There it was, a shining bronze chalice in the middle of the holy keep, radiating intense passion with its amber corona, almost blinding his eyes. It seemed to stare at him, peeking in just as the drawbridge closed. He awoke suddenly, and there he was. One of his friends had also seen the dream, the dream that would fulfill the prophecy, consecrate the siege perilous. He reached for the chalice, this would be the moment of the answer, the moment where his soul would be passed under the angel’s judgement and his purity...
He woke with a start, pushing aside the covers into a heap in the corner of his bed as dishevelled as his hair that time of day. It was that sort of morning that he loved best- those rare mornings when the sun trickled in slowly, coinciding with a dream, so the light forged his dreams into memory just as the sunrise does to a troll. He would get up, and the back of his eyes would still be dancing with magic of dreams- that space that exists for man’s hopes, where he makes the world, he makes the rules, he plays god.
He marched towards the refrigerator and opened it. There was no grail inside there, no, but the chalice of maple syrup was pretty enticing nonetheless. The bag of flapjacks yielded to his touch, and opened with ease. Dousing each in turn with maple syrup, his knife and fork and mouth made short work of his breakfast, and his hunger was satisfied. A nice gulp of pure water helped wash out the cloying sweetness of lingering maple syrup. A sweet thing, once gone, leaves a small remnant of sweetness, just enough to cloy and claw, tantalizing but ultimately just gone, just past...
Having met his basic needs, he donned his robe and swept himself out the door, like the wind sweeping aside a pile of leaves, the leaves seeming to move of their own volition in the gentle air, but really a tiny current guiding them, an external force pushing them, stirring them..
He glides over the street, thinking “This is My Kingdom. With My Eyes, I Make This World, I See it Into Existence.” Power courses through him, he feels a certain potence of having volition, influence, however slight, in a world full of random incidence, arranged by many tiny patterns all with a singular aim, the opposition to entropy. Coming by the tree, he watches the leaves fall, having succeeded in their goal, now relinquishing themselves the the earth, returning to the dust from whence they came, springing forth new life in the soil.
A puppy walks by. A masculine rage fills him, his anger at the puppy for interrupting his s?ance, for bringing reality to his dream. Don’t kill puppies. He resists.
A blinding flash appears in the air, rippling slowly in the air, growing to a wild crescendo of color and light, the infant sunrise providing a backdrop for the brilliance of the supernova that just now fills the air. The light created long ago just now penetrating the earth, decorating the sky with the glory of a star’s dying breath, the last words of a powerful monster that brought the sky life,  a rippling wave of photons as the bright wake of the moldering darkness, the void left behind by the star. The star’s ego he sees, broken by the insults of reality, its creative wake spilled across the sky as its soul dies, like the artist in sorrow, committing his light some book of poetry as a portion of his soul is lost forever, claimed by the darkness of reality.
He woke with a start, pushing aside the covers into a heap in the corner of his bed as dishevelled as his hair that time of day. It was that sort of morning that he loved best? Oh, the grail.
****
The grail. He is blinded once more by it. There she walks, stalking with all the grace of an assassin, a soul-assassin, armed with daggers of beauty and harpoons of wit, talons of power and cloaks of grace, brushing past a shelf full of arcane knowledge or the ill-written half-baked plots of some fledgeling quick-buck author like Terry Goodkind. Of course it was a library, wasn’t it. The nexus of the knowledge upon which he fed now a keep for the most dangerous woman on Planet My Consciousness, the soul that his eyes and ears now drunk to well beyond the point of intoxication. Would that his lips could taste so. Words pass between them, vehicles, packages from their minds sent via their lips, the one receiving the other not directly, but through the medium of words.
The Grail. But he is not holy enough. Sin, the blood of puppies, is on his hands. When he steps outside again, he spreads his hands apart, calling the rain to wash his sins away. He holds his hands up and apart, as if holding a chalice, just to catch the tears flowing from the sky of his soul, his conquered ego. Away he goes, back home, back to the comfort of the dreamscape where love is actually possible, swishing through the autumnal leaves, praying for life from this death, for emotional endurance. Winter is coming, but he is still in fall, the hopeful leaves still clinging to the tree of his ego.
    He ascends the steps back to the safety of his home. He disrobes, shedding the last vestiges of power and volition, the last leaves of fall leaving his ego to make way for winter to come. Impotence, powerlessness course through him, and he surrenders to the randomness of the world, entropy’s eternal iron grip on man’s life. It is a zero-sum game.
    ****
    The grail. Arthurian legends are called legends for a reason. Love is the stuff of legends. Nothing false and possible is love.