The #Broken_Dagger Forum

The eyes are red-rimmed, circled 'round with shadows. There is no sound sleep for Germanes Presecan. There had not been sound sleep before but intermittently, as fatigue would inevitably claim his too-stressed body. He wakens from an unrelenting pillow of distressed parchments, pages littered with his incessant scrawl, the evidence that his mind is a turbid device of the most explicit and morbid literary genius. He wakens and he blinks against impinging rays of morning sunlight, reminding him another day has passed. Another day gone, indeed, but another day in which he must wrestle a creature of a most inimical nature, a thing of his making... yes, he has made it, breathed life into its ignominious existance and allowed it to prey upon his humanity for too long. How shall he combat it? for it is not reliant upon him, but he upon it.

It is clear, a crystalline fluid as sheer as the glass cylinder which houses its threat. It glistens in the morning sun's sublimity... and it makes its whispery call. It can help. It can ease the flesh's febrile tremors, the poignant nausea, this creeping death which consumes, which is the poison in the blood and the blood pleads for mercy. Just a little to ease the misery.

And does the author have the strength to continue to deny it? He has come this far, has born his struggle courageously and alone... can he, when pressed to the very limits of physical capacity, see clearly enough to deny himself the drug?

Ink-drawn parchments crinkle mildly under the stress of his hand, his hand which tightens, knuckles pale, fingers trembling with desire to reach. One vial left... with a meager amount remaining... just take the rest, and when it is gone it shall be utterly gone. And he reaches that tremorous hand, ink-stained, and fingertips hover near that tiny corked bottle-mouth. He may feel the cool of the glass, may even feel the pleasant release its contents would have if fed to that demanding sanguine efforting pumping in his veins. But his hand balls and he sweeps the vial from off his desk in a violent surge of emotion. Parchments and supplies hurl from off the surface as well, making a fluttering dance of scraplet papers as they settle slowly, and he is left standing... shaking, sweating, not weeping though his eyes foster moisture and the blinking of desperate lids turn them loose upon feverish cheeks. The suddenness of the movement devours him, his empty belly roils, his lean frame convulses, and he heaves dryly as there is nothing left in his stomach to vomit. Then the floor is his comfort, his horizontal companion... and whole world is aspin before it is dark.

Another night falls, another day dawns, and he knows he must eat. Water cannot sustain a human frame undergoing these types of trauma which nefarious addictions often stimulate. His eyes lift and, upon an ewer's burnished belly, glimpses himself... a morphed self, distorted, a simulacrum of that fellow of fashion and poise.

Days ago she had gone... can he recall if she left word? Had she left word? Had she gone without it? He cannot now say, for Time's course has gone on too hastily and has left him without comprehension of its passage. He exists in a cyclonic saga of sickness and confusion and regret that he allowed himself to be enslaved by a substance. But she is gone, that woman of vast constitution whose entrance into his existance has draw his gaze, so devoted to narrow things, and cast it upon fairer worlds, words, images, and emotion. Tormented, he journies between hypnotic visions of her and defying remembrances of former days... alas, the life of a literary mind such as his is too often a dramatic, operatic epic of abuses and depressions and morbidity. Death's concept makes dark the damask drapes of his chambers, metamorphs them into the angels of the nether-reaches, awaiting his final farewells, waiting that moment when his strength fails him... and then his soul should quit his sickly frame by willing over-medication, a willingness to end it.

How long has it been thus? How many years have colleagues given him suicidal examples, displaying their despair in a dreary casket and consequent posthumous glory in the wild praise bestowed their names. And years have those spectral shadows lived in those very drapes, in the darkness above the mantle, in the dusty corners and cobweb-heights of his manor's uppermost chambers, in the quiet spaces between old tomes, in the haunting particles seen in the sun's piercing window-piercing rays, in the view onto Mortimer Street with the Scarborough's living across the way, they with their ebon carriage, their iron gate, their crescive social affairs. And he suffers their looks, has suffered them too long.

He is glad she is gone wherever she has gone. She should not see him this way, should not glimpse him looking as pale as Death's spindly fingers, suffering as wretchedly as he is. And yet he clings to the remembrance of her presence, loses himself in the freedom he felt in being near her, for in these days he is utterly and pathetically alone. Even his housemaid had been sent away, but he knows it to be a mistake now. He needs someone's aid... someone, anyone. The manor sits stoically, looks on his lunatic detoxification unflinchingly though houses him amid his physical and mental crazes. It is in this intensity that he is most vulnerable to recidivistic failure. Like so many, he could find himself on a certain insalubrious fellow's doorstep with a fortune in his pocket, ready to exchange progress for a dose.

Strength he must have... perseverence of old. And so it is into the far-reaching past he hurls himself, while making wavering progress downstairs... down, down into that kitchen where there must be something nutritive, not jejune, but capable of supplying his body of what it desperately requires.