Remember our Sermons on the Rocks?
When indulgently
You let me play
Severian to your Nikolas,
Even though 'twas I
Who longed for Seleucar reborn,
Or at least something like it;
Something imbued
With the same terror.

Our eyes met with the vast meridian
Of Ethian
Spanning between us. And from that hurtling star,
Whose splinters jagged and hooked into our skin,
We were blessed with celestial omens,
We were pressed like dried flowers or poems,
Or butterflies poisoned on the pin,
In between the pages of all those dusty tomes.

And I remember you there,
In that rarified air,
In your mountain holdfast,
Your sky-piercing eyrie.
And me down here,
Midst the murk and fear,
Wound like a viper round a dying candle.

You knew I was Serpent,
But not what kind;
No adder I, my fangs are blunt,
I crush my victims in my coils.
But I have trained,
I've wrapped myself,
With feather care about a quail's egg,
That I might slither
Into your embrace
Without you falling prey to my constriction.

And I remember
You were an actor,
I'd always been warned against those.
But we laid our masks aside
And slipped soundlessly backstage
As the roaring crowd became a murmur.

And in those darkened passages,
Where the star-crossed and ill-fated flee,
I spoiled your pale gold locks
With my filthy squid ink,
Which of course you smeared into art
The way I never could.

And love should be enough, you know?
But the goddess that kept her was slain.
And love could be a knife, I said,
And you sheathed her deep within me.

But Aeon rules and scorns us all
And Love's no match for Him,
The grave's no bar to Time's black claws
And enough Time warps into Sin.

Remember our Sermon on the Rock?
The stink of cormorant and taste of sea?
I'm waiting there in that squawking flock
Till the tides will wash you back to me.

Penned by my hand on the 3rd of Valnuary, in the year 954 AF.