Finale

Awakened by an emerald

(in the muddy wash).

This anarchic verse will mark

The decline of the pale chef's control,

A scar on the face of the creature,

A fire without timber or coal.

I. Discovery

Wading through the muddy wash,

Suspicion discovers a leaf.

Wisdom removes the mask of truth

And startles the faceless thief.

II. Disbelief

Frozen lids crack open

Young pupils find the lies,

Chapped mouths now bleed with rumours, but

Their careless talk costs lives.

III. Denial

Shutting their eyes, they burn the books

Of truth and brand them sophistry,

"This verse", they spit from haunted lips,

"is treason dressed as prophecy".

IV. Destruction

Curiosity endures the ascent,

Forcing open the gates with his youth,

But the small trickle becomes a torrent

And Madici drowns in the truth.

The fugitive surfaces from this tomb of midnight blue

and emerges into darkness. His distressed body cries

with remnants of the life he left behind. Staggering

forward, he drops to his knees; his eyes adjusting to

the gradually expanding world.

Void.

Cool mist swirls around his ankles as he walks briskly in the pale morning light.

His vision is fixed on nothing and everything - indistinguishable points in the distance, the dull colours of the new dawn, a stranger wearing familiar faces.

Usually a deep thinker, he surprises himself by his lack of creativity; the ideas he manages to capture trickle through his mind like water through a sieve.

Nothing matters to him anymore.

The silence fails to play a melody to the chords of his breaking heart. For, he convinces himself, what was once a feeling is now nothing but a memory.

Maybe it was nothing.

Maybe it was everything.

Halfway across a bridge he stops to watch the magnificence of the sunrise.

His mind wanders somewhere else.

T. Grayson

"...so now my friends, 'tis time we begin/this glorious story of glorious sin" - from "Infernal Madici", T. Grayson.