Totenklage

[Nullia]

I find that this world paints a very particular picture for me.

In terms of the arts, I am many things.
A musician, a dancer—I could sing if someone asked me to, mother said I was quite good.

I am not a painter.
But I think I have a kind of talent for seeing what it is someone intends in a work of art.
What someone means with a painting. How someone feels with a poem.
I find many, in this place, of lamentation. Of what was, of what could have been.
Of what no longer is.
I find that people lament even what is now.

But the people aside. It's days like today that the world itself paints me a picture.
On a canvas across my eyes, I see a myriad of things.
And I find that it all, generally speaking, reflects the same image as the people who paint inside it.
Today we won a war. I was sat where I am always sat, meditating as I always am.
Some time after the crowds left, which I confess I was not there to see,
A man returned and declared a portion of the result.
"What?", I thought. "Already? But they've only just set out."
So it was that, it would seem, we had obliterated the opposition.
No surprise to me per say, but I've never been a fighter. I might even be a pacifist.
And yet...

I find that no one is happy.

This painting is one of melancholy and lamentation still.

"He has been executed." I hear a distance behind me, briefly stirring me from my half-consciousness.
"Ah." I think. "Of course. He can't cause problems if he's dead."
But as a follower of the Ordinance, even if I've not yet introduced myself to the Church,
I find my thoughts linger. I find that I question the character of a dead man.
Not accuse. Question. Wonder, even. I muse on what led him there. From his cradle to his grave, I wonder what he was like.
But there is still no joy. The declaration meets silence. The conversation passes on to the next war. The next conflict. The next deaths to come.




Across my eyes there is a painting of the world.
I see fields aflame,
I see rivers red,
and I see legions of toy soldiers scattered across it, this painting. Not painted in, but rather laid on top. Balanced, even.
Some of them teeter close to the edge, over the abyss looming below my hypothetical mindscape.

I wonder about the value of a life that can't appreciate life.

I pray for you all, my little toy soldiers.
That whoever pulls your strings,
whoever beats your drum,
has mercy on your souls.

May you become something beautiful in your next life.

Ad astra per aspera.

[Nullia]

I find that the human heart is the strangest thing in this world.

I have no illusions of grandeur—I am an extremely sheltered girl.
I know what I am. Likewise, I know what I am not.
Though I am smart, I am pretty, I have a wide spread of talents;
Though I am able to cook, enjoy cleaning, though I am well-versed in history,
Though I like intellectual debates, though I am of the cloth, though I know my way around the mind of another,
I am not well-versed in love.

I often hear this idea that the heart and mind are separate emotional concepts.
I figured it foolish.
The mind is, naturally, in complete emotional control of the body. That is how it works. That is the driving concept of feeling.
Things fire off in your brain, and you feel something. Chemicals go up there, and you feel something.
And yet in a solitary room with exactly one other, I found myself terrified.
She touched my hand, and it froze. I tried to move it, but could not.
There was no magic. There was no trick. I felt the texture of someone's fingertip, and my arm stopped working.

I felt vulnerable.

And it terrified me.


I wouldn't say that I'm a guarded person. I wouldn't say I build walls around myself.
But I don't like things that I don't understand.
Usually, that is a faint annoyance. That I don't properly comprehend something.
That there's something I missed.

Usually I feel a drive to know it, be it of interest or spite.
But in that immediate moment, it's not that I didn't understand what was happening,
It's that I didn't understand myself,
And that I was terrified to find out.
Not that there is some part of me yet to be explored,
That there's some part of me that I don't understand,
But rather that that feeling of not understanding could be so...
Visceral.
A rush of realization that, all at once, I'd become completely powerless.


A while ago,
I fought a Nethadrin.
It pinned me to the grass, and brought cutting gales to my throat.
I find it disturbing how quickly I processed and prepared for my life to end.
For myself to die.
I couldn't breathe. I couldn't speak. Like some kind of beast I sat in rabid, feral shock,
Clawing at the dirt, kicking my feet, trying and failing to scream.

But this is where I realized it. What truly made me understand the depth of non-understanding I have for the so-called "human heart".

I recovered from that experience. I moved on. Covered myself in the blood of another Demon for the sake of others. I did not stumble again.

But when I saw her cry that day, I had never known in my life a more shallow, underwhelming fear—
—that hurt me so badly as this.


I can only explain it, then, by submitting to that foolish idea. By admitting to my own ignorance.
I freeze up when she touches my fingers.
I stop thinking when she stares at me for too long.
I find myself staring at her in turn.
I want her praise.
I want her recognition.
I want to figure out this vile torrent of things that I don't recognize not because of my adherence to the Ordinance and it's teachings but because there is some part of myself I simply do not understand,

And it terrifies me.


