Lost, without a map…
Walking down these familiar corridors, I pause and wonder how I got to where I am. I pause and wonder why I continue to press on… To fight a foe unseen, the creature calling my name from the darkness? The voice I believed had been slain? I’ve awoken here with no memory of my journey. Perhaps my presence in these halls is destiny.
Yet as I peruse these galleries, smattered with bloodstained murals painted once upon a time in hatred and bitterness, an old friend seems to stalk up behind me, greeting me with cold fingers, familiar fingers, fingers with the power comfort and destroy. Logic bids me to turn and run and never return, to erase this memory forever. But as sight has shown me, logic is another friend which cannot be trusted. This gallery, these corridors, should already be no more.
So I slow and greet this old stalking friend. He smiles to me, and we continue to peruse down darker hallways even as he pushes these old, rusted daggers deep into my chest. “Remember despair?” He asks of me. “Funny you should ask,” as I begin my tale.
What is it, descending down these torch-lit stairwells that I find so irresistable? What’s been calling me lately? Perhaps it’s been those poison hallucinations? Could it have been these deceitful apparitions which had fooled me into believing such a fortress could be toppled forever, brushing me with their numbing tendrils, now tugging at this armor which had once served me so well?
Or perhaps its all a daydream? Perhaps I’ve rebuilt this stronghold with my own hands, in some sort of sick monument to those who once had to slay their own dragon and banish it into their own abyss?
The world is cold and this fire I’ve built down here in these old ruins has begun to dim. I fear the night and what it brings. Did the stranger and The Other push me down here accidentally? Or had I been searching for the entrance this whole time?
I truly haven’t forgotten. I can never forget. A part of me wishes to, but another knows better. It knows that were it possible, it would have been done by now.
Woe is me, for I am undone. And lost without a map, to boot.
