Above: a shaft, a blink, a crash, a voice.
It speaks to him and offers him a choice:
To take a soul as tender for his vigour,
Decline and wane, I'll watch as you transfigure. 
Unlike his kind, Elric can sense the scales.
The equilibrium of moral tales
Can raise the dead and furnish them with speech 
Allowing ghosts to tell and preach and teach
Lamenting sermons scraping long dead souls  
To sweeping hymns of lawful hero roles.
The tug of ghouls will make him hesitate
And curse his curbing conscience incarnate.
But Elric knows deep down he must plunder
To feed his curséd sword born of thunder,
Rejuvenates his soul like fresh spring bloom
To wilt again - eternal cyclic doom.

Michael Moorcock, English science fiction and fantasy writer and musician, was born today in 1939.