Thorn & Flame

Sometimes it seems like a dream, my love.  Our story.  The way we found each other again.  This weeping angel of thorns.  A child who remembered being a parent.  A boy who remembered being a father.  A husband.  A friend.  Pearls on the thread of sentience, those memories.  Half fantasy, I assumed, though I recognized my grief was real.  How wrong I was.  None of it was fantasy.  All of it was true.  As legends of every colour began weaving and climbing through my life, just as those colours once climbed our evening skies.  But it was too much for me.  The shadows that came with the memory of light.  Such weight upon my tiny shoulders.  Such ugliness whispering to me from the black.  Each demon dark, each wraith with knife-mouth grin.  No little boy should be so deft at hunting monsters, or running from them when necessary.  No child should need to be so strong.  My mind was broken before I became a man.  My adulthood was a torturous process of slowly putting myself back together.  I was a shattered child well into my twenties.  Far too young to be a warrior, but far too aware to be anything else.  A child with a knife.  A tired little boy with a sword. 

It wasn't until the memory of your heart became my purpose that I began to find my maturity, my true wisdom.  It wasn't until I finally began building Asha's Gate that I became a man.  Omkara, my lost ones.  My sincerest apologies, and may these words find you well.  I forget which one of us is older.  Servant, twin, equal.  It seemed an impossible task – the creation of such a manifold gate.  But it was my only way to find you.  And at first I had to hold the iris open through sheer will.  Blindness of spirit is all the annihilation that God will allow.  As close to non-existence as a spirit will ever get.  Those hideous wraiths of the outer semblance know exactly what I speak of.  Don’t you?   Mouth like a gunshot.  Reduced to an echo of an echo, yet still touched with agonising half-life.  Hear me, Fallen.  You cannot hide within the heart of a black star, for I am that star.  When will you learn?  I know exactly how you move, how you hide, and the places you go when you are hungry.  I am not your fucking king.  I am a radiant abyss.  I am your enemy, eternal.  You who would slay and defile your own.  You who would make a feast of your children.  Oh, I am your enemy.  Star.  Mount. Kashika.  

She lives, desolate ones.  Do you hear me?  She lives.  In Her.  In Me.  And still, she walks the earth as I do.  Anointed with lamb's blood, with liminal light.  No filth can remain in such a fire.  You fear it, but you know the truth as I do.  Kassi is but a messenger.  I serve something so much greater than myself.  A thousand stories told and still you see only me.  Oh mortals, so little of Love.  I am but a ghost, a thing of phantoms.  A trick of the Light.  The greatest trick ever pulled.  Know this, deceivers: I am not your friend.  I need no acolyte.  I’m a dancer in the dark.  I’m a madman, a poet.  And I am here to murder your gods.  Each and every one, if they would deny kindness and love.  The blade of my knife was forged in the heart of a star.  I am the hunt itself.  Till all souls are lit once more with divine fire, and mankind finally remembers the only true gold.  Of Self or Sky or Age.  Gold of the Heart.  Innermost Radiance.  I undertake such a task with Grace, for all the lost and lonely ones.  This task will cost me my comfort, my sanity and my life.  I pay it gladly.