A slow smile creased his face; boot heels crunched in the wake of each methodical step, splintered shards of colour and glass sent strewn, scattering across the floor toward an ever growing pool of blood. He was amidst it now, black leather cutting furrows through the ebbing tide of the dying -- a sword, clasped lightly in the hand, snaked behind him with angry intent.

"You say I drink blood? That I lap like a dog upon the rivulets running bright from a man's throat?" He was closer now, a few strides only, perhaps, from his fallen opponent; the latter, face pale and wan, head hanging as he sought to prop himself against the stone balustrade of the balcony, had one hand clutched to his gut -- blood seeped in a steady flow from the joints between his fingers -- the other fumbling, sticky and red, for the hilt of a fallen sword.

The approaching killer paused now, gave a vicious kick toward his enemy, sent a spattering of his own blood splash against his face, run into his eyes.

"I care not for your blood! Keep it! Keep it all!" A few more kicks, another lunging step forward. "Your body, I leave to you. Your blood, I leave to you, but your soul... the one true portion of yourself that dwells in both worlds at once. That.... that I must have" He was astride him now, bent down now; a hand of deceptively slender proportions reaches forward, clasps the neck and raises the body from the floor. There is a pause, a silence. One booted toe sending the dropped blade ringing across the slicked stone tiles, one arm showing astonishing strength as his...

He glares into me, his eyes... grey.... no blue, no black. Then. Nothingness. Blackness, and teeth in the night. Suddenly, all brightens. I see him again, but he is grinning at me now with the horrific visage of a demon, frozen on his face as it were. Cold... so cold, and a coldness wells up into my soul. The room cools, I feel... faint. The teeth approach, the maw opens. So wide! So... and then... blackness.

With a sudden show of force, the body was flung clear over the top of the rail and sent crashing down to the marble tiles below.

"I am... a little more selfish than all that, actually..." the man remarked, half apologetically, before turning and stooping to select one amongst the hundreds of shards strewn all across the floor. Head tilting back, he held the piece to the sunlight that leaked now through the shattered emptiness above where there was once a window. For a moment he might have seemed almost in a trance, though all in an instant he suddenly slipped the piece in a pocket, his cloaked he took up from the floor and his sword vanished within.

The sound of each footstep resounded with a hollow click through the vast extent of the nave; the steady progression of the rapture and apocalypse flanked me upon either side – eyes, human and inhuman alike, glaring down upon me with the same judgmental stare. I paid care to my steps, though found my stride wandering ever further to the left with each passing aisle. The warm red and glowing amber of some poorly-informed artist's conception of hell seemed rather to beckon, a far cry from the cold blues and greens and painfully brilliant whites that stalked my passage to the right. But my eyes did not waver, bent rather upon the dancing spots and splotches of coulour all in a play before my feet, the two combining into a bewildering kaleidoscope of such confusion that it would have taken a lifetime to determine where one might end and the other begin.

A lifetime. And now I have had several. But still my steps carry me onward, toward the only one being that still drew breath in that godforsaken place. Aside from him, we were alone.

“And so you blaspheme even now, and in such a place as this?” The voice came rolling through the pillared expanse in a soft baritone; as much a question as a statement. But there was no hint of anger, only the sad regret of one who has waited a great many years for only the worst of fates.

“Forgive me, father – my thoughts betray me...” the second speaker might have continued, but the older man cut him off almost at once – though again, in the same quiet voice.

“Forgive you? No, my son; forgiveness for you is a task that is best left to God, and when that day comes your years in full might finally be numbered.” His features, as he turned about to confront the slow approach, very much matched the voice: soft and round, yet old with the wisdom of years hidden deep within eyes that still saw clearly, the depth and breadth of life still vibrant in his tone.

The approaching man kept his head bowed; little might be made out of his features save for a head of dark brown – almost black – hair, pulled taut and trailing a little ways past his neck. His head was bare, and the remainder of his dress was equally as dull. Blacks and browns and greys all that might be visible; the better part of a thin scabbard protruded from beneath the low hem of his riding cloak. He wore no spurs, only a pair of polished boots rubbed to such a sheen that it might have been suspected they had never once encountered a stirrup iron.

“And even that...” the priest continued, breaking the silence – for priest he clearly was, though his dress too was quite plain; contrasting blacks and whites and nothing more – “is doubtful indeed, save what atonement you can seek of your own. Both for what was, and what is, and what is surely yet to come.” With these last words he gazed levelly into the eyes of his adversary, something akin almost to defiance flashing briefly within.

He looked at me then, and it was a gaze that pierced my very soul; I felt the urge to claw at my throat, to pull and pry away the talons that seemed to have latched to my neck, to my innards, to my legs as they dragged me down... down... down to join them in an untold depth below. I forced myself onwards. One step. Two steps.

“Fire, brimstone, sulphur and death!” The priest raised both hands now, the light in his eyes flashing to a real and true glow of their own, stabbing outward and arcing to meet the silent man's downcast gaze.

But now I finally glanced up. Met his gaze. Saw the pity entwined with anger, the rage lost somewhere in a sea of love, the overwhelming conviction... it burned... but I kept forward. Step by burning step, until it felt that the very tiles upon which I walked had become a fiery lake, the air ash and each breath a jagged pain.

“I... am.... sorry...” The words seemed to choke in my mouth of their own accord, even as I struggled to stretch forth my left hand. He did not resist. Not physically, at least. Not as any other man may have, but in the very moment that my fingers wrapped about his throat, and I felt my nails dig down into the soft flesh and the hanging jowls press and shift as I lifted....

All vanished in a swirling eddy of colour and light, the figures from the windows seeming to come into life and charge, rushing with a great shout upon us from all sides. We stood there together, a moment passed. An hour. An age. And meanwhile all below us the raging torrent of war passed by, seething masses and swarms of lives throwing themselves upon one another with reckless abandon. Even here, so far above the plain as to see the land curve and vanish into obscurity at the furthest reaches of the naked eye, I still might hear the clash and clamour of death and bloodshed below.

My hand was still tight about his neck, and my soul I felt welling up within me in a great onrushing that I knew I could never contain... yet he spoke. Spoke to me one last time, though the words now were withered, the voice fading as the life seeped from his mortal form.

“Perhaps, in the end, what you seek will be found... though you may try to devour yourself a score of times hence, still... I have done what I can, and what will be will be, though not in a way either might have foretold.”

“Goodbye, old man.”

“It is your only hope, and my last hope, and her final wish.”

“I will not fail you again...”

And then it was lost. Trailing away into a spiral, lost in some chink of my mind that I have forgotten. And I was filled, filled with the glorious and insatiable spite and hunger and overwhelming cold. Such a cold! Such a hunger! It gnawed upon my belly as though I had been picking upon naught but the shriveled bones of the dead since birth. I relished it. The strength, the hunger. I would enjoy this one... slowly... I thought, even as I began to unhinge my jaw.

Suddenly, my eyes flashed open. I gave a start and a cry, jumping up in a panic as I found myself staring into the empty whites of the dead priest's eyes. Then, in that very instant it seemed, the weight of all I had been running from for so long came crashing down upon my shoulders with the crushing finality of the insurmountable. I shuddered, coughed, sobbed... and then, finally, for the second time in just one lifetime, found myself wracked with tears.