Pale {The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim}

Chapter II: Speaking with Silence {Marcellus}

ACT I

CHAPTER II

SPEAKING WITH SILENCE

{MARCELLUS' POV}

I'm existing in a room where all I can see is a future untraceable, and I come up with a philosophy that is worth stating formally:

Everything begins where everything ends.

It sounds deep, but it's really not much of a stretch.When you leave someplace, it's usually because you're going somewhere else. When you leave somebody, you start your new life without them. When the day ends, the night picks up. Or when you close out a paragraph, you begin another one underneath it.

It's really like stripes: white space ends, black begins, black space ends...

I'll say it again: everything begins where everything ends.

It's worth repeating.

And I mean everything.

It all begins just so it can end. Ends just so it can begin again.

(You get it yet?)

We're born to die. We perish because we live. It's common knowledge.

Just like what we disdain. Nobody hates things just to hate. They hate because they want something better.

They want an 'end', so they can get a 'begin'.

And I'm one of those people.

You could say I have a death wish, as most people do. And around most people, I spit. But here, I'll say no. I don't have a death wish. I have a life wish. A new life wish. One that starts off someplace else as soon as this one flickers off.

I am a risk taker who doesn't take risks.

I kill myself everyday. I walk the line between life and death. I stand at the edge of Oblivion and carelessly hop on the verge of the damned like it's nothing.

You see me as a warrior. It's almost comical, because that's exactly how I'd picture me, too. Some tortured, fighting soul whose nurturing family was slaughtered in a likely 'Imperial' raid and had to watch his beautiful, limitless life shatter to conveniently fixable pieces at age four.

You picture me going on in some brooding inner monologue, silently weeping in the emotional hovel I created for myself:

"Their bloody heads rolled," I narrate. "But I single-handedly killed a smirking soldier with my bare, toddler hands as the guts of my loving sister stained the hardwood floor in a gelatinous pile of crimson goo," you imagine.

"I could save the town" - the soliloquy continues - "but not my parents, so I forever walk this earth blaming myself for their tragic death and hating every aspect of my awful, yet noble, personality because of it. I'm incredibly skilled and handsome (but I don't own a mirror and have no idea), and women flock to me as if I am fine jewelry (although I have the fine part down), yet I refuse their advances because I am emotionally unavailable and can't see the good within myself," you see me saying.

You think me as this guy. Right?

Well, I'm not.

I'm handsome. I know that.

I'm skilled. I know that.

I'm cunning. I know that better than anyone.

I'm a bad guy. But yet, there have been worse.