Saturday, September 11, 2010

The Dark Ages


Coke

I drank a liter of Coke today,
And saw what it had done.
Not much, although, I must confess,
I had me quite some fun.

I drank two liters of Coke today,
To overload my guts
I'm all too used to teas,
So I belched up all the suds.

I drank three liters of Coke today,
I swear I'm going blind.
My hand would twitch all on its own,
But still, I didn't mind.

Four liters and I know I'm dead,
My teeth feel strange and rough.
My stomach's full of sugar,
And that carbonated fluff.

I drank five liters of Coke today,
I passed out on the floor.
I sat there, still, and scared of course,
As my friend knocked at the door.

I woke up in the place I was,
And drank two liters of Coke.
This shit ain't right, I'll tell you what,
But I still refuse to joke.

Three days ago I died because
I drank myself to death.
On sugar and that carbon shit,
Like child-friendly meth.

I went into a trance of mind,
And saw the face of god.
He moved upon a sea of black,
The strangest thing I've sawed.

I traveled to a place called Mars,
And boarded down its slopes.
And all the hills were perfect,
Since the martians spilled their soaps.

To Eisengard I rode so gallant,
Minding all the orcs.
I stared the dark lord square in eye,
And found he's quite a dork.

I ventured to the paradise
Where macfags live alone.
Though they're constantly at war,
With the PC's and their drones

Forever fear the Ides of March,
I stabbed him in the eye
Then my homies all joined in with me,
And stuck that fucker dry.

The zombies rose in London North,
And filled the town en masse,
But an employee at Circuit City
Kicked them on their ass

My Xbox ceased to work, I found,
And wished itself be dead.
"Turn on!" I said in desperation,
"I'm sorry Dave," it said.

Leon met Matilda once,
And saved her from her pain,
But he turned himself into a plant,
And saw her once again.

A joker met a bat that day,
And scared a city cold.
The lawyer lost his mind as well,
And lost his heart of gold

A magazine, a toaster, broken pipe,
And Bourne escaped quite well.
When the coppers finally got there,
He had blown them all to hell


I woke up in a frenzy,
On the sidewalk in my town.
I dressed up as a STALKER,
While I dressed up as a clown.

I held a bottle of Cola,
And an Xbox on my chest.
The people stood and stared
As I walked it off my best.

I felt alright, and brushed my teeth,
I flushed my body clean.
That fucking Coke demolished me,
And fucked my mind up mean.

Technicolor Clocks

These reasons naught, I seem to see,
The days come marching one by three,

Bound unto my screens for now,
But leavance has its yet to sound,

These industries turn skies to gray,
Which tread upon each happy day,

But people never seem to know,
That finance is the way to go,

Yahoo; red and white and bleak,
Chasing stocks like hide and seek,

Catch a tiger by its toe,
Sell it to a refuge grove,

My childhood was just a dream,
A precursor to this, it seems.

The pixels on the screen, I think,
Are outline hard with green and pink.

Falling through vanilla skies,
Clouds just flying through my eyes,

Until the earth deceives, reclaims;
I hit the ground, they call my name,

And angels come to lift me high,
But heaven's still a place that I

Deject to such a squatting low,
Compared to home, where screens do glow,

Take me where the world is square,
The world is just and proper there,

Tell me where I need to be,
Where technicolor clocks are free.

Sanguinis:

"What do you claim?" spoke Jafra.
"I claim no one," spoke Sanguine.
"Where are your men?" spoke Jafra.
"I have none," spoke Sanguine.
"Then we shall not skirmish," Jafra finalized. His blade was sheathed.
"Strike me," insisted Sanguine. "For I am a god. My followers know themselves, and then they are none. Just as a true cannibal eats himself, so my soldiers know their place as well: in their blood. Speak unto me, and I will not falter. Curse me by your holy fidelities and watch me change not. Pierce me with your steel and I shall live on. I'm but a god; the sky and the sun. For I am Sanguine, God of None."

Jafra made no inquiries to such radical talk. He was left defenseless before a man with nothing on his slate, nor an event in his future, merely his existence and the gravity he imposes. He was not to kill Sanguine. But nevermore his control, and no more blood be spilt, thought Jafra.
"We shall," spoke the inquisiting Imperial. "I say you shall not spill a drop of blood on my watch, under my nose, and so long as my eye is kept upon you. Sanguine, you demon. You hold the cane of a whore and the hand of a reaper, and you slice through legions of soldiers; for what, may I ask? Their blood? Aye, go to war, Sanguine. You shall spill much blood there. But you are without an army, and you are but a delirious brainwasher. You cannot brainwash the Imperial Army of Tamriel. We are the men of the world, and we are the protectors of peace. You shall not break us, not a one, for we are against you thousands to one. And we must strike you down before remorse has its final swing. There will be finality for one on this day...and justice for all."

The Breton threw down his helmet from atop his head, and he pulled his sword from his sheath. Fixing his gaze upon Sanguine, but fifty paces away, he began to pace there slowly. He knew Sanguine will run, and when he does, he will be tripped and ripped limb from limb by the people of Vos. He will collapse within himself as a failure, and a simple man full of foolish beliefs and psychotic nature unrivaled by anyone in the land. He will become a drunkard, a sleaze, and a cruel, heartless idiot on the day he faces the final armies of the Imperials.

Jafra approached Sanguine. Sanguine did not move, nor drop his wretched smile. He stood, and stared at Jafra. Soon, he reached five paces from the sleaze, and froze still. Such twitching jittered throughout his body, and he had no scream to match the sensation he felt, when he threw up his arms and clenched his heart with such force that he ripped the lacing of his metal chest plates apart and tore his clothes to see his chest, where blood was spilling from his heart. There was a hole no rounder than a thumb cresting through his left breast, and he emptied such a stream of blood that he felt only to panic at the matter. Soon, the hole grew larger. He looked up to see Sanguine hold his wretched hand low towards his chest and from his palm emitted a flame of black. Sanguine clenched a fist, and Jafra screamed such a wretched screech in pain far too worthy for a god, and the energy and will to reach out he felt from such pain drove him to grab his jaw and his eyesocket, and rip his head from his body. He fell lifeless, as blood poured from his body.

A ruckus emerged among the army. Men rallied themselves and yelled, "He is dead! Jafra has been slain!" They ran towards Sanguine in numbers unprecedented, and they all died the same. Sanguine held forth both palms open, and emitted a massive flame of black. No man too far could see what happened around him, and so, one by one, each man approached the fiendish deity and were stripped of their flesh where they stood, so that their organs fell from their bones and flesh and armor fell to the ground among masses of blood. Eyeballs fell to the ground, skeletons ripped their spines in two to cease the divine pain they experienced, and tormented men without skin or muscle writhed on the ground, reaching for any blade to stab themselves with. And Sanguine laughed. He was doused in blood, and he hysterically cracked as nine hundred and thirty thousand men rushed to him at once. He walked upon a pile of clothes, flesh and bone formed by the men o'torment.

Imperials, Orcs, Bretons, Altmer, Dunmer, and civilised minotaurs descended upon Sanguine. They saw his flame in his arms atop the piled of death, and were driven to it. Soon, they dropped their weapons. They dashed to the man and sought bathing in the flame of such evident doom. It was delicious to them, like an oasis in Oblivion or a feast for a beggar. They knew not why they felt this way, but all of them laughed the same when they felt his flame in their hearts. And all of them were slaughtered the same. And all of them celebrated his name when they felt the flame, "Sanguine! I am your child! I am your slave!"
"Animals!" shouted Sanguine. "Feast upon the luxuries of the insane! See your deepest dreams in this awful world of order! Of tyranny! Of the short ruling the tall! Of money! Of sophistication! There is none of this, there is only love! There is passion! Bathe in it, my children! Let there be hands ripping their own flesh, men frenzy in masses, wives go without men, children go without fathers, families fall to poverty, women be used, whores be bought, blood be drank...and Justice, for all!"

And when all nine hundred and thirty thousand of them were dead, Sanguine stood atop the mound of bones, blood, tissue, organs, and guts, and he placed his staff of the Whore beside him, clutching the top. He put his foot atop the skull of a minotaur, and looked out onto the land.

Erginvond:

His name was Erginvond. His fingers were long and bony, he was as brittle as a twig, his head was round and smooth like his flesh was stretched over the dome of his skull, his cheekbones protruded like corners of a cube and he was clothed in a suit jacket and a white button shirt, the cuffs of which exploded out the ends of his jacket sleeves in an unorganized and bunched up way. He sat half-hunched over his coffee and muffin on the deck of the River Road Coffee Shop looking over Lake Hudson. Such a tall and brooding figure he was, but so kind was his face that it was impossible to fear this man. A strange character he was, and with good reason. He was a rich and accomplished man, so much so that he should not doubt himself, but he does to keep himself in line.

Occasionally he would take out his iPhone and scroll through something in the middle of someone speaking. But I did not doubt that whatever he was checking was important, because otherwise he would not deny his best friend, who was me, attentive audience when he spoke. A selfish approach, but true none the less. He was a deeply respectable man. Few times have I ever seen him angry and even fewer times have I ever seen him speak negatively. He was an innocent soul because he had things to fear. He feared disrespect towards him and incompetence, and such things kept him so in line that it would make almost everyone he would meet seem like bumbling idiots. Even I, his dearest friend, feel less conscious of sophistication than he.

He was a scientist, but before that he was an artist. When we were in public school, I remember all the times he would come running to me with a picture he drew or a poem he wrote, and every time he did I would find myself reveling in the sheer brilliance of it. Each picture was contrived in such detail that he was driven to become a scientist. He designed a robot when he was 14 but was never able to build it. I remember it required an entire computer inside of it and lots of wireless interaction between the mouse, keyboard and monitor hooked up to it. Not only that, but it would have taken more time and money than he wished to spend on it. He graduated from a university the name of which I do not wish to disclose, and was soon building robots in Japan. His understanding of computers, planning and coding was what truly set him apart from all other engineers of his time. Soon, he helped construct and distribute the very first domestic working bot. It moved on track wheels like a tank and was connected to the world through four senses: sight, sonar, hearing, and chemical detection (or as the team called it, “smell”).

“I think I’ve found a way to defy time,” he said to me that day. When I heard this, I was truly astonished. He had already made a laser window that filtered dangerous chemicals, and I had no doubt on my side to prove he was foolish to his word.
“Oh?” I responded, setting down my espresso and leaning forward a bit.
“Yes,” he continued. “It came to me during a meeting yesterday and astounded me so much that I could think about nothing but that without interruption.” Few things astound my good friend Ralph Erginvond. He went on, “Time is a concept. There is matter here but there is nothing controlling it. When I say ‘defy time,’ I’m referring to speeding up time, in a sense. Turning back time is just about impossible, but allowing an object to travel faster than it should is a very possible thing. Say you throw a rock with a moderate amount of force. By our terms, it will travel at a certain speed. Why, you ask? Because it is traveling across a plane. It is traveling across the plane of existence. The plane of existence is flat, and not many people seem to realize this. They allow the fact that we are in the ‘Third Dimension’ to corrupt everything they think. This dimension can be drawn out on a piece of paper, it is so flat. If I were to generalize tons of aspects of it, I would probably need a few years to draw it out but regardless, it can be drawn in great detail on paper. Hold on, let me…”

He reached down into his suitcase and pulled out a piece of notebook paper and then a pen out of his pocket. He drew a rectangle on the piece of paper (and how perfect it was), then drew what looked like a ladder or train track across it. Next to it in the middle was a house, and near the end it began to wind and finally straightened out as it reached the end of the rectangle.
“Say a train is traveling on these tracks,” he said. “It will take three hours to get from one side of the rectangle, which is existence, to the other. Now say it reaches the house. It is one hour and thirty minutes into the journey at this point.” He then took out a pair of scissors from his suitcase and folded the paper so he could cut a long in the middle where the house and railroad tracks were. When he was finished, he showed me the paper again.

