he smiled sadly, tucking away a stray tear, wiping from his face as though it meant nothing to him. but i knew, had i reached out to hide it off his cheek, it would have weighed more than the world itself. i had always known he was stronger than atlas...but watching him smile as though the burden was nothing more than a deserved reality, though his shoulders softly broke, fracturing into the surrounding sinew, made me so biblically and righteously angry, had the gods stood before me then, i could have killed them, without poetry to grant them salvation, ruining their glorious indefinence without hesitation. for whom could have abdicated such responsibility, throwing it so unceremoniously onto such a delicate beauty, had they not been the embodiment of intrinsic evil?
