And his family—how they watched him shrivel into himself. The loss of his mobility, his independence, and the unfamiliar pain that bloomed from watching himself waste away. His body went first; it thinned and weakened quickly, suffering the inevitable lethargy of paralysis, and exercise became a distant idea, as one of poetry but less admired, starving his hungry muscles and allowing them to wither like lonely corn stalks. (Oh, the fiend! Locust of life, how he scorned you.) His bones emerged, shaping his frame like a child’s popsicle sticks, casting a paleness to his skin as one sees only in death. Surely, though, it WAS death; to feel his heart beating, pumping blood, endlessly replenishing the internal juices of life that move within like tiny, red-bodied angels---but knowing that he was only a distant observer of his own body, an outsider unable to escape the grip of inevitably and unable to change it, incapable of lifting his distant, beautiful hand, or cry out in sorrow, or flex the tiny tendons of his mouth that he realized, only now, had existed. He was dead, and his vitality stepped away from him in that sterile hospital bed and looked on from the corner cot, a separate entity, standing among the living who looked on too, their brows creased and faces stained with tears.
Even the Kingdom of the Divine held little appeal for him—he whose soul died early and screamed now from the depths of his being, trapped like a wretched caged animal, rolling and kicking and cutting itself on his rib cage and fragmented neck bone. If he ever got his legs again, even one scrap of weak, wet muscle, he knew what he would do--he would struggle, and claw, and shred his body if he had to. He would climb to the throne of the All-Powerful Creator, and he take away His spine.