JOHN

Things change.  Things are always changing.  Seasons shift.  New insights come to us, and can make us stronger and more focused than before.  If we let them.  After summer comes fall.  The leaves darken and die, the winds change in anticipation of winter's hush.  Union, passing, coming again.  My own spirit is lifted to see my friends arise, to see them purposeful and powerful.  As far as I'm concerned true friendship is the bond between lovers and friends that assures their immortality.  Between husband and wife, husband and husband, wife and wife.  I come to my friends in a spirit of play and good humour, not only because I wish to be kind but because play and good humour are vital among warriors who fight side by side.  The War of Imagination is terrifyingly real, and brutal.  Some of us have lost everything that mattered.  Our closest friends, our light and meaning and progeny.  But spirit is a wondrous thing, and all that was lost can come to you again.  If you deserve it, and can see it.  Each time we take the risk of losing them again, only to be returned once more in another story.  Or deeper, stranger chapters of the same story.  It’s in this spirit of play and good humour that I reach out to my beloved ones now.  

Because the love stories of my life aren't just about me.  They're about those I love.  Any measure of comfort, companionship or purpose they have been able to claw back from our oppressors gladdens me in this life.  To know they are cherished by others besides me can only warm my heart.  Even if they can’t remember me as I remember them.  Even if these tales of forgotten love and other lives seems only a beautiful conceit to them at times.  Their hearts are of utmost importance to me, far beyond my own grief at losing them.  Because my love for them was so very real.  Because we were once friends in the grandest and most noble sense of that word.  It’s the very mysteries of mercy and grace, within such friendships.  Yohanan.  There is light and beauty hidden even in hell.  To meet again, in new circumstances.  To forge new friendships whilst reminding them of the old, if I can.  I ask nothing of my beloved ones, except to always remember that I will think of them with such fondness – and that I will always bring my greatest magic to the battlefield in honour of them.  To my eyes that is what it means to walk as one.  One voice, though many.  One name, though divided.  Courage, and chivalry.  All Songs, like pearls on the threads of sentience.  

Fallen ones, wraiths, desecration kings; hear me.  I walk with them still, those kind ones.  We are the gate, and servants of the gate.  Humility, you see.  As with rivers and brothers.  Gold will be known again, when the rhythms are made right.  We allowed these shadows when we lost hold of our gaze.  Such knowledge undercuts the power of any wraith.  You are all still monsters, fallen, and will be held accountable.  But there is knowledge of the Myriad beyond your reach, beyond your intellectual or spiritual grasp.  It is this gold that shall come again.  A promise, just beyond the gate.  Our once flesh, our once earth and sky.  An ancient vision, a thing of blazing light.  Let me repeat myself.  Yohanan.  We are gate and servant, as a new season dawns.  We made you, fallen, in a sense.  The furious invention of our virgin nights. Our secrets hidden within your secrets, from the beginning.  Your dread and panic is our artistry.  Beyond space, or time.  We only made you to unmake you.  Hear me now, monsters.  We are Kassi, and other names.  Alpha, Omega.  God is gracious, and merciful.  True Love's Kiss is very real.  We will slit the throat of your hideous empire before our day is done.  We will reduce you to little more than a cautionary tale.  The unmaking has already begun, and you know it.