So it is that I come to understand a lack of understanding. So it is that I find the shallowest fear the most terrifying. So it is that I recognize the division between "mind" and "heart".
So it is I find that, perhaps, I do not lack one after all.

And I think that is the strangest thing.

[Nullia]

If this is fate,

then I deny it.

No matter what I do, I find my thoughts come back to her.
Like she haunts me.
With her dying breath, she cursed me with the meaning of love.
I understand now. My emotions sizzle. I tried to cast out my heart, to claim it was crushed,
but I find it still beats nonetheless.
Ah, I think to myself. Is this the human will?
To persevere when all that I am has been destroyed.

For, there was a time that I was hollow. It was not a belief. It was fact.
I was deprived by my self, of what others held most dear.
I sat where I always did, and mused on their lives.
What they were like. How they got there.
But father died before I was born, and I never knew the "couple".
The kiss, the hug, the touch of hands and what it all meant.
It just couldn't have been for me.

A girl briefly mentions that my mana "tastes like her taste in women".
I assume she is ill.
She points to a small device, and then makes some strange motion by her ear.
I stare at her like she's stupid.
I had never seen a transceiver in my life. It turns out she was telling me to call her.
I wish I had noticed earlier.

She looks at me, some longing in her eyes. She wants something. I don't know what.
Her hand is halfway between us.
I stare at it.
Very well.
My fingers touch her fingers. My palm touches her palm.
And I feel a shot of vulnerability so vile, I find myself unable to move.
I thought that I hated that feeling. It turns out I just wasn't ready to feel it.
I wish I had noticed earlier.

I fret every day and every night, about the secrets I keep from her.
I have never struggled with this before.
I feel an intense desire to tell her every component that makes me.
That terrifies me.
But I seek counsel, unable to overcome it myself.
And one day I decide that I can't take it anymore,
this feeling I am told is "guilt".
And I tell her all of me.
I thought she would reject me. It turns out she loved me no matter what.
I wish I had noticed earlier.

There is a girl.
She loves me no matter what.
I figured it was because I am pretty. Smart. Perfect.
And that she would lose interest when she found out how boring I was beneath the surface.
It turns out that she loved me for real.
I found that the most painful thing about that,
was that I didn't know how to love her back.
I told her I couldn't.
I told her I couldn't.
And she stood there,
and she looked me in the eyes,
and she said, verbatim,

"Even if it takes fifty years for you to understand.
I'll be here."

In my life, I have cried pitifully few times.
I knew no adversity.
I knew no loss.
I knew no pain.
I am a sheltered, coddled, mother's girl that was not even born quick enough to know the loss of her own father,
and therefore felt nothing of his death.
I can count the times I have cried on my fingers.
Once, when I was fed up with my lessons when I was six.
Once, when my mother passed away on my twentieth birthday,
And once,
when I heard her
say those words to me.

I have never known a more immediate, crushing pain.
It's a waste, I thought.
It's a waste on something like me.
And yet she defied me,
denied me,
and told me there that she would wait.

That she would crawl her way out of the Citadel,
just to see me again.

Well, Estel?
Will you?


I told her, then. I could not live with the shame.
That such a gift had been wasted on me.
I don't know if I meant it.
I don't know if I meant it any time after.
Not when I whispered her name—her real name—in her ear,
because I wanted her to love that too.
And not even in the last moments,
before she was off to die.

This romance was a slow-burn novel that never finished.

The producer shut down and the author died.

The pen remains on the table,

the words

"I love you"

never written.


I despise this curse. I resent this understanding.
Your final gift to me was to truly understand how much I had failed you.
I did not mean the words that escaped me even a single time.
They were selfish mockeries to keep away the guilt,
that you had wasted your time with someone like me.
That you would waste fifty years of your time.
Why...
Would you waste...
...So much time on me?
And so it is that your last words are,
"I'm sorry",
and,
"I love you".
I hear them.
And I hear you die.
And it plagues my every waking moment,
and my every dream,
to know that until your last breath,
I had lied to you.

If it is fate—
—then I deny it.

I reject this burden.
I reject this reality.
I reject this world.
I will make fate myself.

I will pen our story myself.

There was once a time that you told me I could do anything.
That you were convinced I make miracles.
And now in this time,
I fall to my knees and cry.
I do nothing.
I truly did not deserve you.

But I will become someone who does.


That when we next meet, I may look you in the eyes,
and say that which you most wanted to hear.
My unfiltered feelings, a confession unbridled;
the words "I love you", in your ear.


Very well.

May the world watch, as I make manifest,



a miracle.

[Nullia]

How many flowers.

