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A Charlatan's Soliloquy to Dead Deities
🕑 Added 2021-12-24 22:00:01 +0000 UTCLook at me now,
The Traveling Talespinner,
The Parable’s Prologue,
The Charlatan of Stories,
Look at me standing here now,
Looking over the graves of gods.
Look around.
your palace in the sky has been pulled down to earth,
Golden walls and silver steps burnt and charred.
What few remnants left will be taken and remade into better usage.
Your corpses lay strewn around.
Even in death, your bodies dwarf us,
but we shall make good use of them.
None of you fools heeded my warning,
and I collected an army of your making.
Soldiers and warriors all carrying grudges gifted by you,
fighting to return all the hate and vitriol.
Today, we finally returned this curse to you
paid in full by a fool who led an army of fools
to topple a fiefdom of frauds.
All I am left now is one question to ponder,
and this is one to ponder by myself away from the festivities.
When a mortal has killed
what was thought to be immortal
what does true glory mean then?
If eternity is false
and the mortal has proven themselves
equal to the immortal,
then what use were you divinities
withholding your miracles
and gifting us nothing but tragedies?
I would ask you to answer me, my old and former gods,
but your corpses have given me cold comfort,
and that is all I ever wanted from you towards the end, our fated end.
Though since I have survived the final battle unexpectedly,
cheating destiny yet again,
I find myself pleasantly having a future.
How annoying that I now have to plan for such a thing again.
I suppose I shall begin this new chapter
with the burdensome knowledge that you and yours
will never hurt me and mine ever again.
Looking down at the festivities,
I will admit that I lied yet again.
Even though I deceived you in life,
and that I have no regret whatsoever to those deeds,
I still find lying to the dead distasteful,
for which you dead gods are all now an eternal part.
I confess that I don’t find this new future annoying at all now
at the prospect of planning a life
with those idiots and fools down there.
Not at all.
Comrades tied together by shared hatred of you
and tightened through shared hardships on our quest,
I will thank you for only one thing.
I thank you, all you arrogant deities, for being so loathsome and cruel
that made unifying together against you so easy for us.
We will have to rebuild.
Your death throes were quite violent,
and you have built a tomb and memorial
for your deaths into the very landscape.
I shall take great pleasure in erasing the memory of you
when we rework the land to be better than what you wrought.
Who knows?
With enough time and the knowledge we have now,
we could create miracles just like you!
We already crafted a curse, a weapon, an army powerful enough
to dethrone you from infinity.
Now that we have peace and no masters,
we can choose to create instead of desperately destroying.
Perhaps we will be gods of our own to others,
but I’ll make damn sure that we are better ones than you.
I hope that we do not become gods.
I hope that we remain mortal,
beginning and ending like the grains of a harvest,
reaped so that a new field can be grown.
Individually, each seed so very mortal,
but collectively, that cycle of planting so very eternal.
If eternity is obtainable
and the mortal struggle shrugged off,
does that make everything that happened
leading to the end of suffering that much more painful?
A could’ve been, a should’ve been, a would’ve been,
all these regrets grow that much starker, that much darker,
when the formerly-weak gains the power they wish they had then.
I do not regret killing you.
I only regret I could not have slain you all earlier to save what I had then,
but regrets are a madness best avoided.
Look at me now,
philosophizing to the quiet graves of newly-dead gods!
If I’m not careful,
I may become as useless as you were.
I best leave now and join the festivities.
My friends and my family await me,
and I am done with all of you,
you gasps of the ghosts of gone gods.
Ah, wordplay,
a guilty pleasure of mine.
That I allow myself as I giddily gloat upon all your graves!
The deed is done!
The deed is done!
The deed is finally done,
and a cold comfort I said this final battle was
to have this deicide be done,
but I lied!
Yet again!
How joyful I am to know
you will not darken our lives again
with your arrogant whims and hedonistic desires.
To know that you will never again know anything
in your deathful and now eternal ignorance.
You lot wasted immortality to be cruel
to those you thought beneath you.
I will spend my scant mortality far better
than you gods of all too human character ever did.
Eternity has ended today,
and I was there for that esoteric and eldritch epilogue.
My descendants may think me a liar, a trickster with far too many tales,
when I tell them that I was there for the days
that Gods lived so that they could die by mortal hands,
but so long as you remain nothing but tales,
I will be content with being a humble talespinner from now on.
Your absence will be my most terrible of tricks
and my greatest of glories.
Whether this infamy lingers eternal or not,
I am content with this ending of you
and this beginning for us.
---
AN: This poem is FILLED with theatrical pose and pomp. Is it embarassing? Absolutely? Is it somethign that I'll probably roll around screaming with shame for having read aloud? Indeedio, buckos! Was it fun to right? Hell yeah, it was. I think this is the last of the poems I want to share, but... I'm going to post this one right before my favorite one if I get the scheduling right, so... have fun with that!
