Just the shock of hitting that big boy had re-bruised his brain, he knew, knew it bled in his head. To sleep would be to wake up in a bed, a life spent weeing in nurse-held pans…

The words in his mind had already begun to shrink, would soon desert him for the “dees” and “dems” of pugilistic infamy.

This, he knew, had been his last brain injury. He must soon die or descend into the tittering hell that would sprout like watery plants rotted in swirling mud in the ruin of his brain. Like Wilfred screaming for his baby food, having wiped his rear on the kind lady’s diapers, might his life end.

With such thought had Poet staggered or mind and strode of body into the study he shared with Usef, the place where the Black Snake, the Shaykh of Fake, diverted him with his very own childhood dreams of Clack Power Herodom, of his fantasy of youth. Usef had abandoned him to his descending mind after the night of the Devil Train—one look in Poet’s eyes enough to convince him to leave his fighting dog gone mad to eat his own paws in this false lair.

But was it false?

Across his back was the great knife, scabbard tucked in his belt—how he had gotten dressed none could tell—least of all him.

Around him were the paintings and sketches of his youth: W. D. Fard, trickster prophet, Elijah Muhammad, the Honorable Minister Farrakhan, Big-Headed Yakub who Fard had said invented the White Devils on the Accursed Isle in the dim dawn of Time. They were to be like worker bees but became killers instead, or so Fard had said.

He fell silently, slowly, to his knees in the attitude of asking, not submission, the dim light barely illuminating the room, where hung the ancient oddity of his youth, beneath which silently spoke the legend of his fictional hero, sporting the characteristics he would adopt as a man, the fictional hero that was at his disintegrating, self-made center.

Wanting a hero his own—being a boy of comics—he had had to fashion one, but never had the courage to write his story, for the character had felt too true to have a happy falsehood for an ending and he had no wish to kill the soul he had cobbled together from the leavings of the corruption of adulthood that lolled so drunkenly and drugged about him…

It is the Year of Advent 9999.

Doth is Defender of the Reach, Seventh Hand of Ascension, sitting the Cataract Throne.

No one remains who might call him Doth, his family having willingly descended at Advent on his Empowerment Day, confident that he at least among their kin would Ascend.

His subordinates address him as ‘Defender,’ a reminder of his place among men.

The Five Intermediate Hands of Ascension name him ‘Seven,’ a reminder of his place among men.

The Intercessor, First Hand of Ascension, declines to address him, a reminder of his place among men.

The Chiefs of the Reach, whose fearless sons he has sown the fertile banks of The One River with, name him 'Reap,' a reminder of his place among men.

Doth is a man quintessentially alone.

This is his story.

He knew it was not real.

He knew.

But it was him.

Was he real?

If so, for how long would he fictate across the face of this wicked world?

He walked there in the picture frame of his searching mind’s eye.

If this was the door to Hope’s dusty tomb, he would take it.