“If there is no existence to travel across, it will take a shorter time to travel across what existence there is. This means reducing the amount of time it may take, as well as what matter it will take to travel across. Time will skip at a certain point and everything that would happen as a result of the current variables will take place in less than an instant. A child will suddenly become an old man, a war will suddenly be underway, a profusely bleeding man will suddenly die and an aspiring artist will suddenly be great. The child will have no life to live, the war will have no events to heighten to its commencement, the bleeding man will have no one to help him if paramedics had not been called, and the artist will have no doubts in his mind. Mankind will ready itself for what it wants and all will suddenly skip ahead. It is risky. There will be one man who wants every person in the world dead, and that’s at the very least. It’s something I hope will never happen. I can only hope no one pulls through with it, though. I can only hope, though.”

I had nothing to say. I stared at him silently and still. My jaw hung slightly and I narrowed my eyelids around my pupils. I said, “That is absolutely astounding.”
“Indeed it is,” he replied. “Of course, I cannot be modest about it. This idea was no product of mine. I believe creativity is not a product of the individual, but rather, a collection of events filtered through his mind, and he has no control over this filter. Mankind is delusional to himself. He is delusional to how he and the universe works.”

I met my friend Erginvond at his home later that day and listened to music, drank soda and cursed out loud like we did back when we were young. It was something I wish I could do more often, weren’t it for my health and physical status. After a while the music stopped and we sat down as we usually do, and he began to write an email to his associates (who should be called subordinates) about his new discovery. It was over his own private network, which was shared by him and nine other people (his associates). This means that no one could possibly see it but them. The silver little Macbook Pro on his lap almost looked like a 17-inch atop his thin and deprived legs, starved thin by his long days and nights working without interruption for meals, and therefore few interruptions for bathroom breaks. He told me the email would be short and that he would elaborate the next day, for he was feeling somewhat ill that night. I worried for him, but he said he was quite alright.

I left that night and flew back home with a very sincere good-bye to him earlier. On the flight home I saw the clouds shrouding the cities beneath them and thought about all the tons of matter upon which the cities sit, how much makes up the cities and how much will be lost if we decide to leap forward in time. A train traveling on a track, and a ring of matter had been displaced to an area millions of miles away. Recent advances in teleportation, by the way, were what made his hypothesis probable. It was when the prime minister of France teleported a muffin to the King of England that the media exploded and humanity had set itself on a new track through history. With this technology, we could displace entire armies to reserved areas in the universe that have been hydrated and oxygenated, or maybe we could just send them into the vacuum of space. The matter would be returned to the Earth, but the men would have been left to suffocate. No spy could infiltrate a US base to copy its technology. This would be the new atom bomb.

The next day I received news that my friend had died in his sleep. Only the sadness I felt when my mother and father passed away topped the sadness I felt at this. I was thrown into a funk for many days, but I still had duties to perform. We buried him in our home town of Seattle, Washington and let him rest in peace. I was invited to his funeral and the only ones who attended were his friends and I. They were only supposedly his friends, for they were his associates. Everyone respected me when they discovered I had known him since we were both four years of age. I learned that they had received his email before his death and that it had been copied nine hundred times so that each associate had 100 copies of the document. A printed out copy had been sent to their headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, and the nine hundred copies were sent to each of the associates’ homes.

I returned home and stayed there for months. I did my work from my house and emailed it to my superiors. As a historian, I had no choice but to begin to cite so many works that I hardly had any work to do. I would copy paragraphs in my own words like I was in high school and eventually I began to miss entire assignments in my mourning. There was always a memory I had with Ralph Erginvond, and I would not stop crying until I had mourned the loss of every one. Months and months later I saw on television a broadcast from Tokyo the sight of which drove me to drop the glass of iced tea in my hand all over the documents on my desk. On a stage stood his nine associates, and they presented to the world, “Erginvond’s Theory of Time and Space, or a Lack Thereof.”

I flew to Tokyo without a single hesitation. The price of the ticket was none of my concern. When I arrived, I took a cab to the Erginvond Center of Science and was stopped at the door.
In the white expanse that was the lobby, a Japanese guard grabbed my arm and said to me in English,
“Excuse me, you need a pass to come in here.”
“I’ll have you know,” I shouted at him, “I am Ralph’s first and best friend. I have something to tell his associates that will save humanity, and I’ll not be stopped by a boneheaded guard!” In his confusion he let me go and I showed him my pass. I used it so I could be allowed to visit Ralph in his penthouse on top of the huge building. I reached the second to the top floor of the building and saw the room to be equally as white as the lobby. I saw his associates sitting around a conference table in the middle on laptops, with desks scattered around the table and papers everywhere. I tried not to step on a path of paper leading to the table while Mark, his secretary, approached me.
“James, what a surprise!”
“I need to tell you something very important,” I said. “All of you need to hear this.” Everyone turned to me as I began to speak. “The very day before his death, Ralph showed his plan to me. He told me it was genius, but that he hoped it would never come through because it would be just as deadly as the atom bomb.”
“Did he say anything else?” asked Mark.
“No,” I replied. “It was a short conversation but he explained it in some detail to me. All I need to tell you is that you absolutely cannot go through with this operation and we need to tell this to every organization that may also be capable of pulling through with it.”
“James,” said Mark, “we understand how you and him may have felt about it at the time, but as Ralph’s chosen associates, we would know whether to go through with it or not.”
“Well apparently you are wrong!” I exclaimed. “Do you deny I am his best friend? Do you deny he would tell me more than he would you? He said you would receive a more detailed email in the morning. He had pored over the idea for a single day, there’s no reason to go through with it!”
“For Christ’s sakes,” said Mark, “calm down! You seem to be denying that we aren’t capable of making educated scientific decisions.”
“You are denying the word of the most incredible scientist in history!” I screamed in his face. The conversation was now beyond civility. I was off my rocker and I had made it clear that it is no laughing matter. They all sat there silently.
“I think he’s right,” commented Jergen, Ralph’s illustrator who drew the schematics for certain inventions. “We should listen to James. He probably knew Mr. Erginvond more than any of us.”
Mark looked back at Jergen, and then at me. “We accept your idea,” he said. “We’ll buy you a hotel room for a week and contact you there to discuss this more civilly, but please, for now, allow us to think this over in private.”

The next morning, I had discovered that they had left their studio in Tokyo and headed to the laboratory and construction site in Siberia. It was a massive tract of land designed to be completely isolated from any common communication. In short, it was impossible to happen upon this area in the world. There was no way I could contact them now, and there was only one reason why they would go there: to build something. There was no leaving the subject now.

I traveled to Moscow, ignoring the expenses of my travels. Upon arriving I met with an old colleague of Ralph’s named Jasik, who was a Swedish scientist and a former engineer of the CERN. I found his online profile and contacted him using video chat to ensure my identity. We met at the square next to the fountain and I got right to the point. He said he could tell me where the site was located, but that he didn’t know any place that could take me there. This was, indeed, a factor I had not perceived. We sat and thought for a few minutes, discussing ideas, when at last we decided to simply go to the police.

We marched into the front desk and asked to speak with the aviation captains or those in authority to the helicopters. When we were denied audience, I told the receptionist woman who I was and the exact situation. I showed her my ID and gave her my business card, after which she phoned the chief inspector to speak with us. I told him the story again, this time in more detail, and showed him my identification. He took us into an interrogation room to discuss the matter more privately. His argument was that a helicopter could not be reserved for private use when crime may be occurring.

And so, I was stuck in Moscow, slowly losing my fortune while I stayed at a hotel. I contacted Jasik again, and he allowed me to live with him for the time being. He understood the situation completely, which was a larger benefit than I had thought it would be. We would spend some nights discussing how we could defend against the temporary voidance of time and space, but we found no way. At last, we saw another broadcast on TV originating from the site where Ralph’s colleagues were held up. They announced that, having discovered new technologies in voidance of time and space, there would be a 10 year jump occurring in ninety days. They warned all viewers to situate themselves in certain ways so as to get a positive outcome from the leap. This means scheduling things, making long term plans and anything else of the sort. It would begin on January 1st, 2081 and would end exactly ten years later.

I went back to work immediately. In ten days I produced a book outlining the disaster that would be the jump. As Ralph’s best friend, many believed me, but I found my advertising to be sabotaged by commercials for the Leap. The Television Regulation Act of 2067 was a godsend on some levels, seeing as how literally everyone on Earth would see the broadcast, but it was a benefit for them as much as it was for me. I sold many, many copies and gained enough money to buy a helicopter and pay a pilot. After thirty days I set out for the site, and arrived a couple days later, on account of coordinate confusion. Rising above the horizon was a clutter of massive pipes aimed towards the sky, and as we drew nearer we saw a grand facility majestic to the likes of any other facility on Earth. It was laid out like a computer chip, it seemed. There were polygonal buildings everywhere and they were all connected by many walkways and stairs and bridges, and there were tanks of fluids and matter and everything else being driven into buildings here and there, all surrounded by a radius of solar panels. It was so detailed, complex and massive that its sight alone puzzled the mind. We landed on the helicopter pad and received lots of rejections from the landing crew, but I told the pilot to land anyway. We were immediately approached by the navigation officer as soon as we landed, and simply marched by him, handing him my business card along the way. Recognizing me, he allowed me to pass and called for someone named Mark. I only assumed it was the Mark I spoke to back in Tokyo.

Upon entering the building we met with a digital map and made our way to the bottom floor – the building site – where Mark was supposedly located. We made our way past tons of engineers and legions of workers sitting on computers when we entered the office of Mark. We opened both of the white doors which automatically closed behind us and left Jasik and I staring at the man with short, gray hair in all black sitting behind a desk with a Macbook before him.
“James!” he exclaimed, holding his seat. “How did you get in here?”
“Without effort,” I replied. “We need to talk, Mark.”
As Jasik and I sat down in the chairs before his desk, Mark said, “How did you find us, anyway?”
“Jasik here,” I said, “a colleague of Ralph’s, knew the location. Now before you begin, Mark, I’m going to say I do not want it to become violent or uncivil again. We are not going to leave until we have terminated this event once and for all. The site will be obliterated and you will be paid in retirement. I encourage discussion but in the end, I will win any argument. This is for the good of mankind, Mark.”
“James,” said Mark, “you do not understand. All the other associates of Ralph’s were murdered by my order. This is not for the progress of science, Mark. You were the right hand man of the most intelligent person in history and you still don’t understand the idea of corruption. I am corrupt, James. I am doing this all for myself. I am not conscious of other people. No one is. You are only conscious of yourself and nothing that happens to anyone else will affect you. Every human is an individual. If we were one body, we would be one single organism. We are capable of anything, as has been proved, and we have no limitations at this point in our evolution. And as an individual, I crave things for myself. I crave power and fame and nothing else. I’m doing this for me, James. What else is there for anyone else? This is a burden on peoples’ lives. Humanity will skip ahead ten years and anything that is happening now will stay the same. We’ll just be 10 more years into our lives, in an instant.”
“Ralph said ‘No’,” I said. “There’s a reason he did. It’s because it is beneficial to nothing. That’s how he thinks.”
“It doesn’t take a Ralph Erginvond to know how the next ten years will play out,” responded Mark. “The war will be over because America will have kicked the Iranian’s asses. The economic recession will be over because it’s already getting better. People will wake up to a new world.”
“You think I can’t stop you?” I asked Mark.
“That’s exactly what I think,” he replied. Upon saying this, I put a bullet in his right shoulder. There was a silence in the next room, and he jolted madly to the floor. I walked over and looked over him as he crawled away in terror. “You’re a fool,” I said, and then shot him in the skull.

