long before the world knew joy, pain stretched across the galaxy in a form that would be remembered forever by the feeble minds of the human race. and those that believed no pain can exist without joy could not have lived in that age, some one hundred million years before humanity stood upon the murky firmament of the earth.

i am cenobite ... eternal, immortal, insane. and after this life i've led, there is nothing i do not know or have not felt that could convince me anything other than my humble assessment.

it is odd, now. lucifer has long passed from the memory of most. god has ceased to even be a word. since the demise of the realm of spirit, little has been done in the ways of magic or mirth. i alone still remember the joy of a freshly murdered foe ... of a newly born cenobite tasting their first drop of human blood.

they say the realm of matter is also no more. that even if there were gates through which we last cenobites could traverse, we would have no prey; nay, not even firmament upon which to tread. where once was billions of stars, and billions of mammal races is now only the coldness of the void. not even atoms dare to exist.

as i sit here, pondering the millions of lives i have erased, both human and not, i wonder how long before even the realm within which i exist must disappear. wonder how long before i finally see myself for what i am: something which should not be.

as a joke, i told my brother i had found god ... i cannot say what thoughts he had in that mind of his, but the very words provoked such horror in his eyes that even i was revolted. he comitted suicide before my very eyes, the only way we know how - tearing his very existence apart with a thought, the chains of life lifting from him, then tearing him asunder.

we are so few now. i grow tired. how i miss the days when lucifer tread existence. at least then we had a goal. but when heaven fell, and god was killed, all was forgotten and meaning fled from the life of all. even lucifer took her own life in the wake of oncoming emptiness.

from where i sit, i can see the end of the realm. and eternity washes ashore there, fragments of the world of matter fumbling quietly before they disappear forever. a statue floats at my feet ... thousands of feet tall, it fell when a world forgot it's place in the scheme of things ... i think they created humans, but it was so long ago.

how worthless the struggle seems now. even i cannot remember why we ever lived. and i am older than god.

woe is me ... a cenobite ... insane ... and now, it ends.