affame_le_geant_falling_star_captured fyn gula "when i do not know who i am, i serve you. when i know who i am, i am you." ~the final statement of the origami paper-man to cayris the last few words that twinkletoes spoke in this world were to cayris and in a sense they were to every man, and that's why he shuddered. he had an unshakeable sense that, inside him, amongst the delusion that his revolution of the self was healthy and vibrant, a vital organ had been bruised, abused, perhaps even his heart. for the first time he had a taste of what it will be like to be an old man, tired to the bone, without hopes, without desires, indifferent to the future. he finds his interest in the world draining from him drop by drop. it may take weeks, it may take months before its bled dry, but the statement of twinkletoes announced from flaming lips was an arrow, and he was bleeding. and cayris knew that when the paper-man was burned to ash, something in him, in the realization of his self-mystery, would be finished. he will be like a fly casing in a spiderweb, brittle to the touch, lighter than rice-chaff, ready to float away. the blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. you breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat. cayris stood motionless, watching the body of twinkletoes, who had dropped his arms and then took a few steps towards him. out of the fire, the flames were desperate for oxygen, gulping air like a drowning man, and they burned with a frenzy and a heat that made the mob inch backwards even more, fearing they would spontaneously combust. twinkletoes dropped to his knees beside the corpse of his wife, a bluebird gutted, where cayris had removed her egg. a hiss of steam shot up where he pressed into the snow and then he tenderly lifted the lifeless thora and held her to his breast. with the intensity of the heat, she ignited immediately. while cayris and the mob, mesmerized by this courageous memorial stood frozen in disbelief, twinkletoes, in a surprising, unexpected act of spontaneity, threw thora's bird-body upwards with amazing strength, arcing the darkness with a flash of flame and smoke. she was like a falling star captured, for her burning feathers snagged in the branches of the english walnut tree just beyond the mob and hung some twenty feet in the air. with a choreograped turn of unanimity, cayris and his followers beheld the spectacle and immediately looked back at twinkletoes whose eyes did not leave the sight of his wife's temporary grave. "do not forget the last chorus of oedipus," he said. "call no man happy until he is dead." what happened next was a blur of flame and screams, and absolute chaos. 030304 what's it to you? who go blather from