Golden Scapegoat's Mutterings

8 The two gods brush past each other by the shoulder along the bridge — he imagines such a scene. One is the blinding light that rises from infinite void, and the other is blackened blood coursing along parched earth. One dons a flaming crown while prostrating, and the other weeping tears of sulfur amidst hymns. "This happened a thousand years ago" — the elder he imagines says to the children. Words became flesh. 9 The sinner swallows the faint light behind bars, the prison so dark he can't see past his own hand. He doesn't remember who locked him up here. A trail of black ants crawls past his black garb in darkness. The lamb's skull murmurs to itself: If we had fangs and claws, you wouldn't be locked in here now. "Enough," he musters in a moldered voice from the depths of his corroded throat, "the sky is but an abyss darker than a prison." "You and I are nothing more than slaves to a distant dream." 10 The sinner was once gardener to an epitaph. The world was still young then, and the final words of the deceased had also just opened their eyes. "The night uses its tide to cover us, the reciprocal light being its rhythm." "Sunlight wavers between movement and stoppage. That transparent flash was also once someone's life." The dream is everything that the dream forgot. People are shadows of people's words. 11 The sinner and the lamb are like two shredded pieces of paper: Torn apart by dreams of day, bound together in blood by dark of night. Destroyed before it all begins, living in shame after it all ends. Letters have long been etched into eternity — that fate was, is, and will be written by the sinner's own sword, dipped in blood-ink. The one who carries out the sacrifice is also part of the sacrificial offering. They all no longer have faces. They all no longer have names.