Shadow Veil

Cain's Punishment

2005-07-24T20:43:00.000-04:00

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This story was written by me, it's my own version of Cain's life. This is the last part, the ending.

"And so I come before you," continued Michael, "sent before you by my father to tell you his will."
With this, Michael unflunged his wings and hovered up to the air, and his next words were not calmed as the previous ones, but strong and deep. And they resonated across the wide chamber, and all the other noises seemed to silent themselves to let this new voice speak.
And then Michael, hovering in the air, threw his finger at the first-born, and with this the fires went wild, as his hair did, and the sun behind him seemed to intensify, sending its rays so strongly that Cain would have been blinded if it weren't for Michael, who blocked them, making his siluoette contrast against the bright of the day. Then Michael, with his sword in one hand and his other hand aiming at Cain, spoke:
"Cain, son of Adam. Your sins weight heavy upon your soul. Of your crime, God finds you guilty. He offered you attonement, yet you refused it. He asked you to honor Him, yet you refused Him. He asked you to turn from evil, yet you refused it. For these sins, Cain son of Adam, God condems you. From this day forward you shall be known as the Traitor, the one who brings ill. From this day forward you are exiled from Heaven and cast away from the light of your father, as Adam was before you. Death will never find you, and you will never find it, but sadness will always be by your side. From this day forward, as long as you walk this earth, you and your kin will know no love, no peace, no satisfaction. You will eat only ashes, you will drink only blood. You will stay as you are now, never dying, living on. Rich yet poor. Your house will always walk in shadows, and all you and they touch will crumble to dust, and it will weight upon your hearts. This is the will of our Father, and so you shall follow it."

Said this, Michael disapeared with a flash, and all the noises returned, and the fires calmed down, and the rays of the sun returned to their normal bright. But Cain wasn't calmed. His heart hurt, and confusion crept over him. For he did not understand. God had asked him to sacrifice that which he loved the most, and so he had done, yet now he was punished. Abandoned by God and by Lilith, Cain sat alone in that big chamber in the empty land of Nod.

The Swimmer

2005-07-24T20:20:00.000-04:00

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The Swimmer

Adam Lindsay Gordon

With short, sharp, violent lights made vivid,

To southward far as the sight can roam,

Only the swirl of the surges livid,

The seas that climb and the surfs that comb.

Only the crag and the cliff to nor’ward,

And the rocks receding, and reefs flung forward,

And waifs wreck’d seaward and wasted shoreward

On shallows sheeted with flaming foam.

A grim, grey coast and a seaboard ghastly,

And shores trod seldom by feet of men—

Where the batter’d hull and the broken mast lie,

They have lain embedded these long years ten.

Love! when we wander’d here together,

Hand in hand through the sparkling weather,

From the heights and hollows of fern and heather,

God surely loved us a little then.

The skies were fairer and shores were firmer—

The blue sea over the bright sand roll’d;

Babble and prattle, and ripple and murmur,

Sheen of silver and glamour of gold—

And the sunset bath’d in the gulf to lend her

A garland of pinks and of purples tender,

A tinge of the sun-god’s rosy splendour,

A tithe of his glories manifold.

Man’s works are graven, cunning, and skilful

On earth, where his tabernacles are;

But the sea is wanton, the sea is wilful,

And who shall mend her and who shall mar?

Shall we carve success or record disaster

On the bosom of her heaving alabaster?

Will her purple pulse beat fainter or faster

For fallen sparrow or fallen star?

I would that with sleepy, soft embraces

The sea would fold me—would find me rest,

In luminous shades of her secret places,

In depths where her marvels are manifest;

So the earth beneath her should not discover

My hidden couch—nor the heaven above her—

As a strong love shielding a weary lover,

I would have her shield me with shining breast.

When light in the realms of space lay hidden,

When life was yet in the womb of time,

Ere flesh was fettered to fruits forbidden,

And souls were wedded to care and crime,

Was the course foreshaped for the future spirit—

A burden of folly, a void of merit—

That would fain the wisdom of stars inherit,

And cannot fathom the seas sublime?

Under the sea or the soil (what matter?

The sea and the soil are under the sun),

As in the former days in the latter,

The sleeping or waking is known of none.

Surely the sleeper shall not awaken

To griefs forgotten or joys forsaken,

For the price of all things given and taken,

The sum of all things done and undone.

Shall we count offences or coin excuses,

Or weigh with scales the soul of a man,

Whom a strong hand binds and a sure hand looses,

Whose light is a spark and his life a span?

The seed he sow’d or the soil he cumber’d,

The time he served or the space he slumber’d,

Will it profit a man when his days are number’d,

Or his deeds since the days of his life began?

One, glad because of the light, saith, “Shall not

The righteous Judge of all the earth do right,

For behold the sparrows on the house-tops fall not

Save as seemeth to Him good in His sight?”

