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THE DEATH OF HEROES. Part 1-Robyn Red. A pastiche. “It lives!” These are the thoughts and words of Robyn Red, as, hear ye hear ye, he comes face to face with the end of his newly acquired mortality at the hands of ‘Die Mutter aller Nachtshreck.’ (Less of a diary. More of a diuretic.) Question: Has our anti-hero become good? ‘Been there. Done that. Heads with horns. Don’t wear white hats.’ Answer: No, but can I still buy snacks? My thoughts are convoluted, twisted some might say. But only as an epitaph. She’s, coming. The body and mind constantly at odds. My seeming frippery, an internal dialogue: a cuff of woven lace set against todays grunted, lycra, vulgarity. I appear rude and lewd. Thought and speech parallel but unconnected. My mouth moving in monosyllabic, x-rated emoji’s of leering sound. A dichotomy of the said and unsaid. Blunt and brutal. Every word at odds with the effete italics and foppish curlicues of my convoluted thoughts. Each one of those, in truth; spurious, outdated and antiquated. ‘A silence of books? A finger to her lips. A history in decay? As day by day I rot away.’ Mawkish. My mind, moth eaten with hind sight, cannot encompass today how far, until now, my feet have walked to escape the past, trying to grow stronger... (Weak and trapped in a prison of breakable bones.) ...and here she is catching me up. Close on my heels. I have a cul-de-sac of choices. The not so great ‘I AM'. A manual-biography in an automatic age. The poisoned nib of an antiquated quill. Who would, for the cost of the pennies in your eyes, rosin up a bow to see the startled world go up in flames blue as an Angel’s eyes. Conflagration. Nero was such a small minded man. Death should be shared on a meteoric stage. (Dictatorships will never be forgotten...they always take notes-HA!) Fear is a constant scream that tells me I’m alive. Insomnia. I am hollowed out with tiredness. Listening. Listening. Listening. Am I what I was? Lies and half truths, layer upon layer of my life, sugar spun, peeled back veneers. Civility coating the derelict folly of my exsistence. A fragile ruin. The taste of you upon my tongue, cursing my name. Hatred and love, beautifully barbed and twisted together as one. I yearn for Bella Donna's final kiss. Wasn’t ‘I'm mortal’ once a single word. Inhale. Expire. I shrug my shoulders living in the ennui of the ‘NOW'. Hiding away in a cave full of Nixies that steal my tears and drink my blood. The floor, littered with porn magazines, a fetish stone statue standing at its centre. Tandy's image dressed as a pony girl complete with tail. (Small spider engraved on her hip.) I shudder tormented. Excited. My sharp nails longing to engrave, she loves me, she loves not, upon her writhing flesh. Do you hear me as cursing your name I relieve myself (the likeness is uncanny) every night upon your effergy before losing the battle, I fall, in terror, fast asleep. Lucid. I dream, chocolate box dreams of excruciating nausea and pain. My body sick with the craving of your flesh. Shaking with the palsy of withdrawal and addiction. Before dozing, slipping in and out of consciousness, the Nixies sensing my weakness, begin to gather. Fear jolts me awake, breathless, scrambling to build the fire higher and drive them back towards the indivisible shadows of their exsistence. I tremble, my exsistence; diaphanous and under constant threat. ‘Robyn Red, Robyn Red. Bled of colour. Always felt his victims pain. On which he gorging fed.’ (Yum. Victims. Succulent and soft as bruised, over ripe fruit.) My psychiatrist said I have tendencies and should avoid going on spree's. I told him I only kill psychiatrists that over charge. Which is all of them. Edited. Withheld. Dysfunctional. Blaise. Intense. Complex. A migraine above my right eye. Homicidal and killing. Saturnine I stroke my goatee. Look there’s a rare horned narcissist swimming in the crystal sea of dreams whilst the stench of the whaler remains a speck on the far horizon. Regarde! A herd of horned masochists raise their antlered heads, their cloven feet soft with moss and lichen, lightly touching the sucking marsh