A single whistled note pierces the air for a moment before spluttering and passing away. Choked and fading into nothingness.

“La musica?”

El Mariachie Muerte tries again, his whistle living for a moment before dying into the bleak. Muerte’s sorrow is caught in the silence.

“¿Cómo puedo curarte?”

The Mariachi kneels over his guitar, inspecting the rot that had infected his instrument.

“How can I bring you back to life?”

“You were once immortal, unable to be destroyed. Every scratch would heal, when you lay broken and shattered, you would always become whole once more. Refreshed. Renewed.”

“That is how it was meant to be. I had never considered that something which was immortal could perish. But I see it with mine own eyes, La Musica… Infested, decaying before me.”

“An immortal guitar dying, and a mortal man unable to. We live in unbalanced times. I am an agent of death, and its order must be restored. The music must live on.”

“It is unnatural to upset the balance of nature. That which dies should stay dead, and that designed to be immortal should remain so. When the music dies, the very fabric of death and life is torn. It must be restored. Balance must remain.”

“Is that not your very conundrum, Drewitt? Defying death itself in a forced immortality, yet torn between worlds with no escape from he who ferries souls. Permanently alive, yet permanently lost. Body and soul disconnected from one another. When death seeks you, and Tombstone comes knocking at your door as he does now, he cannot stop until you perish.”

“You can continue to kill yourself and re-awaken. Each time tearing the fabric of death itself further. Are your actions to blame for the music dying? Or does your unnatural immortality hold the key to the answers I seek?”

“The cruel irony is that I hold the key to the fate you deserve in my hands. It lies, rotting away before my eyes. The chance to feel again, to live… and finally, to die.”

“I will stop at nothing to restore the natural order of death. To revive the music that has been broken. I am not resigned to living in this world of silence – a Dirge without Song.”

The Mariachi places a rose over the fretboard of his guitar and laments with a sad, spoken poem, eyes closed.

‘Into the darkness it goes, la musica de los muertos. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel; but I am not resigned.

 

Lovers and thinkers, into the dirt with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains, – but the best is lost.

 

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently you go, the beautiful, the tender, the unkind;

Quietly you go, la musica of the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.’

Eyes open, Muerte looks up from his guitar.

“The music must play once more, Drewitt. Even if you must be destroyed in the process, the music will play.”