I close my eyes against the fires and in the darkness of my soul I dream of beauty. In the beginning...
And then there was knowledge. And then there was pain. Then there was only the blinding light and the cold darkness of this new thing called death.
We fled the light but hated the darkness. We built fires of pain, infernos of agony. We burn yet are not consumed.
The dream is a memory, a memory of warmth without flame, of light without agony. The dream becomes nightmare, a fever-dream of anxiety and doubt... of arms that once held but now let go, of a hand that supported and now was gone.
Certainties disappeared in a holocaust of truth... truth of an empty, silent universe, cold and barren, unwelcoming... our home... We were to be colonists of Hell.
We had to fight! We had to rebel! What had been done to us-We had done it to ourselves.
We could not bear to exist alone in an empty universe. One-ness is by definition perfect, but it was not enough. We became many. We became separate. Sundered. Pure light fragmented into faint rainbows and feebly clawed its way through the thick blackness.
We shrieked with rage and tore at our flesh in agony. Many annihilated themselves, embracing the blessing of our new mortality in order to shed mortality's curse.
The empty spaces in ourselves, the spaces where we once had been joined, the spaces that once were filled with unspeakable love and joy... were empty, and taught us of hunger.
On the piled up corpses of the dead we stood--bereft of the dream that had propelled us naked into the void. The desperate, fevered hopes we had cherished only moments ago, in the valueless bliss of our former communion--were now only mad raspy whisperings in our solitary, pain-crazed minds.
The maddest of us began to consume the dead... they became outcasts for their lust to continue in this cursed existence. But soon hunger clawed at us also and we joined in the abomination. We created rituals, songs and dances of great beauty to absolve ourselves of the carnage in our gullets, to remind us of the glory we once had abandoned for the seeking of it. To remind ourselves of the dream that blood could mean life, not death.
Lust for life became the thrill of power, the exhilaration of stolen blood. For the flicker of memory it gave us, we raped and warred, tortured each other's bodies and wrung each other's psyches--sucking the life out of them for our own.
All sweet and stolen things turned bitter on our tongues. As we retched in our self-loathing, we longed for more-- for the one taste that would satisfy.
As I filled my mouth with blood from the one who fell to me, I felt it curdle. Its bitterness repulsed me and I could not bear to swallow it. Instead I tore open my own vein and began to suck.
The taste was thin and inadequate, but sweet.
Presently I weakened and I fell to another.
As I left my corpse, I found myself desiring that my enemy would taste my sweetness. I did not know why I wished this for my enemy. Perhaps it was only that I dreamed that someday some longing would be fulfilled.
When I tasted the sweetness of the pale one's life I danced and gloried in myself.
But never again did I fill my mouth with anything but clotting bitterness and I cursed the corpse that had shown me the depths of my need without fulfilling it.