I took the train today… but I was not really in the train. I was with the Lady Justice as she recalled the tale of how she lost her sight.
No.. no… that was not my fault… I blinded the Lady Hope, Justice is another story altogether. She is the one who wears the blood-stained fold over her eyes for they’ve never stopped bleeding since. Have you ever wondered how someone weeps tears of blood, fresh tracks of crimson staining her porcelain cheeks everyday?
She took me back to the day of treachery; how her sight was robbed and she was cast into darkness for all eternity. They are egregors, these prophets. They do not die like we do; they vanish when they are forgotten… when their names are buried under centuries of dust alongside ancient texts written in dead languages.
So Lady Justice… she was tricked by the jester child who climbed onto her eyelids one night. The jester child sprinkled sleeping powder stolen from the Beetle King (who used the same power to lure the One-Eyed God to sleep but that is another tale for another time).
While she slept, the jester child stuck the Key of Souls into Justice’s eye, one after another; to unlock the dark side of her that is Injustice.
The pain must have been unbearable for we all heard her scream that night; the sort of cry that makes your hair stand on ends. The jester child then crawled in to Justice’s ear and whispered evil lies; bearing witness to false crimes so Justice would unleashed her swords, Ebony and Ivory upon the house of god…. and she did.
Not one monk was left alive that night; all of them fell under the blade like wheat.
In the silence that followed thereafter, we saw her drenched in blood… an eerie glow of mad fury mixed with the stench of death shrouding her like a cloak in the misty light.
Hollow sockets stared at us as if she could see right through us. It was almost unreal but we knew she saw us with a sight far keener than through the eyes she once had. It felt cold and impartial, like the weighing of the scale to determine if we lived… or fell under her sword.
The jester child unleashed the shadow beast within and Justice abandoned sanity for the code of the prophets.
No more boundaries, no more rules, no more right and wrong to still her hand. She would bring vengeance to our doorstep; upon the weak or the strong; the ones deemed righteous as surely as the ones deemed evil and she would do so without remorse.
I went up to her and offered her a rose; not just any rose…. a lilac colored one for though she cannot see, the smell of the lilac rose in unmistakable. It carries the scent of the heavens before its gates was closed on us.
Perhaps, when I have etched her face with sacred ink and named her spirit; I will show her to you that she may visit you in your dreams and show you what true horror means.
The beast was here all along…