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One flat night, the wind stilled itself like a breath held in the worst kind of anticipation; the moment when you realize, too late, that everything has gone wrong with every carefully laid plan. Every alibi come to naught in the face of something far too dark to even be given shape: gloried in the feverish tongues of those men who spread their crazed scripture to those who pass beneath their perches just out of reach.

Fear.

The word dances across the lips of the multitudes, washing away serenity and sense, slathering a coat of ashen sludge across our hearts and burrowing into the mind like some virulent maggot, squirming for that last little bit of sanity we squirrel away in even the bleakest of times.

Fear. Say it, taste it, wallow in it if it would please the thing itself; let it tell its own lies in the face of liars and lovers where it pleases. It is a cloak, a shadow upon the radiance of what the thing might once have been or could have been in glory; fetid now beneath the lyrical cacophony of our Hallowed Lord Phobos, or was it Pandemonium who struck the first cord?

The song rang out, “Noli timere, et dilecti” through us all and became us all in the embrace we so give our neighbor as we might give ourselves in moments of weakness, when the words would not cut harshly enough from our peers, we hum the words to ourselves in the dark, before mirrors or even in fits of screamed playwright. It pervades us, heralded our coming and passing in bleak certainty, but always with a note of barely contained sarcasm. What might mankind be, before the endless tune?

Sing, weep, laugh and strain; twist away from the sadistic little tryst the world fights against itself in crashing waves; the song will always follow, but it need not pervade; the wind always rushes back, the anticipation ends and the breath can be replaced by another if but the darkness set aside. One need only look behind and see the other members of this chained choir and see the herald of a different tune in those who will not weep, in those who will not simply take the blows rained down from the lips of the raven-black prophets of Almighty Fear.

One only need to change the tune.