There is an age, perhaps, that one reaches and finds not the inspiration in stories of great men, but despair. Every new tale of champion born and hero rising becomes a new bar in the cage that envelops me as I grow further and further from the living spark which, when nourished, becomes a blazing forge in which to cast one's soul and hammer out each crease of weakness, every impurity left by despair, and burnish away hesitance, doubt, and the tarnish of self-loathing.

I doubted, briefly, that anyone could ever be smithy to their own nature; Hephaestus too wrought such wonders but never were they his to keep. Yet every disparate liar told the same lie, and told it so well that it a Truth erected. If a thousand people with a thousand hammers might all blindly strike at a mountain until finally revealing a flawless sculpture, beholders of this miracle must ask if these rabble were Michelangelos all or, more likely, if The David was entombed in that mountain all along, in the stone but not of the stone, waiting to be discovered by those who sought no form at all but in their rough masonry were simply unable to strike the smallest chip from such a substance.

And I, in my own mountain, almost chipped all away and yet I have found nothing. And the result, this cage, this fear to go on seeking lest I excavate myself into nothing. Or perhaps (in the possibility I find most amusing) I persevere, the bars give way, and I find myself in an oubliette.

Such are my current concerns, though these are relatively new and may pass. This possibility I allot to all things, however, and like anything ubiquitous it is more akin to draping oneself in passing breezes when a warm quilt is required.

So, then, the excavator turns inward and seeks out that spark, now an ochre ember. Life needs life, so I purse my lips and blow gently upon it. But breath is not enough, not in dire dark and iron cold. I thread in a memory and the breath becomes a whisper and and the whisper becomes a telling and I am huddled over that tiny stubborn coal telling, telling, and revealing everything.