It was a fine day in prison when it happened. The broadcast was displayed on the television in my cell (which was not there for entertainment purposes) and I began to recline in the thought of peace after the jump. I was to serve 10 years, and so I would emerge a man befallen by grief from prison, walking out the front gates with my package of personal effects. I just sat on my bed and waited. It counted down to 1 from 10. Mark’s murder didn’t stop it. I was in jail for nothing. The world is doomed. These were my last thoughts. And then, it happened.

Suddenly I was on the ground. There was a horrible pain in my stomach. It was insanely hot. The ground was red and I got up to see bodies for miles around me. I was outfitted in prison attire. There was destruction in every direction, and then it hit me: the Iranians won. The mountain originally situated near the prison was jagged and in the final stages after an explosion. The sky was red as well and it was snowing. I felt so sick and in such horrible condition that I felt deathly ill. I was being radiated by all the nuclear fallout all around me. Yes, the Iranians won.

I walked for about a mile or so among the remains of jets and men and even vomited twice until I arrived at a bunker. I opened the thick metal door after some pushing and finally made my way in. It was still in alright condition once I reached the livable areas but there had evidently been a gun fight. I only found nine people and they were all dead and shot in one area of the bunker. Suddenly I heard an awful buzzing sound and,

I woke up. I was in my bed, now propping myself up by my arms and staring at the clock. It was 8:01 in the morning. In two hours I had a meeting with Ralph. After an hour of preparation I met him at the cafĂ© and told him about my dream. “You ought to write it down,” he said.

The Darkness:

On the hill was a wretched apple tree, dead and decaying with a few hopeless fruits still clinging to its limbs with lifeless fervor, which stretched gruesomely into the sky in a scraggly and painful manner all over like black lightning reaching into the sky. There was a well beside it, and beside the well stood my brother, O a tall one, and he stood there in dark cloths of a black longcoat and a mahogany scarf which I made for him in my endless labors on cold nights. His hair was flying in the wind like fire and he stared down into the well without a sideways glance, just staring straight down into its tunnel at something clearly occupying to the mind.

As I approached him, I heard an awful grunting. It was seemingly in vain, and sounded almost inhuman, but the horror was that it was very much so human. I heard painful scraping noises coming from within the well itself as I hiked up the steep hill, huffing and grabbing to the ground in my own way. But at last I was at the side of my brother, and I looked down to see a light emanating from the bottom of the well, and before it was a very awful sight. A horribly thin and grayish man with a macabre and bony face and dressed in nothing but tied scraps of ripped doublets and dresses was stuck near the top of his well with his long, bony fingers stuck in between bricks in the well. He was making some progress up the well, and was within our arms length, but neither my brother nor I durst lend him a hand. It was when he was able to pull murderously on his tiny and brittle arms and lift upward his stretched and thinned pelvis which was stabbing out of his hips that my brother took up a hatchet and brought it down upon the man's hand, which rested on the top of the well. Screamingly, with an almost piglike scream, he fell back down the well, hitting the side of it once and landing on the lantern at the bottom without a sound but the hard and scraping sound of his breath.

I looked up at my brother and saw his metal mask shining down at the bottom of the well. His blank, iron avatar was somewhat grimy and rusted from the rain, and it was almost unreal in color compared to the world around it. The trees I saw behind him, a cluster down by the creek, were rustling, and I saw a flurry of leaves fly from them as a gust cam in and brought away a hail of leaves from atop the hill. I looked back down upon the sill of the well and saw three fresh fingers sitting motionless. I picked one of them up and brought it near my eyes, studying its thickness versus its length and judged how many days it had not seen food. I at last heard the man in the well begin to speak some kind of jumbled slur of speech and howl at us like in a goatlike, screeching voice. I assumed he said something like, "Yins monsters! I shall see to it you'll be jailed!" In a rage, my brother walked over to a large rock sitting nearby, picked it up with one hand and launched it down the huge well. We heard a horrible snapping sound and the man let out the most awful howl I had ever heard. My brother walked down the hill as I stood there in the aura of the poor man's hopeless cries. It was fire in the ice of the moment. At last, I followed my brother and did not speak to him until we had both made it to the cabin.

The next morning, I awoke to the sound of leaves flying about in the wind and saw that my brother was sitting at his desk in the room across the hall, writing furiously on the parchment with the feather of his pen flying every which-way like it was still on the bird. The light from the candle beside him wavered all about, and the context of it made me think it was rustling in the quickness of his pen. I got out of bed and walked over to dress myself at the armoir. Afterwards, I marched into the living room and took down the stairs, ending my journey at the armchair beside the fire, where I sat until my brother emerged from the room without his mask, indicating he was indeed ready to depart for the town on a fine Sunday morning such as the one it was. His face showed a hard brow and a grim mouth upon skin as light as a cloud. I asked him, "How are you today, good brother of mine?" There was no response from him, though, and so I immediately started out the door, making sure he sulked close behind me.

Upon arriving at church, my brother and I met with many of our friends and colleagues, moreso than came to church last Sunday. I saw in all their faces a smigeon of fear, and during the service, many of them left the confession booth with a look of agony. I was right, they were sinners indeed. I spoke with them after the service, and all of them asked how my brother and I were getting along. "Alright," I would always respond. "There's only so much my brother can do as a man of few skills, so I take the initiative of making sure we don't starve ourselves." I showed great respect to all my friends but loathed their sights indubitably. I at last shook the hand of the last friend of mine eagerly and declared my departure. "Well, friends," I said, "we really must be going, but it's been wonderful to see you. Good day." As I turned to walk away with my brother, another soul took my arm, and so I slapped it off of me and screamed in her face, "Good day!" The lot of them were silent, and so I took my leave. Brother and I did not look back.

We made our way to the carpentry store and met with the owner of the establishment as we walked through the front door. A fat and jolly man he was, he held the most money in town, but not without the grueling labors with which he was known for. He provided the best parchment for miles and the best furniture for miles still. Red haired and Irish-named, he was a well rounded man both in spirit and stomach, and would send across a hearty laugh without any sort of warning or notion of laughter. He would come to us even on the most wretched days to deliver parchment and would not leave until we were splitting on the floor. At last, until I was. My brother, you see, simply does not laugh or smile. We took our parchment from him and walked to the general store where we picked up more pens and ink.

Our final destination was the market, which was full of screaming merchants and laughing men and women. A family in poverty sat lonesomely in an alleyway, the husband staring blankly into the forward wall, still as a statue and disregarding his son, who was tugging endlessly on his sleeve, beseeching him for something. I stopped and stared in that direction while my brother stared off in another. I sensed the madness inside this man; he was just beside a crowd of people, yet he was shunned and casted out by all of them. He had no money, food or hope left in his eyes. The look on his face was grim and almost painful to watch. I grabbed my brother's shoulder and turned him to watch this man, defeated and full of rage, screaming in his mind in the lonely alleyway, trying in vain to ignore his son. It was then that the man stood up and turned to the poor child. They stood face to face, and then it happened.

The man took a knife in his hand and drove it into his son's skull. His son fell lifelessly to the ground, and so the man reached for his wife, who was staring perplexingly at her son with tears streaming from her eyes. He grabbed his wife and laid fist after fist upon her face, until her entire complexion was polluted with blue bruises and blood drenched the V of her blouse, which just barely covered her body and soon became withered against her, the blood having soaked itself into her clothing. Her face was disfigured and her jaw hung twitchingly. Her eyes stared at her assailant and let out as many tears as they still could. The man let his wife fall to the ground and stomped her skull until she was certainly dead, and her arm sat crudely upright with her hand twisted in comparison. He then was confronted by a group of cross onlookers who ganged upon him and beat him to the ground. He took each blow with a straight face, and the awful and gruesome scene was soon covered by everyone looking onward.

I smiled and turned to my brother. "I think," I began, "we should see how our friend in the well is doing." We made our way back to the cabin, where my brother took his mask and departed with me to the well. We walked through many long minutes of woods, but soon reached the clearing, and saw the lonely well atop the hill beside the crooked tree, which still looked wretched even in such beautiful light. As we both reached the top of the hill, we looked down into the well and saw that the man had ripped his leg from his body and had eaten off all of the meat. "Hungry, were you?" I said. "Didn't want fresh meat to spoil? You should have asked for a mutton or a piece of good muscle."

"Monsters!" he screamed at us in his inhuman voice. My brother stared down at him motionlessly, and I received the vibration that he was planning something. The man was a good fifteen meters down the well, and so there was little we could do to torture him beside throwing down rocks, although they might kill him accidentally. At last, my brother took the bucket of the well in his hand and pulled it down, loosening the rope attached to it in doing so. He managed to let the bucket fall freely to the bottom and tied it to the three posts: each post supporting the roof and the bar around which the rope was wrapped. The bucket clunked upon the man, but not on his head, for he proceeded to complain in his incomprehensible speech as my brother tied the posts. And oh, what a genius my brother was.

For about an hour, we watched the man try to climb the rope in many different ways. He cried every time he tried to ascend and especially when he would fall to the bottom. He begged for our mercy, but we would give him none. He complained of his red palms and his lame leg, which had apparently become black where he had ripped it off. He vomited while climbing up the rope even, and after he fell, he swore to sit there and die, once and for all. I laughed, and my brother just stared blankly down into the well, clearly savoring the moment.

Returning the next day, we saw the man was nowhere to be found. He had escaped from the well. The rope was still intact, although it was drench in and reeked of blood. My brother pounded his fists upon the top of the well, which cracked the bricks. He ripped the roof off which his bare hands and thrashed it upon the ground until he was thrashing upon nothing but the earth itself. It was then that I looked up and saw that there were only two apples on the tree, rather than three. "Two apples," I said. "Two apples are left on the tree. Oh, look! An entire branch is missing!"

My brother approached the tree and reached down, grabbing up a black and rotten apple off the ground. He stared at it for quite some time before crushing it in his hand. After a long moment of silence, he and I marched down the hill and returned to the house, where we mulled over the situation deeply. "He must have taken the branch to support his leg," I wagered. "It was a strong one, if I recall. How do you think the town will react to this?" It was only then that I saw my brother had the shotgun in his arms. "Oh," I commented. "Well, I suppose we've nothing to fear?" It was then that my brother began to recite some strange poem, most likely one that he made himself:

"Cast away against volition,
Forlorn of hope by any mission,
Man of gray departs from us;
The hour haunts the grueling dusk,

And torches fly between the trees,
The people scream like mobs of bees,
The images they seem to see,
Are ecstasy to you and me,

So brother, now, we'll have our way,
Just hope that I shall never say,
That hope begone and dread is here,
For we have nothing yet to fear.

The hour haunts, but's yet to come,
The heart begins to twitch and hum,
The fear will make you blind and dumb,
But brother, dear, my mind is numb."

It was then that an awful crowd of people came breaking into the silence in the distance, and I rushed up from my seat to look out the window. The only sight I saw was a crowd of torches far away between the trees, rattling and advancing with the sound of hatred in the night air. "Brother!" I exclaimed. "They're coming! We must go! Out the back door, now!" But my brother stood still. There was not energy in his limbs, and he sat staring out the window before him. "They all will die," he said. "No matter how many come - none of them shall see tomorrow." It was only then that he got up and walked over to face me. "Bring my mask," he said. "And fetch the ax for yourself." I did so, and came back with his iron mask and an old ax in my hand. The moment brought strength to my arms. I felt a confidence that I had not felt for a long time. The confidence that sent vibrations through your bones and made you unstoppable. And at last, the door swung open with the awful sound of men and women, bloodthirsty, screaming, with torches in hand. Brother let off two shots, killing the two armed men and wounding another behind them. The only guns in the crowd were down. Brother and I grabbed the shotguns and flew into the crowd with our weapons blazing.

