Pandemonium

" Ladies and Gents, this is the moment you've waited for. "

_________________________________________________________

When the war took his country he hid in between the tents and the shadows where the sun and soil are one. Where no one bothers to look, where lies and weeds grow. Orphaned by the blood rivers, and the bombs going off in the distance. He spent the hours crawling low to the ground, seeing with the eyes on his shoulders and wings, scraping our reasons to stay alive. And when the dust settled, and when the camps were abandoned, he chanced the light, caught by the second wave, and he was dragged out into the open.

They wanted his magic, tried to take it from him. But he would not forfeit the power--he couldn't--the mazes and shadows and spirals of death he had made himself welcome among. Anger trailed from the eyes. They covered all the eyes and locked him in a cage.

Now he rules the ring. When the hearts of the captives have joined the blood rivers, and nothing of them remains, but for the scars he carries in his mind--silence, and darkness, and being jostled around in a cargo hold. Like a fever, that time faded...

With his magic he composes the most wondrous of spectacles, illusions, dreams, terrors beneath the heavens of the tent top. Dozens of claws, the ghosts from his past, waving, reeling, reaching all around. There's nothing left to hold, he says, but a new love for life, but the guise of the master, his ceremonies each a spectacle. The dark spells he learned, the tricks that he gleamed, the eyes, open wide and looking into other dimensions, the paths each member of the crowd had taken to converge here... after hours he tracks and devours the black-hearted, the corrupt, the unjust, and pours their ugly blood beyond the banks of the river.