as they flee before the hunters baying horn and hounds. Welcoming the buds of spring before the dogs tear them to shreds. Surreal. I am an epees lithesome dance amongst the collateral damage of a machine gun age. Alas and alack: Rat-a-tat-tat. A sacrifice. I was swallowed, then hacked back up and spat out whole, all feathers, fur and fine white bones. A fetish. An effigy. My remit. Death by design. Signed in blood. Your souls like precious gems to mine. Your lives just so much slag and waste. Endgame. “I’m sorry but you must die...so that various, unspecified, dark gods may live again.” Evil laugh. A bad-man. A soul-man. I bagged and tagged. Nobody was ‘good' to go. “You all deserved your comeuppance. Didn't you?” Hot pokers and infernal damnation. A tough gig. Evil for me, was polite, almost apologetic. Death had a reason. A root. Now its sporadic outbursts, all whim and spur, seem but acts of madness; casual and uncaring. Momentary lapses of skewed insanity, gleeful dispatched. Is this a butchers kit I see before me? A harried, hurried, frenetic pace. Death’s victims, all dispatched on mass, like cattle to the slaughter. I find my unworldly finesse: those finer threads now undone, unspun and woven into coarser cloth. Fleet of foot I run to escape my fate. She is close. My shadow. Approaching footsteps in the dark. Alone, spitting blood, I tear my nails to rags and ruin. She is here. Upright, hunched forward, I stop and scratch. Aping crudity. Mocking myself. My conscience drones on: a locust's plague. Drip. Drip. Drip Solitary. All my royal kindred are dead, for such is the way of demonic succession. Leave no witnesses. Stay alive. Don’t be betrayed. A deaf ear listens intently for the sounds of the dead as they arise. Once I had a shop where you could pawn your soul. The cross of a peasant, the seal of a king. Of all my kith and kindred, that visited, not a one did I leave alive to listen or care. Causality. Casualties. In ignorance, theirs bodies dump in the well poisoned the local water supply, which rather fortuitously hid my crime amongst the carnage and pestilence that followed.. Ignorance. A happy accident. But now I find that nobody, in this ‘modern age’, is willing to engage with my long courtly soliloquies. Such formality and ritual is forever lost to short term memory and impatience. The complexities of world dominion, domination, forever cast aside by dullards competing in bloody cock fights that delight in short term gain. Companies now sit rigid upon the broken thrones of megalomaniac’s, despots and dictators. Everything and everyone disposable in their dull and dreary industrial republics of avarice and greed. The prosaic darkling kings of old; beheaded or fled. So be it. Nowadays I say very little. It’s part of my human condition. I curse and swear. Staccato. One word at a time. With feeling. With gusto. Get stuffed! Weirdo! Creep! I swear it’s the truth. Yeh...the truth with a hole in. Subtle nuances are but broken wings, that scratch at the desecrated earth, leaving all my more prosaic answers as throw away detritus droning on like background noise in my sluggish, thuggish brain. Doublehandedsingledigitmotherfuckingarseholes. Everything’s a red noise. Arterial it bleeds from this tepid heart. Organic and ignored. In terra-firma’s inferior form am I remade. ‘Of earthly constraints, no wings to fly, the ‘futures’ blue, and endless skies’. A manic mud-man. A turd reborn. Shat out, and made of slurry and cobb. Wattle and daub. Interlude. Sympathy plays, mournfully, on a string section of small violins. Its orchestra broken on the rocks of modernity. So sad. I will not cry. Why waste precious tears on such as this. What is lost, is lost. Chagrin. Sharks grin. Shagreen the sharp suit I’m wearing. Caught and cut and skinned alive. Penitence. Armour. Hair shirt. ‘For all I’ve changed, hate remains, and hatreds edge it cannot lose. And wild its fires can't be constrained.’ I silently mouth and mutter a litany of utter, guttural nonsense. Gutter mouth. Once it was said that the ‘vintage’ of a villain could be gauged on bravura, bravado, a vain need at great lengths to explain the permutations of foul deeds and diabolical machinations. No more. Now they just kill you. No clever ruses or complicated schemes. Just something sharp when you least expect it. Dark alleys and chalk outlines. One more body in a world of mass graves. Now where’s the fun in that. Irony. I once stabbed a bishop to death with the extreme collection of high heels he’d bought for his mistress to stand on him in. A large man he died copulating, trapping her beneath him, gasping for breath, crushed into the soft down mattress of his four poster bed. Her initial screams ignored, as adhering to their vows of silence the monks exchanged knowing smiles. Wink. Wink. Nudge. Nudge. Eight inch spikes in soft white flesh. N.B ‘The past’. Once upon a moralistic tale, good triumphed over evil. Yeah right. Fair means or foul. One trick I learnt was how to throw my voice. ‘Fare il ventriloquo’. Diversion and slight of hand being the most basic survival skills that I suckled on from an early age. I used it to confuse my enemies, so that my evil laughter would disturbingly make my victims twitch. Unsure where to look. Left or right. Uncertain whether to keep an eye on me or to look over their shoulder. Fatal mistake. A lovers embrace as I taste with a kiss their dying breaths. The freshest wine upon my lips. A dagger in between their ribs. Diabolical. Delicious. “No final words?” A slither of vowels. A grind stone of consonants. Mutter Nacht. From such a womb all fear was born. Bollocks! Bollocks. Bollocks. Words fall like snow on a moonless night. No one to hear. No one to see. Snow globe. I am become Tourette’s the destroyer of words. My intellect once vast now derelict. This human shell testudinea. Mental acuity. Synapses slyly napping. River washed flint unstuck. I've always tried to keep a mental diary. Dusty tombs. Learning from my mistakes. So this, if you can find and read it, will be my last word and testament. A pastiche of my emotions prior to my final death. Robyn Red, Robyn Red. Read as gospel. When I’m dead. *Past sins can’t redeem. Or mitigate guilt As she weighs in her hands Deaths many ways To elicit they're fate. (The Extinguished Light. Taken from a poem by Idryll Umbelicus. Voice of the Eterium. 12 BD.) *BD=Years before the dark. EN=Ages spent in darkness(The Eternal Night where time held no meaning.) NT= The ‘Now-time’, after the emergence of light and the binding of the Eldrich. Where to start? Question. Can I sidestep a mortal blow by an Elder God? Answer. No. All movements slow, an amber glass against the swiftness of her...disembowelling blow. Mankind but motes of dust. Buggeration. Today. Of the moment. What stands before me is lethal and unforgiving. Mesmeric. A viper swaying before my eyes. Fucked. Well and truly. Mortality the dragging chain, that binds me to a feeble beating human heart. So turgid and slow. Crap Hear my voice, not a word wasted or out of place. My fate, it seems, in letters large is writ, and she the author of said tale awaits its gory epitaph to carve into my flesh. Vinegar's piss. I empty my bowels. Death my mistress come at last, antithesis of life, born of The Firmament. A shadow against The Light. Shit and shovels. Bereft of hope I stand alone. So has it ever been. The weak will fall. The strong survive. Escape or redemption through terrible prose. Bitch? “Call yourself a demon.” She sniffs and pulls an uglier face. Are you talking to me. I grin. A image steals into mind. Old national health glasses. (Taped and broken when first we met.) Mismatched gloves. A shopping trolley, car battery, hairy boiled sweets and jump leads. Innocence waiting to be defiled. So sullen and petulant. Ha! I grin a grin, all teeth and recklessness. Beauty once beheld stays in the eye of the mind against all odds. She has changed, yet is eternal. Carve you name across my heart I want... Wah. Wah. WAH! A babies cry. All for the swapping of a ring. Bloody minded, a spirit in spades! What the fuck! Dead is dead, and though the ice be thin, I pirouette and take a bow. Fear is now a mocking jester in motley. A clown before he takes his final bow. Oh for a few bells. Damn. Real time catches up with my epilogue. I