The Eleventh Gate stood in the underworld — silent, unmarked.
I wandered, neither living nor dead,
Caught between shadows that whispered secrets I could not grasp,
Searching for meaning in that endless twilight of souls.
17:17 appeared to me
While I was confused by the thoughts that crowded my mind
And darkened my heart,
Searching and hoping for a way — for a way out —
Which did not seem obvious,
Given that I found myself in the labyrinth of death,
In a world suspended, beneath that of the mortals.
How I found myself in that world, I think I have remembered it:
that chariot of skeletons and spectres, of demons from the underworld,
had overwhelmed me and taken me away
into their grotesque world of nightmares.
Monsters adorned in sparse and ancient garments
wore grotesque masks and stared at me with their dead,
Yet burning eyes,
as if they could read my heart,
and they sneered at my fears and weaknesses,
and at my ethereal, mortal being.
I had become a captive of that world, a world of shadows and wraiths.
Subjugated to their power, I could not resist,
And my steps grew heavier and heavier,
as if they echoed the weight of my heart,
which had become a heap of metal shards and thorns.
Exhausted and bloodless, I surrendered,
and no longer felt that languid sense of torpor and melancholy.
Horror and chills had gripped my entire body,
And the beating of my heart stopped
like a broken pendulum clock.
I crossed the Eleventh Gate, seventeen times seventeen,
And with each passing, a part of my heart fell
upon the ground made of bones and carcasses and mud and buried souls.
And thus it was that I collapsed,
into a terrible slumber.
Of death.
Elisabetta
