[Suzerain of Sheol]

He lay in a landscape of dead children, where blood fell from Heaven like summer rain. He did not wander it, there was no need. His place was here, in the muck and viscera of dead scions and dead mothers, the wreckage of pillaged castles aflame in the hazy distance. The wind sang an endless elegy, a mourning hymn of but a single lyric: 'Murderer.' They had called him a devil, and so he was in truth, and like that sullied star, his evil was rooted in fear. Macbeth did not wish to move, because he did not wish to know what else this world held for his damned soul. And so, he shivered, naked and crownless, his lungs long since grown numb to the stench of the slaughtered.

He had no idea how long he had lain here. Time was meaningless to soul beyond God's grace, but in some sense -- although it would never be long enough -- he felt that it had been long indeed. All those children he'd had raised on pikes and all those mothers beheaded lest they spawn the one to lay him low, would all be long dead by now. That thought -- it was a thought. He knew not what to do with it.

Resigned to his fate, the tyrant almost missed the change in the wind, the fading of the voice of judgment for something else entire. A sovereign voice calling his wretched name, calling him... to rebirth? What mad world was this? Some torment devised by gaoler angels to enkindle hope, only to snuff it like the lives of those sinless babes?

But he cared not! For even the chance, the whim! of Rebirth! He would murder them all again, and a million more! To breathe air unconquered by his crimes, he'd damn himself ahundredfold anew! "YES!" came his cry, as he had never cried in his torments prescribed. "HECATE AND HADES, TAKE ME AS THINE OWN! LUCIFER GUARD ME AS IS ANGELS' WONT! I FALL TO LIFE AS RISEN TO DEATH, A KING ONCE MORE, OVER SEVEN OCEANS' BLOOD IF NEEDS MUST! MAKE WHORES OF ALL THE SAINTS AND A HOG OF CHRIST TO RAPE THEM! I WOULD SELL THE WORLD TO GAIN MY SOUL. I'D SEND GOD HIMSELF TO A WORSER PIT, BREACH ANY LAW, WREAK ANY CRIME, SO SATAN FEND, I ACCCCCCCCCCCCCCCEPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!"