put on my glasses. Horn rimmed. Ha. Fake nose. Before me. Standing in the caves entrance. Lit by Internal moonlight. She is. Angular. Tall. Emaciated. Her ‘shadow’, bloated, distended, stretches from a past so dark with death, it runs counter to the sun that shines at her back. Never is it to enter, she drags it hard upon her heels, dogging her every smeared step, forever red with death. The stench of the abattoir crawling in my throat. Heavy with flies and maggots. I gag. Present tense. “Crap!” (I was up to my neck and sinking.) She was here. No gloss or stunning figure hugging dress. No courtiers poised to do her bidding or fawn upon her every desire. But a pared down, extinction level version, all sharp angles, cutting edges and nothing left upon earth, she'd shed a tear to lose. Fuck-a-duck. Apocalyptic. Mood and deed. Nothing had meaning or value. Nothing but death. Insignificant. As she was ‘more’, all else was ‘less’. My worth long past, soon laid to rest. CRAP! She was alive. She whose presence cast the world in darkness...der nacht. She, the knife unseen. The ‘Mutter Alle’. The ‘All Mother'. Alive and awake. Crap. Crap. Crap. “Come out, come out...” I stayed put. Death (the big and bad) had come for me, but due to an unforeseen circumstance. (Fear of death.) I would have to forgo her gracious, one time only invitation. RSVP. NBL. (Not bloody likely.) Bollocks. I desperately wanted to leave by the backdoor I didn’t have. Note to self on future accommodation. Cave. No. Tunnel. Yes. Survival skills. Petrified I tried standing still, which seemed a bit pathetic, but I gave it a go anyway. Fight or flight? After all how do you hide in a cave from someone who sees clearer in shadow than in sun? To be truthful, standing still and thinking stalactite thoughts in boxer shorts didn’t seemed to be as effective as I’d hoped. I'd sipped my tea and dunked my last biscuit. Maybe some friendly banter? ‘Looking good your ethereal wastedness. (Lie) If you could just stand aside while I run screaming into the distance (True) I would be extremely grateful. My morning run (Lie) is looking a very healthy option around about now (True), and I find a cardio vascular work out while I still have the internal use of my heart and lungs, is much preferred to your maniacal laughter as you tear them from the cold slab of my twitching corpse. (True).’ I choke on a few crumbs. Because meaning no offense, your extreme wickedness, but that’s one ‘out of body experience’ I could live without. Clap. Clap. Clap. Crap. Crap. Crap. I’m so out of practise. Even my knees wont work now. When did I stupidly grow a spine? It used to be I could prostrate myself in abject terror like all the other poppin-jays, flunkies and invertebrates. MALEVOLENCE. She of the Scarlet Way. Faith would not deny her and angel’s only added to her plucking ire. I gave her my best stare. Ineffectual. Which she returned in spades. The sort grave diggers use. Can you describe your murderer? Autocratic. Disdainful. Impatient. Proud. Long, dank hair, tangled and knotted with grimy feathers, braided with gnawed bones, reached to her shoulders in dark waves, before falling to her feet, were it spilt like a shroud upon the floor, merging shade and shadow into: a sable cloak, an ebon shawl, an eclipse of the natural order. Falling away. Meandering. Dragging like a penance behind her in a singular carnal tract of entropy. The souls of slaughtered heroes trapped within its entropy. From hell her tether stretched. Eternal. I’m was so stressed I was past tense. Mutter Nacht was the fonts blessed waters and the altars sacrificial knife, from birth to torture and eternal death. Stories in our great Demon Halls were told before the sun rose as ‘das Kinderlings’ fought, tooth and claw, for space upon the ever shrinking ducal bed. Succession is a bitch. *All her past crimes, covered the earth beneath and behind in an oil slick of unrepentant death. Lets be clear. I am no hero. Half a chance and I would run from such a fate as this. Never to fall beneath those bloody feet... The landscape darkens, changing as she walks upon it. What was once green and lush becomes a Frankenstein