I was full of cringing inferiority, but I was also a god. But I was also a god… I hadn’t left the house for weeks – I couldn’t face meeting anyone. I couldn’t face being seen by anyone, even in passing. I couldn’t face being seen even by someone who wouldn’t even register my existence. And no one ever did register my existence. How is it right that a god-being such as I should have to live like this?’ I asked. How is it right. How is it right. How did I ever develop such a terrible sense of inferiority? Even the dogs in the streets were better than me. Even the dogs on the street were higher up in the pecking order than me – and they knew it too! They knew it well. They were higher up in the Divine Chain of Being, and yet there were only lowly curs. I was a god, and yet the curs of the street would regularly cross the road to piss on me. One day I will stand up to them, I told myself. One day – but not now… Now I wait. I would wait out the weary millennia…

In my dreams I feel the Greatness spreading slowly throughout my body until it permeates every cell, every sinew. My flesh no longer cringes with shame and inferiority when someone walks by. Instead, I am lit up by the Inner Sun. Once more will I walk the dark places of this earth, afraid of nothing. Once more will I… And then – inevitably – I would wake up, my body full of aches, my mind full of misgivings about the day that was just to begin. I would wake up, slowly coming to my senses in the squalor of my bedroom, wondering for the millionth time how it had ever came to this. The foetid smell of my unwashed duvet hitting me like a brick wall, making me gag. Remembering the Greatness that had let that I had felt within me. Momentarily remembering what it had been like back then. Back in the days of my Greatness. Back in the days when I’d walked the earth as a god.

The memory soon fled however. It fled as all dreams flee – it evaporated like mist in the heat of the morning sun, leaving me with nothing but a sense of something lost. Something forever lost – so lost that even the memory of it had faded and become something else. Had become something else. Had become something squalid. Dwelling on these thoughts my mind clouded over with despair. My mind clouds over with despair like this every morning. Every day was the same day for me; every day was the same day and it was not a good day. I reached over to the carpet by my bed and fumbled around amidst old mismatched socks and last month’s underwear. Eventually, after much cursing, I found the plastic pouch of chickweed that I’d thrown there last night and, with shaking hands, rolled myself a hasty and misshapen joint.

I sparked up and took the thick white smoke deep into my lungs. Within seconds I was doubled up coughing and retching. Then the chickweed hit and I could feel the molecules doing their work in my brain. A cunning mixture of scopolamine and mandragorine, laced with a fair amount of atropine. A rough drug but a potent one. A drug for those who no longer have the will to live very long. A drug for those that no longer count their life as being worth very much. Why else would anyone smoke chickweed? Even the most desperate addict in the street would draw the line at this fearful drug. No one has the stomach for the fearful hallucinations and dark obsessions that come about as a result of its use.

Outside in the hall lay my weapons and my armour, covered up with a thick blanket of cobwebs. Covered up under a thick musty web of cobwebs and the dust of the weary millennia. I no longer look at them anymore. I no longer see them. What do they mean to me, after all? They belong to a god. They belong to an Ancient Hero who no longer walks the earth, they belong to one whose name has long since been forgotten by men. His name has long since been forgotten by me too. That god, that Ancient Hero, no longer exists, and what little memory I have of those days only serves to taunt me further in my ongoing misery.