Prologue to an Echo

(Chapbook.) Scorning the romance of origins, everyone on this kill-list is an antagonist whose actions witness and question sin’s ancient beginnings. Repeating Faustian missteps—led by whispers to precipice edges—hermits with lantern-lit hearts are called to pay-up mid-flourish. Within the jaggèd edges of each tale, stitched together to reveal these are those whose failures erect portals for evils to enter hearts, the holes in which are abysses being so desperate to progress, to go forward, invites archdemons to fill. Corresponding to the cardinal sins, the ones ruin runs from come in sevens. Told over what might be a week—perhaps not of days in the conventional sense, but aches terror paints in words—these are fables for the faithless who will relate to the horror of awaiting a tomorrow that never came—until it did, but not at all in the way anyone thrown so low could anticipate. Patron saints of terrible decisions, these—our characters fate relegates to reprobates reliving its fall again and again, within hells enveloping them over seven nights—are victims of free will, living fracturing shells of existence letting an illusion’s emanation—swallowing hope of sorting-out life’s gloam—grow to some beast not even one mind can hold…