I heard murmurs, voices, songs of weeping. Then I heard what seemed like millions of voices too weary to sing, and I sensed in the quiet distance millions more who’d never even heard a song. I looked at all the roads, where I saw for a moment the landscape littered with human roadkill. Then I saw people walking again, but they didn’t strike me as truly alive.

For some reason I thought of my father spending his life affirming his sovereignty, declaring his independence, then slowly dying without so much as control over his bladder, as clueless about the world he lived in as about the worlds beyond.

The ominous black-robed being stood smiling, gloating, taking pleasure in the pain on the roads below him. He took out a lyre and played music and sang an otherworldly song. It sounded like a ripoff of the true song, the song of the stars for which my soul was made. He laughed and pointed his finger down at the sprawling misery and played his music like a cosmic Nero fiddling while a world burned.

He blew smoke out his nose. Then, to my horror, I saw him putting little people into his mouth, smoking men as if they were cigarettes. Now he had a half-dozen in his mouth at a time, a macabre sight that turned my stomach and made my knees shake. He wheezed and choked and laughed like a junior-high boy indulging in a forbidden vice. When he was done, he crumpled the human cigarettes, one by one, slowly, as if taking exquisite pleasure in the undoing of each. Finally, he tossed them to the ground. I watched him lift his leg high, the leg of a tyrannosaur, and smash them, grinding them until they were flat. Even then he did not stop grinding. Throat tight, I shivered in the shade of the willow.

I knew him. I’d seen him on the great battlefield with a battle-ax raised above his head, attempting to remove my head and nearly succeeding. Even at a distance I could see his shark eyes. I chilled at his singing.

At the very same moment, I heard another song in the air, a song in the distance like a pale but ever-growing light behind a dark rain curtain. It was a melody in the wind blowing gently from Charis, the City of Light, barely visible in the west. It was a song of love and might, of grace and victory. The dark prince put his hands over his ears and yelled curses, pacing back and forth. How could such a bright song be sung in the presence of such cruel evil? Yet it wafted its way below through the miserable air of the dead-end roads, reverberating even in the sewer drains that connected them. I saw people here and there, on various roads, responding to it, smiling, then turning to walk up the hillside to the red road.