"Our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off!"

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You can pinpoint the very day you first picked up that tale; and that’s all it ever was to you, a tale. And you slandered it mercilessly, as if it was yours to pour over with calumny, the sour words trickling off your tongue.

“There is no life in me,” he cried, shaking his fist in the candlelit room. “And I am exhausted. Exhausted and tired of returning to a place every single week where everyone is dead.” You nod ferociously in assent, poised as one of the living, but they all knew that you laid in darkness along with every other corpse.

He told the tale of the brittle bones that were once again granted, by the grace of a wild flame, feeble steps outside from their graves if they were to serve for this army, and he then told us we should not be intimidated by death. He told you that in this tale, there was no one left to bring the bodies home, because everyone was left for dead, and if we were to continue this way, there would be no one left to find what was once in our bones. We should not be intimidated by death. 

“Your cynicism is merely a pose,” he shouted again. “This is not who we were meant to be, this is not who you’re supposed to be. I can’t change this for you, and you can save everyone on your own. But you know who to go to when the bones are left on their own.”

The fire in him is evident, and you will envy it for the rest of your days. It pours out over everyone he’s ever loved, and he has more life in him than the rest of you could ever aspire to. You know this is more than a tale.

There is no life in me.

There is no life in you.

But surely, 

He will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live.