It is a wretched, clinical necessity—a surgery of the spirit performed without the mercy of ether. I am a scavenger of the soul’s last gasps, a cosmic bailiff sent to collect what the flesh can no longer hold. The poets prattle of silver waters; they do not account for the way a spirit clings to its ruinous house of bone like a leech to a dying horse.
My task is the filtration of truth. I separate the clean water of an essence from the wastage of lies poured over it by the world. To my sight, the pageantry of history is a transparent fraud. There is no distinction between the knight in his white cloak, entombed beneath the rotting masonry of a corrupt church, and the silver-winged pilot whose metal bird became his pyre. The queen, condemned by a jury of jackals, is the exact peer of the young barrister sacrificed to the hungry waters of jealousy. They are all the same: currency spent by the greedy, doomed to remain forever young and forever damned in the eyes of the living.
But my eyes are not those eyes. I break the locks of their cages with a cold, Victorian precision.
To the architects of these cages: keep your heads held high for now. But know that I’ll follow you into every dark corner of your history until I’ve emptied your prisons. No matter how deep you bury the truth, I will be the shadow at your heel.
Watch now, for he is here. The triple-shell coffin—lead, oak, and elm—has been cast off like a useless skin. I rest my head on his shoulder; it is his turn to comfort me, as I have comforted him through the long, rain-slicked years of his exile.
I choose him. I choose him for he showed me more compassion than the living, and more love than any man who breathes. He is no longer a ghost; he is a blinding light, a twin soul carved from the same defiant stone. There are no moans, no suggestive exchanges—only a unity in spirit more precious than any treasure of the mortals. I swore I’d never leave the side of the wronged, and he swore he’d always stay.
Before the light consumes the room, I set the table. It is a meal from a world we both remember—medallions of turkey seared in butter, simmered in a velvet reduction of almond milk and flour, scented with the curcuma and coriander of a lost Empire. It is a recipe of precision, served with pasta on the side, just as the high-society houses once demanded. It is the taste of a truth that survived the water.
The living believe they own the narrative, but the dead don’t lie, and their truth is a weight you cannot carry. Look upon the vacuum we leave behind and understand that the silence you relied on has finally broken.
The dead don't die—but they are finished with you.
