Suns of Alba

Sometimes, when the world is on fire, I have to be brave and look myself in the eye.  I have to remind myself of my mistakes.  The ruins of my realm.  For a true regent there is no one else to blame.  It's good for all spirits to be reminded of these unvarnished truths from time to time, regardless of their standing.  After all, we don't want to become the very things we despise.  And you know what they say about fighting monsters.  Albion was once filled with monsters.  Fairies, giants and angels.  Even the stone beneath our feet was enchanted, until such stone was shattered.  Hidden, sold, rearranged.  A king is both the fisher and the healer of his land.  Those are the duties of a wise one, especially a prince of angels.  I'd rather not end up as a cautionary tale.  But even angels can behave very foolishly.  I mean, isn't that how we fell in the first place?  Ambition, corruption and pride?  That's what the stories say at least.  A feverish chaos, like writhing ghosts aflame on a black horizon.  The world inverted in a silvered glass.  Interplay of shadow and light.  I’m just a peasant.  A former slave, given a crown of fire by my Father.  I only hold the sword.  I don’t write the hills or paint the songs.  I suppose such matters are the province of poets really.  The Children of Knox.  Sons and Daughters of Alba.  They would know better than I.  Perhaps I talk too much.  Perhaps I imagine a little too grandly sometimes.  Dreaming of angels, heroes and chieftains.  So many of the things I am are unimaginable, and so much of what I do is dangerous.  The world is still full of frightening monsters, and I'm not half as wise as I pretend to be.  A little humility would do me well, especially now at the edge of all dreaming.  A mage, a fire, a city of sand.  Black & white, and all the ladders therein, like the vivid colours of ancestry.  Like the four corners of the ancient familial covenant.  Is there some taboo against miscegenation?  A divine right of things?  Well, I overrule such nonsense.  I've been a hybrid since before the raising of the first star.  Sirens, and Cyrene.  You see, Albion was an egalitarian realm long before the birth of the first Dru’ai.  Those wyrding ways and Elenic paths.  Before men created gods, and gods created graves.  Such was the old chronology.  The shining world.  Before the threads of the wheel were rewritten with dark magic.  But I’m still here, Fallen.  I'm still electric, like the stars themselves.  Do you see what I mean about foolishness, recklessness?  Finding my way into places I don't belong.  Claiming the writ and rites of others as my own.  There's a word for that, beyond theft.  It's called appropriation, sinister ones.  And nobody does it like I do.  Not even you.