and the light dies down on broadway

He writes. Until the ether lamp burns out and he's just left seeing by the shades of his own purple glow, he writes. The prose flows fast and he fears his quill won't be able to catch it all but after all why should he be afraid of that, what's so great up in your head that mere mortals can't catch it?

Mere mortals. You'll grow old, and you'll die. But you'll write, before you go.

Will they even remember you? You'll be the first to tell Addam's story, the only one who cares so much about it - and maybe no one should, even, because you know you're flanderizing - but even then, what if they don't? What if Vez's memoir, when he finally comes out with it - came out with it, I should say, it's been many too many years, even if it's only been fifty, because what's time, to a Flesh Eater - is all that sticks?

There's room for two, isn't there? Two interpretations, two bolsterings of the reputation? What are you afraid of?

He's afraid of his own hands. Of his jealousy, of his envy, of all the sins that Torna took to a cloudy, watery grave as she died that he's still got because he's still alive. And he shouldn't be.

How old is he? How many years has it been? Why doesn't he know?

He doesn't know because most days he doesn't leave the bed. If he leaves the bed, he can reach the quills. Tips sharp, always sharp, kept sharp, sharp enough to draw blood. Ether, rather, because that's what runs in the circular, circuitous veins around his wrists. Convenient, that.

Yes, afraid of his own hands. Afraid of the ghosts of Addam's hands clamping over his shoulders, grounding him into the world and saying you are here, you are alive, you did not die on that operating table, and I want you to be glad of it because I am glad of it.

Glad of what? What on earth has he ever brought of value? Amalthus didn't see it, and Amalthus was a very smart man. Was? Is? Is he still alive?

Addam was not, exactly, a very smart man. And how many years has it been since Addam died?

Minoth doesn't know. This shack he lives in, squalorous and stupid, edged away somewhere on...Gormott? Not Coeia or Spessia, because that would be impossible, and not Leftheria, because Addam would never have let it happen, but perhaps some other second-rate dump-heap Titan out in the middle of nowhere.

Maybe Malos sank them all. Maybe Amalthus sank them all. Maybe they're all gone.

That rankles, doesn't it. Torna sinking was only the first act, or perhaps the second scene after Coeia, opening on to Spessia the third, before the second act of uglier consequence could begin. All the world a stage and all its people only players in Amalthus's black-and-white grey-moralled chess game.

Not a single wit of Addam and Lora's stockless faith was more than brick in the staunch little seawall that was doomed from the very start to be slapped down upon by the breaking wave. You knew that. Before Mythra had even been awakened, you knew that - before Malos, even.

You knew what Amalthus was capable of, from and in where his convictions were rooted, and yet you still stood aside and prayed for the victory of hope and glory. Preyed on their downfall, more like, because you only serve to benefit when there's tragedy to write about.

And how many times can you write about the same thing? Here people dying, here people killing themselves, here people thinking about killing themselves because they couldn't stop the others from dying. It's not all that nuanced. There was a reason Malos talked about life and death.

He was the Architect's first and only true son. No need for despair to drive him, he only functioned upon the input of the truth. There it is, yon auteur: there is only the good, and the bad. And most of it's bad. Stupid of you, Minoth, to believe that there's so much richness in this world. You always used to think you had such a handle on all of it. But what did you know?

That's the crux of it. Repetitive rhetoric, so easy to write on and on about those who wandered to wonder above their station. That's why he'll never publish it. Nobody wants to read about people who were pathetic, people who died, people who failed. They only want heroes. No one wants to look in the mirror and see a monster staring back.

Minoth smashed the mirror. Again, he doesn't know what time it is, in the grand scheme of things, if he even knows what hour it is day to day, but he knows that that happened long ago. Or does he? It could have been yesterday. The shards are just as sharp.

He would know. He's tried it. Tried them. What a drug, to see your own life leave your body. To know, the world is healing, because I am leaving it. Because I am leaving it alone.

The thought comes, why don't you tear it up? That first page of your rattiest notebook, the one you keep tearing out and replacing, the one with all your plans, your hopes and dreams, scrawled on it in fifteen different fonts. You don't remember anything, your memory's all gone to shit, old man, so if you simply remove it from the record, you'll never do it.

In other words, you're just an actor on the concept's stage. You have no substance of your own.

But what is all this, then, that I've written in these past half-quarter-eighth hours? Thousands of words, and I did not steal them from anyone else. I know when my genius is my own.

I am Minoth, and then again maybe I'm not Minoth anymore. But my oeuvre is my own. No one else will write what I have the way I have. And maybe someone, somewhere, long after I'm dead and gone, will treasure it.

He writes. Until the ether lines fade out and he's just left seeing blind by the afterimages of what once was there, he writes. The prose comes in drips and dribbles and he fears the idiotic impulse that leads him to even try to pen it, and overstate his importance before the world, but it's in his head, so it's got to come out.

Maybe once it's all gone, then he can leave. Then he can be gone. Then he can be done.