It is well past midnight and sleep evades me; my very mind feels heavy and painful inside of my own skull. Even as I write this, I must rely on a machine to type out the words for me as my hands are not steady enough to hold a pen. Sweat paints my forehead despite the chilling night air wafting in through my study window. I realize now that this is the only way I can find any form of solace or peace. I write this now not as a last will and testament for the encroaching end I know is just lurking in the shadows between dusk and dawn. My body is aged and withered, but not beyond what my own arts cannot restore. Truly I could live beyond the years of this physical form if I so chose, but my end is not in my own hands I fear… no, my death will come to be; soon. So, I choose to write this as a confession of my sins.

  I know no communion with the divine will save my soul nor will any apostle or disciple of those beings be able to cleanse the blood that stains my hands so thoroughly with just a generous ear alone. When death takes me and I am before the gods and they find it in their hearts to accept and forgive me, I will call them fools, all of them. The reason I sit here now before this infernal type writer that beats away at the page like cracking thunder is because I feel someone must know of my plight, if only to learn from it and avoid a similar fate.

  Years ago, when I was but a boy, I remembered living inside of a lavished mansion furnished with paintings covering every wall, suits of armor standing as stalwart guards throughout the halls and the most immaculate furniture both in comfort and appeal. This was my domain and one that I shared with my father and our countless servants at our beck and call. My father was a decedent of a wealthy businessman from generations long since deceased. The Slode fortune was amassed by the ever-constant wars that ripped across the human colonies of Erphagst between Agape in the west and Stronge in the east. Our home was settled just south on the very cusp of the northern mountain country of Eros, a prime spot between to sell arms and armor to the constantly feuding countries as Eros was rich in rescores of iron, oil, and copper.

  Since these times however, my father has enjoyed a life of what he claims to be pacifism. In all actuality, it was a life of drunken debauchery, drinking himself sick and eating himself fat and plugging anything with a hole. A practice that inevitably came around to bite him once I was left at his door with little more than a note explaining that I was his son. To this day, I have no idea who my mother was, a fact that my father was ever sure to remind me of with the countless whores who lounged around the manor and were dismissed as quickly as they arrived. I hold no disdain for my mother for giving me this life when I think of what I could have been subject to. I was given a roof over my head; a kitchen constantly stocked with food and cook to make it for me and money to allow me to peruse any interest that stroked my fancy. I would have given it all just to know my mother's face however.

  As the years of decadence went on, the seemingly infinitesimal fortune of my ancestors quickly began to run dry. It was not long till our living became more and more modest by the day. The halls were no longer guarded by the suits of armor, the walls eventually lay baron; silhouettes marked the walls where each painting had been before. The servants were eventually dismissed one by one and with it a thick cascade of dust and grime covered every surface with a tumultuous wrath that could not be stopped.

  As the weeks turned into months and our immaculate abode turned into a hollowed shell of its former glory, we relied on candle light to navigate the familiar halls at night time as we could no longer afford the luxury that electricity. Along with it, the only source of warmth to be had was by the hearth of a fireplace, burning what we had left as my father and I wrapped ourselves tight with what remained of our beds. This was not enough to stave off the harsh winter nights that eventually claimed my father in his sleep. 

I woke in the morning cold, shivering with my breath appearing before me in a white puff and a dead fireplace laying before me. At my side had been my father, laying still and cold with no breath to speak of, his body a fraction of the size it had been as the years pressed on and wore him down till he was little more than a sheet of leather stretched over a skeleton. His corpse looked as if it had just been sleeping, earning the rest that now humbled him. I did not mourn his death, but I was grateful that he went so peacefully in the night. By no means was my father a bad man, his claims to pacifism were not just an excuse, never once did he raise a hand to his servants, to the whores that warmed his bed or even to me. He had just as much of a right to send me from his home and out into the world without so much as an excuse to do so, but he still took me in, knowing I was his son. Perhaps he was not the father I wished I had, but I count myself grateful for what was given to me in the twilight of my own existence.