Let me enlighten you: you will not last the night. They told you that your words could form the parapets to the stars, the bridge between heaven and the mind, a monument in the memories of the cosmos. They told you that every time the fire of blade slipped across the subtle rises and falls of a new world’s canvas, the ordinary became extraordinary. They told you that you belonged here, that this could become the home not even your finest efforts could form. But your simpering lips have always adored the sweetness of lies.

 

 

 

No.

 

 

 

I know you: you are the necromancer of the soul, trying to perform a miracle with the sanction of the devil.Your crimes live on in the memories of the world, a fugitive living on the fragile border of heaven and hell. You mean nothing.

 

 

 

Stop.

 

 

 

Alas, child, you seek mercy? Or pity? Or perhaps you seek a liar’s breath?

 

 

 

Please. Just go. I haven’t done anything to deserve this.

 

 

 

Ah, you bask in the glow of a false innocence, knave. I know as well as you the laws engrained in your collection of reveries. To the day when words no longer bend to your will with the gleam of a frozen fragment of starlight, there will be no peace. The rule stands beyond all fleet footed hopes of ephemeral mercy: to live, you pay, and never can a single Tartarus-kissed syllable cross the end of your pen, lest you wish to follow them to their source in a final sojourn of the soul. These words, the currency of pride and curiosity’s bounty, bleed on to the page from none other then your own fingertips. This filth you lay before me, shame this hallowed ground of miracles and tragedies. The cursed crimson that has no purpose more than to water the wilted locks of the Earth. Shame, child, for if not the symphony of letters that forms the earth beneath your feet, you stand before this mirror staring into the executioner’sflame lit eyes.

 

 

 

Please, I can do better. I know I can, I haven’t lost my way with words. The flame still lives, the dream has never left my soul. I’ll give you anything, just give me one more chance. Please!

 

 

 

Look, how the accused, when alack of a savior, flounders in the summer sun upon the dock. What a shame, to have missed such a feast for the entertainer for so many long years. But indeed, to trade any whim of the imagination for the mercy of a stone? Very well, should this uncouth poison taint my being another moment, I shall not grant another chance. Blood has no equal but that which inhabits the veins, and such will be the currency of the imperfect fiend.

 

 

 

But I haven’t—

 

 

 

 

 

Law shall not flee from the fingers of the week. Hold your sword, take your lashes. For if naught you give forth can amount to the worth of the name we have constructed from the very essence of our flesh, then naught you shall receive more than the consort of death which the great Xavier Knight has come to kiss the fetid toes of.

 

 

 

Why must I pay?

 

 

 

Indeed, the child, a simpleton from the depths of the mundane, asks why pay for the privilege of sight. Without my word, child, all you have would sink below to the murkiest depths of prosaic hellfire. I see the hunger that scratches every note into memory’s rapture to fuel the pride which no creature on earth will ever come to know. You come from the tactful musings of my fingers, a product of myself and myself alone. Without me, no word would ever escape your lips without the cannons of the ordinary aimed to fell them for the sake of all mankind’s sensibility.

 

 

 

Liar.

 

 

 

You protest? Alas, let us examine the rusted gears of your thoughts, shall we? Within this ancient village adorned with the gaudy misnomer of worth, dwell the thoughts that labor on to seep life into the horrors of the ordinary. For each, another battle of wits and strength through the moonlit lands of idea, the promise of new worlds to roam and explore tantalizing. Yet more often that not, they fall to their knees in a desperate clamor for survival. They whisper their souls of fantasy, their loves of mystery, their dreams of truth, yet the blade of reality shows no fear in rerouting them to a land of another sort, one riddled with broken scraps of hope, shards of wishes, and fragments of dreams. Yet allow my cloak to embrace the follies of the earth, for the dispatcher of these thoughts lives in no other form then that which eats from your plate, sleeps in your bed, and speaks to you now.

 

 

 

You have no mercy. No justice.

 

 

 

Alas, child, I have but boundless pity for those who grovel for a chance to last but a moment in the eyes of heaven. In all, I surrender more sympathy to your blind rapture than any may have guessed. Justice belongs to the strong, the worthy, those who can wield it with honor and keep its glittering epithets alive. I strike more justice upon this coward in the face of humanity’s kindness than ever should be given.

 

I am nothing, then?

 

Nothing.