Bleeding Pens and Crumbled Paper

Compass Skull

As I walk through a world of darkness,

Where shrouded poisons clot my lungs.

I realize that there is a white orb hanging

From a ceiling just above my cranium.

I look up, and see a skull, with dark teeth,

As crimson as the blood flowing through its eyes.

Without muscles, it smiled a grimace.

And speaks to me in a language long forgotten.

Yet I understand the words, as their translated in my head.

He speaks to two roads, one wide, one skinny and trecherous.

He speaks of a fissure at the end of the easy road, 

And a golden mountain with a silver empire at the end of the hard.

"For your destiny depends on the road you will trad upon,"

So says Lynth the skull, floating above.

Then the ord disappears, and I am left to walk in darkness.

I tread upon the ground, which glows with bioluminescence,

and I realized the ground is alive with the dead, their spirits trapped.

They whisper of the horrors of the wide road, where temptations await.

They whisper in my ear of temptations that will make your mouth water,

and the result will be terrifying, with endless torture without a death.

"For eternity," they said. "You will bear the pain, unless you take the hard road."

And so I treaded on.

I apporached two mountains, one with a wide road which could fit twelve people,

shoulder to shoulder, which thousands, if not millions, walked on.

Their eyes were dazed, as if they watched some paranormal beacon.

And then there was the skinny road, which lead to a mountain tipped with gold.

The road was covered in ice on the left, lava the right; there was no sure ground.

Yet the voices of the dead whispered in my ear, and my heart was clouded with dread.

Would I be tortured for eternity? Or do the dead lie like men lie in life?

I decided to trust the carcasses and carry on, carry on.

Up the steep, hard road.

My feet burned and froze, I constantly fell, and sleep clouded my head.

But as if I was some automaton, I walked without a thought, until

That golden tip became a city.

And at that city lay rubies and saphires and emeralds for the ground.

formed from the lava itself.

And zircon and quartz and calcite and halite, made a beautiful collage

for the gates to that marvelous city, which I walked towards.

I saw the skull, far away, shrouded by fog, grinning at my success.

And I walked through the gates, and smelled wonderful ambrosia

And was immediately in a state of ectacy.