What plagued me most in the years that preceded this moment now, this moment where I am standing on a battlement encased in glass that stands amongst osmium and diamond, the stylus in my hands, the ashen world gaping beneath me, was that I was an arrow without a target, the very definition of sin. Why I wandered about Thirty-Third Day as long as I did, seeing nothing that I couldn't have guessed would be there, I do not know and cannot excuse. And yet, I met Tythus; such a charming child. I tend to think that if Eris and I had a boy, he might have been something like Tythus. But even my marriage to Eris was a failure. Neither her nor I was meant for a long, contented life. But we lived a dream of one, and I wouldn't trade that dream for anything, as much as it bleeds me to think back to it. How do I reconcile this? I suppose I don't, because I can't, because what's done is done. And now I'm standing on the summit of a mountain, the earthly pinnacle, looking out at a sky that I myself have set on fire, willfully ignoring the futility of lamenting past mistakes.

A marvelous thing, the stylus. Would you believe me if I told you that I have not consciously named a single chapter in this novel of mine? I chose the title alone, having put a great deal of thought into all that my life has amounted to. The Hellenes said that we should know ourselves. I know that I am many things, and that one of those things is a mirror, because I have learned about myself as I have learned about my world, and the two of us are both vessels for a damaged soul, and a wounded heart, and as twins we have such clouded minds, and are pining upward for the glorious Sun. Sisyphus may smile, and I might too, were my labour as simple as his. I can't call myself Atlas, or Arjuna, but I am certainly a figure of myth, only bound to a duty of finality. Ironic, is it not, that one cursed to continually rise was made to bring about a lasting end?

An end. A beginning. I suppose I am a fitting instrument, as there is no distinct delineation between my death and rebirth. I reform as I am unmade, and as the sky ignites with Hadeon's sad ire, those who heeded my warnings are merely waiting for the tempest to subside before they emerge to a new world that healed in the throws of its death. I wonder what is happening now in the undercroft of Thirty-Third Day. I wonder if more died than I feared, or less. There could be no peaceful merging of its peoples. As those above descended on those below, there could be no avoiding violence. Perhaps some people took it in stride, but there are wild things in both camps, and both their leaders are gone. Perhaps you'd like to hear that tale?

There's no surprise, as you are reading my words. You know that I succeeded, and that my enemy failed, and that my helper died. But there might be something buried in my memory waiting for the chance to surface as my feet kick up the topsoil of reminiscence. Maybe these anecdotes will inspire you, though I'll be content if they manage to at least entertain you.

I fought for Tythus's body, so that I might... have it? The life giving worm was crushed in the physician's hand, as his heart was crushed in mine. It was all a storm of white rage and red ribbons. I was sickened by the amount of corpses I created in my drive to win just one, and in the end I gave up, but those few living fled, leaving the boy for me to collect. There was another me, so consumed by despair, and those poor souls met with him while I cradled my son in my arms, shielding his dead ears from their living shrieks.

I took him to where I found him, and set him on a clear patch of floor at the bottom of the pile, hands over his chest. But then I felt repulsed by my own cowardice, so I bound him once again in one of those glossy black bags and took him with me, following my heart which I had allowed to be tethered, and I saw a pair of eyes like mine, sanguine, blistered with mean thoughts worn raw by time, until the sound I'd heard so many times and in so many ways hit with a single point, and we can call it a gong. Then I found myself in a dark hallway lit by red lanterns very high above, and glowing birds of white and lilac and soft yellow fluttered in formation this way and that. The crowd parted before me. I wore my shroud, but I'd learned that hiding my face and eyes caused more fear than revealing them. Tythus, wrapped tight in his death bag, was bound on either end to my spear, which I held across my shoulders. I would have cowered from myself, had I stood in front of a mirror. When I did see my reflection I laughed, smugly, as I was very satisfied with myself.

Drawn by Her breath, I found my way through mirrored halls and smoked courtyards to the maiden who lights my way. She had many forms, all of them beautiful to those who saw her, and so to me she was a horror. Her servitors parted like seafoam on the prow of a ship (lies of Elvedon), and six hands opened her doors. I felt my strength leave me as they took my spear and carried Tythus to a bed in the center of the large room. From canopies of tattered silk that billowed in the windless space, a long neck unraveled, and my serpent guide shewed me her capitoline face, gorgeous with sets of needle fangs and burning eyes. A human facade formed thin like gauze over her primordial head, and it was so finely sculpted that I felt aroused the instant I saw it. Then my heart slowed its pace, and I fell to my knees, then to my face, and soft hands took my clothing and washed me with heated sponges while I faded into her mind's embrace.

You've met her already, due to the whimsey of the Stylus. She is Ama'Pelerine, Matron of the Blazing Star, a nigh ascendant mother of sea dragons. Lady, Painted Lady light my way.

You spoke to me with your silence. You looked at me with closed eyes. Enion, torn from Tharmas, so many names to encompass the scope of all your movement. So sad to see a world ending jewell such as you cramped in such a rank and squalid bower. A sad green room for such a fantastic band. Poor stand-in for your surmounting ulro. But even the circle of destiny cannot properly contain your dark heraldry. Your heart of coal, flaking away with the fading of Elysium. The next cosmos will be all the lamer for your absence, and I, oh I, oh how can I be the last brow your lips have marked? I would have given myself to my embryo if not for you giving so much for so little. What future have you seen that moves you to such a seemingly misfit sacrifice? How could the vagrants of this crumbling rock be so crucial to the coming age to excuse you spending your bones on our achromic flame? I will never know the answer. Answers are not my gift, weapons are. Very well. Arm me, and send me to war.

I'm not being artful, though only the finest art could do the Painted Lady justice. I mentioned finding her sexually appealing. The veneer of human form that she wove with light was indeed a stimulating sight. I'd wandered the world and met so many surrogate mothers, women who I sought only nurturing comfort from, with only Eris to stir me with desire. But when I saw the Painted Lady, descending from a waterfall of imagined sinewy forms that each sought to fill perfectly that ever fluid niche of my hidden want, I wanted her. Or, more to the point, I wanted to ascend to whatever higher plane would give me the knowledge needed to understand what I found so scintillating about this alien being. I wished I could become more, so that I could have a chance at wooing her, because I knew that in my current form I couldn't even comprehend in what way she and I could pleasure each other. What I saw was a flurry of emanations, and I am being as close as I can to literal when I call her a waterfall, because her faces changed their paint with the same constancy as a waterfall, and in the same way the motion of a fall paints a semi solid picture whose motion we simultaneously ignore and accept, her features were all and one, moving and still, an image that sculpted and resculpted itself in pictures that constantly gripped me in new and frightening ways.

I saw long necks like serpents, with hair that made her many beautiful faces look like the heads of drowned corpses, and there was a movement like silken drapes in a stale breeze that was the caressing of her hands. I lay on her lap, but with my eyes closed I felt as if I floated near the surface of a deep pool. When I opened my eyes, I saw pale shadows of the Sun. Her voice was the trickling of wafer thin chimes. You don't hear her words, you know them. I spoke with others about her, and to each client her chimes manifested differently, though they never ceased to be what they were. When her voice first touched my ears, her little bells made shapes. Her first words to me were a flock of disparate birds diving into waves, and I watched them from below where the waters were still calm, though polluted with a thick murk. With that vision, I knew she spoke not only to me, but to every Victor that ever lived, and instead of feeling lost or inconsequential, I felt honored. She had echoed Turk's words of me being the endgame of the Dolomite opus. And there was a melancholy aftertaste to her words that called to mind the lesser spirit that lurked somewhere far below, and while I had yet to meet the man, I pitied Victor 33.