I watched the shadows move
Birds with eyes as red and angry as the sun.
They spoke to me in the grinding tongue of industry
And the merciless crunching of bone

The words they had to say to me
Felt like solace, promises, colors and beauty.
They offered me eternity, freedom, and an existence outside that of any human experience.

Light danced in dizzying patterns
Illuminating the wall in paper-thin aluminum, spelling out the mantra
Burned into my eyes.

Your beauty felt like hell to me
Forlorn and broken
Dead trees strewn out across famine-ridden fields as far as the eye could see
Like toothpicks dropped upon the kitchen floor.

I traveled with them.

They carried me out of time and space
To a mountain made of snow and fire.
It burned and froze; I saw
The skin and blood falling from my hands to form a steady stream of sickly yellow ice and gooey flesh
It smelt of iron and burning hair, of rotten eggs and teeth, of tears and drugs and cigarette smoke.

My bones, like crisp white paper, blackened and crisped, thinning and disintegrating
Until I was disembodied
A demon, free to roam the outer dimensions of this universe with them.

My wings were made of emptiness, of black holes. My feathers were the event horizon, all light and hope disappeared into them.
I beat down upon the gates of heaven, but they only echoed hollowly back, a mocking song of eternal condemnation. It sounded like bells and gentle breeze, reminding me of all the things I had so hated

I retreated into myself, and my eldritch scream pierced the thin barriers between worlds so that every organism knew my pain, in fear and despair. And to them it sounded like knives upon nerves, the electric apocryphal song of death.

Upon the earth, every light and star was snuffed out, every muggy ray of harsh light evaporated and burned to be absorbed into my tears of molten metal.
I glowed, brilliant and promising, only in the eyes of those tainted by the stench of death, decay, and personal damnation.
All manner of entities swarmed about me.
Each one I passed turned, staring at me from sunken, widened, bloodshot eyes
Grinning at me through teeth and lips disfigured and contorted as though acids had passed through them.
And within them I tasted the venom of snakes.
I drank it greedily as they gathered beneath me, offering themselves up into my massive jowls. I enfolded them in my wings,
And my eyes burned as red and angry as the sun.

Their fingernails scraped against my feathers and I drank in their horror and what was left of their humanity; it tasted of the richest wine known to humankind.
Intoxicated, I screamed again, with drunken rage. As one, we flew far and fast. They, inside of me, gurgled and screamed and scratched, and
Sounded like the relentless pounding of the ocean waves upon a barren cliff side.
And so we added our voices and rage to the sounds of the sea and descended upon it to pollute it with smog so that every creature might know death.
Trapped souls - opaque and bald, hollow-eyed and spindle-fingered -
Rose up in answer to our cries and poison
Their hands stretched and expanded as only water can and pulled us under.

As we drowned in free fall they were consumed, their voices added to ours, so that the cries of the ocean became more piercing, unearthly, echoing out across the cliffs
The wind carried faint whistles of our deaths all across the world; the lighthouse did not shine and all those who heard it shivered with sudden unbearable cold as though their marrow had been replaced with liquid nitrogen.

The stars fell from the sky to be swallowed by us, to feel warmth and to see light one last solitary time.

Terrified, I shrieked and screamed oh how I never wanted this and I channeled all the cries of the tormented in hell. I tore the heavens down like drapes and all that was left was darkness. Cloaked, heavy, and delirious, we sunk

We were pulled beneath the white crests, comatose
To be buried with fallen angels and demons chained to the deepest trenches of the ocean with only barren rock and vile worms for company.

And there we remained, burning, freezing, melting…and the ocean roared forevermore with our empty howls.