The Pain of a Muse

There is a restless torment that never ceases.  An unsettling that must be satisfied before it lays down to rest—but it is never satisfied, and so it never rests.
            It must wake, and when it does, it yearns.  The weight of it beats within itself as though a heart, for it is a kind of life blood.  And when it eats, it devours—it cannot help it—until nothing is left, save itself; a glowing torrent that aches, turns, and is as brutal as the most tenacious current.
            Some say the fairies put it there—and lit the match that made it burst.  Some say it was the gods, put in place with keen desire so that the frantic depth they themselves could not escape would dwell in others.  And some say the gods are fairies, doomed to grow ever smaller, as their place in the world diminishes.  But what ignites it matters not; for it grows ever more possessing.
            A double-edged sword for the fae-gods, for they diminish from its very existence, but cannot be apart from it—for it is by its virtue that they continue to exist.  
I do not pity them. 
For it is my ache, my torment, my ceaseless inward beating they have lit.  This fretful chaos that can never be satisfied, that some would mockingly call ‘muse.’  I cannot be torn from it either, for to do so would be to take away all of what I am—this is how far it has grown, this possessing soul.
            And so I’ll feed it, with gods and fairies, to let them live.  In this we are bound, them and I.  But I am grateful, all the same, that though it blows as an unflinching wind; when I feel its whipping breeze, I have no doubt that I live, too.

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