Chapter 22 Chapter 21

All afternoon, Martin Silenus worked on his epic, only to stop writing because of the fading light. He found that his old studio had been looted and the antique desk was gone.Sad King Billy's palace has withstood the worst abuses of time, with broken doors and windows, miniature sand dunes drifting on the faded carpet that was once full of wealth, and mice and small stone eels scurrying among the collapsed rocks.Apartment towers have become home to pigeons and falcons, which have returned to their feral state.Finally, the poet returned to the congregation hall, sat down at a low table under the huge grid dome of the dining room, and began to write.

Dust and debris covered the ceramic floor, and the scarlet hue of the desert creeper nearly covered the cracked window sills, but Silenus put all these extraneous things behind him and fought in his "Psalms" middle. The poem tells the story of the fall of the Titans, who were replaced by their own offspring, the Greek gods.It tells of the struggle of the god Olympus as the Titans refused to be replaced: as Oceanus and his usurper, Neptune, wrestled, the seas raged; The sun vanishes as Berian vies with Apollo for control of the light; and the universe shudders as Saturn and Jupiter vie for the throne of the gods.What is at stake is not just the disappearance of one group of gods, who will be replaced by another group, but also the end of a golden age and the coming of a dark age, which will mean the destruction of all ordinary people.

"Hyberian Psalms" does not hide the other identity of these gods: we can easily understand that the Titan gods represent the heroes in the short history of mankind in the entire galaxy, and the usurper of Olympus is the core of technology. artificial intelligence.The battlefield between the two sides has spread to the familiar continents, oceans, and air routes on all the planets in the ring network.Among these, the Hades-monster, though son of Saturn, was impatient to inherit the kingdom with Jupiter, and secretly stalked his prey.It hunts gods as well as mortals. The Psalms are also about the relationship between creation and creator, the love between parent and child, artist and artwork, all creators and their works.The poem celebrates love, fidelity, but teeters on the verge of etherealism, corrupt plots about the power of love, human ambition, and academic arrogance.

Martin Silenus has spent more than two standard centuries on the Psalms.It's in these environments that his best work is created—abandoned cities, the desert wind screaming in the background like an ominous Greek chorus, and it's filled with the menacing shadow of the sudden approach of the Shrike.In order to save his life, Silenas left the city, abandoned his muse, and silenced his magic pen.Now he picked up his pen again, chasing the exact deeds, the perfect sentence structure, which only experienced by gifted and inspired writers.Martin felt his youth revived... His blood vessels were dilated and his lung capacity was extremely increased. He savored the gorgeous light and pure air, but he didn't feel their existence. In one stroke, the previous pages were piled high on the round table, and the broken bricks and stones were used as paperweights. The story flowed with the flow again, and every stanza and line shone with immortal light.

Silenus has reached the most difficult and exciting part of the poem, in which the war sweeps through thousands of lands, entire civilizations are ravaged, and the representatives of the Titans request a temporary truce to fight Olympus The humorless heroes meet and negotiate.In the vast scene imagined by the poet, striding past Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus, Briareus, Mims, Enceladus, Rotus, and Other gods - and their same titanic sisters, Tethys, Phoebe, Thea, Clymene - and across them, the somber countenance of Jupiter, Apollo, and Olympus' many brethren . Silenus did not know the end of this grandest epic.He just wants to finish this poem...for decades, he has been working hard on it.As a young man, learning words as a teacher brought him fame and fortune, but all this is over - he has gained immeasurable fame and fortune, but they almost killed him, and did kill him. His art—though he knew that the Psalms were the best literature of his time, he simply wanted to finish it, to know the ending for himself, to make every stanza, every line, every word as best as possible. Perfect, penetrating, beautiful form.

Now he writes with ecstasy, almost insanity, full of hope that the poem he has long thought impossible is about to be accomplished.Word by word flowed from his ancient quill pen, swayed on the old paper, stanza by stanza leaped effortlessly to the end of the paper, the poems found their own voice, written with a stroke, completely No need to revise, absolutely no need to pause for inspiration.Be it the words or the images, the poetry bursts forth at an astonishingly fast pace, and what it reveals is horrifying and heart-stoppingly beautiful. Under the banner of armistice, Saturn and the usurper Jupiter stand opposite each other at a vertically cut marble negotiating table.Their dialogues are grand and austere, their debates of survival, the basis of polemics, create the most brilliant debates since Thucydides's.Suddenly, something new, something completely unexpected in Martin Silenus's hours of meditation without a muse, appears in the verse.Both kings of the gods expressed their fear of this third usurper, a terrible foreign power that threatened the stability of their respective kingdoms.Silinas watched in great amazement that the characters he had shaped through thousands of hours defied his will, shook hands before the marble slab, formed an alliance, and resisted together...

resist what? The poet stopped, the quill stopped, and now, at last, he found that he could hardly read the page.He had been writing in semi-darkness for a long time, and now total darkness had descended. The world poured in again, and Silenas came back to his senses, like feeling back after orgasm.Only the author's re-emergence into the world appears more painful on return, the trailing cloud of glory dissipating quickly in the earthly stream of sensual trifles. Silenas looked around.The vast dining room was dark save for the intermittent flickering of stars and the light of distant explosions piercing through the ceiling panes and ivy.The table beside him is a shadow, and the walls thirty meters away in all directions are the deeper shadows adorned there, with the distorted shadows of desert vines.Outside the restaurant, the night wind was rising, and the voice was extremely loud, and the gaps in the rafters and gaps in the dome sang contralto and soprano solos one after another.

