These cold and desolate nights have given me pause as I look into the last fire I’ll ever see. Behind the wall of flame, my lichen covered stone of black marble gleams with my name etched in fake, flaking gold, waiting below for my starved, broken body to shatter.

This is the fate that awaits me for my crimes.

***************

They tell me she was just a child lost and alone in the woods, her parents beset by wolves, but I saw her true form; when she emerged in front of me after catching my scent, her scarlet irises pulsed with eldritch light, and her pupils flashed gold, suddenly, like a match struck in utter darkness.

It was then I felt the jolting pull of the void kiss my soul in greeting.

So I gave chase.

They told me later that she never ran, that I slaughtered her where she stood, hacking through her upraised arms, cleaving her skull, splitting her screaming mouth in a spout of gory blood and bone.

I swear by heaven, I heard her growl deep in her throat, and promise to savor the taste of my flesh.

**************

This last, most wretched dawn brings no warmth, and no hope.

The weak sun reclining among drifting, gray clouds is a filmy eye that gives poor witness to my insignificant demise.

The trod and murmur of the blood thirsty self-righteous grows louder, and my resigned soul stretches a sad smile across my lips; they will not find me weeping for me, but them.

A young priest drones pleas in a dead language to the celestial. His unseasoned voice is almost a light-hearted counterpoint and harmony to the bells that ring the news of my passing, a killer’s life fully extinguished with the last fading, echoing knell.

I lower my eyes from the unrelieved, unrelenting sky of slate, and see her specter still as stone among the crowd. As she smiles at me, the wound in her face opens, seeps, and her eyes turn scarlet and gold, never leaving my own.

The deep pit waits like a vulture’s nestling, and as I fall, I hear her laughter.