They came for him one day and found him ousted. What remained was husk, ashes and shadows.

This is the tale of how much a man can wither and what can stand the test of time's tortures.

Allow me to grant you entrance to a special sanctuary.

Whether or not you choose to trod where Angels wouldn't dare, is up to you.

-cold-cold-blistering-chill- soaks up behind your eyes and refuses to leave.

Breathy crystals of ice peak out from where a tongue once lain.

It's getting dark, much too dark to see.

Pandora's Hollow.

---------------

Hello lovelies, he might have said.

If shape and form were things of bone and bread.

Yet, between the you and the I(eye), we're somewhere in the in-between.

Not here nor there, (they hadn't heard hide nor hair...), yet in the ether. (Either he's gone and lost in memory or he's been trounced by the fades.) So, where might we be if not in your living room, snuggled up in your chair?

Well she's all alone in his head, counting the stars as they blink out of existence and listening as the rivers shutter and dry. (Dry sense of whit, of comedy, of self - so bad, bad, bad!)

Lapping at the joy he'd had, she siphons all the emotion out of his tank(his soul), storing it away in a far-away trove of treasures (lamentations and hopes.) "Oh but no!" he'd cry out, contrary. "We haven't yet sliced off that last bit of hope, in the corner!" So he would point a shaking finger into the darkness of his mind, eyes cracking and peeling away.

So she(and they and him and the bad ones), whisk off to thieve away all that he was and could have been, to take all the 'all' that comprised of him, leaving him barren and scooped out.

Much to their chagrin, once they reach their destination(hell, not heaven), they shrink backwards, frantically clawing through his mind scape, hoping to flee. Yet the monsters that dwell within, they are ravenous. They haven't fed in so very, very long.

"So, now, I ask..." he says, smitten and coy, his hot breath acrid. "When you dip your hand into the darkness, into that opaque absence, what normally returns in your open palm? Roses and lost loves? Hopes and hoping's core? Not this time, lovely - for you've tried to fell a tree, most thick! One that has been rising since before the dawn of demons. You've touched a 'sickness' and what's left of you, I ask?"

And they all scream, the shes and the hes. Ghastly visions of skeletons and monsters, all clawing at the flesh, the brain, the sinew and the bone - anywhere to crack away from the hell they've stumbled into. A hell for hellions.

And now, from back there, cradled in that stark blackness, a face forms.

Face of an angel, a devil, a Legend, a 'mare.

That of 'Cyren.'

And he laughs, deep beckoning laughs, as flames crowd his face and melt his flesh.

And what remains after this deep melting, you might ask?

Oh, but you know and have always known.

That 'monstrosity', that 'nightmare', that thing that curls up with you in bed and whispers damnation in your ear.

And then, belching out, the beast intones...