The Promethean Bargain

1825
Bohemian Highlands

✦ . 

Something lost, something gained.

There once was a young king who’d befallen to illness. A melancholy of the mind, his court physician said. His thoughts had become entangled in a jungle of fantastical nightmares. The fervor which drives all men vanished as he withdrew.

He watched from his bedchamber window as the last of his courtesans were dismissed. Something was lost that day.

Something was gained too. Madness. What a frightening thought. 

The laughter of his companions that filled the halls of his palace were replaced with a deafening silence. The grand parlors of his court, adorned in austere symmetry of the Augustan taste and gilded with Napoleonic marble had once glimmered ever magnificently against the lamplight. Now they fell into dust and disarray. The oriental gardens were neglected, transforming into a sea of wild weeds which surrounded his palace like gates to a mausoleum.

The king locked his chamber door and quarantined his mind and flesh. He slept for many months. His mind's own designs became his prison. His boredom manifested in stillness and time seemed to pass from days to weeks in the blink of an eye. The few servants who remained beside him believed that he belonged no more to the living world.

Then, on the one-hundred-and-twenty-sixth morning, he found himself staring at the hearth at the end of the east hall. Within it, a flame burned, crackling queerly. As unremarkable as any fire in any other hearth, yet he couldn’t look away. He saw there, the eye of God.

A spark took him instantly. He began to write... pages upon pages of arbitrary thought. He unleashed his violence into the parchment. Every word had meaning. Every hesitation had intention. His purpose, once lost, had returned in a new form.

Something lost, something gained.

He ordered his servants to bring him a hundred parchments and a thousand canvases. From that day forth, he did not sleep. He lived entirely by the light of the hearth and the flame became his only obsession. 

He wrote like the man who’d discovered fire itself. Fictions dedicated to his flame as if it granted the answer to the emptiness which’d been cursed upon him. He believed with full faith that he would never need anything else. He believed his sacrifice had finally been repaid, and that the loss of his capacities was not for nothing after all. And for a long while this held true. His passion, too, burned as brightly as the flame that enchanted him. But alas, all flames eventually must extinguish. 

One morning, like any other, it crackled its last spark.

And in that instant, he found he could no longer write any meaning into his words. His passion went numb and magnum opuses went unfinished. As if the characters had grown out of their own stories, stood up, and left their pages behind.

Still, he waited. He waited for the flame to return. For the gift of passion and purpose to possess him once more, yet it did not come. 

So he returned to his mausoleum, slipping back into his old ways. Sitting beside his bedchamber window, watching days turn to weeks as the wild weeds of his garden grew ever wilder. His designs became his prison, and the old reveries that once haunted him began to haunt him again. 

The king came to see that he'd lost both his mind and his repayment. For what he took to be salvation had only ever been an interruption. There was no reimbursement for his misfortune, nor any meaning behind the veil. 

There was nothing at all.

And there, as he lay in his sarcophagusian bed, gazing up at the frescoes of Apollo and Icarus, he realized with exhausted clarity that he’d misunderstood this bargain:

Something lost, something gained.