A Bitter Cup

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Silence for that confession. It is the way of priests, of mentors, and elders that sometimes the only response is no response. In those instances one cannot always think of something substantive to offer. In others the silence, or the words which preceeded it, speak for themselves. For his part, with such a confession as that, Teron is silent outside the forge before stepping into the cramped confines now absent of heat. Here is a billows, there hammer and tongs not far from a smelter. At one moment the Ashfiend had hurled Cinnabar into the ashes themselves and sought to strangle and incinerate him upon the spot. In one corner Ariane had brutalized him with her speed, and in other Cinnabar had driven his head against the enemy's to seek some measure of an upper hand.

The door remained partially open and allowed weak sunlight to slip inside as witness to the Ashfiend's memories that swirled and choked him since this dialogue with the guide had begun. He plucked the hammer from its resting place, felt the topheavy weight, recollected his instruction at the forge to create endurance and to remind him of how the common people he had once protected, lived.

"There were lusts," he offered in a hollow tone that echoed upon itself in the vastness of his ancient and sprawling memories framed in cobwebs and shrouded in bitterness. "There were testings and torments. Selfishness. Envy and greed. Pride." Things known to all men, once known to him as he yet knew flesh. "Hate."

So it began even before Vraal's curse, the hate?

A curt nod to the question. "I remember that it was so," the icy reply, these words from a corpse that wasn't and yet was. He set the hammer down, his other hand coming to rest upon the flat of the anvil. Its weight was significant, a thing easily manipulated under the strength of fury, and in the moment he struggled to shift the thing at all.

Why do men grow angry?

"For lack of what they want," the easy reply as his crimson gaze swept the room's interior and filled in the emptiness with himself, Ariane and Calomel struggling and wrestling over the priviledge of destroying one small piece of Vraal's legacy. Enemies forged from those who might otherwise have proven to be allies. Enemies who had striven yet to be just such a thing, burned, spurned, near murdered under the Ashfiend's hands. Kindness was, indeed, too harsh a thing.

"In her was a measure of grace," the Ashfiend continued. "Yet human she remained. Devoted, kind, gentle. Full of life," the last words drawing his attention to the lay of lifeless flesh over the back of his pallid hand.

And when she was taken, there was no more grace for you? No acceptance?

Silence. A nod of acquiescence. As the words came, silent and yet infuriatingly omnipresent, he heard and felt beyond them a steady and unearthly tred - an approach of one whom his thoughts told him that he had no wish to meet.

No acceptance other than mine, you mean.

"At last we come to it then," the words left him in a chilling rumble, free hand again closing about the hammer as it would any weapon. The other flexed and prepared, to hurl the anvil, to conjure up his nefarious sorceries, to strangle a throat, to fill a grave. "Tell me, spirit, guide, jailor," he snarled then as the words left him, building and rising like a stoked flame. "Who are you?"

The one who has always sought you, accepted you, loved you. You knew me once. Since she left you, you have hid from me ever since.

"Since you took her," the Ashfiend roared as his livid gaze leapt to furious unlife and driven, constrained frenzy that tore at the depths of his ruined and bound soul. "Took her and drove me to this."

I welcome all sorrow. You turned from grief to rage, from me to you and your sorrow, and buried it beneath your hate. All things are good when they look to me. All things are evil when they look away.

"I didn't want you," he shrieked as hate lent dreadful strength to cadaverous limbs and he hurled the anvil across the smithy's breadth. "I wanted her. Save your pity and your mercy for the weak!"

Your want for her placed a great burden on her, to be all that you required. A burden she could not bear when you wrested her back to life. And in your rage you insist that she bear it all the same. That she bear it still, even in her grave.

An evil he had all but confessed to Ariane, and not so long ago in this very prison. The murder to fuel his hate, the hate which reached back and was fueled not by a fiend but a man. A lonely, arrogant man who planted a murderous seed in his betrothed. "There was still love," he offered in trembling defense before the merciless judge. Merciless and yet did not lecture, scream, or shout. It merely judged, calling the truth for what it was and dragging it into the light for all to see. For him to see with his livid gaze, angered ever more by the twisted, naked, starving thing this judge had dragged into the light: the monument of his own sins.

Love and sin both. You sought her grace when I offer mine freely. Your affection fashioned her into an idol that broke beneath the weight of your worship.

"Who are you, in truth?" came the query through parted, mutilated, ruined lips that birth the ruin of a cold and echoing voice.

I am one who has sought you over six thousand years, and pursued you even into this place. I am all that is true. You have had no ear for the truth in some time. All who hear the truth listen to my voice.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The Ashfiend remained still for a time with that answer, that response, which revealed the nature of his guide, his hunter over the last several thousand years. Truth. Grace. With that truth, the sweeping aside of all excuses, reasons, explanations and stratagems. With that grace a terrible need unearth, laid bare and unfilled. On this side of the horde of his enemies, all the ones he had sown to reap his own destruction of both heart and body, there was nowhere left to hide. Even in this smithy, where Calomel and Ariane had sought to unmake the serpent, he had forged enmity where there might have been alliances, perhaps even more. All at once a countless collage of other such moments played through the recesses of his plundered mind. There were no corpses, slights, insults, vows of vengeance to hide behind. There was only the full and terrible weight of all of his history.

