Author's notes: The very last sentence of this chapter is an ecclesiastical phrase that means this is my body in Latin.

Disclaimer: All recognisable characters are property of LucasFilm.

Chapter III: Winter's Frost

There is chaos.

I never believed in good chaos. I would have none of it, but there is no way out. It would be better to have naught, to have nothing at all, than to know this delirium of clarity, this conscious deadness, living cancer. All the waking dreams of a crippled angel, like the skittering pulse of the one-armed beggar who suddenly discovers that he is perfectly healthy and able-bodied.

Beggars can't be choosers. A rose by any other name…

But, love, there is no way out. No way back to the one love. For it is love. It is really that simple. As simple, as profound, as a single leaf, they once told me, though they were not speaking of love…Like a rose waiting out the storm. Like a rose, dead, dried, yet preserved in all her prideful, thorny glory of a rush of frail bloody petals that carry the scent that is more potent than the smell of blood and death. No way out, pervading every corner of the windowed room. Waiting out the storm, the rose behind her glass window, and the smell that lingers, that speaks of our painful, entangled love. No way out. It is dead—it has died ten thousand deaths that each welcomed with gladness the slow creep of winter's frost—the same frost moving upon the water-reeds. No way out. Aloft in the dizzying sensation of wine-dark petals like frozen stills of the ones that were not borrowed or stolen. Dark, wrinkled, old, dead. He smiles, teeth showing, white-bright. Bitter the taste in my mouth as I look on him. And 'It's still sharp,' he breathes. Perched precariously atop that dream of marionette elegance, like the obscenely obscure length of a ancient, forgotten blade.

Who bears the scent of the dead rose flower? Why does it hang forever in the air, haunting the fragile, heartbreakingly beautiful corpse? And sunlight pours through the window from behind the dull yellow clouds, on the bright raindrops clinging to the window; slipping, sliding down the clear cut glass smooth as silk, smooth as a rose petal. Love, the rain slid down glass that was smooth as a rose petal. No way out. The rain drops slid down. They can't hold on. They can't hold it. They can't hold…they can't grasp it. they can't understand. No way out. I watch them, sitting not far from where the rose stands, leaning a little toward the window in death, in her cut-crystal vase of part hard glass and part reflected shards of sunlight's prism. No way out.

And still the rose waits , hearing the gasp of the after-storm rainwater dashing hard upon the window and trickling slow down—defeated. Hears the crystalline tinkle as, every morning, the lover breaks the phial to release the sweet young perfume. No way out. Neither death nor pain, dearly beloved, shall drain the heady, intoxicating wine of blood from the rose flower—none shall dull her weapons or detract from her height. She stands unmoving—the ghosts of New Year resolutions breathing sickly decay down her slender neck, she has no way out—before the glass window. Glass, so they say, is not a solid material, but a supercooled liquid, such that it can retain its shape for a goodly number of years. But if it stood untouched for half a century, the lower portion would be visibly thicker than the upper. The glass, clear and shining, you have to think of it, sliding down, flowing. All goes down. No way out.

Look through the glass window, my rose. There is no way out. The rain drizzles on. No way out. Endless rain, and at night, the stars are dim. Do you see clearly now? do you see clearly now! Love the wooden shield of the ancient fairytale warriors, love the fiery dragon with green and silver scales…to look upon the eyes of the fiery dragon is death. Their gaze is terror; they shine like stars in the sky; they wing on through the rain. Flying away…but we have no wings, and I fly the base airs of heaven for a little while. There is no way out.

Tell me your dreams, my apprentice.

Starvation is death. There is no way out.

Contrary to popular belief, hunger is not an emptiness, a lack, a Void. It is rather a Presence, a monster growing and bubbling in the veins and crawling up the throat and spilling from the mouth like vomit, oozing from all the orifices like the maggots that bloat up a dead thing.

Starvation is death. There is no way out.

If death is like God, who knows the ways of heaven? Not all the martyrs and saints, nor the angels, not even those with broken wings. They watch over all the worlds of this universe, the angels. They are very beautiful. Their faces shine like the sun—their glory can never be reconciled to brief, bitter mortality. And just perhaps, they smell of roses.

Mortality. Some die for love. What courage they must possess, to willingly take it into their arms, to embrace death, to fall with naked purpose into the burning valley between her legs. There is no way out. She is merciless. There is no way out. And then love lays them conquered in a dark coffin, no way out, and the scent of dried roses…Perhaps it is for these that the rose wilts, waiting. It is humbling, the suffering that men voluntarily take upon their bodies in the name of hate, or despair, or love.

Hoc est enim corpus meum.