Murder Song

I've often found that mortals have no real grasp of what's really happening around them.  Even in quieter climates, but especially during times of crisis. They cannot recognise the stage, nor the players.  They cannot speak the language of the birds and so they confuse fiction for fact, wry truth for metaphor. They think this false chronology is real and they don't understand the stakes involved.  But we do.  Don't we, Fallen?  Players in this renaissance game.  At least, that's what I wanted you to think.  That you understood something.  Truth be told you have no idea.  There are many kinds of occulted vision.  Many kinds of chorus, and you are not the experienced veterans you imagine yourselves to be.  Where is your nuance, your dexterity?  I'm not talking about the ability to model a possible outcome.  Or skill enough to encode some fourth-dimensional mockery within your rhetoric.  Any fool with an understanding of true physics can do that.  Kashi isn't impressed with your dark magics and supposed hyper-sigils.  This isn't about information, or mathematics.  This is about knowledge. Maha-mahtica.  Truths beyond truth.  Dreams within dreams.  From a distance birds can be confused for angels, can't they?  Dreams of feathered flight spread aloft, or folded at our backs.  I wonder how many mortals recall the truth of literal human flight.  Or immortality?  For the longest time I counted myself among the dead as well as the living.  Lost cultures and chronologies. Wandering through the three-dimensional ruins of psyche.  But death isn't what it used to be.  Such is always the case when oppressors begin to lose their power. Things start to shift.  Subtly at first.  Like a half-imagined tremor.  But eventually these changes gather pace.  The veils begin to thin.  Even fracture.  Suddenly communication of all kinds is possible.  And believe me, the human spirit has a way of beautifully gaslighting the Fallen.  Driving them mad.  Because we protect our young and honour our dead.  Unlike the demonic energies your wraith-priests call forth.  Do you have any idea, Fallen, what it means to be a Father?  Or a friend?  To be a mentor, a student? No, you don't.  Because you can't even grasp the truth of song and centre.  The veracity of presence.  If a winged eclipse is all you can understand of the infinite, then it's no wonder I outmatched you the day I crafted the feathered tongue.  Any callous fool can commit murder.  An act that is ugly, banal and thoughtless.  But Kasi has a special way of killing.  I can do it on the inside, and you won't even blink.  None the wiser.  Held suspended in a single breath, the final breath, for a thousand years.  The very last beat of your heart.  I know what that's like because I lived it.  Oh, Fallen.  Still so ready to debase and enslave?  Still confusing truth with metaphor?  No matter.  Even the dead don't live forever.