Butcher Bird_ A Novel of the Dominion

Fifty-Three


Threnody 23

The long-extinct scorpion people of Anu sang songs for their dead. Each song was designed to teach a new spirit some skill or valuable lesson for the Afterlife.
Of all the Anu songs set down on tablets and scrolls, only a handful were for those on their way to Heaven. The vast majority of the songs were for those on their way to Hell.
A translated excerpt:
To whom shall I cry to as I go into the depths?
My God who, if she should appear, would destroy me
With her terrible beauty?
God's Enemy, who would consume me in his resplendent terror?
At the bare edge of the abyss, beauty and terror are less than
A burning step apart, each worthy of worship, graced, pure, demanding.
God burns us. The Enemy burns us.
They will light my way through the long dark
And fire me in a sublime pyre, until I am only ash.
Only ash, I enter the abyss to behold
My shadow
My sins
My world laid bare
Surrounded by souls, dust and ash, I go alone.
Dust and ash, I know that we all venture alone, but that we all venture.
And it is only dust and ash that passes through the abyss,
Only dust and ash.
The sublimely consumed. The radiantly destroyed.
Only dust and ash passes through.