Once we were empty, we brandished our axes and hatchets and laid waste to the crowd. We overpowered anyone who sought our blood. No strength overcame us or overwhelmed us by any length. We laughed ecstatically in the explosion of blood that came with every strike upon human flesh. Men laid upon the ground, bleeding and gushing blood from all over. The pastor laid on the ground lifeless with a bible in his hand. The woods ignited with the dropped torches and we slaughtered the town in the fire. We pursued the rest of them through the woods until we led them into the town and killed them there. And so, the woods burned, and so did our home - but not a man in the village remained, and so it was us who ruled the night. We stood in the center of town with bloodied weapons in our hands, panting and huffing after the awful dash we made through the woods. I felt such an unearthly rush through my veins as I felt the blood of others trickle down my brow and the voice of my brother came about, and it said,

"We are the night, brother. And we have enveloped the world in darkness."

The Echelons of Deception:

My name is Edward Stonewell of Castle Lain, and for many years now I have been retired from the County Hall of Lain, where I served for a majority of my young life as a simple guard to the Princess of Lain, who was so woefully and, I daresay, appropriately, christened with the name of Mary.

I retired from the Princesses' domain at the age of 40, and my fortune was sustained on annual royal payment, which I would receive until the end of my days. In my boredom, I became engaged in documenting the horrible events that occurred in Lain Hall, but it was all in vain, because I was never satisfied with any version of it, and so my efforts brought about little more than wasted parchment, ink, and quills. Hours and hours were wasted in attempting to write down my thoughts in a manner appropriate for the high society of England.

At last, when I was searching the Royal Library for a certain copy of Homer's Illiad, which I hoped would give me some insight to writing well, I happened upon an entire collection of papers signed by Marcus Smith. Having read these papers, I found that they were absolutely complete accounts of the events which occurred at Lain, and so I decided there that I would cease my efforts to form my own accounts and begin to copy these haggardly written papers into a more formal document, for they were old and written with haste, it seemed, although they did prove to be flawless accounts of the events from the perspective of Marcus, and they entailed more than I will ever know about my time during said events.

And so, dear reader, I present to you the Account of Lain Hall, according to Marcus Smith.

"

The fairest princess who ever lived, Princess Mary of Lain. Her hair was thin and far golder than gold itself, and it blew so perfectly and heavenly in the wind like the hair of an angel. Her eyes were as blue as the sea, and her skin was light and pure like that of a goddess. Such an ethereal thing she was; she was no woman or girl, but the ruler of the hearts of any who laid eyes upon her, and so she would take initiative to show herself to every person in her domain on her monthly parades. She would throw flowers into the crowds of toadish beggars wearing rags as makeshift clothes in their mud and wood-built shacks and shantees which crowded the city like grass and housed the most awful of villains that anyone would ever see. But regardless, in her perfection and grace, she would see these people by her own will. She would hand them roses and tulips gardened by the finest landscapers in the kingdom and blow kisses to any horrible being she would lay eyes on, and touch the hands of all the villains and thieves and awful men of the kingdom and kiss the children on the forehead. So benevolent was the angel who walked the earth unrivaled.


And I am her personal royal guard. I am in charge of her safety, alongside the other royal guards, who are drones in comparison to my rank. Of course, I am not chosen out of blind inheritance. I have served in my share of battles and have dominated every one as the finest swordsman in the kingdom, if not in England. I daresay there is no feat I cannot accomplish with a sword. But alas, I am not perfect, unlike the one I am to guard. And that is why it is not I who is princess, but her, besides the fact of my gender. I am at her side until she falls asleep, at which point her room is guarded inside and out by royal "Drones," and I am to sleep in my own quarters and escort her to every corner of the kingdom she wishes to travel to. From her daily baths, to her meals, to the moment she falls asleep, I am fast by her side. Why me? Because I grew up with her. She was the closest friend I ever had as a boy, as she would request my audience in her royal chambers long ago when she and I were children. I think it is because of her that I became the swordsman I am. I hungered glory for some reason. Maybe to be at her side like I am now. I cannot say, truly.

The Royal Family consists of her and her two parents, and then the nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, and so forth who branch out all over the known world. Her parents are old, and her brothers all died in war. A king must be chosen, and so it is her jurisdiction which will decide who will lead the greatest kingdom on Earth. Fortunately, there are many suitors who seek her hand in marriage - suitors who have trained since birth to be the perfect prince to the fairest princess who ever lived - Mary of Lain. I know these men - many of them, actually. There are at least a hundred in the immediate city of Lain, and I can recall the names of all of them. Another reason why was chosen as the princesses' constant guard - I possess the greatest memory that we currently are aware of. A better one is probably out there among the hell of the peasant lands, but he is nowhere near as loyal as I.

Erickson of Gale, the noblest of all nobles, the one who was trained since birth to be the greatest prince who ever lived. And what excitement does explode from his face! A bright and naive one he is, perfect for the job of prince. All he seems to think about is the princess, and how he may please her as her prince and husband of unrivaled love. What sonnets he has sent her, and what flowers he has ordered to be grown for her, and her alone, by the finest gardeners he could find. He has quick eyes and a quicker mind, and his mouth is the fastest vessel on his body. He is fluent in Latin and employs it often in daily speech, primarily for an elegant effect. But he is no pretentious man by any length! He is exceeding respectful and very meekish, meekish so that he may be thought of as a second Claudius, the lamest yet one of the most powerful emperors to rule Rome. Very nimble and athletic, very sharp and very meek - this is the Erickson that all his friends love.

He arrived at the royal county hall one evening in the fair month of September, when the air was even and the hall was bright with light from the stained windows. Erickson had a long, protruding, down-cruved nose like a bird and a rather sharp chin. His face was thin as well, which made him almost seem impish, and his eyes would compact so joyously whenever he would laugh or smile massively. As he entered through the doors, the air of excitement which ever so often emanated around him filled the room and put a feeling of joy in the minds of everyone around, whether drone or princess. He shook hands and greeted many a royal men with a flower in his hand and a sword on his belt. He gradually silenced as he approached Princess Mary, and he would grow quieter and quieter as he would walk by a grand column in the hall and came close to the many steps leading to the royal chairs. At last, he alighted the stairs, and I was able to see a lyre of some kind on his back. I was eager to see what grace he would bestow upon the princess.

Soon, He was within paces of the princess, and so he handed her such a beautiful white flower of golden taint, and he said to her in a quiet and magical voice, "O wonderful Mary - it is not for any child of God that God allows life in his realm, it is for you, dear Mary, the fairest woman who ever lived." She looked at him and smiled, turning the flower in her hands and waiting for him to proceed with his imminent serenade. And so, he bore his lyre, and began to play. And oh, what magic he made with the lyre. What an alluring and beatific song he played for the fair maiden Mary, and how I saw the captivation in her eyes. Her blue eyes, deep and magical like the ocean blue, captured by the music of the lyre, which almost drove me to tears. At last, he struck the final note, and bowed courteously to the entranced princess. And so, he was applauded and cheered by the many royal men in the hall, all brought to tears in such a similar way.

The princess was silent. A smile was upon her face, and a dream was in her mind - I was one who could tell these sorts of things. But Erickson was finished, and he waited eagerly and with a magical grin on his face of such genuine happiness. At last, the princess looked up from her contemplation and said, "Is this all?" Her voice was like a cloud cutting through a solid sky of blue, and so I saw a face of unbalance take its form on Erickson, and he upheld his smile with all his force. "A lyre and a rose," continued Mary with her heavenly voice. "I am a simple person. I am royal, but I am simple. Men have slaughtered thousands in my name. They have sought my audience. Why, then, should a song and a flower sway my benevolence?" Erickson's face was destroyed. His eyes were extremely wide and his mouth seemed to slump like the curvature of his nose, and his face was tense with such awful destruction. A considerable tear ran down his bony cheek, and it was as though the aura of Erickson fell to the floor and died suddenly. The princess went on, "Erickson, you are occupying my time. I suggest you do something now, to impress me, so that I do not grow furious with you. I may say my time is not worth occupying by anyone other than the few that I choose to allow. What man makes ill use of the time of a princess?"

Erickson was crying, and his face melted with his unrivaled sadness and his tears, which streamed down his face in utter ignominy, caused his face to fall apart and droop, and I swore his nose bent even further than normal. He put out such horrible sniffs and voices that it almost brought me to equal tears as well. He took the lyre in his hand and studied it, and so he saw the rose as well. What gruesome and ungodly revelations boiled in his head, I cannot possibly imagine. "And look, now," said the princess, her face solid and unforgiving. "You're soaking the royal carpet with your tears. Have you no respect?" He hugged the lyre to his chest and walked down the steps with an irrepairable hatred for himself and an unheard of revelation in his mind. I ordered a few drones to take my place, and then followed him out of the county hall and to the Great Balcony, which was a massive marble terrace overlooking the city of Lain.

"Erickson!" I called as I left the great doors of the county hall. He looked back with his destroyed face, but in his despair I knew there was no hope for him now. Still, I approached him and place my hand on his shoulder, and said, "My friend, you are a man of great honor. No force can dishonor what great efforts you have accomplished in your life. Not even the will of the woman whom you swear to engage with, now hear me, man, you will not drag yourself into hell on my watch!" But I knew my words were hollow to him. And they were, indeed. I took my hand from his shoulder and allowed him to walk. I watched him closely, sure of his next action. He walked solemnly to the edge of the Great Balcony and stood atop the marble railing, seeing the immense drop below him. Still hugging the lyre, he allowed himself to fall forward...and so the great Erickson of Gale was no more.

As night fell, it was my obligation to assist the princess to her quarters. Through many archways and halls we walked, until we reached the finest bedroom in the land, and I entered through its heralded gates into the most heavenly living confinement known to any man at the time. The bed was plated in gold, and the bed covers were fine silk. I followed the princess with a distance, and only approached her at the bed, by which she stood, and began to undress from her many articles of royal clothing. I drew close to her and consulted her, commenting, "Erickson threw himself from the balcony." The princess was silent. At last, her voice broke the air and she spoke, "What of it?"
"You know the kind of man that Erickson is," said I. "You know why he loved life. It was because of you. It was because his only hope was to take your side in marriage. Now, Erickson is no more."
"What did you expect of me?" asked Her Grace.
"What do you mean by that?" I inquired, as though sarcastically. There was no secret between us, and so she turned to me, and we embraced. Her embrace was far more amiable than mine, and I gripped her shoulder and back close to my chest and felt her hair as I caressed her form.
"Why should I accept anyone other than the one I love?" she asked. I had no reply, because there was nothing I could say to someone such as her. The girl with the bluest eyes, the most golden hair, and the fairest skin in the world. The finest concentration of grace in the world. I embraced her more lovingly and rest my head upon hers.
"I want you to respect these men," said I to her, as I felt her tremble in my embrace.
"I respect no one," she said, "other than my parents and you. No one shall ever make me feel the way you can. Men will walk this earth blind to truth, confident in their false supremacy, and perfect in their stride, ignorant to a fact as simple as this. I love you, Marcus, and no one shall ever come between us."
"It is time for me to take my leave," said I, but she contested.
"I order you to stay," she said. "Only once do I get the chance to embrace you so."
"What shall you do with these men?" I inquired. "What will you do with the hundreds of suitors who are all intent on your hand in marriage? Surely you cannot destroy them all?"
"Perhaps," she responded. "Perhaps I will have them beheaded. I will do anything I desire with them - anything that may keep them from coming between you and I."
"You will be seen as bloody," I said.
"So be it," she retorted.

