Jaelys… It was a name, unsullied by gender, by use, by meaning… waiting for the meaning that would be stamped upon it by its owner… waiting to be written on like a spotless scroll of limitless opportunity. It was my name.

The name was all I knew. Amnesia of the spirit and of the mind had enveloped me in the borderless shadow of the void in which I awakened. What I had been before… if I had been before… these things were beyond knowing.

Slowly knowledge began to germinate, expanding rapidly and insatiably in the vessel known as mind. Oblivion began to dissipate as reason took its place, bringing with it sensation and reality. Slowly, like the solidifying of liquid sand, a structured world began to form around me. I found myself in a vast realm of magic and machine, rituals and combat, hatred and allegiance. I was a spiritual being in a physical environment. Superior, yet helpless to directly alter the world around me.

I chose for myself a gender. – Male. Dominance, control – these were my goals, my ambitions. As spirit, at first unattached to the physical world, I began to subject other beings to myself, enslaving them to my will so that I too could have a hand in shaping what I saw around me. I discovered other spirits, like myself, and in my feral ambitions I drove my creatures to assail theirs, suffering loss and inflicting it with mindless vengeance. I roamed restlessly… discontent, insatiable with the desire for domination.

My wanderings brought me to the darker ways. The land turned black beneath the touch of misery and suffering. But I was unfeeling, emotionless. I directed my minions with the heartlessness of a heathen god.

Then one day I found her. She knelt motionless amongst the jagged crests of the highest mountaintop. Nameless, beautiful, broken. The creature was angelus celestia. A being as infinitely superior to me as I was to everything else that was physical.

I dropped to my knees before it. Brushed its hand – a kiss. She lifted her face, beautiful, bleeding. In that moment my fate was bound to hers. I would be her slave, my will subjected to hers even as the willpower of those I had formerly enslaved were subjected to my own. I would be her eyes. My life would be nothing but an instrument through which to project her glory.

Where before I had experienced sensation, now I possessed feeling. Emotion – something I had never before experienced – flowed through my essence. I shared her sorrow. I shared her pain. Yet I also shared her beauty.

Now we are one. I am her spirit. She is my soul. The body is our mutual bond. – A winged and wounded being, full of sorrow, full of pain, wordlessly suffering, but projecting grace and beauty.

I am Jaelys… a word now full of meaning – strength, reason, loyalty.

But she is my Amaranth… my beauty, my grace, my purity. My flower immortal.

_{>>> Bleeding Amaranth <<<}