There was an old Mariachi I once knew.

His face, lined with wrinkles that told the toll time had taken on him, had long since weathered. His fingers had long since become too slow to work the strings anymore.

He had seen life, and it had taken much from him.

We called him El Sobrevivente… The Survivor.

Everything life threw at him, he endured. He fought his battles and immortalised the tales of his life in song.

But he was never at rest, El Sobrevivente… he was never at peace. Even as his body failed him, his eyes still burned with an uneasy yearning.

‘Heavy is the head that wears the crown of thorns.’ He would sing.

I see that same fire in your eyes, Slade Kincaid.

The fire of a man who has fought his battles and lived to tell the tales, time after time. It’s the fire that burns with screams of those who perished at your feet.

You only hear their song in the stillness and quiet that we call peace.

But peace is not poison, it is a ballad. Rhythmic and relaxing, predictable and safe. But to you, mi amigo, peace is a stark reminder of a world no longer familiar.

For you left your heart on the battlefield long ago. You sold your soul to the harsh march of war. It was the crown placed on your head.

I know full well how you feel, amigo. But men like us, we don’t sleep as well as we used to.

We are survivors, for better or worse.

Without my guitar, I hear their voices too. Your silences are filled with the screams of battle… mine are filled with the screams of the lost I can no longer reach.

I hear them now la musica is gone.

Their songs unplayed.

Because my head is every part as heavy as yours, as burdened with my own past.

But unlike you, I have something left to live for. Something more than clawing at yet another endless battlefield.

I have hope… and it came in four words that have become my everything… El Peso del Cráneo.

My head is heavy but it’s not like yours, stuck lying in the dirt, merely surviving to fight another day until your flesh becomes weak.

Is that your future, Slade Kincaid? That of El Sobreviviente?

A man who life had taken so much of, but endured it till his flesh could take no more?

I survive by hope alone, yet it nourishes me.

I still seek something more than the fight. And by hope, I will take it.

I will take back my life.

You lost yours long ago on some forgotten battlefield, death just hasn’t caught up yet. So, like that old Mariachi that begged me in the end for his own death, I’m only too happy to oblige.

For what you forget in your endless battle for survival is that death is not the enemy, but an embrace we all must face.

It calls you in the still, peaceful silence.

Can you hear its song yet?