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...