And this man’s joy shall have no abiding,

Through lights departing and lives dividing,

He is soon as one in the darkness hiding,

One loving darkness rather than light.

A little season of love and laughter,

Of light and life, and pleasure and pain,

And a horror of outer darkness after,

And dust returneth to dust again.

Then the lesser life shall be as the greater,

And the lover of life shall join the hater,

And the one thing cometh sooner or later,

And no one knoweth the loss or gain.

Love of my life! we had lights in season—

Hard to part from, harder to keep—

We had strength to labour and souls to reason,

And seed to scatter and fruits to reap.

Though time estranges and fate disperses,

We have had our loves and our loving mercies;

Though the gifts of the light in the end are curses,

Yet bides the gift of the darkness—sleep!

See! girt with tempest and wing’d with thunder,

And clad with lightning and shod with sleet,

The strong winds treading the swift waves sunder

The flying rollers with frothy feet.

One gleam like a bloodshot sword-blade swims on

The sky-line, staining the green gulf crimson,

A death stroke fiercely dealt by a dim sun,

That strikes through his stormy winding-sheet.

Oh! brave white horses! you gather and gallop,

The storm sprite loosens the gusty reins;

Now the stoutest ship were the frailest shallop

In your hollow backs, or your high arch’d manes.

I would ride as never a man has ridden

In your sleepy, swirling surges hidden,

To gulfs foreshadow’d through straits forbidden,

Where no light wearies and no love wanes.

Nemesis

2005-05-17T20:32:00.000-04:00

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Nemesis
H.P Lovecraft

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,
When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

I had drifted o'er seas without ending,
Under sinister grey-clouded skies,
That the many-forked lightning is rending,
That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.

I have plunged like a deer through the arches
Of the hoary primoridal grove,
Where the oaks feel the presence that marches,
And stalks on where no spirit dares rove,
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things, I care not to gaze on again.

I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,
I have trod its untenanted hall,
Where the moon rising up from the valleys
Shows the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.

I have peered from the casements in wonder
At the mouldering meadows around,
At the many-roofed village laid under
The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble, I listen intently for sound.

I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
I have flown on the pinions of fear,
Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;
Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

I was old when the pharaohs first mounted
The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;
I was old in those epochs uncounted
When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
And great is the reach of its doom;
Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

untitled

2005-05-17T20:10:00.000-04:00

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The body is but a vessel for the soul, a puppet which bends to the soul's tyranny. And lo, the body is not eternal, for it must feed on the flesh of others, lest it return to the dust from whence it came. Therefore must the soul deceive, despise and murder men.

- AJ Durai

To Be Bound by Flesh

2005-04-21T21:42:00.000-04:00

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Illusions

2005-04-13T16:19:00.000-04:00

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Angel Teardrops
by Kathleen Sheppard

My guardian angel, once careless and free,
flew into the clouds and lost touch with me.
Her tears were cold and wet, falling on my face.
Her smile had left us without a trace.

Her angelic lips quivered, frozen and scared,
I felt rain clouds visiting, and had to prepare.
I knew that angels, often content,
were very special presents that God had sent.

To see one so sad,
so afraid,
so alone,
had made me weep while the cold winds had blown.

Her wings lost feathers,
comforting and soft,
falling from the stars,
floating aloft.

Her pain was felt throughout the land,
to feel true misery is impossible to stand.
I prayed so that when her hurting stops,
I'll be able to taste the angel's teardrops.

Illusions are what maintain us alive, when a illusion dies, something inside us does so. Although we can have new illusions, these can never substitute those that perish. illusions are as dreams that we forget, we can never recover them. Even if we try, they are never the same, there’s always the fear we might loose them again. And even if they end up being, they never shine as much as they could have shone originally.

The angels are the correspondents of God, they represent illusion, happiness and hope. Every time we lose an illusion, is as if an angel stopped existing. It's a stain in our soul, big or small, that even if forgotten, will never stop existing. It marks us of for life, want it or not. Know it or not.

People usually remember the illusions that grow to something, and they forget those that never flourish. For that reason, I suppose, people tend say that every past time was better.
For my part it’s the opposite. I have stronger memories of the illusions and desires that end up in nothing. So I can say, like J.P Castell said, that every past time was worse.
It is sad to see failed illusions, but if I were given the chance to forget them, I wouldn’t. They remind me what I have lived, they are a part of myself. I don't understand people that say that it's better to forget the bad things. Even if it is something unpleasant, it is part of your life, of you. You lived it and you learned of it. To forget it is to deny your past, your life, to deny yourself. It is an escape route, that, in my opinion, brings more suffering than remembering the illusion itself.....

By the way, that picture wasn’t taken by me.

Note: Excuse any possible grammar mistakes.

Shadow Veil

Cain's Punishment

The Swimmer

Nemesis

*untitled*

To Be Bound by Flesh

Illusions

untitled