Amid the pounding of the drums I made a choice I cannot recant; a silence lengthened a study of death and now these doors are closed; will you not come to me and show me how to die?
I was born a scientist, a doctor, turned wizard and shown the Faustian door, and some who called me genius knew not that I could go even further; the good doctor made his bargain with the devil – to mortal eyes I became one. I read of death in books and cursed myself to never die: I turned to bone, I turned to ash, I sloughed off my humanity.
Will you not come to me and show me how to die?
I wait behind the final door and all call me the scourge of reality, even those who do not know I exist. Leaving life behind made me a concept, made me the end of things; the dreaded thought. As such I am everywhere and even in you. And I will inexorably draw you to me, by the very nature of my being and yours.
This starlight chamber is speckled with the deaths of suns; this gurgling black whirlpool devoured my rotted skin. This the grotto of ages; this mire-breath putrid in the glacial air. This dungeon dripping with black blood: rain and fluid from the world above. The unthinkable world! A hateful world of love and burning sunlight.
My robes offer no succour from the cold; tattered and nearly dust. Were I to move, they would fall off me and settle into this stone throne and become a part of it. It is likely they have already.
Gold armour I had once, and now I think I live in bones; I have no eyes, I see only through magic, I live only by an unearthly emanation. Will you not come to me and show me a new power, one that can challenge my existence?
In life, I met only pathetic movable objects. In every art I was master. I challenged Satan, and when he had fallen I turned my eyes on God; so I made myself a pure force, and existence held no challenges for me. Now with one mottled foot in the mortal realm and the other in a place I cannot see, my attack has nearly begun.
Here in the cavern of stars the ultimate being waits, for a hero to come and try to sever his last remaining link with reality: that being an object I considered ‘precious’ in my life. What thing, you ask, could such a creature have once found precious? Surely in such an analytical mind there would be no room for sentiment. Only ambition – which even now makes fetid the air in my grotto of death. Only ambition, which seeps through the cracks in the ceiling.
But I do have a precious thing serving as my phylactery. This grotesque thing waits for you.
Will you not come for me, and show me how to die?
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