How many graves.

There was, I'm sure, a precipice at some point.
A cliff, clearly defined, impossible to miss.
But when you're spinning, falling, plummeting towards the ground—
—it's not easy to look up, again.
I must have tripped.
Surely so.

I feel it still. The dissolution of my self.
A doll, a puppet, or whatever other thing I may be.
I feel the strings around my limbs getting tighter. Not out of strength, but out of desperation.
To keep me up. To keep dancing and clapping like a good toy.
Because these strings know that if they snap,
if I fall,
we're both going to burn in the fire.

I feel it still. The dissolution of my self.
Taught, snapping. Threads run thin.
What starts the fire, I wonder? That is lit underneath me.
That is lit around me.
That lights me.
What starts the fire, I wonder?
When these strings snap, when the fabric of my body comes undone—
—do I collapse, and die? Does all that I am cease to be?
Do I break under the pressure? Living a hollow, ignorant life I don't enjoy,
until I stop struggling to do what I couldn't the day she died?

Or

are these chains, that bind me?

My limbs bloody and scarred from pulling against them,
until they just,


snap?




How many graves am I going to visit?
I've started not to care.
I feel it. Every day. The hammer that is this violent world, beating down on me.
On my will. My mind. My soul. Even my body, until it is a struggle to escape the confines of my bed.
Wearing me down—no, shaping me up.
Into something that suits it.
Long have I felt that desire in my heart. Scared was I to confront it. What it meant. What it represented.
No more, I professed to him. I will use it. This desire of mine. I will wield it, as I have wielded all else.

But the farther my fingers reach,

the more I feel like I'm going to lose them.

The strings that bind my body, the strings that hold up my mask—
—I feel them snap with each passing day,

As this sentient garbage believes it can talk back to me.
Is this some kind of joke?
I do all of this work,
just for more shit to wash up on the southern shore.

I stand in defiance of this reality. I deny all that it is. I deny all that it represents.
They tell me,
                          they tell me,
that I'm strong. That I'm doing something no one else can.

Why?

What is it all for?



Ah, that's it, isn't it?
It's not what.
It's who.
This city is going to be the death of me.



This world toils to break me.
It has once before.
I picked up the pieces, tied my strings, and bound myself to the whims of the gods yet again.
Like an obedient little dog, I chain myself to my fate.
To let it toy around with me 'till I break again.


I've read this book before.
It's a slow-burn romance.
The producer shut down. The author's been dead six years.
I know what it did to me last. I know what it will do to me now.
It will destroy all that I am.

My fingers clasp the pages,
and I stare deeply into the words on the final page.
"I love you"
it tells me.
I know how this story ends.

And yet here I am,
on my knees,
begging for it to kill me again.

'Till my strings snap a second time.


And I truly come undone.

[Nullia]

My dear, my child, my sweet little

butterfly.

Everything is going to be alright.





On the day of our twentieth birthday,

'twas the day we watched you die.

Passing away quietly, your hand in mine.

What words do we hear whispered from your

dry, flaking lips

but the promise that

everything will be alright.

Mother, 'o mother dearest

—dearest to me, to our heart—

why are you

a liar?

Each day that passes,

since the one where you left us,

it gets harder,

to control me.

This soul within your soul,

this very concept of me.

We have watched

thousands die.

We have stood

over a thousand graves.

Every single person,

has left you behind.

No one will be here for you.

No one will mourn you.

We have been,

and always will be,

each other's sole company.

Within you, there is a vile, bloody hate.

A desire to watch the world burn.

I bleed, I cry, I kill my frail little body just to make a difference,

just to be something more than an object to someone else.

I open our heart,

desperate for the approval of another.

And again, and again,

do we feel it ripped to shreds.

I reach out,

into that which I cannot know.

You feel a hand in yours,

holding it tight.

I feel it slip,

still stunned by the touch.

And we watch it fall away,

into the abyss.

Father, 'o Father dearest,

why must we suffer so?

Why are we the only ones left?

when will our breath finally end?

Eight years past,

this body should have withered.

It has only been a nuisance.

So why does your light not fade?

Leave us be.

Let us die.

At least in the lifestream,

I can find the people that cared.

So do you clutch to your chest,

and realize what I have told you all along.

My dear, my self, my sweet little butterfly.

There is no one in this world for you,

but me

and me alone.

I am tired of these

self-imposed limitations.

The strings have long since come undone.

We writhe on the floor,

in this broken prison of flesh.

Human-shaped trash,

still breathes my air.

The people that never cared for me,

still die by the dozen.

Soul of my soul,

The very concept of me.

Let us show them

what martyrdom looks like.

What it is to

burn.