patchwork of forgotten battlefields, body strewn and drowning under palls of fat lazy flies. A no mans land stretching from the Maidens Pool to this hilltop ledge. *Heroes. Eternal damnation. Lying where they fell. Every cut still fresh. Trapped forever beneath beady eyes and tearing beaks. Claws digging deep into tender flesh. Shrieking. Caw. Caw. CAAAAAAW! Feasting on this faecal bounty, this carrion plenty, is a villainy, a massacre, a mutilation of ember crows. Their shimmering charcoal feathers moving like cracks in the world to show the magma at their core. *Flaws within the sky so blue. Mutter Nacht. Mutter Nacht. Confused. Heavy brows overhang the deep seated, seething intensity of her molten eyes. She tilts her head at an odd angle. Bird like. Obsessive. Oppressive. Confused. Confounded. Her intellect sharp as broken flint. Her sanity a shattered scrying glass. All futures mutable as wind blown seeds that fall on fallow fields as weeds. Small pauses break up her sentences, fading in and out, listening to voices in her head. Seeing what is to be, unfold anew, with every gesture that she makes. Myriad and fleeting they form. All she has to do is turn her hand, and made of smoke and mist, they dissipate. Evaporate. Every instance, every second reality is born and reborn again...and then a wave and a shimmering it is replaced. A dissonance were time a fluid separates, distilled from what was ‘then’ into the ‘now’. The subtle changes, she can by merely ‘being,’ generate. “The world about ME, it rotates.” A raised eyebrow. Self centred. Selfish. Her eyes flickering from depthless black to opaque white. I’ve three words I can't gainsay. Chilling. Traumatised. Mad. Her finger points. “Half cast from faerie curd and mortal whey. Riddled with empathy. Caught in times decay. An aberration. A quisling. Dark of heart, without a soul. But”, head tilting, “there’s a catch, you have a ‘spark’ within the dark. So should you choose redemptions path to climb so sheer, I’d let you just to watch you slip, to watch you fail. To watch you screaming fall. You’ll find that love will fade away, whilst evil it remains...in me, forever pure.” “Don’t you”, long pause, “agree.” A graceful movement of her hand gives me the suffrage to speak Concur. Conquer. Cur. Dog. Mongrel. How to answer that, when yes is death. And ‘no’ such agony, that later screaming I would wish that I'd picked yes. Regret. Emasculated. I feel all my futures shrink away. She, the Dreadful Nothingness (Dreadnought) of the Feral Fey has awoken from her ‘Unkind Sleep’. Not in fairy armour and heart rendering glamour. But broken and insane. I terrified stand my ground. You think me brave. But I as ice am frozen, an effigy before her baleful gaze...unable to move...unable to breath. Or tear my eyes away from the fiery comet of death that hurtles towards me. Extinction. She speaks. Eloquent, brutal, her words drawn swords. These three her drawn ultimatums. Broad of blade and sharp of edge. Expect total obedience. I sigh. For lies and cunning are my only weapons here.. “My goddess, when did your moonlit glamour start to wane. The only colour now, a bloody path. The red that’s ever dripping from your feet. Soaked in the blood of all you’ve killed and maimed. I name thee Mutter Nicht, Malevolence and Queen. I know that Time has lost your thread and by your very exsistence nature is desecrated. Anathema. Despoiler of your sisters life's work.” “O my sister. Always the pretty one. Whose hands, bloody as my feet are RED. Wears a mantle GREEN in contrast to her teeth and claws. Bah. Gai will consume you. As I the bride, Death be my groom, so hers, relentless Time will everything pursue..” “Your words are false. No bride has death. But Satan’s wife, the queen of lies, she stands in truth revealed, before my very eyes.” Unhinged. I will never even hear the creaking of the door that opens up beneath my feet to silent let me fall. She throws back her head and laughs as a thousand wings take to the air. “Delightful.” I'm a fool, no matter how hard I try to alter its outcome, the sum of those three words, always resound in my fledgling soul the same...”Never!” (Millennia