dancing out with the moonlit knight

It's dark, in the Praetorium. The moonlight glints emptily on the tiles. Two are there, two who can perhaps see better than most, through the gloom, and then again two whose vision is perhaps most clouded by the drear.

Their minds, somewhat unfortunately, do not work like those of other Blades. The Core Crystals, where the dichotomy truly folds and slices, definitely do not work like those of other Blades. Neither will let them die in peace. Neither will let them live in peace.

Will they

even

let them live

together?

"Gonna have to kill you someday," says Malos, grunting between each word as Minoth palms hungrily at his ironclad chest. "You're too...damn..."

"Human?" asks Minoth, lightly. His own chest is bare, scars that would be grotesque to anyone else and then again probably are to present company stretching in a spider's ominous web away from the Core Crystal. It's been lifted up, resettled, reset. You won't kill me, thinks Minoth. They didn't kill me. I'll kill myself first.

And yet...no. I'll never know if they wanted to, if they could, but... You're the only one who could, aren't you? If you're God. And God's the only one who can, but he can't. Rather, he won't. He won't waste his time.

"You'd never kill me." No? "You love me too much for that."

Implicitly, you're human. You're weak and you're facile just like the rest of us. Or don't you want to be?

Minoth has to want him to want himself to be. The willful suspension of disbelief necessitates it. Sends the instructions along the pipeline. No choice but to execute.

Well, that is to say, when someone who wants to die and someone who's made to kill get together, can you even call it love? It's not even lust. It's just ragged animal magnetism gnawing fleshless at its bits. After all, what is sex, or this inhuman half-human approximation, but a dance of death? What is living but dying? What is creation but destruction?

Stupid questions. They're stupid questions. All the world is a stupid question, asking, what if things were horrible? What would you do then?

You would find someone else who had resigned themselves to watching the wreck and you'd wriggle your fingers, tooth by nail, around the crags and cracks, the chinks, in their armor, and you'd try to touch them.

What is there that is inherently, intrinsically, tolerable? Not pure, not good, not joyous, not worthwhile, merely live-and-let-livable. Something that won't literally bite you in the ass later.

There is nothing. If you think about anything long enough, study its faults and its flaws, it will become horrid and evil and blighting upon your eyes. Humans were made to hate, and only those who are wholly separate become above that basest feeling. Because if God himself made the humans...well then. The humans can never again lift up a lilywhite god.

"I don't love you," Malos says, but why would you touch the inside of another being if you didn't love? If you weren't curious? Circle back around, and it's humans who use other humans like trash, without meaning or motive. So then, Malos must hate Minoth. Must hate him powerfully, terribly much. If he doesn't love him.

There must be a reason. For this, there must be a reason. Malos needs Minoth to tear out his entire insides and fuck them into ribbons, because in there, in his destiny...there is no reason.

Who has the power, in this devil-damned power struggle? Who is the older, who is the eternal? Who is the wise one, and who is the fool? Quite the opposite, really, of who is wise and who is foolish. They're both pitifully wretched.

"Maybe it'll be me who kills you. Eh? Because you..."

Malos hates his own corporeal self more than he ever has, because a howl rips through him, then, in the bleakest blackest night.

"You're not human enough. And you never will be."