Anthesteria. A smouldering wreckage spans before El Mariachi Muerte. He watches as people tend to their loss.
“I suffered from a speech impediment as un niño.” He reflects. “I knew what I wanted to say, but couldn’t get the words out. I would stutter, stumble over syllables. I desperately wanted to find my voice, but the more I worried about my speech…”
He closes his eyes.
“I learnt to silence myself.”
Muerte strums a chord.
“It’s a horrible purgatory to find yourself in. To have something to say but not be able to say it.”
“To have a story, but no… voice… to share it.”
He stumbles slightly over words wrought with pain.
“Ser silenciado. Shut away invisible but wanting nothing more than to be seen.”
His voice becomes crystal clear as he sings.
♫ I been holding my tongue way too long
It’s got me going…Purgatory’s not where I belong ♫
“I can only imagine what it must have felt like when that door slammed shut, Grimskull.”
He pauses, breathing heavily.
“Your own purgatory, shut away and left to die. Your pain, your anger. That no matter how loud you scream, nobody was coming to save you.”
“Because you were Zeus’s darkest secret, mi amigo. A secret he spent his life trying to hide. Those visions still haunt my dreams. You, trapped in your purgatory like a boy who desperately wanted to be heard but couldn’t find the voice to speak.”
“Unable to ask that one question you desperately need an answer to… why?”
♫ Living in the fear of an open mouth with nothing to say at all…
Are you alive? How can you survive and not wonder why? ♫
Muerte watches sadly as a mother cries over the burnt remains of her dwelling.
“But this is not the way to be heard.”
He kneels, running fingertips through the ashes.
“When I was that child, I grew angry, resentful. The purgatory of my voice unheard eating away at me. This is the result of that same purgatory of the tongue in you and Drewitt.”
“But I found la musica. I found a better way to be heard.”
♫ Eyes under wool, it’s hard to see
Death on the sidewalks
I can’t breathe ♫
“You’ve always spoken out, padre, but today you speak from the wrong pulpit as I once sang from the wrong stage.”
“Mi amigo, I regret the secrets I kept that put you behind that door. I can’t change the past but I can reshape our future.”
♫The longer this goes on there will be nowhere to go
So send your thoughts and prayers,
words without action just move air. ♫
“I have been forced into silence. Choked out to protect Arcadia from the truth I know.”
“I have lost loves, had friendships torn apart, all in the name of a secret that eats away at me. At Thunderstrike, mi amigo, my voice will sing.”
“For Gemini. For Anthestria. For that little boy who wanted to share his story.”
“You can either sing with me, or be silenced so my story can finally be heard.”