has past, and I will never bend the knee again, for she, Tandy, the splinter in my heart, would forever more think less of me...) Resolute. Adamant. Silent. These words remain moot. Mute. Suicidal I am not. Cursed. I thought I'd suffer and die of a long degenerative disease. Such is life. Growing ever older and more senile. But now, my exsistence, by my own words, I shorten from years to days. Days to moments measured by the breaths I take. Until the soil rests upon my bones and I forgotten pass from time into the tortured realms of hell. To scream eternally her name. I feel hollowed out, her dead eyes stinging, a nettle rash of doubt against my irritated skin. A tic that flickers beneath my eyelids. As I stare at a mirror of my own mortality. Her limpid. Waxen. Corpse like flesh, leaving an ancient trail of bloody footprints, her hair hanging loose, a vast shadow cloak of feasting crows born to feed on the bloated bodies of slaughtered nations. Ripe for the plucking, each is littered with those who fought in ‘glories’ name. Their boasts of victory, now forgotten, prowess, sword and shield broken, lying beneath the mud the blood and the rain. A golden age of heroes the like of which, its said, will never to be seen again. Slain. “BOW. GROVEL. COWER. Be quick and take your pick. My patience knows no governance. So hungry since I broke my chains. I’ll kill much more in frenzy now than I can ever eat.” She growls, swaying, rocking back on her heels. Mesmeric in her vipers dance. Readying to strike. Her need to feed incessant. Her patience, frayed and threadbare, a cloth she wears, on starving bones, stretched far to tight. DONT RUN. DONT BLINK. A mantra of hope. But who’s hope? For hope was never mine. To survive I must become, non-threatening...but not a victim. Subservient but not a slave. I must define those vagaries, those smudged outlines, those fine details, those very distinctions between life and death. For here before such a cruel and terrible majesty I stand upon a tipping point of madness, hers, were every words is judged and weighed. Every sentence punctuated with finality. “You look so, (handsome, suave, sophisticated)...appetizing". Crap. Fragile as a paranoid berserker on amphetamines. Rabid in her desire to kill. Hands flexing. Nails ragged and sharpened to metal burs. A fine corked wine. No subtle flavours. No pleasing bouquet. Just acid and iron “But your ‘good’, to good to eat.” She spits in distaste. ”Mostly I prefer red and raw, but in your case l think I’d hang you on a butchers hook till your rancid and dripping with the juices of decay.” The drool is not a nice look. N.B, Gruff and raw, I notice, her voice edged with insanity, measures out its limited control with every rapid breath she takes. “Mutter. Mutter Nacht.” I eek it out, my voice a mouse that squeaks and cowers running for its hole. No, no, no, that wont do. I cough out loud. Better. Stronger. My voice deepening. A big cat hidden in plain sight. Less yellow streaks, more tiger stripes “Mother Night”. I bow. A flamboyant movement of an arm that wishes for a feathered hat. “Enough!” Crows gathered at her feet. She stands before me, naked, covered in gore. My libido colliding with pure terror. My over active mind painting explicit pictures. So exciting. So terrifying. Hoping against all hope my flippant mouth stays firmly shut. For beauties teeth are razor sharp...and my glib tongue’s to indiscreet, to let it in her presence speak. I edge out of reach. * I am aware that she, so powerful, amongst an army, could rend and tear, with ease, they’re polished ranks to tattered shreds of red and bloody hanks of sodden meat. Well she like her men well hung so that’s a bonus. The crows caw. Seeming to feed on my thoughts. Their beaks and eyes having scavenged the bodies of the slain through out the histories of war. SHOW NO SIGNS OF WEAKNESS...or defiance. I remain still, praying my scent does not betray my fear. Knowing that distance is an illusion given the speeds at which she moves. She tilts her head. “Sensible.” A sibilance of snakes, hidden in the undergrowth beneath my feet. I want to look down. I need to look down. DONT LOOK DOWN. TREAD CAREFULLY. *All her polish dulled, the gold that ran within her veins, is now, of baser metals made. What once was perfect, incomplete. Flawed. “Am I so forgotten. Am I? Do those who live within the folds of my eternal shadow? Do they forget the mercies I bestow on those who show me no respect?” I here a faint echo. ‘While my shadow slept did they my name forget?’