I recall back in the days of yore, when I first made the princesses’ acquaintances. I was a peasant boy who had much wisdom, but little skill as the son of a merchant. I lived near to the walls of the citadel, in which the princess lived, and so I would look upon it whenever I felt low in spirits, or whenever some awful catastrophe would come upon me (which they often did), and in seeing it I would seem to meet eyes not only with God, but also with any eyes of royalty which may be looking down upon me; nay, not me, but the entire city, and so, me as well. It was during a fine August that I first met the princess. I did not know she was a royal girl, for she wore such simple clothes, although her apparel looked upright regardless, so I assumed she was simply nobility. I saw her exploring the back of our shop in the alleyway, and so I ran to her, thinking I would ward her off. She stood in a doorway, running her hands through a pile of assorted things, for we kept our merchandise in piles. I could only see her back from where I stood, and so I saw her immediately as an average girl.

At the time, I was a weakling, and so my strength could probably not have even been effective against her, should I have used it. I usually ward off beggars by approaching them, although when I approached her, she did not move her place of stance by even so much as an inch. I bounded over piles of stuff until I stood right by her side, at which point I was quite perplexed as to what I was to do next. I stood directly next to her as she stood up with her arms quite full of random things, which she all dropped back upon the pile when I reached her side. She stepped back, then, and curtsied before me, and said, “Hello, my name is Mary. Might I ask your name?” The only thoughts which came to mind, I must say, were lovely images. For when I saw her face and heard her voice, such things were all that could fleet through my mind, and it was on that day that I truly discovered the nature of love. I daresay before that moment, I was quite animalistic and greedy in my ways, until I uncovered the purity and grace which love may bore. And so, I finally conjured the courage, in my weakness, to say to her in quite a stumbling manner, “My name is Marcus…Now what’ll you want in our merchandise? I’ll not hand things without formal exchange.” My dialect at the time was severely haggard, as was the dialect of the frogs who roamed the peasant streets, and so in the presence of her voice, my was but pure disgrace.

She laughed quite softly, and I knew why without hesitation. I said such mean words to her without a hard look, and so she must have sensed meekness in my face – and meek I was, I confess. For her complacent and calm face destroyed all reason for me to think lowly of her. I seemed to think that a girl such as her must mean nothing but good intentions, this being only moments after first laying eyes upon her. She bestowed her voice upon my hungry ears again when she said, “Would you like to go off and play somewhere?” I asked myself, Does this girl seek my audience? Does this thing of grace wish to see me more? So again, pretty things fleeted through my mind. I approached her with a happier air and said, “Well, I cannot. I must stay and watch the shop! If not, father’ll beat me good, he will!” I cannot help but laugh at the tone I had in my youth, for it was exceeding uneducated and silly in the wake of how appropriate my speech is in these days, when I am a prestigious and well-knowing man. Mary spoke again, and said, “Let not your anxieties irk you, boy – I’ll send a man to this place and tell your father rightwise.” Rightwise? What sort of word was that? I could conjure a meaning of it, but it was quite unusual, and it filled me with a great feeling, for I then felt quite complacent with myself, and my shoulders dropped below my heart until I finally had the perfect essence to smile and approach this girl in apparent approval. It was that that she took off with wonderful haste, and I followed quite close after.

And this girl, Mary, took my hand in the streets and led me to a wonderful place in the citadel. It was full of flowers, bushes, trees and other quite strange formations, all of white and pink, and some blue on occasion. She took my hand again and ran me through an endless field of red and white trees, which, she said, were all from a strange land far to the east. She at last, with all her force, threw me to the ground with all her force and sat us beneath one of these majestic trees, so that we seemingly sat side-by-side. And she told me a tale of a messenger sent to the faraway place to retrieve enough seeds of the plant to populate an entire field of the things. She told me, with great vigor, that the man collapsed out of sheer exhaustion as soon as he stepped through the gates of the citadel. And so, they erected a statue in his honor, and such was the massive, marble structure of a poorly-looking messenger boy which looked kindly upon the field of white arbors.

Mary took me hand once more, and we embarked on a long journey to a hall of statues located deep inside the citadel, and it was full of structures of unreasonable height and majesty. Such statues as Alexander of Macedonia, Caesar, Cincinnatus, and Richard the Lionhearted stood looking ever vigilantly over an infinite expanse on the other side of the citadel from my home, and the expanse was of green and blue and it did not end until both such plains met each other in the center of my view, and such was the glorious horizon. It seemed as though I stood above the clouds, which seemed to walk along the earth with invisible legs and morphed into strange figures faster than I had ever seen. “Aren’t you captivated?” asked Mary. And I should say now that never once did her voice fail to greet me with such incredible grace – not for as long as I have known her – and so at that moment it seemed to capture my emotions ever so wonderfully. “I am captivated,” said I to Mary, “and I think it is because I am near you. When you approached me, I felt very strange, and now my feeling is at a summit.” As I thought my speech over again, I noticed its haggardness in comparison to her wonderful voice.

Mary laughed, and I looked over to see her cheeks turn red and she looked away with a clear but minor sense of embarrassment. Although, in the wisdom I had at the time, I knew not what I had said to her other than the sheer truth; for it was in my ignorance that I did not know I admitted my feelings for her so outwardly. I looked perplexingly upon her, and eventually shyly, for I felt I may have done something wrong, and that she was laughing at my foolishness. It was then that she spoke to me again, and in such a beautiful tone, as always, and she said: “I rather do enjoy your company, Marcus. I should wish to see you again another day.” It was then that an awful voice came roaring from behind me, and I was swept off my feet by a strong arm, which turned me round, and I saw the face of a screaming royal guard. “Who are you? How did you come to the garden, you dirty creature, and I should say a courageous one at that!” With little delay, the girl screamed at the man, and she said in a voice which, somehow, maintained unalienable beauty. “You useless drone!” shouted she. “I’ve brought him here by my own admittance! Now drop him and march your way back to the county hall before I had your head upon my bedpost, you idiotic thing of hell!”

The strong man dropped me to my feet, indeed, although he held such a face of dread and doom, and he sulked in morbid devastation back from whence he came, and so I looked upon Mary again and saw her as twice the savior she seemed at first. Should I have been swept up by a guard without her, I would expect to be beaten, sent to death, or dragged home where my father would instill a thrashing upon me. I felt something quite strong inside me, although I was simply unable to put a thumb upon what it might have been. I felt, deeply, that I enjoyed the girl’s company, and I was complacent that she enjoyed mine doubly so. After this short incursion ended, I was led home by the girl quite calmly, and she took with her a royal guard, who would escort both of us back to my home. The streets were cleared for our footsteps, and at last we arrived at my horrid abode, where the guard met with my father and exchanged rather good words with him, and so the girl bid me a good day, and promised me she would be back the day after. And it was when she looked back at me through the crowd that such butterflies fluttered through my mind, and I recalled the sight of the expanse of green and blue from atop the citadel, and a rush of such pretty images filled my head.

Indeed, she did come back the next day, as well as the day after, and it became quite regular for me to see her. And I would build upon our relationship quite substantial feelings until the day she told me her title. We were sitting, our faces to each other, when she said, “Don’t you know? I am the Princess!” I was rather dumbfounded. The girl who sought my audience each day and ran so happily through the fields with me each passing day was the princess, Mary of Lain. The Lain in which I lived, all my life, and she was there within it every day that I was, it seemed, and she had always been there and looked out upon the creatures and fowl beings of the peasant lands, which were horrid and awful, and out of every peasant and monster of darkness that she could have chosen, she chose me, and such a feeling, as I said before, filled my mind with pretty images. I recall fainting, and then I only recall the princess holding me in her arms. I was puzzled at the situation, but I had no other feeling than the feeling that I should embrace her as well. And so, we sat there for such an endless time in our embrace beneath the arbors of white, and it was then that my mind seemed to melt with my heart, and I knew who would be the girl I would love for the rest of my life, and no other creature shall ever come between us.

We would go to the fields and embrace every day. It was quite a strange thing, that we enjoyed the feel of each other, but we loved it regardless, and we knew not any other way to express our feelings for each other. To kiss her at that point would be rather inappropriate, thought I, and so I had no other choice than to accept her desire to embrace me every day, and so I made no refusal and embraced her willingly, for I felt it right in my mind to do so. And in staying about her, I learned to speak more appropriately and I learned things such as manners and basic Latin. In time, she asked me to become a swordsman. Only a swordsman, she said, could act as her personal royal guard, and so, without hesitation or reluctance, I became the finest swordsman that the world had ever seen. At least, that Lain had ever seen. I was admitted to royal lessons from the other fine swordsmen of the citadel, and in time I became a swordsman and a wise man like no other. In the day, my labors to become great were endless, and in the night, my labors in the pursuit of knowledge were twice as endless. My desire to please the princess met no boundary.

And after each long day of education and training, the princess would order me to her quarters, and there we would express our love, which evolved most definitely into the exchanging of embraces, kisses and beautiful words. Our ways did not change, they only multiplied, and together we felt as though we were children, regardless of our age. Having gained access to the royal accounts, I learned that the princess and I had been born in exactly the same month. Though the day was not the same, and I was older than her, it was amazing to us that, possibly, we were meant for each other. And so we spent long hours in each others’ arms, endlessly challenging someone, any soul should do, to separate us, and destroy our love. And so it was proven that nothing could destroy our love.
In time, she became rather powerful and, as explained, would go out on her excursions through the city, blowing kisses and singing songs to the good people of Castle Lain. Her reputation was seemingly immortal by the time we were about twenty-five winters old, and it was then that her true nature was revealed to me. Perhaps it was what she saw as a child, but it truly does perplex me. When she was five years of age, she witnessed the invasion of the castle and was supposedly distraught by the insanity of it, and to the end of her days would never forget the intensity of such sights and sounds. Even in our most sensual of conversations, I can sense a phantom in her voice, that of the sounds of horror which finds a way through her mouth from out her head. I recall one day when a suitor entered the hall bearing a flute. He was certainly a squire, and most likely hailed from the Hurlot clan of the forest to the east, for he was rather thin and pale, and he wore rather forest-worthy clothing, as though it was woven by the woods. It was all green, and his shoes were elegant leather. On his back was a great bow, and on his side was a quiver of arrows. His smile was fair and careful, and he never fully opened his eyes, valuing him the image of a wise man.
As he approached the princess, he began to play a song, and I must admit, it brought almost the entire hall to suddenly fall asleep. It was uneventful, soulless and bore no message or meaning. As he bowed, the hall clapped out of respect, yet it was in our solidarity that he was genuinely terrible at playing the flute. At last, he plucked a flower that was lodged between him and his belt, and I daresay it was the most beautiful flower I had ever seen. He handed it to the princess, and her face absolutely illuminated. It truly was a beautiful work of nature. He stepped back and bowed to the princess, patiently awaiting his judgment. After thinking for a moment, the princess finally arose and walked gently over to the Hurlot squire on his knee. There, she kicked him rather hard, and sent him tumbling down the stairs. He was absolutely baffled by what was happening to him, but I could tell he durst not leave the presence of the queen. He shouted, "Oh highness, what might I have done to gain your loathing?", and "What atrocity hath I committed?" Taking advantage of his general weakness, the princess proceeded to beat him rather heartlessly until she was satisfied, and the poor squire was laid out upon the floor of the county hall, unconscious, with blood pouring from his nose. And O, how horribly she beat him! She kicked him hard in the fact, pounded her fist into his spine, hit his face and stomped on his limb joints. When she was satisfied, she ordered the guards to drag him out, which they did, and she returned to her throne.

The Gears:

I walked lonesome through town on my way home from work, and pervading over me was a terrible feeling of lukewarm light, the light prevailing from above, through the filter of clouds, beyond which was the splendorous sun. And this filter cast down upon the earth an awful grayness which tinted everything and allowed nothing to hide from its reign. Each brick-laden house, each high-rising chapel, each storefront and the faces of the people who commuted between these things were tainted with such treachery that I was unable to bring to words the lukewarm feeling of entrapment in this world of gray. That no light or sanctity will ever save me from this horrid light.

