Chapter 40: The Fourth Monk
Arthur stared blankly at the beautiful canopy of scarlet roses. Their vibrant crimson hue stretched across the landscape like a sea of blood, undulating gently in the breeze. The petals caught the fading light, creating an illusion of flames licking across the ground. Despite their beauty, he felt nothing—no awe, no appreciation, just emptiness reflecting the void within him. The world could have been painted in the most magnificent colors imaginable and Arthur would have remained unmoved, his capacity for wonder extinguished alongside his will to continue.
He sighed and looked down at the roses by his feet before slowly lowering himself to one knee and wrapping his fingers around a root and picking it out of the ground. The stem felt cool against his palm, tiny thorns pressing against his skin without breaking it. The rose was perfect—unblemished petals spiraling outward from a tight center, each layer of deepening crimson more exquisite than the last. With methodical slowness, as if each movement required careful consideration, he stood back up and slowly raised the flower to his nose and began to smell it.
The headache came on as usual—a dull throbbing that started at his temples and radiated inward, pulsing with each beat of his heart. Then came the temptations and the urge to give yourself to them. The whispers at the edge of consciousness, promising relief, promising an end to pain, promising power in exchange for surrender. Actually in truth they had been hammering in his mind ever since the end of his fight with Luke, but Arthur's mind was so fractured and in such disarray the temptation of the roses became little more than background noise—just another torment lost among many, another voice in the cacophony of grief and guilt that dominated his thoughts.
Right now he was simply smelling the rose and trying his best to enjoy its sweet and savory scent... but he did not smell anything. No fragrance reached him, as if his senses had shut down along with his emotions. The rose might as well have been carved from stone for all the sensation it provided. Another small loss atop countless others, another reminder of how disconnected he had become. Arthur sighed and dropped the rose along with his hand limp by his side, watching dispassionately as it fluttered to the ground to rejoin its brethren, disappearing among the sea of identical blooms.
Before slowly looking to the right where he had long since felt a presence entered his dark sense radius. The awareness had been there ever since the dead flowers came back to life, footsteps under the shade of the freshly bloomed flowers, but he had ignored it until now, neither curious about its nature nor concerned for his safety. He looked blankly at the thing that lay before him and for the first time since leaving Luke's body, Arthur spoke.
"The fourth monk... guess there will be someone to witness me die after all."
His voice was hoarse from disuse, the words scraping against his dry throat like sand. They seemed to hang in the still air, alien sounds in a place that had known only silence. To Arthur's right, standing ominously in the field of red roses, was a skeleton draped in a black robe with the hood pulled over its head. The fabric was worn and frayed at the edges, moving slightly in a breeze that seemed to affect nothing else. In its hand was held a scythe that was as long as the skeleton was tall. The wooden handle was dark and polished from centuries of use, and the blade gleamed with an unnatural sharpness that seemed to cut the very air around it. It looked lifelessly at Arthur, unmoving, empty eye sockets somehow containing a penetrating gaze that pierced through his physical form to evaluate the state of his soul.