. Trick question. Reluctantly I give ground. “YOU...,” she steps forward, each word a sharpened edge, “have lordly airs before your queen. How dare you eyes address me so. Has time rewritten all my tales that ever lesser evils such as you forget their place beneath my ever bleeding feet.” She stares at the heart within my chest. Scenting the air as if for blood. “Tainted. You are tainted. Foul.” She sniffs. “A minor royal, demon born of lineage and line. High you rose but fallen now. Your soulless form ( If not to me), is to another bound. Hmmmm.” Fuck. She knows. Deny everything. My voice is flawless in its delivery, for I am raised to show no fear, and lies upon my tongue come easy. For in truth they are all I know. I open my mouth but she speaks first. “Renounce this aberration. This flaw that mars such arrogant perfection. My child, leech out this poison in your life. Or I’ll will amputate her limb by limb, from your body. Bone saw, hatchet or skinners knife. Take your pick or lose our life.” My posture stiffens. My face strangely wet. “Yes proudly I was born of evil, just lately cursed by grace. But I in death will travel where your threats can never follow...as my tears for her attest. Tainted now I live, my frozen heart to slowly beat. My soul in balance. Eternity no longer mine as love corrupts to leave me weak . A prince you say I shall not be, but crown and birth have left their marks unyielding on my dignity. With eyes that saw the sins of man grow ripe...I look upon my callous queen with pity now, for you shall never know the pain that holds my pride, so resolute, against your hate. And when I fall I’ll fall at peace for you shall never take her soul...for part it resides in mine, as I reside in hers!” FOOL. You think freedom will comes cheap. It is mine to give or take. Free reign or choke chain. The collar at your neck is always mine. MINE!” She snaps her fingers. “Your rebellious spirit is as nothing before me, as I your blood and bone, enslave you to my own. So listen well, as fate a kiss bestows a sentence for this heinous, most holiest of crimes, broken by my wrath, live on, to see her DIE! SCARY LAUGH. She tilts my head, her tongue so warm and moist upon my lips. In thrall to her I cannot move. So small the change. My tears so light can never balance out the evil I have done. For kindness is a leprosy that eats me up inside. “And death. I’ll never grant you deaths release. When I can harm you more if your survive to grieve her loss.” She spits and the acid in her saliva scars my face and chest. Hissing. Burning moth holes in my clothes and skin. “How weak you are.” She mocks. “How pitiful and weak". Such scorn, such hate, all condensed into two well honed words that stab and stab again. “Pitiful.” Derisive, ann open handed slap dismisses all my once vaunted powers as nought. Cheek crushed. Deaf in one ear. Dazed. Muscles locked. She will not even let me fall. Weak. A hammer blow leaves me choking on blood as my jaw dislocates. The pain is mine all else is hers. Condolence. Comfort. Refinement. Deportment. The wicked’s thin veneer. The Fold is always open, if you’ll repent your sins. Generosity. Kindness. Lies. Skin deep. She’ll break you whilst she whispers words of hope. A ladies hand rests upon my shoulder. Long delicate fingers and fine dainty bird like bones that vice like, walk, a spider down my arms. Bones ossifying, crumbling at her touch. That hand, a thing of such beauty that sculptors would craft in marble as tears roll down their cheeks. Whispering words of rapt perfection as they smooth its cold, cold alabaster skin. CRACK! She breaks every bone she touches as she crawls down my sleeve, brittle twigs for bones grown fragile, break beneath, her finger tips for spiders feet. My mangled fingers, joints