sell.my.soul

beyondthis
p l a c e
of wrath and tears looms but the
horror
of the
s-h-a-d-e
(and all the menace of the years finds and shall find me u.n.a.f.r.a.i.d)

Falling is fast and painful and once you've hit the ground, there's no getting back up, not in this world, not in this lifetime. I know this, have known this, since before I fell, since before I turned away. I played the game, played to lose, played for no reason but my own perverse amusement. And in losing, I win, perhaps, in a sense, for us damned have nowhere to go but farther down.

There's comfort in that, and fear.

But hitting that damnation, that bottom, is a sharp, needle-thin pain, like a snakebite, only more venomous. It stings, and it festers, and it claws at your insides, until all that's left is all that you foresaw when you leaped - nothing but cold and fire and the darkest abyss of the unknown. I know this with clarity, with only the barest hint of remorse remaining. I do not inhabit the deepest circle, no. But I do inhabit one.

And in that circle there is freedom, a liberation of the sort the others must feel with more ease than I, but I take what I can have, and never ask for more. Asking for more is what leads us to this place, the dream of another way, another future apart from the ones prescribed by priests and ministers. The dream is not evil, nor the ends we soldier toward, no - it's the means, the means that turn us to this, to the horror stories we once shrank from, our own little nightmares in our heads.

The dreams are what haunt. The dream that we could have been more, and at the same time, have never been more. Power and weakness, life and death, this is our currency. Trading in souls and coins, lives and loves and petty hopes, we thrive. Thrive while the last vestiges of humanity within us cry for what we willingly gave up, willingly turned over, the same things we try to force others into now. The things we offered up we now steal, and wish we could convince them not to.

But we as humans were fools, and all of our once-kind are. Believing in time, believing in our own resiliency, we peddle what we don't understand like it doesn't exist, and throw away what we do on lies and false hopes. And the pain, the falling, the falter, reminds us that we are all under a spell of complacent decay, allowing the rot to take us from the inside out, welcoming its fetid smell like a perfume, turning away the healing like a poison.

As I am now, as I see now, they will know. The cover of darkness and the red-light of fire keeps me hidden while the flashes of light can save the fools. But too proud, too foolish to see the answer in front of them, they allow my tongue in their ears, my hand in their actions, and believe themselves masters of manipulation and deceit.

A fictional hell burns in one eye, while a reality of life blossoms in the other, and they think they've conquered both when, in truth, both reign over them. Like moths to a flame, they flock toward what will destroy them, and leave the safety of the shadow. Or, well, vice versa. In the flickering light, they are safe - even in the dimmest light of dawn, they are safer than in the night's keep. And yet they court danger like it's a game, like their lives and souls can't be whisked away in an instant, as if they are invincible.

Invincibility is a lie, and a joke told by mothers to their children so they believe they can survive the world. But after the world, when the invincibility is real, the world seems unnecessarily kind.

Pity the kindness is wasted on the humans. We damned could use it as well.

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(A/N: God only knows where this came from. Might be continued. Then again, I'm not sure where I'd take it. So... Anyone feel like co-authoring a story with the most notorious non-updater on the face of the planet? ...Didn't think so. Ah well. Review, and I might. Maybe.)