I had no intention of extending this until thirty minutes ago. The Millions Muse doesn't take no for an answer, I guess.
There are no secrets between the savior and the saved.
He stumbles and bows, a thread of blood dribbling down past one of those half-lidded, obscenely gold eyes. It catches me for a moment, a flash of desperate shame, just as quickly erased as it began.
"Eternal pain and suffering to you." You cannot hide a damn thing from me, Bluesummers. You have no self; you are completely, utterly, forever mine. Except now, I have opened the door and asked you, unequivocally, to leave.
He nods, bows again, brow tightening imperceptibly with the fresh ache his movement creates, then vanishes from my light forever. You've fallen from my grace for the last time, pet, and there's only one thing you can do to make up for it now. I made you real, Bluesummers, and now I have sent you to be unmade. It's sickening, how much I care.
You were useful, and admittedly beautiful – if destruction is beautiful, if a twice-broken, once-saved thing has value. Already, it seems quieter here, without the muffled, constant muttering snarl of your mind tagging around my consciousness like a dog. Like the stench of humanity, your faint stink of drying blood and rotting flowers. Roses, geraniums: the air is notably purer now, laced with the perfume of wholeness for the first time in a century.
Or, perhaps, in forty-three years.
Already, you are erasing yourself, shutting down memory and mind as you prepare to complete your wasted life. It's an appropriately poetic justice; another symptom of the human disease at work. The standards of your species would call me callous, standing here reveling as a man who plainly loved me shreds the last bits of his existence into the starving night. But it's appropriate; why should I mourn like a human beast?
My brother is coming home, and a hateful being will get what he wants at last.
Call me heartless, then, but he was good. Not good enough, but he was close.
There are no secrets between the savior and the saved.