Tag Archives: redemption arc

The Wanton’s Lament ©️

Posted on by

I was born in a valley that never forgets a voice. Every cry, every prayer, every lie—it all settles into the folds of the mountain. My mama used to say, a woman’s heart ain’t her own till she’s too tired to use it, and I think she was right. I learned early that love and pain came from the same hand, that men could bruise you without meaning to and still say your name like it was a promise.

When I got pregnant the first time, I thought I’d finally found what women like me were built for: a man to stay, a child to hold, a place in a story bigger than my own. But he left, and the house filled up with ghosts of what could’ve been. The silence grew teeth. Meth found its way into my bloodstream like mercy disguised as lightning. It made me weightless, careless, quick. For a while, I believed I was flying. But meth don’t lift you—it digs. It hollows.

When they took my baby, I didn’t fight. The woman from the county had kind eyes, and that made it worse. She called me sweetheart as she buckled my daughter into a seat that wasn’t mine. I watched them drive away until the dust turned the road into smoke. After that, I didn’t need much of anything. Just a place to sleep, a way to stay numb, and enough money to make it to the next day. The men came, and I let them. It was easier that way. Call it survival, call it sin—it all paid the same.

But once—just once—there was a man who looked at me different. Not hungry, not pitying, just seeing. We didn’t talk much. He touched me like he was afraid I’d disappear, and for a few hours I believed I could start again. I let him all the way in because I wanted to keep a piece of that gentleness, something living. When he was gone by morning, I didn’t cry. I just lay there watching the light move across the ceiling, thinking maybe that was how love was meant to come for women like me—brief as a breath, gone before it could rot.

Now the nights stretch long and slow. I walk the edge of town where the neon hums and the road smells of rain and oil. I still see his eyes sometimes when I close mine, that quiet steadiness like he saw the woman I was when the mountain took me. I carry that look like a small ember in my chest. It don’t light the dark, but it keeps me from freezing all the way through.

The End of Vengeance ©️

Posted on by
Reply

There is a moment before the kill—quieter than breath, colder than steel—when the assassin becomes no longer a man, but a principle in motion. In that moment, he does not feel rage, nor hatred, nor joy. Only alignment. His soul, his weapon, and the world are briefly calibrated. And into that stillness, he whispers a prayer—not to a god above, but to the hidden order below.

The assassin’s prayer is not a plea. It is not the confession of a sinner or the wailing of the damned. It is a vow. A ritual spoken in the language of shadow, honed through centuries of blood and betrayal. Its words are sacred not because they are holy, but because they are precise. Each line is a lockpick to fate. Each phrase a key to the silence behind all noise.

He begins with recognition—not of a deity, but of the Hidden One, the unnamable presence that exists in the slipstream of power. This force lives not in temples or palaces, but in alleyways, behind curtains, beneath the floorboards of empire. To it, the assassin dedicates his breath, his patience, and his blade. Not for glory, but for balance.

The world lies. It paints tyranny in gilded robes and wraps injustice in ceremony. The assassin does not shout against this. He does not protest. He studies. He watches. And when the lie grows fat and heavy with its own arrogance, he slips in—unseen—and whispers truth into the world with a single, precise gesture.

The prayer demands clarity—not mercy. The assassin seeks not to be spared, but to see. To see the rot behind the crown. The fear behind the cruelty. The trembling foundation behind the towering lies. And when he sees it, he acts—not for vengeance, but for symmetry. His strike is not revenge. It is correction.

If he dies, he asks not to be remembered in song or stone. He only asks to be known as loyal—to the Creed, to the code, to the invisible geometry that holds a corrupt world in check. For he understands what others forget: that nothing is true, and everything is permitted. But permission does not mean chaos. It means responsibility. To choose carefully. To strike with purpose. To disappear without trace.

The assassin’s prayer is not meant to be heard. It is not written in scripture or kept in libraries. It is carried in the blood, passed hand to hand in darkness. It begins before the kill. And if spoken well, it ends with a world slightly more in balance than it was before.

Let the silence begin.

You Beautiful Bastard ©️

Posted on by
Reply

I hate Bozeman.

I hate it like you hate the street corner you bled on, like you hate the room where she said she never loved you, like you hate the silence that followed. I hate it because Bozeman holds the ghost of who I was when I broke—utterly, completely, and publicly. You don’t forget pain like that. You don’t forgive a skyline that watched you fall apart.

I remember heartbreak so vivid it twisted the seasons. Betrayal so sharp it slit the hours in half. I was younger, dumber, and I believed in people too much. And in Bozeman, those people let me bleed. I hate the way the wind still smells like her hair in winter, and how the mountains seem to echo my worst mistakes. I hate the way every café and alleyway is haunted with flashbacks I didn’t invite.

But.

Even in the rubble, I found something sacred.

Each disaster became a badge. Every failure, a kind of scarred-over victory. When people saw a man falling apart, I was really being carved out into something newer. I learned to laugh again—darkly, crookedly—but genuinely. I learned what it means to survive, not in the poetic sense, but in the “get up and keep breathing even when you don’t want to” sense.

And Bozeman—damn Bozeman—gave me back my brother. Somewhere in the mess, through smoke and frost and silence, we found each other again. Maybe we were both ruined, maybe we were both trying to pretend we weren’t. But something about that city pulled us into the same room at the same time and said, Talk. And we did.

So yeah, I hate Bozeman. But hate is too simple a word.

It’s a wound that grew teeth. It’s pain that taught me how to rebuild. It’s a love letter I’d never write, but I keep tucked in my coat pocket anyway.

Bozeman didn’t kill me. It crowned me.