The poet sighed.He didn't carry a torch in his pack.He took nothing but water and the Psalms.He felt his stomach growling and his stomach throwing a tantrum.Where the hell did Braun go?But as soon as he thought of her, he became quite happy again, and he was glad the woman hadn't come back for him.He needs to stay here alone to complete the poem... At this speed, it won't take a day, maybe just a night.In a few hours he could finish his life's work, and he could rest for a while and appreciate the little everyday objects, the trifles of life.For years they have been an unpleasant annoyance to an impossible job.

Martin Silenus sighed again and began stuffing the manuscript into his backpack.He'd have to find a light somewhere first...or a fire, with Sad King Billy's old tapestry as a kindling.If necessary, he would write poetry outside under the lights of the space station. Silenus picked up the last few sheets of paper and a pen, and turned to look for an exit. Something was standing beside him in the dark hall. It's Lamia, he thought, consolation and disappointment battling each other. But not Braun Lamia.Silinas noticed the deformed figure, the huge body, the two extremely long legs underneath, the starlight show on the carapace and spines, the overlapping shadows of the four arms, especially the ruby ​​light emitted by the hellishly bright crystal, That's where the eyes are.

Silena groaned and sank back into the chair. "Leave me alone now!" he cried. "Go away, you bloody eyes!" The tall shadow came closer, and its footsteps stepped on the cold porcelain floor, silently.Ripples of blood-red energy rippled across the sky, and now the bard could see the surrounding spines, blades, and wire mesh. "No!" cried Martin Silenus, "No! Spare me!" The Shrike moved closer again.With trembling hands, Silenus picked up his pen again and wrote on the empty bottom edge of the last sheet: It's time, Martin. Martin stared at what he had written, suppressing the urge to giggle wildly.As far as he knew, the Shrike had never spoken to... communicated with anyone.Except through the medium of the twins of pain and death. "No!" he cried again, "I have work to do. Go find someone else, you bloody monster!"

The Shrike took another step forward.The sky glowed with a silent glow of plasma bombs, and red and yellow light streamed down the monster's quicksilver chest and arms like splattered paint.Martin Silenus's hand trembled again, and after the previous sentence he wrote--It's time, Martin. Holding the manuscript in his arms, Silenus picked up the last few sheets from the table so he wouldn't have to write anything more.He almost hissed at the apparition, showing a hideous grin. You are about to exchange places with your master, and his hand still writes on the desktop involuntarily. "Not now!" screamed the poet, "Billy is dead! Just let me finish. Please!" Martin Silenus never begged anyone else in his long, long life.But he begged humbly now. "Please, oh, please. Just let me do it." Shrike took a step forward.Now, it is so close, the grotesque upper body has blocked the starlight, and the poet is hidden under its shadow. No, Martin Silenus wrote the words, and the Shrike stretched out his infinitely long arm, and his infinitely sharp fingers pierced the poet's arm to the marrow.The pen in his hand fell to the ground. Martin screamed as he was pulled from under the restaurant dome.He screamed, saw the sand dunes under his feet, heard the quicksand under his screams, and saw the tree rising from the valley. The tree was larger than the whole valley, higher than the mountains over which the pilgrims traversed; the upper branches seemed to reach into the sky.The tree is made of steel and chrome, and its branches are thorns and nettles.On those spines, many, many people struggled and writhed—thousands.The darkening sky glowed red. Although Silenus was in extreme pain, he still concentrated and found that he recognized several figures.It was a body, not a spirit or other abstract thing, and they were clearly enduring the pain of life. Necessary, Silenus wrote on the Shrike's cold breast.Blood dripped over quicksilver and sand. "No!" the poet screamed.He clenched his fists and pounded on the scalpel and the wire mesh.He pushed and pulled and twisted, but the monster held him tighter, pulled him on its own blade, as if he were a butterfly being framed, a pinned specimen.But it wasn't the unimaginable pain that drove Silenas mad, but the sense of irreparable loss.He's almost done.He's almost done! "No!" screamed Martin Silenus, writhing more and more wildly until Daxiang's blood spattered and screamed obscenities filled the entire space.The Shrike led him toward the waiting thorn tree. In the dead city, the screams echoed for a minute, then faded away.A silence ensued, broken occasionally by doves returning to their nests, falling into the disintegrating domes and towers with a soft flapping sound of wings. The wind suddenly picked up, flapping the loose plexiglass panes and the furnace wall, blowing the brittle leaves through the dry fountain, piercing through the cracked dome pane, the calm whirlwind rolled up the manuscript paper, Some slipped away and were blown into silent yards, empty walkways and caved-in ditches. After a while, the wind died down, and then nothing moved in the City of Poets.

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