Tu Fui Ego Eris

How we've fallen.

It was not enough. The earth and the sky were not enough. Not enough, and full of storms and winters.

So we went beneath the ground, where the only thing to fear falling from the sky was the earth.

When there were no stones left, we mined our own nightmares.

I think we forgot what light looked like.

"King," "reign," even "love," became empty letters in our infected plane. I thought I knew what those strings of symbols were, what they meant, but some lightning-struck, honeyed words, and a spiked staff, told me otherwise. And my heart turned black.

We are so far beneath the flowers.

I was not always a shadow. Neither were my people. But we consorted with nightmares, until nightmares we became. No light. No life. Left.

I promise you, there is a right. Do not pretend, do not tell your soul, otherwise. And I was wrong.

Hard shells on our backs, into soft black, into nothing at all.

We lost our hands and faces...I called back their hands and faces...

I will make you understand.

It is not an easy fate. To be a king, then a prisoner. It would be grim indeed, to be a prisoner in a foreign land. It is, I think, worse yet to be a prisoner in your own land, chained to your head; still a king, still on the throne, still with the power—more of it perhaps—but the throne blooms into thorns beneath your feet, beneath your reign, beneath your brain, in your tattered city, beneath the ground. The nightmare throne, where there is no such thing as ransom. Where the hands clasping yours belong not to your queen, but the demons that talked you into this current plight—even if they're your demons, and your own mind made them.

Cannot leave. Cannot die. Cannot see Metheus again. Watch, and wait, with all that power in your grasp. The only choice is to go mad with it. The only choices are wrong, and wrong, and wrong. You don't make them because you think they're, in any way, right. Not for any righteous reason; not glory, nor even show of strength, not to save someone, not even yourself. Not for any reason at all. Just boredom. Just waiting. Just to fill the nothing. Because sometimes you'd rather have something, than nothing at all. Even if it's terrible, cruel—the motives of a mad creature, mad king, ruler over this insanity, and ruled by it all the same—to cause them this pain, and this much, at least it's better than hollow wind, and taunting memories. It is a rare affliction, I do not expect you to understand it (you, with your head full of needs and wants, and your blood still red...you are so very lucky) but sometimes you'd rather have nightmares than no dreams at all.

Or at least watch them play out for someone else.

You forget the importance of dreams until nightmares are all that is left.

You will be unraveled. You will rip apart at the seams.

And watch them die. No pleasure in their pain, though there may have been a sick part of it all at first. Pure jealousy. You start to long for horrible things. And when they cry 'please, I don't want to die!' before they starve, before the hound's tooth is shoved through their heart, before the darkness snatches their light away, and with it their life, you want nothing more than to take their place. When you know this to your core, then you will know why Death itself is pure mercy.

So you make them come back. You refuse to give them that mercy. It was not granted you, why should it be granted them? Revive, resurrect, just to watch them die over and over again, feeling a pang like addiction in the back of your heart. Mercy or torture, all depends on the voice you use to say the words. All depends on if you're watching the scene from before, or beyond, the grave, or somewhere in between.