Four, Seventh Hour: Turning

UNEDITED ORIGINAL DRIVEL.
(I'm always more interested in what happens after the end of my stories than the actual stories themselves. And I fucked over the characters in Seventh Hour almost as badly as the ones in Stella Matin. They all ought to be dead.)
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In the generations following the last war, the soul known as Tammuz, Endymion, Gilgamesh, and Marcus was reborn three times as a servant girl in the service of a beautiful, angry young lord. Three times, she was beaten and raped to death.

The fourth time the soul known as the Destroyer, the Flame Lord, the Time Keeper, and the Bearer of the Last Hour was reborn after the last and greatest war, he decided he'd had enough of punishing himself, and enough of being punished.

Overnight, the world blossomed into something else, something greater and freer than it had ever been before. In the violence of that change, the soul that had begun it all was reborn three more times, as a politician, a journalist, and a father.

For the first time, he died without violence. When the soul known best as Marcus of the Last Hour was reborn for the eighth time after the last war, the greatest war, the war that changed the placement of the stars, he was himself once more.

The world had moved on; it no longer remembered his names. But he knew himself, and his deeds, and he could still call fire to dance at his fingertips and on the the crown of his head. He could still feel the turning of the earth beneath his feet, and could count the hours with his heartbeat, weak though it was.

He still watched the moon with all the hunger and longing of a drowning man for land- and the moon ignored him, as it had for countless generations, since the begining of time.

When he died, it was in fire; immolated on the pyre of his own epiphanies, the man took back his soul from the moon.

The world moved on, and so did he.