• It was, in some ways, lyrical. The way he entranced his audiences, unleashing their salivating hopes and dreams in just one vehement orchestra of words. He smiled, and everyone smiled. He slept, and everyone slept. He wanted someone dead, so did everyone else. People worshipped him; adored him; obeyed him. A small, and generally insane, fraction despised him. I was a part of that “clinically mad” coterie.

    Yeah, before you ask… I was a kid. A stupid, naïve, self-proclaimed warrior of a kid. I was forever full of ego; of a deadly amount of confidence… my bloodstream simmered with an omnipresent bellicosity, and my heart, or what I preserved of it, was constricted and confined to the starving prison of lust.

    Life in those years was bullshitted bliss. The rodents that remained of our population lived a tragically ignorant dream, asleep from morning to night and forever trapped in the depths of their own subconscious wants. Scared; drugged into contentment.

    As long as Erebos is in power, we are safe, they told themselves and anyone who would listen, day after day, their tongues molding wearily to the lie. Safe from what? From reality?
    Erebos was a man of neither large nor small stature. He appeared plain to the naked eye, and to some (mostly me), even pathetic. No one knew where he’d come from, and no one cared, because they were all stupid little fools. But he began a revolution that ended in the succumbing of the entire world to him and his ad-libbed poetry, his cheap dime-store fables, his woven tapestries of words with no relevance on his intent that somehow managed to convince the universe of anything in the world. He began a revolution that changed the planet into a perfect and oblivious hallucination called Xandias.

    I loathed it, utterly and unabashedly, and I didn’t even need a reason to. The frigid detestation was innate.

    When I was sixteen, I joined the rebel forces. The senile delinquents. The only ones, the only ones in the world, who understood the true malevolence of Erebos, and endeavored with all their passion to end his regime.

    There was Columbus, the leader. Columbus’ steel blue eyes were constantly flicking about, ravishing everything with a certain paranoid hunger. When his fingers touched a sword, someone would turn out to be dead. Columbus did not speak often, only when he needed to, and that was usually to tell us how to go about surviving. Once, I asked him where he came from. Sucking desperately on a cigarette, bleeding out smoke from his mouth and nose, he turned and looked at me, his face deep and fraught with enigma against the falling silver snow, as though I had just asked him the most ridiculous question in the world. “Everywhere,” he’d answered, and then crunched away to some unknown and unreached destination.

    Then there was Fletcher, whose tongue was always seizing every word within reach, and who miraculously lived through everything even though his inefficiency was blatant to the point of being almost pitiful. Fletcher was enthusiastic about everything from women to explosions to death, but there always seemed to be something missing from him; something I could never explain, but that convinced me that his constant joie de vivre was all a façade.

    There were others, but only a few that were truly important – Machi, a blind boy younger than me but older than everyone in infinite years; Sudi, the twenty-year-old bombshell whose inhuman stealth and baffling prowess left everyone in a daze, and who died in combat two months after I met her; Killian, a man who had an unexplained but murderously passionate hatred for Erebos that far exceeded my own; and Isaiah, the oldest of us all, with his frail silver hair and his frail silver eyes and his frail silver heart, whose sole purpose was to heal us, both physically and emotionally, in ways we could never fully comprehend.

    But above them all was her. Her, and her hair that was as biting as obsidian but that she always claimed was brown; her, and her derringer, which she named and always called “Esme;” her, and the sizzling spell she held over my soul and my existence.

    Nissa.

    It was several days before I first met Nissa, but when I did, something inside of me rapturously burned to the ground and never grew back again. Everything about her ignited something within me that was deliciously foreign, like a new language to a child. Her lethalness, her wit, her elegant silence. Her smile – which was never completely so – forced me into numbness. And yet, above it all, there were her eyes. There was something very terrifying about them. Buried deep within them was a burning and violent flame that never went out. They lit up the swarthy skin of her face with a ghostly and ethereal conflagration. It would feel like every piece of me; every thought and every memory and every fear, was being roasted to the point of fiery decay whenever I would look at her. Her emotions seemed to flicker in and out of existence. And I loved her almost as much as I completely and utterly feared her.

    –

    The seasons did not change in Xandias, but on that day, the sky was ablaze with the saffron kaleidoscope of autumn. There were no clouds, but it was snowing. I sat outside of the base, crouching beneath a long-dead tree, a cigarette between my cold-sliced lips. Footsteps chattered behind me and I turned nonchalantly, my eyes roving up to be incinerated by none other than Nissa’s.

    “Hello,” she murmured, her voice like oil over a river.

    “’Lo,” I answered back, hiding my skittishness behind a visage of indifference, and looked away.

    “How’re you doing?” she asked.

    “All right I guess,” I replied, sucking haplessly on the cigarette. “You?”

    “All right,” she shrugged.

    Silence. The snow fell in feathery fists.

    “We’re all going to die one day, you know,” she whispered.

    “I know,” I nodded.

    “Erebos won’t be stopped,” she continued. “Not by us, anyway.”

    My head swiveled sharply around to face her, something like rage erupting inside of me.

    “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I demanded. “Of course we’re going to stop him.”

    “No we’re not,” she retorted gently, pulling her collar up around her cheeks. “You know it, and I know it, and Esme knows it, and Columbus knows it. Everyone knows it. And yet we keep fighting him anyway. Do you know why?”

    “Of course I do.”

    “It’s because,” she obviously pierced through my lie in an instant, “we want to.”

    “…that’s it?” I scoffed.

    “That’s it,” her head cocked slightly upwards to regard the falling snow. “Look at the snowflakes. They’re like bullets. Bullets that never hit you. I wish they’d hit me. Just once. Then it could be over and done and some other idiot could take over for me.”

    I said nothing.

    After a moment or so, she asked me if I had a cigarette. I said yes, and gave her one, and lit it for her. She did not thank me. We sat out there in silence, until she finished it. Then she flicked it into the snow, stood up, and turned to walk away.

    “Viva la vida,” she said, and as she walked silently and flawlessly away, humming the flimsy entrails of an ancient folk song, I realized that her voice had no desire for life to live on at all.

    And now she is dead. She left Esme in my possession. I’ve told myself I’m saving the last bullet for something special, but that has remained undisclosed, and I think it always will.