east side of the camp, he attempted to regain his strength… he had ran for a few hours, far away from the town and the temple and the people, with nothing but a bag and the book… first thing he had done was set up a fire, but it had burned out.

….he turned to the bag. He didn't know why he had brought it, but he felt the compulsion to open it now.

Untying the drawstrings, he reached his hand into the bag, his fingers brushed the the cold smoothness of polished topaz. He felt the small gold chain, and allowed his fingers to follow its cool twisted path before actually pulling it out and staring at it. It reflected his face back at him, distorted… it was his marriage necklace. The one Helena had picked especially for him, promising their engagement… the marriage would have been in a few months after Ariel left. If he hadn't left, he would have been sleeping with his beautiful wife now… or at a nighttime activity with the rest of the town…

He didn't quite know why he had brought it with him in the first place; it represented a tie back to his old bondage, but the night he had left, he had been weak, entertaining doubts. It was understandable why he had taken the brooch to start with.

But as Ariel now set the gem in his hand and ran his thumb across it, feeling the icy smoothness of it, he couldn't help but wonder why he was reestablishing the tie… the tie to his lover…

Almost without thinking, he snapped the gold chain, then he snapped it again… snapping each half once more before letting the eight pieces of gold fall to the dirt. He grabbed the topaz, hooked his fingers in the four shallow indents on each side, and wiggled it free from where it was held, then let it fall to the ground with the holder. He stomped the pieces almost blindly into the dirt, filled with an inexplicable anger, then turned and raced out of the cave, ignoring the branches that clawed at him.

He ran.

As he ran, he cursed.

As he ran, he wept.

~Composed gold rain, wash my grief away~