So sulked I through town, and I gave inadequate attention to those I passed, for there were many occasions on which I graced shoulders too closely, such as when I stared upward at the sky in my treading, and so I knocked over a young little girl who fell backward and gave out such hopeless moans. Such a thing brought up the fists of her father, but he was soon observed by others who insisted he lower his knuckles. And so I pressed on through the dreary town, once vivid in the procession of autumn, now drenched in the sorrow of the heavens, and it seemed as though it would never change. There will always be rain, and snow, and the seasons will always revolve, and there will always be a righteous dawn beyond each malevolent winter, but first the Winter must plant its roots, and its malice must reign.

Having returned home with no good vibrations about me, I took to writing, as usual, and attempted in vain to document these awful feelings. But the parchment below my pen saw no genius, and so I forged its place among the many piles of crumpled sheets, which rose ever so high off the floor. My ink grew low, until two full hours after I began, at which point I was thoroughly exhausted of ink. And I knew it was my chore to leave and fetch another well, but I saw it in my heart that to do such a thing would surely kill me. I knew that the grimness of the day would prevail, and I would be left to fester in my own depression until my mind saw it right to cease its functions and leave me to die peacefully there, in a state more calming than the state of consciousness.

I looked about my home and saw little more than dark corridors, the corners of which haunted me and daunted the well from which I drew all my courage, which was drying fast, and so I had little choice but to lapse myself into another mental incursion. I was haunted by my own mind; late nights I would sit in rigid contemplation above my parchment, always looking over my shoulder, expecting to see a white and skeletal girl with bark-like skin and an unfathomable face. With each glance to a doorway, my mind would project an awful sight peeking from around a corner, and should I turn a corner, it would project a ghoulish thing there before me. And everywhere I walked, something followed behind me. And every thought I passed was scrutinized and judged by the specters who never ceased to scrutinize me; the invisible men who floated around and instilled their terrible and wretched fear in me as I would lay wide-eyed in my bed at night, staring into the far corners of my dark bedroom, waiting for an awful thing to appear and turn the air to a freezing low, and approach me, when it would do its horrible thing to me. Scream in my face, stare at me, make unearthly noises and permit me not to sleep. The things I imagined - what awful endeavors. What awful endeavors, indeed.

Each day, I pass through the market of town, and I always lay strong eyes on a store in the center of the storefronts, into which I have never stepped in my entire life. It was a knitting store, which was of no interest to me, and so explained my absence from it, but I knew that one day I would walk through its doors and meet with a new place, and variety may instill itself in my mind again, until the place grew old, and the pervasion came once more. So desperate in the dreariness of the day after work, I approached the store and looked in vain through its dark windows, but saw no such thing that may define its interior. And so I tried the door, which, to my surprise, was open, despite the shop clearly appearing closed from afar. I entered the place, and closed the door tightly behind me. I felt as though no one could see me in the store and that I may have been in a truly private place - viz., I felt as though I was not being watched, for once.

But darkness was there before me, and there was no figure inside the shop. Clearly, it was empty, and perhaps the store owner was clearing out due to bad business. I decided to leave, but it was not until I turned around that I discovered the door had changed. Or rather, I had not seen the other side of it before. It was unlike anything I had seen. It was white and very flat, and made of a particular type of clean and smooth metal, which I observed from tapping on it. The doorknob was like the one on the other side, but looked so misplaced upon the door. The door was strangely futuristic, so much so that it was almost ominous in its entirety. And beside the door, near the corner, I saw a strange sort of small lever. It was jutting from a plate of a strange material the likes of which I had never ever seen or felt before. It was solid like metal, but soft like wood. It shined like brass, but felt nothing like it, and was beige. The lever was possibly only an inch long at the most, and it was pointing downward. And so, in my curiosity, I switched it the other way.

The room illuminated with a very strange flickering. What I saw in the room was extremely strange and unexplainable. I saw the ceiling had some sort of metal infrastructure, and from the ceiling itself hung long lanterns of purely white light. I was curious as to how a simple flame would produce such a blinding light, but it did indeed, and I looked down to see something which I never forgot. Gear, I saw. Massive machines simply sitting stationary in the center of the shop, implanted in the floor and awaiting initiation. I walked among them and came to find that they ended on the other side of the shop. I asked myself what it might be that they power or process. Why was it that these strange things were here? Wishing to leave at once in order to raise a commotion about this, I rushed back to the door, but found it to be locked. I had no key which may unlock it, though, and so I felt trapped in this strange store, which was, evidently, no store at all. What intrigued me was the neglect people seemed to have for the store through the window; no one looked to see these strange machines, not a single glance.

I receded back into the place and made my way through the jungle of machines until I came to a door in the back. It was red, but still seemed to consist of the same material as the front door. I opened it and saw such strange machines in the next room, stranger even than the ones in the first. They had glowing squares and rectangles placed upon them, and they hummed with an ominous and futuristic vibration, like a locomotion traveling at thousands of miles per hour, and the rhythm of its wheels was little more than a soft hum. Strange lights glowed and blinked all over this machine, and I must confess that I was dazzled by this sight indeed. There was a whole ring of them in the center of this room, and they had upon them boards of buttons, and on each button was a letter or a punctuation mark. I saw on the bright screen before one of these boards a huge expanse of writing. It was a series of informal letters, it seemed, and the bottom one read:

" Section 3:

There's no real use in getting the report in now, because the contract already went through. So what I think we should do is just get up, walk out, and see what happens. We see what happens, we react, we go back to work. This is all way too screwed up right now, and we can't hope to sit here and try to fix it. So on behalf of the whole team, I gotta thank you guys for your efforts, and I hope this thing doesn't bone us.

-management "

The grammar perplexed me. It was hastily written and even used unfamiliar words to me. It was clearly not of this realm. I wondered, and I wondered so deeply why I saw such strange things. Why was this place deserted? Where have the workers gone? Such a curious place it was indeed. It was after I looked around this ring of machinery for a short amount of time that I came upon strange visions in the rectangles and squares sat on top of the machines. I could see the street as though I were standing in a window above it. I could also see a storefront, a lonely alleyway and the church entrance. These four sights were divided into four sections of the screen, and they all showed life in full motion. And so, I was spying upon the public and watching their affairs. And how awful I felt for it, because it was none of my business putting my attention upon the faces of so many people. And then, it seemed to dawn on me. This place seems to be administrating the town in which I live.

I can see into the homes of anyone, see anywhere in the entire village without consequence, and go anywhere with the push of two glowing dials embedded in the machine. I began to fiddle with all kinds of controls until I was able to remember a mental map of each strange dial and knob. I became quite overjoyed with what each little piece did when interacted with, for example, one dial made smoke come from out of a chimney, and another turned the barometer atop a lonely cabin out in the thick of the woods. What is the purpose of changing these things? I could not bring myself to a plausible answer. Such curiosity raged inside me, and I had such little outlet for it. At last, I looked upon a screen to the left of me and saw some strange and detailed instructions as to how to use these controls. There was a schedule, and it displayed what dials to press at which time of day, which, obviously, is done to achieve some kind of effect, but I couldn't conjunct as to what it might be.

And then, once more, a gloom pervaded over me. I ceased to fiddle with the controls and stared blankly into the window through which I saw every angle of the town. I truly allowed myself to sink into the fact that all these hundreds of people were being watched constantly. At least, so they used to be. Now no gears turned behind their backs, but I knew indeed that at some point, their lives were engineered to an almost involuntary extent. Did the government know about all of this? I could only hope so, for it was an overwhelming concept, the idea of constant control. And then I thought, well, they are not controlling us, but rather, the little things around us. And perhaps they did such smalls things in order to ignite mundane or otherwise unnoticed thoughts, and, in turn, controlled us.

I thought back to the horrid gloom which I felt earlier that week, when I would lay awake in bed ogling each corner of my chamber with unceasing tameness. Did these machines invoke my fear? Did these machines invoke my dread? My hatred? My lack of romance? I pondered these things for a while until my mind was brought to admit that, indeed, my life was under the hand of these machines and their operators. And in the dark room of bright windows, I reveled in such a drama. I then saw on the circular desk, which was the inner ring of the machines, a key, and it was labeled with a metal plate which said upon it, "FRONT." I tried my luck at the front door, and so my luck held up. I walked from the store with a peculiar look on my face, but I had little desire to scream and shout in the streets anymore. What strangeness I saw that day jumped about in my mind with cacophonous resonance.

The very day after my discovery, I aligned with a comrade of mine, a Latin major whom I lived with during both our times at Bowdoin. He was a fair man, indeed, but he always had about him an air of superficiality which, at this hour especially, seemed very fake indeed. Around each of his words was wrapped a filtration of expression. I sensed it in his failure to reach the climaxes of conversations, when a single enrapturing thought could provoke hysteria of agreement and joy, yet he refuses, for the sake of his reputation and own good will. I sat with him at the pub, where we met almost every week, and with him I discussed a matter which so massively dominated my mind.
“I believe life can be symbolized by a clock,” I said to him.

Naturally, he was astounded, and pleaded, “Well, please go on.”
I explained, “When we look upon this society which we have established, it is at first rather simple to grasp and its rules conjunct well with common life. In the end, we can all agree that this society is, indeed, very adaptable and massively convenient in the horrible world around us. But when we take society off the wall, and we turn it around, and open it, we find it is very strange and dark. In fact, it is almost overwhelmingly phenomenal, what we see. It is a confusing and horrible cultivation of gears and levers the likes of which the common man has never laid eyes upon. It is dark and mysterious, and it is better to just watch it from the front.”

He pondered for a moment with a hard look, until he said, "Philip, you have lost your right mind.”

I sat in contemplation over my parchment once more, pondering the true nature of my life. I looked out the window before me at the dreary expanse of flat, featureless land, upon which sat leafless, desolate bushes and a single, leafless tree. The ground was flattened by the leaves and the rain, and the tint cast down from the sky illustrated the forward landscape with vivid dullness, and the sight festered in my mind until I agreed to avert my gaze back down to the parchment, upon which I had written nothing. I looked to the wine sitting on the table beside me and took the bottle in hand, swigging it until I was sick enough to vomit an organ. My mind was cast into chaos, as though I had been socked in the face. My wits failed me, and so I began to write a strange nonsense on the sheet before me. Reviewing it the next day, I found it to be incomprehensible and indecipherable.

In my pondering on the day of Sunday, I came upon a realization the likes of which I never once thought that I might come upon. I pondered doing a very, very horrible thing, and an awful endeavor it was. Abigail Yvette was the daughter of Rodolf Yvette, who was the local banker, and the most powerful man in town. Oh, what wretchedness he would reign upon me, should he have discovered my thoughts. I pondered to do things to his daughter - awful things, in almost every form. What consequence is there? The men are not at their stations in the house of Gears. I deemed it as being an experiment, rather than an act of perversion. It was an affirmation of the discoveries at hand. But, O, what woe came over me then. For it dawned on me that I may have a sincere perversion for young lasses...And I became physically sick. I held my stomach and vomited out my window, trying to grab hold of what was happening to me. It was engraved in my mind that I was to kidnap Abigail Yvette. But, no - I wasn't to. I quickly threw the idea out of my thoughts when I looked upon the parchment on my desk and saw it there, written. "I am to touch Abigail," was written on the parchment. I took it in hand and ravaged it something awful.

What forces prevailed me? What is the meaning of all of this? I returned to the house of Gears again in order to explore it further. In the room of windows and lights was another door, which led to a corridor. The corridor led to many other rooms similar to the room of gears and the room of lights. They all controlled different sectors and partitions of the town, and they all were located behind a different store. It was odd for the knitting shop to have gears actually in the shop itself. I was able to survey life through windows without being scrutinized back. I took no excess in this ability, and only watched life for a short time, for prolonged scrutiny gave me such uneasiness. I experimented with the buttons and dials until I came upon a rather large and imposing one of reddish coloring, and below it said "Gear Room Initiate." Without a single needed hesitation, I pressed it, and so a monstrous roar of working machines ignited the semi-silent air of the corridors behind the stores.

