Most live trying to ignore the encroachment of death, trying to stem it off, to stop time from revealing their end, losing themselves in solipsistic dreams of tomorrow. But he did not. He had been murdered, a cleaving of his heart and trust so deep and unrelenting that he only sought to make it end. It would not, and the beauty of the world was stolen by the deceitful, the false, and the brutish and twisted into obscenity. He was not dead, not in fact, not in definition, but he longed to be taken by that icy hand, and, while others strove to evade it, living for their delusions, he begged for it, living only for the day that it finally came and released him.