It drove him to his knees.

Hate and vengeance failed him. Words failed his trembling, parted lips that struggled to voice some thing, anything, to forestall this reckoning. Vainly he sought over the misery he had sown and the sorrow and rage he had harvested. Shattered kingdoms, ruined lives, broken families, restless spirits, shaken saints, empowered sinners, all with roots in the great length of his shadow. The battle on the mountain reached its final summit within the wreched remnants of his broken heart. A furious shaking overtook him, threatening to bow the Ashfiend in half as eyes rimmed with a searing mist.

How long you have trembled, in darkness weeping.
No rest in language, no words to speak.

The words plunged into his ears, into heart and mind and plunged into the battered depths of his wearied, chained soul entombed in ruined armor. A ruined man of ruined past and hollow choices, a once-man bereft of the kindness, such as it was, of hate, spite, and vengeance. In the shadow of truth and love there was nothing else to be done. The growing light began to obliterate his shadow, and in its growing illumination his lifeless palms trembled and sought those tearing eyes alive like smoldering coals. There were no words left in the light, in the wrecked expanse laid bare before this other and himself.

The terrible weight of loneliness fell upon him, driving armored elbows to his knees. The first tears meandered acidic paths down the tormented length of deathly features, pale and lifeless. The hateful flame of his eyes sputtered like smoldering coals while each droplet of sorrow painted pain and scars down the length of his countenance.

*But there in the wreckage, beneath bricks and bindings
Love has come, love has come for you.

And with the loneliness, immense loss, the loss secreted within his core and that lent sparks to his burning, tattered soul. An emptiness that moved limbs to strike and murder the world of all that lived and breathed. The lives, his betrothed, his humanity, the countless loss of ages of men plunged and tempered into shadows now fell upon a new forge, the forge of these truths beginning to hammer away upon one who had already died and now felt to die again.

Everything worth keeping, it comes through dying
And love has come, love has come for you.

Broken. Battered and broken the sobs came, wracking his ancient frame with remembered spasms. Each tear hissed angrily and left raked furrows over that dead, dead flesh. Dead flesh marked, insulted, injured by salty life. The guide spoke so easily of love, love in light of the terribe, crushing weight of all that he had done hammered into a binding, blackening chain, without even Vraal's curse to blame it all upon. The truth had shown deep, deep enough to testify that the spark had been lit by he and he alone.

Death indeed was upon him in that weakening, with every tear widening the blackened vaults of his innermost self to the awful, hideous truth before him. The wracking sorrows shook and trembled him to his naked and barren core, armored chest heaving in paroxysms of strangled breath, a native impulse to forgotten flesh. Trembling arms arose, hands seeking to grasp at any thing to break, to destroy, and landed upon his own shoulders. Fingertips scraped down to bone as he tore at his own armor, seeking solace in self-mutilation to drown out the dawning grace.

"Please," he begged in quivering whisper, not knowing for what he pleaded save for an ending of all of this.

So lift up your heart now, to this unfolding,
All that has been broken will be restored.
And here runs deep water for those who are thirsty,
For love has come, love has come for you.

"How?" he snarled through the tears, through the palpable haze of the past that colored all before him in murder, treachery and devestation. "There is nothing left," he conceded, confessed, admitted as his arms trembled at the strain of impossible self-murder. "Nothing left to restore, it is all gone."

"Gone." Peace. Elysia. Penroll. Life. Light. Goodness. Mercy.

He felt the awful thirst of emptiness as the tears reached and painted his tattered lips. He heard the shuddering half-breaths his dessicated lungs could offer. He saw the forge through his streaked, burning vision where his soul waited and was hammered. And there, before him, he beheld the guide. A man of no notable physical features save for the eyes that held his own, quiet eyes that did not turn away, empty of hate and vengeance. Full of that awful light that illuminated all things, that left him no violent solace or shadow into which to crawl and find respite.

Ten thousand angels will light your pathway
Until the day breaks fully, in the East.
They will surround you and make your path straight,
For love has come, love has come for you.

A palm for the Ashfiend's tear-stained chin. An uplifting of that nightmarish visage, scarred in sorrow and forged in hate. A smile for that ruined memory of a man and a gentle turning, so that darkened eyes might see the scope of lights that awaited him beyond the forge, and framed a trail that burned its way eastward.

"I am love," the guide offered, "And I have come for you."



* "Ten Thousand Angels," Caedmon's Call

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The tears angrily caressed his features like ruinous talons, each a grave for the sorrow that erupted and bled through each limb, every numbered bone, and slithered from that dimmed gaze of searing coals. Armored shoulders shuddered with each sob, slouching beneath the burden of the misery he had wrought. The gentle hands and unwavering eyes, clear with light and grace, offered no respite from the rapacious misery and unconditional acceptance.

