Prose Poem
I met the devil last night, and he was beautiful- terribly so. Not the kind of beauty that gleams, but the kind that settles into the marrow like frost. It wasn’t beauty meant to be admired, but to possess: to wrap itself around you until you forget where it ends and you begin.
His eyes found mine in the dark. They didn’t blink. They didn’t need to. They watched me like twin eclipses cutting through fog- eyes that didn’t just see, but knew. And in that knowing, something ancient unspooled within me, as if he’d spoken my name before time ever learned to crawl. He didn’t need to speak aloud. He had already rewritten the shape of who I was.
With him, I was no longer a shadow in old halls or a ghost beneath the weight of silence. I was seen. I was heard. I was whole.
He reached for my cheek with a glacial hand- deliberate, not cruel, like someone mourning the last ember of a fire that almost died. His touch held cold, yes, but also something gentler: pity, perhaps. Or reverence. For the flame still smoldering deep within me- small, stubborn, still burning.
His voice wasn’t sound, but a murmur rooted deep in the place where dreams grow wild. He spoke of stars that bled, of angels drowned in ember, of promises whispered beneath the first mourning sky. It didn’t frighten me. It filled me. As if I’d always known these things but only now remembered.
He looked at me as if I were a secret he had longed to remember- not something to own, not something to take, just something known. I was a rose in his garden, a bloom born of sorrow. And he- he was the thorn. The keeper of the withering. The hush the wind sings when it forgets how to be kind. A gardener of what the world had left behind.
He leaned close, and the space between us folded like paper in flame. My breath caught- not from fear, but from the ache of recognition.
I had always belonged here, hadn’t I? Half in shadow, half in dream. He kissed my forehead like wind on stone- slow, reverent. To mark, to say: I see you. I remember you.
And when I turned to leave, I didn’t. There was no longer a reason to wander. The dark had found me. And it did not ask me to run.
He was an angel who fell from grace. And I- his reaper, rooted in the garden he carved from silence, from sorrow, from ash.
A place only we could ever call home.
The Altar 