Men live and die, either caged or made to fly, either immolated or elevated by their desires.

If in your eyes flickers even the faintest of lights, harken, and let stars become sparks. For there is no difference between will and want, between want and wish. Therefore, if you, too, are all too human, then you must be in the possession of an embodied will. Yet who possesses whom? That is for you to choose—but be warned: the fork ahead beckons peril like the flutter of a serpent’s tongue.

To the left drips venom of the most decadent variety. Nothing tastes sweeter than what falls from the fang to roll down the tongue. If swallowed, or if injected by way of wounds, the victim succumbs to a blissful numbing. The limbs become lame and the eyes blind, the ears hard-of-hearing, and the tongue dumb. There can be no distant stars on the horizons of him so bitten; there can be no fire to fight the cold, no light to burn back the dark, no promise of dawn, nothing beyond an eternal winter, no spring, no fruit whose sweet juice might make the miles hiked worthwhile. There is only the poison and its eternally dreamless sleep.

To the right is the essence of fire. Spit into the eyes or delivered time and again to he who dares snare the serpent, this venom burns, purging like salt all parasites and poisons. Eyes cry; lungs bellow; musculature burns; and skin sweats slick with bitterness and resentment, both of which become vaporized by the heat of the stoked soul. And between tears, sparks grow bigger, brighter—the fire, could it really be drawing ever closer, now just out of reach?

Hope is a smoldering coal buried deep in your breast. To hold onto it is to cling to the serpent, through terror and agony, recognizing that the pain of its fangs is dull compared to fire burning inside—that the bite is a blessing in disguise, that the fever heat and dreams which follow are precisely what keeps the soul from going cold and dark.

So harken, you with souls of fire. Do not avert your eyes from your desires. Look long, not away, and embrace the pangs of longing. Let them light your way and burn decay from your body. You cannot reach the stars while so heavily weighed. Vice grips like ice imprisoning ships in the bay. Melt it away and take up your snakes, you whose souls are flame.