Howdy y'all, been busy (have I fuck), but here's chapter four, as you can plainly see. I must have swallowed the Cheshire Cat. Meow. A Yuri/Halley is brewing in my tiny mind, problem is I've forgotten most of the plot of Shadow Hearts so I've had to play it all again. Yeah, like that's a chore.......

Chapter IV

It is endless. At sunrise we are born, we take up arms and laugh as blades pierce our smiles and our hearts; we fall, almost through the earth itself - Gaia, epiphyte whore. By the light of the virgin moon we are revived and once more we battle and burn, spawned twice by a solvent fireball deity and its devitrified concubine. I have been shown things, this night. Brothers, each long starved by his chosen path, one the saviour of an empire, the other a shadow drowned in a chorion of dreams and desperate for fear of himself. Laguna. Vincent. Two dead men, one taken long ago into the hub of some crisis from a radioactive sky, the other aging in the mellifluous arms of my trappistine goddess. Myself, and Zidane. Past devastations ache still, gilt-spun hair and caesious eyes, now a kind of sculpted uniform poured about his adolescent shoulders. Desire always is the trigger-finger of pain, heaven's molested snipers buried in a hail of their own bullets.

Searing agony. Brilliant radiance. My hands fly to my temples and clutch nothing of the pain tearing through my skull, slamming against my eyes with infinite images I recognised. A sword, clasped in my arms like a steel-lined lover and then alive in my left hand, biting back with all my caustic fury, a rage that would destroy me and all the world unless I acheived extinction, channeling it down the bolted metal shaft and through an endless chain of lifeless gods, men and monsters. Then beside me, even as I slept beneath the stars with a heartbreakingly beautiful blonde man, silenced only in sleep. I had to make him scream, because........I had already made him kill. At that time no gods could threaten us, their power just hollow decrees from an impotent string of reluctant dictators. They could try, but my lover need only say the word and he would have their heads. And any part of me.

My filthy back room in the forgotten wastelands of Treno's slum district weighs heavily on the soul of such a romantic, but for now it is adequate. We couldn't risk letting the king see me having one of my nightmares in his bed, now could we?

"Kuja? Are you here?", that unmistakable swan-song of the brunette seraphim called me closer to the door, partly for fear that she should see my dwelling in its ghastly entirety. "I must speak with you. I apologise for my reticence but you must understand that - "

"Understand what?", as if I didn't know that. She loves Zidane and Zidane loves her. Why must she explain this to me, suck out my aching heart with those cherry-blossom lips and throw it to her lover like a burning blood-soaked apple. She steps inside uninvited but not unwelcome, callously casting off her enceinte cloak and arranging her obsidian hair in perfect symmetry.

"That I am restricted in everything now........even those I may love", her long lashes dropped, contrite and submissive, and for all I tried to reach out to her, I seemed further away each second.

"Dagger, if there was anything.......you see, I.......", the words had made sense before I'd tried to articulate them, but upon leaving me they tripped and fell through gaps in a sectarian spiderweb, the oblique gossamer strands ignited by aslant sunrays from which they cower.

"Kuja, are you drunk?"

"Sober as a judge", I couldn't even shake my head.

"So you are drunk!", the Queen scolded me, albeit a little too loudly. And with that she was gone, possibly because of frustration, and possibly because of the Alexandrian guard who'd materialized on the opposite balcony. I don't know why I killed that nameless soldier, or how I instinctively knew how to use her own special-issue machete so well that my magic was but pleonastic adornment.

* * * * *

Serpent, Dragon; death and darkness, who sealed my eyes with spiteful stitches and watch me slip away. I can feel something warm, a chasm drawn in daylight's air and perpetuated by his hand. He is reaching for me, as I knew it would be. A gift, my love? I thank you. You will be rewarded, when I assume my rightful place upon the throne of this vagrant world, and it won't be long now. From our own arms we will carve the blades of justice, the sun as a sword and the moon as a through thrusting fire, now so far under my control I barely notice their existence.

Not long now........
* * * * *

"I don't think that because you haven't heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. No, rather I am still here. Like a spirit. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest; anxious to please Sam......Now the void has been filled...... In their blood and from the gutter, Sam's creation." -- David Berkowitz (Son of Sam)

Coronis @-}---