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rochesta

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We are led in.

            Theking’s hall is indeed massive. Giant chandeliers hang down from a high ceiling like two balls lost inan endless dance of space and time. The glassy floor leads us to a magnificent throne adorned with manycrowns of a thousand and one kings. But of them all sits here the most regal.  His calm complexion silences me.  He stares at us with cold, malevolent eyes of a devil.  They cut through my eyes and downthrough to the bottom most valley of my mind.  I cannot help but stare back, giving way to the trance thathas set my gaze to hold forever. How many lives must he have lived? How many winds have yielded to his icy stare, fallen dead and lay downat his regal feet?  How manycondemned souls have broken down and repented before this almighty king?   Like looking into the stars, I stare and find nothing staring back at me, no hope nor definition of my soul.  It is nowhere to be found. 

“I understand that you are wanderers,”comes a great voice like a wind in the canyon.  “What do you belong to, then, if not your existence has lead to this?”

Neither I nor my brother cancontemplate what to say.  My words are lost within his cold and empty eyes, the net of the great abyss.

“I ask you again,” comes the thunder.  “What do you belong to,if not to nothing?”

What do I belong to?  I search my mind, yet nothing yields back to me.  Emptiness.  Nothing.  Is it possible we belong to nothing, my brother and I?  We so belong to noting, we so belong to air.  The blackness of a bottomless night falls into darkness and shodow of the night sky, yet nothing is found here.  No truth, no logic nor no great riddle to toss and turn for in a sleepless night.  Nothingness. Vast nothingness.

“I ask you one final time-”

“Nothing,” I claim.

The man opens his mouth as if to scold my empty eyes, but the great hand of the dark king puts his mouth to rest.

“We belong to nothing,” Irepeat.  “Because nothing belongs to us.”

The king leans back into his massive chair.  His stare again,his cold eyes of hardened ice. Again through me, I look away, nearly in shame.  But of what?  Why does my soul stir, uneasy as if in the presence of Black Death?  What sort of unknown troubles my mind; frightens my dreams and haunts my meaningless existence?  I remember the phantom in the woods, the chilling shadows of his empty black face, painted with all darkness of mankind’s corruption.  But are they yet one in the same, this phantom and the king?  His stare, the stare of a shamed father, of an uneasy god.  The stare of darkened men.

“It is a pity,” he sings.  “For you know not of your purpose.  You may know great things but you cannot see.  You think many thoughts and possess a mind unsurpassed, but without eyes, what good can it be?  And you” —to my brother—“You feel all.  You feel words and the grass sweeping between your toes.  And together you band a team as swift as the night, cunning as a sun and fearsome and ferocious as the stormy sea. But without eyes for a purpose, your power is lost as you are here and now.”

Without eyes?  Cannot see?  I?  Who is he to judge me, to condemn me?  A lash for him!  Two!  Nine!  Twenty!  How dare he condemn me!  His words are not welcome here!  A stab!  May he drink his own blood and bathe in gore and corruption.  A stab!  Again! Again!  Again!

“You cannot see your purpose,” the snake hisses with fire in his eyes. “That because of you, he will live.”