[SWE] The Festival of Lights

Deimos the Reaper You can't take back the cards you've dealt on this long and lonely road to hell the throne must be such a sad and lonely place The world churned back into its disorder and melancholy. He forgot the weight of the unknown as it transpired before him, as voices became murmurs, as the breath seemed to leech away from his lungs, cling back to gallows, throb in his heart. Death sung its sultry tune in the awakening of bodies, ghosts and wraiths, straining, clawing, sliding their way in serpentine machinations. Another had been chosen in the midst: honored in his test, in his task, by the exposure of wraiths and phantoms – for half a second, had the Reaper even managed to make a lantern, he wondered if they would’ve come. Would they have screamed, yelled, and hissed at him? Would the bodies of his adversaries rise and stare, glare, as menacing as they’d been on the battlefield, kill or be killed, swords drawn, bloodied, then the last lingering moments as their hearts ceased to beat? Would his parents have been there, amongst the crowd, not dead by his hand but perhaps just as well, smoldered, driven to cinders, to ash and dust? Would his friends have been there, stuck in their smiling, smirking, snickering compositions, haunting him because they couldn’t have been saved? Would she have been there, the gentle, assuaging, comforting rain, then gone in an instant, returned to heaven while he stayed in his own personal hell? Perhaps it was just as well that he’d never be chosen, abandoned and desolate, forlorn and absconded, for he wasn’t sure he’d be able to face them. He wasn’t ready – tied, knotted, and gnarled – but his eyes kept taking in the legions of specters, selected from their tombs and catacombs, fascinated. His ears caught the tension in conversations, the discourse rising and falling, the malice and menace buried deep in those not favored. Ludo and his granted schemes and wishes, Ludo and his trivial foils, Ludo and his wares – and those who couldn’t control their intentions and emotions. There was a shift in the air, a threatening constriction and rigidity floating along the eldritch ether, something akin to an incoming battle, an oncoming rush, a fervent, ardent passion sizzling – animosity, acrimony, wretchedness brewing. Ordinarily he’d be a part of the mess, a weapon of revolution and sedition, but he had no dog in this fight, ignorant and inept, useless and depraved in the scheme of things. But at the very least, this experience, this encounter, had led him further out of the unknown. {Just wrapping up!}

_{Photo and Table by Time
Photo taken at Hero's Square in Budapest, Hungary}