Life and Death

[Deuteragonist]

"Where's Ciel?"

"I...I need to find my dad. Have you seen him?..." "Where's Sylas?..."  

"Dead...dead...dead..."

"No...But he was- but he was barely much older than me. Why- why would... But why would...?"

""I have no doubt that he has been accepted into Avalon."

"My cousin is gone, there is no getting around it, there is no getting over it, I have to deal with my failure."

"Uncle, stop...joking around. This isn't funny."

"They took Ciel's life, that is no joke. This is reality."

"Dejected, Faust spies a phial of poison and contemplates suicide. However he is halted by the sound of church bells, which remind him not of duty, but of his happier childhood days."
- ???

I have not smiled since you left us. It is a bold, dramatic statement, but I am known for thus, an unfortunate side-effect of being a nobody permitted his hubris for too long. It should have been me. They are saying a lot of things of, for, and about Ciel vey Pelleaux - and I suppose I am no more than any other, so I will join them, and we will mourn in symphony.

The Champion of The Youth who wasn't even going to sign up. A devastating warrior who’d rather not fight. A Radiant who could never stay within the city's walls, such was his thirst for adventure beyond them. Against insurmountable odds he rose again, and again, and again, never a complaint uttered from his lips. We would spar and he would win - narrowly, I'd say. Again, I'd say. This time, I'd say. And he'd humor me, and every time, I believed I could close the gap. But the closer you came to beating him, the more he came alive, as if you were waking a sleeping giant - I do not believe he lost because of his ability. I do not believe he is dead because of a fault in his fighting.

No.

Humans need to believe in fantasies to remain sane, even Ciel. When we are young, first we practice, learning to believe the lies in mythos and nursery rhyme so that we can believe the much more important lies later:

Justice, mercy, duty.

Grind life to its finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. Tell me there is mercy in a man sacrificing his life for his child to be swallowed whole, mercy in the way that wretched abomination walks Esshar, with the suffering he has afflicted countless lives. Even were he slain today, that is not justice. It is not equivalent to the horrors he has wrought. We act as if there is some inherent rightness to the world, as if the cosmos has aligned all things to come out as fair, eventually, even if it doesn't appear that way at first. But I am sick of lies. Even the one you believed, Ciel, the one that got you killed: Mercy. 

I am like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, I can remember where the joy was, but the joy I can touch is only a memory.

When I was a boy, long before I was a knight, Niffty taunted me that the stars only spoke to those destined, and I refused to listen. I prayed, as a knight I prayed, and I hoped. Hope and faith. I begged the Gods for justice, on hand and knee. I plead with the angels for mercy. They have never spoken back. Octavia, Ciel, Sariel...they spoke to me of all that the stars had or have planned for them, but I cannot hear their call.

So I am done asking.

I will make them listen.

And the heavens will remember me.