Chapter Text
Votre Dernier Banquet
"Come, thou with no joy nor grief upon thy brow, and suffer as thou once didst suffer,
in the past tides vanished, certain to never return.
Clad in the guise of a saint yet harboring sins that corrupt all goodness...
O winged one of the noble court of fairness, doomed to blunders unforgivable,
from whence shalt thou soar anew?
Thou art a waning permanence, suspended ‘bove the garden of earthly delights.
And lo, shalt come one day, when thou art splinter’d and shatter’d into fragments,
thy heart yet left unfulfilled;
There, I shall announce my presence, gazing only upon thee, to behold the radiance that refuses to bow to shadows.
I, and I alone, shall be thy witness as thou must wend through purgatory, as thou dost recant thy justice.
I shall be the sole creature in all of the planes to pride myself to have laid hands upon thy stasis.
So, then, take my hand as thou dost dismount the carriage of virtue, yet retain the crown of sanctity.
Vacate the throne situated beside the throne of glory.
These, all I do entreat of thee:
Though thy seraphic brethren peer from behind the kingdom of clouds,
and whisper gently all thy names to beckon thy return,
yet abide here–endure here–in this realm of mortal breath,
where I am the sole being capable of suspending thee betwixt the realms.
Fall too far as a star would, and thou art no longer set apart from the flock.
Ascend too high, out of the reach of mine condemned hand,
and I shall have sever’d the fragile thread we call a bond.
But tarry forever in this boundary that halves the holy and the damned,
where the sacred and the cursed are cleft in train–
and thou shalt find–I could never let thee go.
Thus, when the curtain is fated to fall upon thy tale,
I shall come hither, as a beast, as the lot of man, as the wall that doth sever thee from the empyrean oath.
I shall have my taste of thy unfettered ideals,
I shall have a drink of thy blood through which divinity pulses.
And this shall be named the final banquet for thee and for me!
A finest, final rondo resounding across eons past and future…
And I shall render it into madness eternal, shared by none but ‘twixt we two!
A song that knoweth no end, ever pealing, ever ringing;
Ringeth, and ringeth, and ringeth still!
If there be an eternity for this entwined dance, then let it be as such:
The tolling of bells upon a winter eve ne’er doth cease, darken’d into a mural of sweet depravity–
Of longing unfulfilled,
Of desire unbound,
Of a yearning to be free.
–Signed by a nameless writer; the torn pages were found in the ruins of Domremy Village, France, and brought to London by the ancestors of a noble family that harbored a close relationship with Her Majesty.
Circa 1455-1531.
By whom the haunting poem was to be received, nary a person knew. Nevertheless, the great scholars of Sorbonne University assumed the poem to have been written by the time the immediate family of La Pucelle d’Orleans, Jeanne d’Arc, perished after a bout of an unidentified and uncontained plague affected the village. The one riddle left behind by the mysterious writer was a depiction of a winged crown, drawn in blood, on the last page.
The original manuscript had long been lost to the Great Fire of London in 1666.