The Year in Review Through Prose Poetry

Push Forward (Dark Souls)

Push forward through the fear of death and desolation, young warrior, through those spaces of cobweb, dust, and bone. Hallways as lonely as a crypt and lonelier still, the loneliness of a darkness you can taste, like sulfur, or the copper ore of an abandoned mineshaft, byzantine, crumbling, home to the unhomed dread gestating in all of us. Push forward, noble soul, with armor clinking, with sword or pike wobbling, with breath misting or ghostlike, your flesh pinkish or moribund. Stairs descending to pits not yet touched by the stink of the living, tinted in poisonous haze, hiding creatures too horrible for the eyes of any pitiful being who harbors memory, creatures that taint the mind and the memory, that offer only horror where hope might rest.

Push forward, brave wanderer, lit by the dimmest lights, encouraged by the faintest morality, the most morbid of curiosities, motivated by the basest fears. To see into the abyss opened for us here, we need to accept our place amongst the displaced, to venture to those realms where death is but another portal into deeper and darker mappings. Push forward, cursed spirit. There is no longer a back to turn to.