Drifting further every day.
Getting lost within myself.
Nothing matters, noone else.
He stood on the edge of the canyon, face bared to the desert wind, eyes staring at the setting sun. The past leapt up in his mind, from his early youth, to the adventures he'd undertaken as a young man, to the last ten years of fruitless searching.
I have lost the will to live.
Simply nothing more to give.
There is nothing more for me.
Need the end to set me free.
Driven and desperate, he'd cut off all ties, ties to friends and places. The pain of existence was greater than the joy of friendship, and carefully, methodically, he'd severed all contact. Not that it wasn't easy. Avoid a city, filter the gossip -- that's now he'd managed to disappear. Not one of his former companions would know what happened to him.
Things aren't what they used to be.
Missing one inside ot me.
Deathly lost, this can't be real.
Cannot stand this hell I feel.
Anger flushed his face at the thought of what had driven him to this point. The betrayal, the curse, the demonic forces sent to eat away at his soul. Futilely at night, as he laid down to sleep, he'd wish to wake up with his whole life just a fading nightmare behind him. And every morning, self-deluded, he'd wake to stare at his own hands and feel again the horror of his existence.
Emptiness is filling me
To the point of agony.
Growing darkness taking dawn.
I was me, but now he's gone.
Over the years it became harder and harder to resist the urges for evil, the silent calls inside for destruction. Although he was changeless stone, the battle within had written itself across his face. The once smooth skin of the boy he had been was now ravaged rock, pocked and cracked. The cracks even oozed blood on occasion, amplifying his terrible visage. He'd learned not to smile, ever.
No one but me can save myself but it's too late.
Now I can't think, think why I should even try.
Sometimes, in a fit of optimism, he thought to track down his old friends, but it never seemed worth the effort. He had truly become the monster he'd appeared to be. The deaths and destruction of a hundred villages, a thousand lost lives, could attest to that. Violent rampages came to him frequently, causing a madness in which all thought, all reason was lost. His personal demon had flourished and grown, feeding on his own depression and despair. He fed on himself like a parasite, and now he stood a hollow shell.
Yesterday seems as though it never existed.
Death greets me warm, now I will just say good-bye.
No more. He couldn't take it any longer. There was no salvation in the world, no friends, no hope anymore. The past was gone and dead. The future was a hell he himself had built. With his last remaining ounce of self-control, he drew the enspelled dagger from its sheath. Raising it, he spared a moment to admire its silver glint in the dying rays of the sunset. Then, he slit his own throat.
Good-bye.
Drawn on an instinct to a place a hundred miles from anywhere, Xelloss found Zelgadis's dead body at the bottom of a desert canyon. The only things the scavenger birds had been able to eat was the flesh around the knife cut, and Zel's eyes.
FINIS
Author's note:
WHOA! THAT was gloomy! So I had wondered what would happen to Zel if he NEVER found a cure. Frankly, I just don't see him taking very well...........
Go To Songfic Index