A gentle rain begins to fall,.

  They are the soft tears of a distant

  and reticent deity, weeping

  for a world that has abandoned us.

  I cease my prayers

  at the lip of dawn;

  where sorrows flicker and fade

  like stars in the morning air,

  while the moon stares down

  with blank expression

  upon my pleading face,

  now muted by the

  imagined replies of a

  stern and unforgiving god.

  She watches me still,

  the distant love,

  the ideal that I strove for

  that broke me,

  time and time again.

  Still I kneel before her,

  giving thanks

  for the glory of strange dawns

  in distant worlds,

  cocooned in magic.

  The rain beats down harder

  on my bowed neck-

  the gentlest of reprimands

  for my silent blasphemies,

  the sin of resentful exhaustion,

  the desire for an end,

  an obliteration that is absolute.

  But if you will not give me strength,

  then I will take it,

  from the bellies of behemoths

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  and the throats of leviathans,

  that have washed upon the shores

  of this forgotten place.

  Yet I dare not approach

  those dark shapes on the strand –

  something in the rain

  has quickened them to life again,

  and they stir and shiver

  in the turbulent air,

  crimson eyes seeking prey

  even as they are drawn back

  by some macabre act of Heaven

  from the brink

  of their own destruction,

  while rain falls,

  beaten down by the relentless

  whips of the wind.

  A horn moans somewhere,

  unseen on this grey-clad dawn,

  and love and hate drum as one

  from my heart in arrhythmic beats,

  calling to mind a black moment

  when I cast something

  into a deep and wild Abyss,

  while the winds of a fierce tempest

  created a silence that thrummed

  with its own emptiness

  within my chest.

  My hands, bloodied by

  my own passions

  upon the bones of mine enemies

  now rise like guided spirits

  to Heaven, covered now by

  the milling shrouds

  of deceptions, cast

  like a pall over all the world,

  and the crimson melds

  with the cleansing spirit of the downfall.

  This fire-honed edge gathers

  no rust in the deluge

  of these relentless thoughts,

  but emerges sharp enough

  to cut through fate.

  I have laid my sword at your feet

  in a silent pledge of my fealty

  to your immortal cause,

  having bloodied it

  upon the throat

  of the unbidden memories

  of ice and loneliness.

  And still the rain

  falls

  and

  falls

  and

  falls...