Death, life, death. The cycle is never broken; its unbreakable chain transcends even the strongest of wills in contention with its all-encompassing truth. Despite all paths we may take against it, it is inevitable. It is truth.
My name is Hieronymous Drake, and I rejected this truth.
The days of my early life are trivial, and need not be mentioned in detail save for the fact that I was happy. The halcyon period of my youth was graced by the frivolities of a noble house, and my education was suited accordingly. I was a precocious child, always fascinated by the simple grace and beauty of nature – from the inner veins of an autumn leaf, to the shades of gray on vermin fur that changed with the light. Perhaps what fascinated me most was the way that bone – wrapped in muscle, wrapped in skin – created a perfect latticework for containing our very essence. The human body, thus, became a prime subject of my study. My family, of course, spared no expense in indulging what appeared to be a growing interest in art. The finest model specimens from around the core were brought to my family estate, posing for me in a spacious studio while I carefully observed their musculature. I experimented with various methods of crafting, from paint to sculpture. I did not bother to mention that my fancy was less the act of painting their forms than the knowledge I acquired in observing them. In truth, my art was merely a means of study, a form of categorization. I encoded my findings within the paintings; setting numbers to form, memorizing the relationship between the body’s component parts and the color palette I used…
It was child’s play. And, in truth, I was a child then. I was an innocent with no concept of the endless cycle that entraps us all.
It took my mother first, on my seventeenth birthday – a victim of the yellow fever that came from the swamp. Upon due reflection, I think it strange that at the time I was less overtaken with sorrow than I was with determination to find out more. Such was the result of my education. I had been shielded from death, you see; my family saw fit to keep this aspect of the world from me, to encourage my art more than my understanding of life. It is, perhaps, ironic that my mother – who so played a part in my being protected from death – would be the one to usher in my descent into its mysteries.
I would discover that my education in this matter, however, would not be as encouraged as my education in art. Perhaps feeling a need to carry on my mother’s wishes, my father forbade my study in the realm of death. My research was thus carried out clandestinely, riding down to the cemetery to observe this state I so desired to learn. I can recall spending weeks there, quietly observing the long dead in the ossuaries, the fresh dead in funerary observances, and all the stages of decay that money and a trusty gravedigger could provide.
I learned much during that time, yet something, I found, was missing from my research. I found no way, despite countless hours examining corpses in great detail, to truly understand this state of death. It is perhaps a measure of divine providence, I think, that I would soon further my education in ways I had never dreamed. It was a night during my twenty-first year, and a chance encounter with a man in the cemetery.
He did not address himself by name, nor did I think to ask it, for he was obviously a man whose time could not be siphoned off by such trivialities. He was dark-skinned, his hair dreadlocked and his cadence somehow bordering that of the corpses I observed… and yet he walked, and spoke, and regarded me with every bit of life as the gravedigger companion who stood at my side. To this day I cannot explain fully the nature of what he said that night, but as he finished and beckoned me to follow him through the damp, mist-covered tracts of the bayou, I could not refuse.
I emerged nearly a month later, barely recognizable… hovering somewhere between a state of life and death. I know that he had imparted much to me during this time, yet from the point I emerged from the bayou, it was as if I had emerged from a dream – one that rapidly slipped from my mind. When I came to, I noticed that my appearance had changed drastically, and it was then that I first developed the persistent cough that lingers with me to this day. My hair, which had been blonde before, now shimmered white. My frame became gaunt, my muscles tightened beneath my skin. Were it not for my eyes and generally chiseled features, I would have likely been cast off as a starving vagabond when I returned to my home.
My absence had taken its toll on my father, and a near-fatal stroke had left him paralyzed, save for an occasional twitch of the hand. It was not long before his inability to eat and drink finished what the stroke did not; within a week, he was dead.
Perhaps it was my new understanding that changed my perspective, or perhaps I was now old enough to fully grasp the concept of loss. Whatever the case, when my father passed, I finally felt that which had previously escaped me: sorrow. For the first time, I felt that death was not – and should not be – the end.
What started out as fascination became an obsession. I remember the years that followed being dedicated to long periods of study, contracting travelers and explorers from all corners of the core into bringing me information on death. I spent much of my family fortune on volumes of lore, from the arcane to the modern, trying desperately to grasp the mysteries of death. But neither religion nor science could fully explain to me the nature of the cosmic cycle: death, life, death… none so much as the dark man in the bayou.
And so I went back to the cemetery, back to the roots of my knowledge… and I waited. I waited for days, eating and drinking little, and sleeping not at all. It was finally on the last day of my silent vigil that he approached again, his appearance unchanged from the last time I had met him. I asked many questions, but his only response was a quiet repose and black-toothed smile. Finally, exhausted to the point of defeat, I fell to my knees and asked the final question: “How do I stop it?”
At last, he replied: “The cycle exists for mortal man. If you seek to end the cycle, seek to become more than a man.”
And, with that, he was gone. I have spent the last three years trying to determine the meaning of his words. Can a man can truly become more than a man? Only one thing is certain: I cannot find the answer here. Perhaps out there, beyond the bayou, I will find the answers I seek.
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