Plays With Matches (The Duelists)

The Duelists

A last dance

One last goodbye to the lover, one final kiss

And the piano and the saxophone lament goodbye

The people file out into the wet neon city

A wave farewell

The cab drives off through the yellow street lights

You slosh through the puddles, coat pulled tight

The chill augments as a red siren goes by

A phone call

“Hello?” As he speaks, silence; your voice would tremble

From all the hatred, all the sibling-akin love long ago

The time has come, you feel your firearms fastened close

A final walk

Screaming, crying, arguing, moaning sounds

The city’s life-blood is the people inside of it

You are but a virus in floating through the vein

A cemetery

Your final journey through a dewy night graveyard; you think

For every soul who dies a new one takes up arms

You suppose another soldier will be born in the morning

A stranger

A familiar silhouette blots out the lights of a bar

On the sidewalk you finally stop under a light

No traffic disturbs the stillness

A reuniting

It’s been a while I know You haven’t changed You have

How’s life been I missed you Me too Some things never change

I hate to do this We have no choice Let’s finish this

A showdown

The click-click BANG zoom BANG BANG

BANG BMM BANG -thud- -thud- -kack- thud-

Tck-tck-tck -thud- shatter…

A new morning

One pair of eyes close and the red turns to grey

One grins like a devil, one rests like an angel

One new soul is born into the world to take their place

A lesson

The survivor doesn’t matter, whichever one, be it him or you

They stand tall in the morning by shattered glass and blood

Over their enemy the duelist can still find no solace or peace

OVERTURE to Nocturn, Second Movement (Part Ten)

Friend continues to walk through the desert and stare at the grooves in the sand. Nothing else to do. No games to play with no company to play with. The desert wasn't so pretty here in the maze anymore. He missed his friend Roderick. What was there on earth to do now?

For the first time perhaps ever, he realizes, a fool contemplates destiny, standing in the sun upon a boulder in the shade of a canyon. For the first time perhaps ever, a fool is solumn.

Friend continues to walk through the desert and stare at the grooves in the sand. A fool no more.

---

Days later he happens to catch up to a wandering soldier, the puppeteer of the strange men. He wears the beginnings of a white beard, and his dust-filmed uniform's coat is slung over his shoulder as he marches onward.

"Where are you going to, might I ask?" Friend asks as he tugs on the man's belt line.

"To a perfect world... wherever it may be." His eyes are shut.

"A strange way to get there, might I say."

The man kneels down, opens his eyes and looks up at the humanoid's face: "I can take myself to any world, all I need to do is but imagine... but I may only go to one more place... and they I may never, ever go anywhere again. My travels will be over."

He stands up, and nobly looks down at the creature. "I remember you. You seemed a loyal thing. You may... come with me."

Charlemagne is worried, truth be told. For the first time he is depending on the company of another for protection. All his powers are spent, all but two. The rest he has lent to soldiers on the field of battle, in return for their autonomy, their souls, while the others have been wasted away. His gifts are no more. He has one shot to imagine himself into paradise, and to decide what that paradice is. The final gift? Nobody may know for certain.

OVERTURE to Nocturn, Second Movement (Part Nine)

By the time the Paxian forces arived, the sun was piercing through the black clouds, making the world down below look like an ancient painting. The scene the artist concieced was this:

In the horizon of the desert, desert in a surreal sky of browns and golds and blacks like an autumn puddle, desert of sand and stone, lay on one end a beautiful wall of cathedrals, while on the other side lay cliffs and craigs in a maze...

In the middle the sands are riddled with all sorts of strange beasts of unspeakable beauty, mangled horribly. One man in a bloodied white and gold Paxian uniform walks parallell to the city and the maze, down the center, away from the scene.

An army approaches from the maze, and a city guard led by a mighty priest approach from the city.

In the center of the painting is a small, disheveled creature, cradling the head of an officer. Their lips move, the tiny humanoid speaking in a panic and the officer in the calm of a dying man. As the officer's eyes close, he utters one word, and the creature appears to understand.

Father Aequitas in his ceremonial robes approaches from the left. Captain Mausser approaches from the right. They congradulate eachother for their sound victories, and pay special heed to the hero who led the fool and battled countless demons on the way.

The fool looks up at the two, Roderick's head in his lap.

"My name is not fool. My name is Friend."

OVERTURE to Nocturn, Second Movement (Part Eight)

The battle rages on and the skies of the desert outside the walls of the Cathedral darkens to deep gold with blackened clouds. The fool called Plague by the onlookers from the city walls tear apart the enemies oblivious to his presence. The torrents of motley benefactors regroup by the front gates, where the battlepriest swoops a great sword from a high craig. Amidst all the chaos are two men in uniform waiting for the storm of war to subside from the natural trench they lay in.

Charlemagne dreams of his grandfather and the red truck years and years ago... ages. He thinks of Kayla's face. He smiles. He doesn't want to remember the bad parts. He closes his eyes and drifts while the battle wages on, and a sea of green glass, filled with sentient golden artifacts and indescribable effigies moving with autonomy, and rose colored humanoids with amorphous sacs flowing behind them... a beautiful, deadly, and deafeningly loud scene above the trenches. He dreams of a world of his imagined perfection.

He doesn't notice it as a benefactor's root-like jade fingers penetrate the ribcage of Roderick, and his trance is broken only by the screaming of the poor man. Charlemagne snaps out of it in time to realized his lulled state from a many eyed plant-like benefactor. Things run slow...

Charlemagne punches the stroking members of the benefactor out of his own face with his right hand, and then from the ribs of Roderick with his left, back now to the creature... throws himself backwards, crushing the eyes of the monster on the ground... It sends him images of peace... comfort... NOT IN THE DAMN MOOD, BURN IN HELL... Plucking out the eyeballs... planting his fingers inside the creature's sockets, and tearing apart the soft tissue inside the hardened jade...

Roderick clasped his hand over his chest, oozing blood, while trying to hold his stomach shut... "Get the fool here now", he pleaded to a half delirious man kneeling over a mangled monstrosity.

OVERTURE to Nocturn, Second Movement (Part Seven)

Roderick watched in awe as the team moved with stunning ease through the flanks of benefactors. These creatures in the wave seemed to pour together like a green, glassy water and pour themselves into their enemies. The ten men brought along with him showed no signs of fear as they unleashed strange, unheard of powers upon their opponents, each one a one-man battalion. Not to be ignored, the fool tore through ranks upon ranks with unnatural strength, killing legions of creatures that did not even heed his presence.

Besides them, there was of course Roderick, the overseer of the fool, and the strange man with the white hair, who seemed to be overseeing the squad of men. The two least powerful people here, by the looks of it.

"So which company are you from?"

"Shh- concentratin' ", said the man as he intently squinted and stared at the men. In his white Paxian uniform he looked a bit unkempt, although regal at the same time. Squinting in his white five o'clock, he looked like if he looked away all his men would just drop dead.

"Funny how we're the ones heading this troupe and we're the two who can't do a damn thing. Powerless, you know what I mean?"

"Huh?" The man looks confused at Roderick and at that moment the ten men suddenly stand idle and are promptly drowned by liquid Benefactors.

"Shit"