The gloom-shadow hides naught but dry stone and webbed cobs and forgotten visages obscured betwixt shaded penumbra and cold taught air, forsaken by the blazing sun some ten-fold years ago and all but a monument to an unremembered age of fire sealed away by a century-settled sepulchral gate. Hear, then, the crackling of burning ember and rekindled ash amidst the earthen twilight birthed into a realm of all abandoned shadow to sheer clean the age-faded pall which gently lay upon the central coffin hewn of rock. Swallowing up the frail hemmed cloth it slowly burns with ochre-orange hunger in contrast to how such a delicate material is consumed by scorch-fire. Foreign lanky fingers of gaunt flesh push against the entombing capstone from within the coffin-hearth, deeply gripped upon the masonwork edge and with a push and rumble the blistering casket is opened like a bonfire that makes its attempts to lick at the ceiling. Emerging from its paled matrix formed of cinder once stamped out but an aeon before only to here ignite, to bring forth light estranged to the stonework chamber as effervescent shadows tempered and dim dance along the wither-parched walls, as windswept firebrands climb up to the chamber’s ceiling like dozing lamplighters. Now it lays amongst shambling sweltering forms of flames alight, ripped out of its womb of ember prematurely. Born from the stolen flame of a formless stillborn god it knows naught of its own making and naught of its own will as its existence is yet to still be realized; born from a defiling act against necrotizing flesh and bone out of purest desire and empathy, by cavity of blessed purest maiden as bedside companion and the lifeblood of a greater king of the age of flame as they once embraced each other entombed, she in life and he in death all in an act of humility and dedication.

Shambling, shuffling, scraping as it unfolds itself from twisted shape of fetal corpse fit in the lithic-sarcophagus all as undying conflagration bursts forth with fervor, gray-coal ashes severe from their host of kin in exuviation. Yet the flames hold back their passion and burn naught its skin and hair nor even its ragged clothes that so loosely tie about its waist. Now unfurled and stable in its footing it stumbles forward in awkward-crawl to clear the edge of coffin’s end and find itself stamping upon the desiccated rock-slab. Kindled flesh of rotten death given life from abandoned womb of purity through jumping ember from a god’s fell-hand to reignite such passionate blaze, to seek out its spurned crown and take on a fallen father’s throne. At the crypt-door sealed some age ago the legacy of which has long expired and as the ailing hands lay upon old stone carved in swirling shapes and effigies, all that tell a buried olden fable-myth, the story of twisted fate of the beings progenitors, rusted hinges sing in shrill voices as they resist the temptation to burst off their anchors. 

To pry apart these shaded standing gates, the first of countless barriers to the newborns atonement. It has now passed on through such hindrances and sprung forth by way of pitch-like stagger into a mellow sunbath once so alien to its cocoon of emergence—before it lay rolling hills of flaxen blossoms lit by the daystar all which sway in a gentle whirl and caper-bloom, perhaps dew-kissed naught but hours before. Fiddling fern-heads direct with heavenward-mission all while sickly bladed grasses stifle one another out with pushing and prodding in crowded forms and though the arms of the daystar still blend amongst fervent-undergrowth and too split the skies with spindling sheaths of light its true visage is obscured behind clouds of lofty stature, thus spawning brume of yellow-alpenglow.

Eastward and tied down to the horizon there stood a giant amongst lesser shapes, to cast a shadow upon such golden plains of assumed stretch eternal—a cathedrian fortress of grandeur sublimely embossed as a burnt silhouette on the vista barely beyond eyes reach. A wandering path of sepian buff etched into the gilded fields winds down like a river and slithers amongst the meddling hills in serpentine manor. With its fresh eyes it sees along the path figures wander and thus what could only be thought of as pilgrims set upon a journey, for soon they will stand before the figure of the citadel at promenade's end. And he is to do the same. Perhaps it is the dotted way points that peak from out the soil, each adjacent to the grand path, that guide his newly tempered mind in such practice of thought. Or, instead, a burden placed upon his shoulders long before his emergence from his birthing tomb to be such a cross he must bear and too such an impetus singed upon his void-beat heart. For no breath he takes and no greater will he breaks.

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Peradventure, he seeks out the divine light and purging apotheosis which leads one into purest breadth though all of this not written out upon parchment and laid before him nor spoken into his foundered ear—instead it is a silent shepherding will like that of a star quite blanch in absorbent night, mid-sky. There is no escorting knight of chival order. By this beatific conductance he is to follow, by the wizened fingers of such a god-hand; such a god he knows naught of and too what makes the citadel a monolith stark in his rotted mind. Enough of such a pestilence. There is no need to ramble on about enigmatical reasons that are kept beyond reach of the minds of men and sown away in the hearts of gods untold, who age and grow weak and yet still bring about their willfulness and what can only be assumed as altruistic and often alternate providence. They are of imperishable entropy and too what they perceive as their imposing abiding wisdom—twice I say enough.

The first footfall of grace and long-spoken prophecy to be reforged and set in playful course once again within the fires of fate and such a prophecy to act as cicerone to the shambling nascent, greatly novice to the realm before him. A jagged cough from the interplay of crisp autumnal air as it wisps like fire-smoke into his lungs, a bitter-cold bite for perhaps the dim daylight is feeble in its attempt to braise the gleam-plains and thus in this act spurn to all the land. Down the genesis of the walk-path as it stretches itself to broader pastures but still chisels before him onward through goldflower-crested mounds as he comes a stones-throw-depth from the first marker. There sits a pilgrim of ill-fate who long wayfared from former crusade as across his chest he wears a carmine sash of tapered textile, a blood-stained burn-brand of his past sins as a living martyr for inquisition all to purge the land of smoldering ember, age of fire. Too with him his scimitar that he once had accompanying his hip; now it was a mere cane for if he did not have it he would be but an invalid. It is with his brethren at his side he once stamped upon such cinders and quenched catch-flames as he was a sworn-blade of anti-blasphemy. And with in the dreadfully rotten husk there ignited the treacherous inferno that the neonate was born for to see such a form was but a bane upon his existence—the infirm senex was a remnant of an age that the fire-born had not beared witness to and still his nature uttered mumblings deep within him of distaste and rebukement. It is this internal prattling that drove him to admonish the sickly thing before taking up its scimitar and cutting it down, for in its realization it stretched out its palm and manus now severed forelimb and wrist. Not yet dead and requiring a successant lacerative swipe. It may be that a differing dupe of a poppet might have administered aid or sparing mercy but the god-hand moves. 

Come now into auric beauty sheltered within a basin-dip as such a hovel cuts into the golden dune-like mounts—flowers of nacreous nature carpet the valley that is scored in halves by the pilgrim’s path like a sword’s gash. Bountiful mix of ever-violet and fading amber, yellow and pale and cobalt-azure. Such a place had once fallen upon fairer times wherein perhaps the likes of a shaman of good fortune carted with him a gypsy woman decorated in the finest jewelry and flowing lilac as the two were set on a pleabian’s yatra, as the end to such a journey could then only be found within the clandestine chambers of the citadel. At present a similar voyage would take a virtuous itinerant through stains of war and pagan practice all of which were performed dutifully in the name of the purifying campaign. Heretics all. Bereft of the fire of blaze which once ruled the tattered realm and smoldered in ambition and zealed ardor and put crown upon the senescent head of the former lord, that lay within the bowels of the citadel in draining cistern.