Death Cult

pomegranateandpanzer:

In the solemn midnight hour you swore an oath, standing swollen with enraptured pride, shoulder to shoulder with your black uniformed brothers, rows of steel and wool in the shadows of the arches and turrets that swallow the torchlit square alive; a resounding echo of voices in perfect unison, microphone static drowned out by repeated words that are pronounced sharper than any knife, reverberating through the firey haze, and with the promise of death rolling off tongues, the new elite is born.

The oath resonates in you like a personal ritual that you strive with body and substance to uphold each day, a religion marked by the signs of the skull on your cap and runes on your collar; the blood of your comrades that seeps into the ground under your worn boots a sacrifice on the altar of Europa, and when you slick your hair back and tuck a cigarette between cracked lips while the aroma of death, hot metal, and bodies gone sour embrace you, you envy the dead and their hero’s welcome in Valhalla, and for a brief moment as your hands shake and the tightness wraps around your chest like razor wire, you wonder if you’re already dead.

On death row you ponder your oath as through the grim halls you hear echoes of voices in accents that grate you to the core labeling you a fanatical of the worst sort, arrogant and zealously dedicated to your lost cause, a cult leader dripping in blood and fuel; in the solitary existence that settles into your bones like decay, your oath stays fresh under your skin like the shards of shrapnel that keep you shifting on the hard bed under floodlights and curious eyes, and you wait for death with the festering patience of the martyrs of old, the promise of death lingering like a shadow in the form of a gallows.