As I exited the store that day, it seemed that the clouds began to clear and the vibrations about the marketplace exploded with elations, until I could hardly deny the fact that in initiating the gears, I have set in motion a feeling of balance in the world. A fresh scent of life wafted through my nostrils and it began to rain lightly as the sun made its way into the threshold between the clouds, but only dew formed afterward. Walking back to my abode, I saw Abigail Yvette walking with her father, and I reveled that the ideas I had towards her were surely revolting, and I did little but smile and tip my hat at the two of them with a smile more cheerful than that of a rich man.

As I approached my front door, I noticed my house seemed considerably less ominous, for I had forever felt its girth as being rather threatening, what with the horrible visions my mind would project and the fear I seemed to feel when I thought someone was walking behind me. As I entered into my abode, I found it to be much brighter than it used to be, for the sun had appeared earlier and as I entered the curtains picked up with the breeze, which wafted through my open windows and brought sensations crawling about me – fresh sensations.

Sitting down at my desk, I found the landscape before me to appear quite optimistic, as the bells of the church tower rang in the distance and leaves brushed by, along the ridge of yonder stream central to the valley and far past, into other lands, distant and forever out of my reach, yet still slave to the reaches of my imagination. As I looked down at my parchment, I felt an urge to begin writing, for I truly felt confident in writing my thoughts down, but I realized I had exhausted all my ink. But this did not dishearten me, for I realized that as long as such ideas exist in my mind, ideas are immortal, and so I may forget them in death, but I am confident in knowing they shall live on and strike the imagination of someone else in the future, like a stream of ingenuity which flows to and fro across the plane of existence, planet to planet, galaxy to galaxy, universe to universe.
That night, I lay comfortably in my bed without a single lingering fear of spirits around me. As the lamplight dimmed, I put myself down upon my mattress and immediately rejected all possible thoughts about spirits around me, ghoulish children, violence, doom, or phantomry. It was as thought the phantoms had disappeared altogether. I was alone in my abode for once, and the cowardly old curmudgeon was now but a simple man of simple thoughts. I was finally at peace along with all the other people of this town, as though I was a forgotten sailor who was finally picked up by his long departed ship. I was, at last, at peace, and still am to this very day.

And now, each occasion when my colleagues and I collaborate at the cafes, coffee shops, fine restaurants or libraries and engage in long, meaningful conversations about philosophy, theology, or the meaning of life, I am perpetually silent, and merely observant of the ignorance of my friends. They all speak of God, atheism, science, and the arts. They speak of signs, paganism, the Greeks, the Romans and Da Vinci. And every time they turn to me, and they ask me the meaning of life, or my views on a subject or person, all I can say to them is, “The Gears are turning.”

The Donny Soldier:

In essence sat the Donny Soldier in his contemplation, forever hallowed by innocence and eternally powerful in his imagination. He stood upright in his chair, patiently writing his psalms on a scrap piece of notebook paper, lonesome behind a tiny desk pushed against a tall window in the abandoned classroom of the lively days of yore. His pencil was only half what it used to be, the writing portion still well intact and he was cross-legged in his tiny student chair, sitting right on top of both of his bare feet. The semi-silent room echoed the scribbling of his pencil working its magic on the poor piece of paper, and the other side of the dusty, derelict room was piled upon by a hillock of mashed up wooden chairs. The sound of his breathing through the gas mask cut the air in half and echoed halfway across the world, as he would occasionally shift his weight and the insane mess of wires wrapped and dangling off his torso would hit upon the desk. His long, thin jeans were stained with dust and ripped in random areas, for he durst not try to fix them out of fear of ruining them even more.

In the distance he swore he heard the sound of a train. It was impossible, he reasoned, because he was the only one there. At last, a man in a gas mask and a tuxedo walked up behind him and patted him on the shoulder. "Ascend the hill with no avail, repeal the masses, do not fail! Return the world to former shape, remember what the bandits raped. Brilliant, my boy, brilliant." Of course, our daring, Donny Soldier of the desperate days of yore paid no attention to the man behind him. And so, the man flew into a sudden rage and hurled himself to the floor. He proceded to beat his limbs into the floor until he seemed to merge with it, and soon, he disappeared beneath its planks as though consumed by it. The Soldier paid no attention, as previously stated.

The village outside was bustling with all kinds of men and maidens, boys and girls, bums and laborers, and all kinds of people the sheer diversity of whom I could not possibly begin to explain! The air was full of this strange, white dust, unlike snow but similar to that of a very fine shaving of white ice. But it was not ice at all, rather, an entire population of dead organisms floating freely through the air, landing on whatever physics may cause them to land upon. The People outside all wore gas masks in order to breathe, and the world was soon full of all kinds of life, unlike how it was merely a minute before.

There were ladies in fine dresses, young girls in tight jeans, men in their finest Sunday vests, and youngsters in their shutter-shade sunglasses. They all clashed and got in fist fights because they so disagreed with each other, and soon the entire town took to ripping each other limb from limb, flesh from bone, until the town was littered with blood and random tidbits of human remains, and there stood but two contestants smashing against each other until they faces were but hanging from their form. They both fell, and our dapper Donny Soldier looked inquisitively back down at the paper.

So far he had written a long story about a boy in a strange helmet who imagined things. It turned into a story about a princess making her suitors kill themselves, then into one about a man and gears. It was a strange collection of very odd tales, and it didn't make very much sense. The final line on the back of the paper was "Beauregard." He then put his pen down and walked lanky out of the room, as his tall and skinny form permitted him.

The entire town was littered with corpses. Men, women, children, teenagers, boys, girls, men, maidens and the elderly. They were piled on top of each other, scattered about, singled out among nothing. They were spread out and collected in all sorts of manners. Some hung out of windows, some ran through archways in gardens, some were broken on the ground beneath the place of their falling, some stuck on Victorian iron fences with sharp spires, some were simply in the middle of an expanse of nothing in the square. One was spread over the wall of a fountain. The bodies looked to be in perfect condition, and out of all of them there grew life. Plants and flowers sprung from craniums, eyes, mouths, noses, ears, throats, torsos, legs, arms, spines - anywhere they could. They were moderately placed and all strung together with a seemingly endless web of vines that went as far as the eye could see.

The Donny Soldier approached a girl lying down on her back, her hand stretched into the air. Out of her hand grew a single, beautiful, white flower. He stopped to look for a moment, then walked onward along the boardwalk, the wires and cords all around him dangling five feet behind, yet never catching on anything and never being stumbled over by his long, pale feet. Across the bay, he heard and looked to see a tower falling above all the rest, and the procession of crashing echoed across the land far and wide, and rebounded off the buildings. It took about half a minute to complete its entire fall, then another ten seconds to settle and stay. He ended up walking through the biological reserve at the center of town. There, he walked by the sandstone tulips and azaleas, crusty dogwoods and the Greek gardens, wherein a stoa and a plethora of small domes were scattered about among the crumbling, decrepit, and still, somehow, vibrant botanical life forms of the garden.

As the day pushed onward, the town only grew more silent, and was eerily absent of any light of any sort. Our soldier walked to the highest room of the highest building, the clock tower, and laid himself down upon a pile of hay and pillows which he salvaged from the farms and bedrooms. Occasionally, the clock tower would make a vain effort to start itself again, and would let out a series of small beeps which would be overridden by a low, ominous beep, which was a termination beep. As the Donny Soldier laid there in the absolute silence of the night, there cut through the air a horribly loud bang, which echoed across the land for miles and miles, and sent him clamoring to his feet and hiding behind a section of wall which surrounded the hole in the side of the massive clock of the tower. He knew it was a sniper.

Finally, the moon peered through the three-foot hole beside which the Soldier hid, and illuminated the entire room, exposing what looked like a sure effort to create a home-area. The sniper must have seen it, and surely was on the move, eager to find new life, and possibly kill it immediately. Donny boy took a moment to think about his views on death and finally decided he did not want to die. But he still sat there in the clock tower. He sat until it was light, hours and hours later, and finally he descended the spiraling stairs to the bottom of the tower, where he opened the door and cautiously peered around outside. The early hours of the morning were desolate and especially silent, and the way the sun shone through the misty clouds and was finally engulfed by a gargantuan cumulonimbus calvus cloud ensured that it was to rain later that day.

Slowly and carefully, the Donny Soldier shifted walls and peered around corners of the town, eager to find the sniper and still reserved as far as actually meeting with death. He knew the sniper would probably kill him, but he had to make an effort to defend himself none the less. As the day went on, he made vain efforts to call out the sniper by making alerting sounds or banging against things to imply human interaction. At last, he entered into an old laundromat and initiated the gas pipes, disconnected them, and turned on the gas heater. He ran out and hid behind the building across the street until the entire building exploded and caused the surrounding buildings to catch on fire, as well. Soon, the entire block was on fire and he was dashing back to his tower at almost full sprint. He finally entered through the door and began running up the stairs as fast as his legs still permitted him to move.

When he got to the top, he heard the door open at the bottom of the tower. Some feet began sprinting up. He stopped for a moment in order to observe and burst through his door, locking it behind him, but still conscious that it will do nothing to stop the sniper. A feeling of pervading doom crawled over him. He solemnly walked over to his bed and sat down. He wanted to meet another human being for the first time in years, even if the human was going to kill him. The fire was now raging meters and meters into the air, and it seemed the entire town was on fire while all hell rained from the heavens and seemed to battle with the flames. All the bodies and flowers, gardens, inns and pubs were burning away with the inferno. He wasn't going to live much longer, and an assailant would succeed him - but no one can harness the beauty of the town but him.

The feet approached the door and stopped, then stepped back and kicked the door down. In ran a gas-masked figure with a rifle on its back and a pistol in its hand. Its apparel was militaristic and worn, and its form...was that of a girl. The form of her legs, hips and breasts made it obvious what she was. And the mountains of gunmetal machines strapped all around her made her look like a biological killing computer. Her arms hanging, and a handgun in her right hand, she simply looked at the Soldier sitting on his bed, then slowly walked in and looked at the clear living space which he had devised. The flames illuminated it, displaying the refrigerator, stove, cupboard collection and chest. She dropped her pistol, and undid a strap on her chest, which dropped her rifle. She let down all kinds of straps and dropped all of her equipment. The Donny Soldier stood and began to approach her.

And suddenly, she embraced him. She ran at him and threw her arms around him, lovingly, and the Donny Soldier did little but slowly wrap his arms around hers. He was relieved. More relieved than any of you may possibly be able to comprehend. The two of them were complacent together while the Soldier looked sideways into the village. The fire was killed by the heavy rains and the gardens were still intact. The massive clouds were rowing away in the oceanic skies and the sun shown brightly over the land again. And our Donny Soldier was, at last, at peace in this world.

The Contenders:

I

"God," said Mr. Spade, "obviously does not exist. The very idea of his existence is mythical in the face of how the world actually works. The people of two thousand years ago, in fact, longer than that, had nowhere near the scientific knowledge we have now, so they could not have possibly made a scientific conjecture that rivals ours. We know how the entire universe works now!"
"How do you know that?!" barked Mr. Cook.
"The things we have seen," explain Mr. Spade, "act accordingly to the way things work on Earth. The moon swings around the earth, asteroid belts revolve and large bodies of matter act as weight on the fabric of spacetime! And this is only in our own solar system!"
"Have you seen the entire universe?" asked Cook.
"Of course not!"
"Then how do you know these things you call facts are true everywhere in the universe?" asked Cook.
"It's called using the power of knowledge and reasoning!" said Spade.

