Chapter III

Growth is as slow as change, the shifting sands of this world bulbous and swollen within an hourglass of tears, and all its piteous emotion is merely something that happens to other people. Including the Queen. Sitting by the water, watching wings of glowing wind rape the trees and steal their secrets. It may seem that my languid well of constant inanition is all I have, safe in unrelenting darkness. It is not all I have, it is all I chose to keep. Assuming solitude is a safe place when the greatest threat upon your life is yourself. I can still taste her in my mouth, blood-warm and saccharine, blessing my body with shots of some rainbow endorphin. Stirred only twice by love's clement kiss, here I stargaze upon these forgotten things, the reason Dagger is groomed to despise me and why the Angel of Death himself is still so lost.

So step into my mind if you dare, a tortured niche carved into Garland's exalted nothingness, where few risk their earthbound souls and from which even fewer emerge alive. Which portal? Which rift in concentric epochs, each a sapphire streak of cognitive lightning? Of course, the past. My secret life, my secret lover, whose hands I bound with cut lengths of my own hair and dared to call my own. He always walked a certain way, his tousled leucous head and smoke-blue eyes downward, seemingly shy yet always knowing, like he'd just gotten one-up on the world. Truly he was perfect, and that in itself was my undoing, for the very nature of sumblimity is that it cannot be imprisoned in one man's heart, no matter how hard he wishes for it. As Heaven to the beasts of Hell, clawing at its pristine gates in vain with our bloodied ashen claws. Hell is not a volatile cauldron of molten brimstone and unspeakable sin, tended by staggeringly beautiful abominations. It is sleeping with one, and never once hearing him call your name. I love Dagger more than I care to understand, but I loved this swordsman first. He left without so much as a farewell for a lover, a woman, who would grant him the onus of dominance, an affliction he was denied so long. What was it he used to call me? It was not my given name.

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"Wake up! Can you hear me in there? The barrier's down, we have to MOVE, goddamn it!", this voice offered nothing in return or placating sacrifice as it savagely penetrated my chasm of dreams, instead stealing me away from my thoughts. Memories came next, awakened by the sound, of how first the sky bled, then the clouds turned black as blinding ichor burned my eyes shut and flayed my screams to dust.

"What colour is the sky?", I implored the voice, twitching a feathered stump at my shoulder as it wept the same ether. I could not feel my legs.

"What the fuck? Oh, the boss is really gonna like this bullshit. You can tell him", came the first voice, Dragon, as I had christened him, for presently he had no face to shine through the black pool I lay in, although I knew his hair must be unkempt and as red as the fire in his lungs.

"You tell him! It was your idea anyway. What do we do with him now?", the voice of Serpent hammered my senses again, testing the paper-thin border between madness and melancholy. Leave me, both of you......I just want to see the sky......my eyes are sewn shut.......

* * * * *

I heard a man call out in pain and rose to my feet, my head whipping sround in search of him. Until I realised that my own cries were what disturbed me, the progressive nightmare that grows more vivid and deep- seated each evening, and for which I have no explanation. Rushing back now, all the hellish slumbers and flashes of steel on steel, poverty and piracy, pain beyond belief. How many times did I throw myself from Dagger's bed, clutching my head and recalling the reason why I was afraid to sleep? And how many times did I question which agonising reality was true?

* * * * *

Keep guessing....

Coronis