Individual stones are not heroes - any

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife He learned to worship in a nameless meadow. His father had never had precise names for their gods, they were formless things, half-baked ideas that his father clung to because they could be salvation, and that Sleaze clung to because it was all he knew. He spent days and weeks in that meadow, sun baking down on his dark skin, whispering prayers that were as formless as the gods he sent them to. The hair on his knees wore to nothing, bare patches, and it made it easier for the damp of the earth to sink in. This never stopped him, for Sleaze was a good boy, and he knelt and prayed and thought this would be his life. He never anticipated the things that came after, when father left – the strange quest that left him a purple so dark it was near black, the Glasgow smile of that clown, the burning, the drowning (she loves us) or the way he found that woman, after, whose delusions matched his in such a way he was left to wonder if they were delusions at all. (He wonders this often – how much of what happened was real, how much was delusion. He is purple now. That is real. He has a power, now – the ability to jump into their minds, their bodies – and that is real, too.) He has done little since, cringing in solitude, his mind a cage. Sometimes he tries to remember the prayers he’d said, in the meadow a hundred or a thousand years ago, and he can’t. This terrifies him. A lie – he remembers one line. A prayer that had come to him as he faced death in a realm that may have sprung from madness. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death -- “I shall fear no evil,” he finishes, a mutter to himself, and he is appalled when he looks up and there is another stallion, dirt- and blood-caked. Sleaze should have noticed him – would have, were he not so caught up in the past. “I’m sorry,” he says. He apologizes often. “I didn’t realize anyone else was around.” sleaze cancer x garbage