Love and death are never too far apart.
Love for country, love for fellow man, love for the sake of love, can and have brought many a virtuous and passionate life to tragic ends.
Love can drive man to nigh lunacy, just as it will bring man back from the precipice of insanity. It will be both the rope that hoists you up and the boot that keeps you down. It will save you from death just as quickly as it will send you tumbling into oblivion's greedy hands.
It is what a person does in the name of love, and what they do to bear love's double-edged sword, that defines them.
Death, too, is just as polarizing. Man will spend lifetimes fearing it, fearing what comes after it, and fearing that nothing comes next. Man fears the unknown, but you know death, and death knows you.
Death can be abrupt. It can turn a thousand lives upside-down by ending only one, and it will take it without warning. Death, however, can also be benevolent, and stay its hand if even for just a few moments more with the ones you love.
Love cannot be without death at its side.
A marriage both so cruel and so magnanimous, there never was.
—
My name is Authis.
I am a scientist and a philosopher from a long-dead kingdom from a much-changed world. I've been breathing for hundreds of years, but only a handful of them were spent truly alive. Most, regrettably, were spent in an unbreakable, unfindable prison, crafted by the Gods and buried so deep beneath the dirt that even fossils envy me.
Even in my confines, however, I can observe the greater world, and while most of the insignificant, mundane mind-clutter fails to stimulate me, every now and then, an exceptional mortal or two will spring from Creation's fount and be just interesting enough for me to almost remember what it's like to be entertained.
This story is not my own, but I am intertwined with it in ways I almost wish I wasn't.
Such is the story of Marcus Hekate and Hekate Albedo, men of monoliths that joined to make a spire.