Note: Though my work draws from pain, the aim is to convey something stretching beyond the confines of personal experience. To reach that distance, I study my wounds. I feel nothing of torment once I’ve understood its domain. I write from a peaceful place.
Awakened in a haze. My vision sharpens—there she stands… my love. I gravitate toward her. A body long divorced from grace stirs with purpose. Bones groan like rusted steel—foreign, unfit, as if borrowed from another… being. Each step drags the weight of years, like stone columns etched by time—unbowed.
I reach.
She recoils.
I smile.
Her face… freezes.
I call her name—she screams.
She runs.
I follow. Desperation quickens my pace. But something catches my eye—a flicker, a shape—in the mirror by the hall. The truth. I stop. I stare. And there it is—what I’ve always been. A thing she could never understand, no matter how carefully I’d try to explain. Not a monster. Something more… alien: a man stripped of the illusions that make monsters tolerable.
I step back.
Then again.
And again.
Until I find the bed where the world has forgotten me. I lie down. Close my eyes. And awaken in the orange place—where beasts go when civility runs dry.
There, I feast. On lies. On memory. On the flesh of a reality that mocked me with unkept promises. I rip. I tear. I drink until thirst becomes prayer. There is no rest. No sleep. Only the rhythm of violence—its certainty, its purity.
War etched into marrow. Bones thickened by it. Whatever pain remains is swallowed by this black heart—longing hollowed into hunger, set to strike. To kill.
Prince of darkness.