"That lonely shore is not for you," the guide echoed another who had spoken of such things. "The fire you have held so tightly, you can at last let go." With that he gestured with his chin towards the long length of lights, tamed and earthbound stars, that illumined a path for him.

"And what shall I hold, then?" the Ashfiend's words left him in a hollow murmur, their icy rumble a graveyard strain in the burden of this awesome light. "How shall I even rise? My strength," he paused then, the weight of each dead limb threatening to pull him earthward and into a grave of his own, a grave that had patiently waited for so many years. "My strength... is gone."

"Your weakness is my strength," the guide responded, "for my strength is made perfect in weakness." A pause then. "The weight of your past pins you down, anchors you to this prison and every prison."

Teorn nodded at these words, the responses coming with increasingly less resistance or effort in the beaming light of his guide that reduced his shadow to nothing but lengthened his offenses to their true height. "I cannot stand," a whisper, a confession, an acknowledgement of the end. "You have followed me all this way to lay me in my grave," a quietly murmured rebellion, a futility of acceptance. "Now that time has come."

"I do not offer a grave, but a life," again the even response, potent with meaning enough that each word caused the smithy about them to shudder and swell. "You cannot stand in your sin, lost to the weeping in your darkness."

The guide's hands left his visage then, as the figure bent forward and slipped his hands into Teron's ruined, pallid own. The touch of mingled flesh set his to aching with a ferocious pricking, a piercing with a thousand nails and the steadying pulse of a heartbeat echoing into his dead limbs.

"But you can stand in forgiveness."

"Now," snorted Teron, "you ask the impossible. Forgiveness?" A shake of that head framed in broken, uneven hair and a narrowing of smoldering eyes into rueful slits. There are battles that hatred cannot win. "I have none to offer, to Vraal, or to me. Only death."

"None to offer," the guide smiled gently. That smile was a daring thing, bold and beautiful, arched like a fleshly rainbow to seal a covenant in the flood of this, the verge of the fiend's unmaking. "But all to accept." Leaning forward again, Teron felt the ghost of his robe drift across an ashen cheek, hands firmly held to bear the weight of his damnation, and a soft breath spill across his lifeless brow.

"I forgive you."

The crushing weight sloughed off as the smithy's walls fell outward like a child's playthings. All of Myrken had been swept away, leaving only the sprawling fields and sun rising as golden herald in the east. A short distance away, the anchored lights hovered and created a dawning path, a sparkling framework for the path offered before him. A firm pull and the Ashfiend is brought to his booted feet, the aftermath of sorrow sparkling upon his unshadowed visage as starlight. The thunder of those words echoed into the depths of his aged consciousness, crawled into the darkness that had settled in the dust of ages accumulated within his grave-like mind.

"Now," the guide smiled resplendently, "There is a way out for you. No prison shall bind you any longer," he gestured again towards the waiting lights. The luminescence caught in the guide's hair, reflected like mirrors in his unsettlingly peaceful gaze, hideous with a meek strength.

"A way out?" Teron stuttered at length, tearing his gaze from the guide, tot he trail, and the gravity of it all fixing those eyes upon the guide once more. A sudden weightiness grasped his ankles, his legs, and the remnants of his billowing soul. The hesitancy transfixed him in this privately shared glory, the ambiance of freedom, as in the silence he had answered an unsurety of even wanting to leave.

"Remember me, and I will be with you," offered in response, arms parting, palms uplifted, gesturing for the Ashfiend to fall upon the trail. "No prison shall hold you any longer. Now," the guide's grin broadened, "you are mine."

The Ashfiend turned, mute, impossibly to disobey, and began to walk from his guide with several backward glances. The darkness within had stirred, retreated, and in the shadows haunted him with Elysia's ashes, Vraal's sharply angled countenance, the blood that ran down Arak's walls and a thousand other atrocities. His betrothed's visage taunted him, asking if he would truly forget her and cast her aside so simply. Vraal's sneer goaded his pride, urging him to answer with fire and first and sword. With each step those images retreated further from the light planted within, waiting at its limits, but boldly stood in the dark to cast there shadows upon this fresh, sputtering light.

Hope alighted his weighty, ponderous steps and lent them the gait of a near-living man. The weight began to slough off his armored shoulders and, unbelieving of the reality of it all, he spared a glance behind him. The guide was gone.

I am here, he spoke. I am with you always...

A home. A... the Ashfiend struggled for the word as he ascended the gentle slope, framed by the radiant luminosity of the sparkling, tamed stars that flanked him in undeserved honor and grace. At the crest the sunlight overwhelmed him with its light, a whisper of warmth murmured its way along deadened flesh and softened the fire in livid eyes. It blinded him to what lay ahead, the unsurety of it all, the questions that had begun to arise within his thoughts and snaked doubt towards what had truly happened. His steps stumbled but continued as the brilliance envelopped his shadow completely and all around him began to fall away.

Even unto the end of the age.

A peace.

Teron stepped into the light.