Alejandro Bruce is a student at the University of Denver who went abroad to Akita International University in autumn of 2023, in part due to a passion for adventure and new experiences and in part to have new things to write about. In his freetime, you can find him at the gym or busy writing at the local library. In fact, it was an English class like this that inspired him to officially pick up the pen and paper in 2015. Linguistics is another passion of his, and in his free time, you can sometimes find him creating new languages from scratch.

Like autumn winds, I come and go,

But where I stop, I do not know,

For warm breezes give way to cold,

As the leaves give way to snow.

Sitting by the sea shore,

Memories known but born anew,

I recall past lives upon the sand,

And the warm embrace of the dune.

As seagulls fly above the waves,

Memories of old friends abode,

Salty flecks of seawater tickle the face,

As I reminisce about the days of old.

Yet as the sun sets on the ocean waves,

Old memories begin to fade,

I lose myself in the beauty of the world,

And in myself, whom it has made.

When I managed to injure that white “raven” with the spell I had found, its form blossomed into something new like a grotesque flower. I can’t really do justice to what this thing (I refuse to call it a person because it acted so feral) looked like. It was grotesquely beautiful in a way: its “face” had many long eyes which unfurled like the feathers of a peacock, yet its coloration would make even the peacock green with envy. I saw vibrant shades and colors which I never knew existed, ones I never knew were possible, and in a brief moment, I almost felt myself weep at its beauty. But as soon as I had begun to weep, my cries had turned to screams. I instinctually grabbed my ritualistic saber and held it just under my eye, just barely stopping myself from gauging out my own eyes with the blade. Those beautiful colors, as suddenly as they had appeared beautiful to me, became the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen. I will never forget that creature’s many eyes, how they pierced through my soul, hungry and filled with hatred. Those eyes were a gateway to a reality I could not rectify. They showed me revelations I was never supposed to see, the intangible chain which binds me to the Voice of Existence, that nebulous being known only as Him. All around me, every waking moment, I still see those chains upon my legs, and tethered to all living things, yet the raven is free. He is not chained like I or all other living beings. His all-seeing eyes etch themselves into my dreams to this day, forever carved into the crevices of my skull, beckoning me to join him, offering to remove the shackles of fate from my heavy legs. Yet while I know that my fate with these shackles will not be pretty, for I have already seen every horrible possibility in how I may die, I know whatever the raven offers is a hell unlike any other. I’ve seen the visions of his kingdom, of his horrid kin eager to devour humanity whole. For years now, I have tried to recreate that sensation I felt during the banishment ritual, that mix of elation and existential terror, but no feeling which can be intentionally invoked comes even close to it. The closest I have ever gotten was getting crossed on LCD and whiskey, then driving my car off of a cliff by my oceanside home, and in the moments where my memory had started to lapse and I was mere seconds away from drowning as my car sunk into the sea, I could feel the raven’s presence ever so slightly, yet the moment passed as water entered my lungs and my survival instincts kicked in, forcing me to break through my window and surface. I don’t think I want to keep living, knowing that the god I prayed to for all my life will apathetically cut my life short whenever it most amuses Him, yet death by my own hands means I would be at the mercy of the raven, a fate infinitely worse in almost every regard, being endlessly devoured and reassembled to be devoured again by the beast’s hungry maw. Many known the raven as the Great Enslaver, but I believe another name is more appropriate: Sa-Amatag, the Architect of Destruction.