The other men in the room all sat in their own ways of shallow dread and expressed their boredom in the way they held their heads in their hands, reclined deeply into their chairs and peered attentively at things other than the clear conflict of the argument of Science and God. They didn't want to be there anyway; this was their job, and it was what they did. It was a brainstorming board at the History Channel offices whereat programs were born - the shows with theses that challenged ideals and investigated seriously in-depth subjects which were never resolved truly in the end, because such extraordinary subjects require extraordinary thoughts to resolve, not the thoughts of a bored council of repressed men.

The meetings were no longer about coming up with show ideas, they were war-stages for Mr. Spade and Mr. Cook, the big-league thinkers who were hired years ago and never failed their superiors thereafter, meaning they received nothing but promotions. Now they were the laborious elite, and were presently battling tooth and nail to produce a 40-minute television show - or so their superiors thought. Their arguments went on for hours. Most of the other members of the board knew they were going in circles, but they didn't care, because it was their job, and they were being paid to be there.

Whenever the superiors wanted a status update, Zapph wrote it. Zapph was the one who seemed to always sit in silent solitude, contemplating some ideological intricacy, the likes of which made no sense to anyone but him, unless he spoke it and put it in a way which could be understood, in which case it was brilliant. He got promoted to an equal position as Spade and Cook in less time than both of them, and many of his colleagues knew he would, in no time, surpass them. Zapph was methodical in everything he did, and when the meeting commenced, he pulled out a fat spiral notebook and started writing with the utmost fury. No one knew what he was writing, and no one ever would know, because he always moved too fast to talk.

The two screaming men would commonly make errors in speech in their vigor, implying that they sacrificed actual perception and sophistication for raw energy. The fact of whether or not they walked on two legs ceased to matter; all they knew was their stance on each others' methods of perceiving the real world, assuming the real world exists at all. And every day, Mr. Cook walked in and took a seat, and waited for Mr. Spade to show up late, which he did every day. He would burst in and immediately raise an issue, usually the last one they discussed the day before. And everyone else just sat there and basked in the glory of being able to get paid to do nothing - except Zapph, of course.

"Ideals come and go," proposed Mr. Cook, "and they destroy people; but Jesus has done nothing but good! He's always there for everyone!"
"Then what do you have to say about the Crusades?" asked Spade. "What about all the violence and tragedy caused by Christianity?"
"Those people were evil!" refuted Cook. "Thou shalt not kill - they ignored that and used faith and glory as a medium to do what they want!"
"So you just say everyone who ever did anything bad was evil?" asked Spade.
"No!" shouted Cook."

Mr. Curtis had a terrible tendency to daydream. He was only 27, and he got the job because of his natural ability to remember whatever date and event in history, and his collection of such information seemed to grow infinitely. He recalled, in his interview for his first position, every important date in the third Crusade, then the entire campaign of Alexander the Great, and as a finale he told the story of the Soviet regime backwards. He was practically hired through the door.

"Back in 1AD," said Spade, "people didn't think the world consisted of many groups of people with different cultures; they only thought there were good people and bad people. People who wanted to kill and steal weren't evil, they just had different motives than people who didn't!" Cook began to interrupt him as Spade said, "Society just doesn't like killers and thieves!"
"You're talking bullshit," said Cook. "So you're fine with people who want to rape your daughter and steal your car?"
"No!" repudiated Spade. "I'm just saying-"
"So you're contradicting yourself?!"
"NO!" shouted Spade.

Curtis found himself standing at the train station one Saturday, waiting for the next shot into town. He felt at ease in places of transportation, such as Airports and train stations, because it they are all designed to make everything go smoothly. In his boredom, he pulled out his Blackberry - which he thought was an absurdly complicated machine - and scrolled through his Contacts until he came to Zapph, second to the bottom, above his other friend, Jack Zychter. He took a moment to formulate his future, and try to have an idea as to where he would be in a few hours. He called Zapph.
"Hey Curtis," answered Zapph. "What's up?"
"Oh, not much," replied Curtis. "I was just heading into Manhattan, you wanna get lunch somewhere?"
"Sure," said Zapph. "Let's go to Mark's, I want some wings and beer."
Zapph had known Curtis since third grade. They grew up together watching television, skateboarding, drinking soda and playing video games in a suburb in Indiana - the 90's was a wonderful year for suburbanites. They used their minds for good on a very subtle level, and only employed their intelligences when necessary. When they did try, however, they usually left the scene with a high reputation. Some called them Rain Men.
The two of them sat down in the dark restaurant and ordered Guinness and buffalo wings. They didn't have formal meetings, business lunches or social transactions; they got wings together. Both of them threw off their suit jackets and undid their ties, then took to indulging in the wonders of animalistic eating.
"What do you think about the titans?" asked Curtis.
"Who?"
"Clash of the titans," explained Curtis. "Cook and Spade having an angry philosophy jerk fest."
"I don't give a shit," said Zapph. "I'm writing the whole program myself. That's what I'm always writing."
"You're writing the show?" asked Curtis, as though his monocle had just fallen off.
"Yeah," replied Zapph. "It's about the Crusades. It's a big adventure-toned program about the beginning to end story of the Crusades, and I'm hoping it'll be narrated by Liam Neeson."
"That's amazing," said Curtis. "How much do you have written?"
"Half done," replied Zapph. "I need your help, though. I need to get dates straight and stuff."
"You're nuts," said Curtis.
"Nuts as shit," confirmed Zapph. "Let me grab my notebook and show you."
The two of their pored over the writing, scribbling things out and connecting things here and there. The first Crusade technically began in 1095 AD, thought it's only more practical to say 1096. The Normans had an age of power only 30 years before, and so Europe's view on conflicts had become slightly obscured. "No, that's weak," said Zapph. "Let's not put it like that."

II

"Religion is perfect," said Spade, "because everything about it can be explained out of rationality. If someone asks why God did something, they are responded to with, 'God works mysteriously,' or 'because we did something wrong.'"
"Is there something wrong with that?" asked Cook.
"God is amorphous!" shouted Spade.
"Oh fuck you," said Cook as he sat down and dropped his head into his hands.
As they continued to exchange curses, the other members of the board all slowly came upon a realization. Zapph and Curtis were missing. Each member raised their posture and widened their eyes while they looked around the table for the prodigal youths. They exchanged messages with their eyes.
"Where's Zapph?" asked an older board member, interrupting the two debaters. "And where's Curtis?" Cook and Spade stopped and looked around the room. Suddenly, something very very strange, as though there was something wrong with the picture of the room. The room was not the same without the two of them.
"That's strange," said Spade. "Where did they go?"
"They didn't come in," said another senior member, Mr. Jones. "Let me asked Ms. Jackson, outside."
He leaned forward and hit the big blue button on the intercom to the receptionists' desk. "Ms. Jackson," said Mr. Jones, "do you know where Ralph Curtis and Derrick Zapph might be?"
"They're right here," replied Ms. Jackson.
Right after, Curtis and Zapph entered the room, Zapph holding his notebook and two white envelopes. They stood at the door like they were Vincent and Joules.
"I've got a couple updates," said Curtis. "Firstly, the program is completed and has been approved. Zapph wrote most of it, but in the second half of its production, I collaborated with him and we referenced just about every board member except for Mr. Spade and Mr. Cook. The second update is, as our superiors wanted me to inform, is that Mr. Spade and Mr. Cook are fired."
There was an explosion of mental gasps, and the two debaters stood in utter disbelief of what was happening. The routine with which they were so familiar had been shattered and stomped on by the day's events.
"We're fired?!" shouted Mr. Spade. "Why?"
"For wasting the company's time and money. Simple as that. Our superiors asked about why we were the only ones working on the show, and we had to inform them. They were outraged by what we told them. I'm sorry. Everyone else stays, though, because we referenced everyone's abilities in the last few weeks to finish the script."
"So that's it?" asked Cook. "We're fired?"
"I'm sorry," said Zapph. "You both are fired. They're giving you a week to get your things out."
The entire room stood still. Zapph and Curtis stood with sullen looks on their faces as the debaters looked at each other and, eventually, shuffled out of the room. The two young men, veritable saviors of the program, went on to present it to their colleagues while the two defeated seniors of their generation piled their personal belongings into what bags and boxes they had, and it came to be that they met each other in the elevator. There was little ice between them anymore; by now, they had both processed in their minds that it was defeat which brought them to the same level, and that they were in the same boat now. Their ideological differences were pale thoughts in the wake of their current statuses.
"We've just fucked ourselves," said Cook.
"Indeed," commented Spade. "I don't know what I'll do now."
"I know you might not like this," said Cook, "but I think you should join my church. It might really help you out."
Spade felt the hatred reinvent itself in his veins. His expression grew gruesome, and he said, "I'm not going to join your church. Jesus is dead! God does not exist! He could not possibly physically be or do anything!"
The doors opened, and Spade went marching away in an unstoppable manner. Cook exited slowly, allowing Spade to take his distance. The two men never met ever again.

The word of Spade and Cooks' termination and the reason for it thereof had been spread around by their past superiors. Both of them applied everywhere they could - including every job their age permitted them to do. Spade took to shoplifting. Time and time again, he would be caught and kicked out, but he still continued to grow into a state of kleptomania. He asked his family and friends if he could live with them, but the little family he had had no intention of giving him a hand, seeing as how his entirely family hated him. In time, his finances hit the ground, and he was cast into the streets of New York City.
He dealt with the scum of the streets and disdained everything, and he stole everything he had a chance of shoplifting. His face became recognized not only by the pimps and beggars, but as well by the police. As his dereliction pushed on, his homelessness became expressed in his appearance. He walked the streets a bearded vagabond; an elder and wise man in the realm of tenements and alleyways, no more.
On a rainy Sunday he walked into yet another convenience store (the cashier giving him a hard look) and he saw a face he would never forget - Curtis. He took a moment to truly absorb who he was looking at. He said, "Curtis? Ralph Curtis?"
"Yes?" said Curtis.
"It's me, Spade!"
"Oh my God," said Curtis. "How've you been doing?"
"Absolutely shit!" said Spade. "I'm...I'm a bum now. I have no home. I tried to work but no one would hire me. I don't wanna die like this, Curtis."
"I'm really sorry," said Curtis.
"Have you heard anything about Cook?" asked Spade.
"Yes, I have," replied Curtis. "He's doing fine now, actually. Someone from his church let him live with them, and now he has a job playing guitar at a cafe in this four star hotel downtown. He's really good."
Spade took on a truly defeated look - one of far greater depression than the day he lost his job. His eyes seemed to go blank and his brain turned black. He dropped his head and walked out of with store without a crumb of nourishment in his hand.
He walked for a while, pondering the error of his ways. The sights of the city bore massive skyscrapers and pristine architecture. People walked by him and suits and ties that shattered bank accounts, and the weight of their footsteps rattled the ground beneath him. Crossing the street he slowed and looked at the ocean of cars stopped at the light - hundreds of people who had places to go and things to accomplish. He was alone there.
As he came to a small stone bridge in Central Park, one connecting a small hill to another and which generated a tunnel beneath it, he saw lying on the ground in the center of the mouth of the tunnel a three-and-a-half foot tall wooden crucifix, the paint of which was peeling off. He thought of all the people he had disgraced - those who now, because of his personal actions, distrusted his methods and disdained his ideologies. Those whom he had provoked to destroy him. He had taken advantage of what he was given. The world defeated him for who he was. The world was, for the first time, dangerous to him.
He fell to the ground in front of the crucifix and hugged it to his chest as tight as he could. He was curled there on the ground for some time in front of the tunnel, and those passing him stared at him strangely. He whispered into the statue over and over again, "Please forgive me."


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