popped, point in different directions, as they hang loose from a limp disjointed arm, shattered in several places, flopping useless at my side. Inside my empty chest I gather screams until a tempest rages within. Soundlessly building, roar upon roar, thunder that shatters the fragile snow globes of my organs with glacial ferocity. * His wounded pride, a broken limb, lies beside his arrogance, fading from his lips. His self belief, his scathing words, dead before they’re spoken. He swallows. “Where is your princely arrogance. Your sneer. Your snarl. What worth has any life so short when placed against my own.” A wrack of shadows breaks his bones to leave him twisted and alone. Scorn. “I bar you from your sires cast. A prince no more. Denounced. All Kith(demons) shall seek your mortal forms demise, as slick with sin any Angel’s touch will see you burn until your very nature has been scoured from your bones by gods eternal flame.” I smile. Paid in pockets full of old toffees, buttons and innocence. “I am of the Methalim who through pride were cast aside. Our wings for ever broken, blinded to the light. Far from home ‘Fallen’ never to return, but I in this wont waver. Infected by a girl who’s smiles so rare, mirrors so my own dark heart, that I would rather die a man than live for ever as a slave within my brothers ranks.” A derisive slap. A rake of claws across his face. One eye blind. 4 ragged cuts so deep they scratch the bones of his skull. Unbowed he looks her in the eye. His rage...something borrowed, lifts him up, his smile not quite his own. She steps back. Uncertain. “I spent an eternity bowing my head to you. AND it took a girl. A GIRL! (Something painful like a blade, moves within his chest.) A girl to make me stand. A girl to make me see. All of us are children of the lesser light, treachery and lies are sweet meats on our tongues. And I will fall before I’ll ever bow to you who spent so many years imprisoned by the gods. But not in evils cause. No. Your pride and hubris did that. How many souls ascended that should corrupted have dwelt within our fathers halls. Fire and damnation should be your only dues. For if I in judgement stood, I would strip you of your rank, your mantle, and cast you down into the very hells you built. To dwell forever in the very fires of pain eternal that you for pleasure lit.” I howl, bones twisting and cracking with the heat. No effigy is this by roaring flames embraced. A wicker man in flesh and form. His scream a name, a longing for favour and forgiveness upon his blackened lips. Footsteps walk away to leave a huddled ball of burning flesh. She never turns trusting the hungry fires to consume themselves in agonies jagged flames. Feeding on the fat of my hubris, the wick of my sins. I scream until my breath runs out. And then I scream again until my tongue is shrivelled and my teeth begin to crack. Blip. I stand apart looking down on the twisted human pyre. A girl smiles by my side. “Serves you right.” I smile back. Power flowing into limbs that slowly straighten. Wounds that slowly heal. Flames that now about me curl, intangible. Unreal. “Keep the scars they suit you.” I sit up. “The tight bitch.” Just enough and no more. I wont die, but everything else is still grinding bone on bone. One eye a milky white. Fingers functioning but oddly misaligned. I groan and try to stretch. FUUUUUCK...perhaps not. Cold I shuffle out of my empty (it only takes the Queen of Mournful Night to scare them), Nixie free, home and gather kindling and moss for a fire I cannot stand to look upon. When I return a bottle of brandy sits upon the floor, a kiss drawn in the dirt. I feel her voice. “Wimp.” I smile. A broken smile. An idiots lopsided, toothless grin. “It suits you.” She laughs. “Bitch!” An epitaph of sorts. Whistling hurts, but the brandy helps. Everything is either torn or broken, but I sleep like a babe. The cave grown chilly, but I hardly seem to care for she has lit a fire in my soul. Her words of love, all bile and bite, and acid scars, brings tears from ash, and choking see me close my eyes and knowing, unshakable in my belief, sleep, safe in her keep. “HE IS MINE!”