The peculiar nature of the human condition is that their hearts can break, heal, and break all over again. It makes me pause. I oft wonder at it but still, I find it all so very amusing. Humans weep, cracked asunder, and their tears become just another element that enters and erodes the edifices they erected, not unlike the wind or the rain. It is their frailty that defines them, it molds who they are and who they aspire to be, in their short lifespans. It spurs them on to do great things, each a small attempt at erasing insignificance. And then it conspires to turn them and forces them to tear all their accomplishments down. With time they feel they do not have, their hearts heal. Then, they repeat it once more.
They call me Blackheart, and they mean it as an insult. Blackheart in his black obsidian tower. Stoneheart, unfeeling. A heart black as sin. I embrace it, truly. I do not have a heart, at least not how humans define it.
In truth, I mirror the worst of their traits back onto them. Their fears, their inadequacies. Their own sins. Having dwelled on this earth for as long as I have, long before the advent of Man, when the skies wore a different color and the land was home to beings now relegated to obscure myth, I have lived what humans experience in, what, thirty, forty years? I’ve had thousands of lives to experience the same.
They do not understand me. They cannot relate. A young, curious girl wanders around and sees me in my tower. And then she becomes a young woman. She grows old, bent, and wrinkled. And still, I am there, framed by the window, at the top of my tower, watching the world. Unchanged. So that is how the insults come. I am a window to what they cannot be. What they would trade places to be. But it has always cut both ways. I do not understand them either, despite my millennia-long attempts at studying them.
I do not remember much of the summers of my youth, but that is an admission only the yellowing pages of this journal of mine will ever bear witness to. It is an admission that, ironically, tugs at the hollow place behind my ribs. An odd sensation, this. As if I was standing next to an open window in a draft, the wind blowing straight through me. Maybe I had a heart, once. I do not recall it ever healing. It is the cracks that turned me into what I am. Blackheart. The ageless sorcerer, sequestered in his tower and who steals virgins from their beds at full moon, and then bathes in their blood to keep his skin youthful. Humbug, all of it, of course!
I comb through my memory. Was there ever a time when I cared enough about life’s tragedies to feel anything? The conclusion I draw is that, aye, I do feel robbed. Robbed of heartbreak. Perhaps it is me becoming the last one of my kind that had made it so. There had been nothing — no, no one left to heal me. To remind me having a heart mattered.
Mine is a curse that having a heart will not lift. I am Blackheart. People shun me, alone in my black tower. Sometimes, I dearly wish I had a heart that could heal. Or break one final time.
Even though that would mean admitting that I am more human than I think.
….
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