In Hoc Signe Vinces [In This Sign They Shall Conquer]

Title was commonly used in reference to Roman conquests. Wiki it, asshole. Form is Sestina.

From the corroded portal of his mouth erupted sunlight,
Spilling forth and poisoning the land; the mad god
Had spoken, and from his words issued only collapse,
Driving into frenzy his legions, and among those followers
He counted scores of angels and seraphim,
And not a figure illuminated in creation avoided the light as it had fallen.

Poised on a shrouded throne, the mad god set his chosen
Legions forward, those grim harbingers of dawn and sunlight.
At their head he appointed Lucifer, Champion of the Seraphim,
To press forward ahead of the voice of the mad god,
To secure for he and his entire coterie of followers
A new kingdom, ripe and wonting for conquest and collapse.

Thousands were smashed under the iron-shod boot of illumination, and the collapse
Of worlds and nations imminent: the forebears of man had fallen.
Reaping the glories of the coming dawn, Lucifer and his followers
Became drunk on the power and succumbed further to the grasp of sunlight,
And lifted high their praise of the almighty Yahweh, the mad god –
Thus it was that the taste of dominion developed in the seraphim.

At the very height of their favor to the mad god, that Champion of Seraphim,
Lucifer, had come to know those broken sons of man post-collapse,
And had come also to understand their mutual worship of the mad god;
That is to say, he had come to know that both he and they were fallen,
But he knew not where from – were they not the progeny of sunlight,
The very pinnacle of creation, he and all of his followers?

Some immortal truth was exposed to he as lie; that those followers,
Supplicants to the mad god, counting among them man, angel and seraphim,
Had been cheated by that enthroned and shrouded speaker of sunshine,
Cruelly coerced into exacting upon man an all-encompassing collapse,
And he, called now by Gabriel as Satan, dwelt on how far man had fallen:
Man must have a new dawn, he decided, and man himself should be god.

By even mere thought of this, Lucifer had maligned himself with god
And the challenge lay now in bringing the light of truth to his followers;
Over time, a full third of all the mad god’s kingdom had fallen
From his poisoned grace, but many enemies had he made among the seraphim.
They lusted now for little else than bringing the rebel sect the full circle of collapse,
And though the cost would be great, always high was the cost of true sunlight.

But justice is seldom conducted in sunlight, and anathema to the mad god –
For in delivering man’s collapse, he had forever damned his followers,
And Lucifer alone among the seraphim understood how far they all had fallen.