Stagan

1 TENEBRIS Imperial Galactic Date – 136511/11.22 An explosion of light leaped outwards into the pitch dark surroundings, as the man in military uniform lit another cigarette. With a flick of his wrist, the lighter closed again with a click, and the darkness engulfed him once more, sparing the immediate area of his fiery little companion. Inhaling deeply, he leaned back against the oppressive obelisk which he had been stood, sat, led, or leant against for the past 15 hours. In this world of complete darkness, he had only the cold stability of this obelisk, and the dry taste of his cigarettes to draw sanity from. It was a prison planet

Gracing a hallowed soul with your breath, as it warms the deep of the halls unending, as it softly sleeps itself to death. Cradling a young heart with time on its hands, gently caressing the layers of doubt and misfortune, soothing all where it lands. Beating and throbbing. A heavy pounding from within as the stress, it builds, and the pressure so huge, the spirit condenses. Hardened, solid. A monolith, a monument to hard times. What is this spirit now? But a structure of accidental design. Flowing so fast, your lovesick blood, as it ferries mixed emotions of violet and red, as it so longs to be more than life-giving mud. St

Perception. Sensation. Pleasure. Pain. Is that pain you feel? How can you tell pain is real? Maybe it's just a tickle and reality is merely fickle. You can percieve it how you like. You are in control, after all. Or are you? When pleasure overruns the senses, can you really tell who is who? A man of action? A man of thought? Feel it or do it? See it or live it? Just beg for one more hit, it's great, that one little bit. Perception. Black and white, biased sight, Right and wrong, Nazi anthem or hippie sing-song? Don't tell me it's evil or good, pure white snowflakes or thick stinking mud. We don't know why and who sho

Sick of people. Sick of people talking. Sick of people walking. Sick of having to do it in return. If only for them to confirm, his ugly life. Where desparity is rife. "I'll give away my mouth" He said. Give it to the poor, the hungry, the sick. No one wants to look like a selfish prick. No one cares, as long as its given. So he gave away his mouth, to those who need it. So a petty social fire might be re-lit. No longer did he have to talk. So people around him too, didnt have to talk. It was golden silence anew. Nothing was expected from him. He could silence others on a whim. Give them a look with his plain, empty face,

Stretching out before me. A land of opportunity, a land of hate. A land of serenity, of choices too late. I want it all. A dominion unexplored and new to me. So many wonderous wonders for one to see. The opportunity to run and hide, escape from the turmoil, turn the tide. To peer beneath the civilised veneer. To grasp my life and bring it near. To engage a whole new frontier. To run. I will meet the hate on open ground. Intolerance, the bastard child of ignorance. Prejudice, deliberate entrapment of common sense. Fear, the source, the fuel and ultimately the cause. I will wipe them clean. I will show them what i mean. Into

Will i find her? Lurking on the periphery of my life, is she waiting? An ending to a story untold. So that i might one day grow bold. To find her. Riding the tide of anguish and pain, Drying myself outside in the rain. The shoreline seems so far away. The shoreline where she waits, come what may. Or does she? Why wait for one so cold. Why wait for a soul so old. Aged and wheathered by circumstances beyond my control. Could she ever love me? To love such a weight of memory, flawed and scarred in all ways. I see only now through a dim haze. Does she see me now? Does she flinch at my sight? Frightened by my illusion of right.

Did they warn you when you were young? Did they tell you before you had sung? Of course not, you went on singing. You sang of your heart and your spirit but they crushed it, and your soul went with it. Telling you who to be, how to be. Telling you why you cannot see. In secret you went on, intent on singing. They couldnt reach you there on the face of the deep within your mind. It would be more than they could bear. Complexity intolerable, form unclear, to bind. Forced down a road you dont know, following a voice you dont recognise as your own. If only you could sink so low as to recognise the voice as your own. Echo it. You

The Great Hall resonated with the bellowing of drunken laughter, the pounding of mugs on tough, granite tables and the occasional roar of fury as brawls began. A new age, they had said, an era of innovation and industry had begun, they had said. Kaloth saw before him adequate evidence to prove them wrong, for this was the same as the last age, the same as yesterday and the day before. And that is how it will inevitably remain. Dwarfkin: Drunk, angry and ignorant; just is their way. How anybody could look upon such layabouts and profess that this warrants a rollback of the calendar was beyond him. So maybe some particularly un-dwarf like engin