NIGHTFALL GIFTED

NIGHTFALL GIFTED

Step one. Retrieve a dead leviathans soul. Step two. Ritually convert a primordial intellect. Step three. Forge a frame from the cold fires of the Void. Step four. Break the will of a singularity. Step five. Claim the Rite. Step six. Kill a God. Step seven. Accept your Gift of the Night.

T I M E: DUSK.

I am not from your time.

I may not even be from your world, from this branching thread of lines that constitute events and possibilities.

I have not been anchored by causality, by the onward arrow of causal time for a very long measure, across backwards and forwards instances that intertwine each other with complex paradoxical architecture that is beautiful, that is unknowably constructed. I should not exist, I should have crippled the fundament of reality since the inception of my paths across this infinitium eternium. Yet, I exist. I am. Clearly. I appear and give and change, I am and am and am, onward or backward or across the gulfs that separate, that change. Sometimes I come upon what looks like my point of origin, the beginning of my banner woven so intimately across what is, what I have witnessed. Points that may be mine, that may have bore a variation of myself. Beginnings or ends seem so meaningless now, so completely incomplete.

I can be many things. I have been many things. Back and forth, back and forth. I do not know if when, where, I came from still is. I do not know if it even ever was. Maybe I am mad. Madness is easy to befriend and sink into when time can be so easily shattered, so easily crossed. I have been a mighty stag, white fur and golden antlers that the Moon loomed within. I have been a vast storm of lightning and radiation canticle, blazing negative fire. I have been the mother of all humanity, the woman who carved up dirt and stone and sky. I have been an armored Titan, an empyrean leviathan who cleaved reality anew with a halo that burned with black fire.

G R A V E D A N C E R

Death provides many voices. Many avenues, many gateways and possibilities, an unending Dawn done in the void light that is ceasing to be. Is death truly ceasing to be? So human, so frail a perspective. Remember what you have seen, what you have witnessed and transcended amongst, what has died at once only to become new, vast the next. Witness. Death shapes, reforms, gives. Call yourself Gravedancer upon your mantle, within your husk thrones built atop bone and metal and broken adversaries. But they where never adversaries, never enemies. How could they be? They so willingly added to the grave you carry open yourself, become legion to the Pax Mortus you and you alone lead. Feel that truth in your flesh, in your purpose. Dancing amongst the graves of dead in the wild is but truth, but shape toward what can and must and will be. One form to the next, one motion to another. Death is simply another motion, not wall or barrier. Not an end, either. How many times have you yourself died, in this place? Yet you return, you are gifted back to particles and quantum realizations to be remade. Each time a little different, a little more intertwined with this truth you carry more and more and more. You will not be consumed, you think to yourself. You will not be devoured, not burned by the black flame you have ensnared. You only wish to know. Curiosity is it's own luminescence inside you. But now, something grows in you. Something.. more. Something different. It grows in directions that you only know from the whispers of the dead, from the calling canticles of long abandoned cathedrals erected in utter, total, primordial eternity. Let it blossom.

B A N N E R • E T E R I N I U M

The sun blazes, masked between the ruined enormity like bones obscuring and crescendoing the light, paradox beauty, bleeding horizon brilliantly sepia and orange and gold on the inky black and thick violet and pale white of metal, of glass, of hardened inconceivable titans. The great jaws beneath and upon the earth open to which great water does flow, liquid and true, remade to new purpose on the dusk descent. Descend below as the water chants it's canticle of summoning, descend below as the gargantuan mechanisms spread enormous planning across a septillion septillion futures and eternities like glowing embers, like burning tree branches blazing in white and golden flame, like constellations of crimson stars to shudder fervently in the dark. Upon the dust and gravity of this place will arise an Empire, risen and yet not, long since defeated yet eternally triumphant. Let the Cathedral illuminate you in its undying glow. As the black ocean of conversion floods out to replace the sky above and the spreading infected perfection of forever yearns, it will embrace you. It has been waiting, waiting and confirmed and unknown at once, truth a ghost that haunts a trillion threads of what is and is not and could be. The Cathedral calls and its Perfection Engine sings, praising itself into godhood with blood and calculated reverence. Eternity commanded, Banner blossomed.

L o o p

Each of Her breaths are a light year apart, a black hole maw wide. Each inhalation is the space between Big Bang blooms, each exhale as distant as the furthest dreaming twinkling realities. The chandelier like snowflakes falling from the silenced grey sky, puffy and crystalline, falling ivory stars that shined against negative blackness. In one world she is Carolyn, another Sabina, another Katy, another Rebecca. Car crash and robbery gone wrong and heart attack at 76 and happy end at 90. Ends are not met, beginnings unraveled to meet this point over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. The snow falls and her breaths continue, even as the false sun beyond lead clouds turns to the bloodshot sphere to burn the world to embers, even as this ashen world yet to be and the long dead sun ease into black-dwarf grave a trillion years un passed. Inhale, exhale.

I'm a lonely tyrant, a king and god of the things that are only mine, mine alone. Stranded on the mountaintop I dreamed so much about. Loved by friends who love me at a distance. I seek not ascendancy yet I am hollow without exultance. The rain falls, dribbling its soft and lovely whispers. I am a lonely tyrant, nothing but simply my own.