Dedication

...and in the end, he resolved the Darkness would not seek him out.

No.

He would seek out the Darkness instead.

Death was always a rigorous mental rehearsal, followed by a virtuoso performance. His victims were nonspecific, his crimes unnumbered, his abominations beyond description. His dedication was monstrous but his frustration grew over time, growing always greater; for the deepest, purest most distilled Darkness seemed to continually elude him. Why this was so, even he could not have said...

Stubbornly, he continued--with renewed zeal and invigorated method, even when the path was sickened by repetition and nausea.

How could he possibly go back?

In his final days, he cursed his fame, his bitter legacy, his legion of crude imitators. Yet slowly, laboriously, enlightenment came: he found the ultimate understanding through the long nights of his final dreams--those dreams that had maddened and tormented him. How foolish and blind he had been to let the very thing he sought mock him...

When they found his body in that shabby place they ran screaming. They told their tale to others who thought them mad. But they dragged back the unbelievers to see for themselves the truth of such mad words.

And in that bare room, stretched out on a blood-soaked mattress, was a chortling corpse with a glistening red blade in one hand and a freshly removed still beating heart in the other.

He had at last found the purest Darkness.