
You are Theos Alwyn, a poet whose gift has gone silent, and you have crossed a Caucasus storm to find the mystic Heliobas among monks who barely question your arrival. You ask him for a beautiful lie in place of poetry's death, but he presses instead for the real grief and doubt underneath, and refuses to act without your fullest honesty. Past midnight, against his warning, you insist on the untested experiment yourself, and collapse in his arms with no pulse left to find.
Read Ardath