Beneath my cities they can be found, among the slime and filth of the earth, buried beneath the vile remains of things best left unspoken. They wait there and sleep, in deathless dreams of never-ending sorrow, abandoned here for all time and for all sakes. Beneath my cities you shall find them, torn and tattered by years of ravaging pestilence and famine. They are dressed in soot found in gutter-ways and rotting leaves of dead and past autumn nights, when even the wolf was afraid to howl. Grimly naked and ghastly pale are their bodies; a tainted white with skin stretching tight, ever so grotesquely tight over wicked jutting bones that press as if to tear through their scarred skin. Burns line their faces in the dim half-light reaching them from under the city, contorting their already twisted image; burns from their uncountable baptisms in the depths of nightmares where there is no light and one never truly awakens.

They shift though the shadows like silk through water, effortless and silent, detaching here and then, rejoining their brethren. They are never seen above on the precious city streets or even in the most waste ridden alleyways. Their mouths have all been sown shut, in their sleep, that deathless dream-like sleep! Never speaking, then, and never hearing in the fear that words could be then spoken. Ears are made to be deaf in all presences, only they can hear each other move motionlessly through their shadowed sewer-ways. They crawl on bloodied hands and knees, such thick rich blood that smells so wretchedly, such as that of decay, the long dead stench of rotten corpses left in the desert sun to dry. They cower and crawl away on those bloodied hands and knees, gashed open by so many shards of glass and thorns from unspeakable plants that only grow where the sun cannot shine.

And such a place in the crypts in which these things live, if living it may be called. Beneath my cities they roam, for no other land would accept them and when they came to me, I could not turn them away, such woeful pale faces. I granted them sanctuary in the only place I know they would be untouched and never again be made into the objects of abuse and derision. I brought them to a place where the hatred of others would never leave brilliant silver and violet scars to trace the paths of pain and misery, so many years of misery. Their suffering was so great. I opened my gates to them, I opened my arms to take them all in, to take them away, and to give them a shelter from the cruelty of the worlde and its uncaring citizens. The ones who mocked ways not their own and burned those who fought to stay pure and true to ancient customs.

They all came fleeing to the gates of my city, the formidable and forbidden gates of my Notre Dame, the pearled gates of my city that rested upon the very shores of the river of Charon, the Styx. They came to me with the tears of the blood of life streaming down their cracked faces, battered by hands and fools that would not take the time to understand what these helpless creatures were. They were treated as savages, by savages who knew only that these creatures were not like themselves, and they were afraid, and fear caused such people to act in strange manners. These now silent ones had been so unjustly exiled, and damned by those who knew them not, nor could ever know them. They came to this accursed cathedral...to my own dark castle. They came to me with no hopes left, dreams smothered in the soils of agony. I opened my gates wide to let them come, to let them all in and they came.

Silent as the night they flooded my city, clinging to the shadows found there until the under-places invited them to a more suitable home. And every morn I return to the gates, to greet any that would come, even now. Every morn I rise, my heart weighed heavy with their uncried tears, so that it troubles my soul to know that any living thing could know such depths of deprivation. Only now they have my city to guard them and every morn I seek the entrance of their crypts, the access to their underworlde lair, and I greet them with kindness and tenderness unknown among mortal hearts. I wipe away their crimson tears and whisper them a lullaby to bring them back to sleep. I am the only one who cares, the only one who ever cared. I am their Father, the Father of the accursed children of the grave and of the darkness, bastard children condemned for their difference by a heartless worlde. The thousands of unwanted children all others had abandoned. And I, their bastard Father, know all too well their terrible suffering, for my own crown of black rose thorns bares proof of my own tribulations...