“Who is that? Wh—G-ah!-D…Damn it! Who is that?” The man brayed into the shadows, but there was no answer. Still, even the most possessive Gods allow us to know more than we should. He felt someone there—in the vault with him. For a moment, he heard nothing, neither breath nor heartbeat in those cavernous chambers.
Then, a crippled clop echoed like a heel upon cobbles.
“Let me suffer in peace!” The man begged, his words muffled by his own hair growing within the ventail and bevor grate of the faceplate {with all but a hood for warmth against the cold, damp stones}. The bridle heavy on his neck so he laid his head upon the slab and the rusting iron cut into his collarbone.
The darkness stirred. Without being able to move his arms, he could all but tilt his head, though he could well enough glance a disfigurement. Some gruesomeness ambling and festering. Hesitating and slouched. Perhaps a human form, but not quite so.
“Who are you?” Shouted the binding-laden miscreant. The only light from a vent-shaft played through the eye slits as he rolled his head from side to side, resounding a metallic scraping sound that toiled slowly over the schist and startled spiders feasting on the carcasses of earwigs and centipedes.
“Who…are you?” the crooked figure asked. The pitch and tarry of the voice divulged her femininity, though she sounded more animal than woman. She limped forward from the umbra. The linger on her tongue revealed an odd compassion at the origin of her question. Yet somehow—did she recognize the husk of the man in shackles? What was it about his fetters that divulged his majesty? Like trying to remember the grandeur of a dream once just awoken.
“Who…” The suffering man groaned, shaking the irons that cuffed his wrists—swollen with scars and callouses. The chains rattled in the valleys they’d carved upon the surface of the rock.
Unto the luminosity allowed by the aperture of a dismal vent-shaft clicked a wearisome and frightful hoof. The periphery of half-light cast a shadow of what appeared to be horns—though the phantom stood upright like a woman. Yet stooped.
A gasp emitted from the strange apparition, “Oh, you’re the one wh—” she brought her fingertips to her mouth as though trying to catch quivering words that escaped through her hands: “You sav—”
“Once…” he lamented, and turned his vision to the ceiling where he’d known every crack, and whose crepuscular dimness {in its charity} allowed him hallucinatory visions during his most ruinous states. “But not any more. Leave me…so I can suffer…in peace…”
The gnarled shape stood, hunchbacked. Scratched at her horns. Hobbled closer to sniff the man.
“I said leave me be!” Called the man, and {skittish} she flinched, ducking into the cobwebbed and moss-filled gloam. There she paused for a moment, not knowing where to go, for the meager perimeter didn’t allow for room to go. The man, unused to company but for those to inflict hell, wondered what cunning form of torment they had conjured and devised? A luring humiliation? What makeshift shame or newfound degradation? In his ponderance there fell a silence that was filled by a faint and fragile sobbing.
“I…” He began. It had been years since he’d heard tenderness {in any form}, and to cry is a most lowly and cruel form of tenderness. He recalled the last time he’d heard a woman weep, and the marrow of his bones seethed in a distant longing.
“If you won’t…or…can’t…leave me be…then—well—out with it then…how did you arrive here?”
She hesitated, quiet as the spoors and mushrooms spawning between damp mortar joints. Peering from behind a time-battered column, in curiosity. Agitated, she tamped the sparse, mildewed hay that soaked up urine and human filth.
“What makes you anxious? What more can they do? If time we must pass, then grant me a story.” The man then coughed such a pathetic and blood spattered hack that the unhallowed ghastliness took pity upon him.
“Please,” he muttered.
She knelt down to study his shackles…at least he couldn’t attack her. At least he was restrained. It’s odd, knowing exactly where she resided, yet knowing she was just as lost as he. Though more terrified. Nevertheless, if there was another creature so dispossessed as she, perhaps he may indicate some secret to endurance, or confer whether there was any purpose in such a venture.
Still hidden behind the column, she relented:
“The LORD loved me once. Once, I was beautiful. Once…normal…The LORD adored me as one captivated by the shine of some trinket. To posses. But you cannot posses the shine. Only the trinket.
She played her finger upon her horns as a girl might twiddle her hair.
“He waited until the morning’s mist to conceal his stealing away to me, when his wife was still asleep.
“But I was afraid of the LORD, taken aback and timid. I cowered away, though that mattered little—for the LORD is the LORD, and the LORD takes what is his. And lo, when the mistress of the LORD awoke, dewy-eyed and husbandless, with vitriol seething from her teeth, she ascended the stairs where straight-backed guards saluted her bidding and scoured the land looking for their LORD—for their LORD was missing.
“It was her who found the LORD when she stalked his laughter. But what was he doing in the glen? She hadn’t seen him in the valley since they were first lovers…He was not fond of strolling. It had been long since she’d heard that snicker and in recent years, she {and perhaps he too} had forgotten that he could be frivolous. So when she came upon him blushing in the fog {her ruddy cheeks like little embers reeling in the smoke of fire} she was reminded of his youthful transgressions. Of hints of perfume. Of errant makeup streaked within the shadows of his contours. Waylaid explanations beneath brow and sneered lip. So that when the LORD heard footsteps resembling the gate of his offspring’s mother he jumped up and transformed me into something stranger.
“Transformation is…terrif—First, I felt the cracking of my skull—as two…protuberances…cleaved, rising like the horns of Moses—writhing and wrenching from my bone, calloused and hard, tearing through my skin…my scalp. My spine contorted into a groveling hunch, for the LORD is the LORD and I bowed unto him.
“But the wife of the LORD is not foolish. And the LORD still loved me, making me his wife’s handmaiden, so he could have me, and have me do whatever he needed. Whatever he desired. And she could humiliate me, his shineless trinket.
“I was not allowed utensils. Stripped of my clothes—because beasts do not wear clothes, she said. Naked, I ate from the floor fighting off her dogs. She ridiculed the remnants of my femininity. The words she used against me, I dare not repeat. At times, she would make me her ashtray. When I slept {which was rarely} she displayed me in a cage. I offered my back when she gave me blows, my face when she pulled my hair. This is how she would entertain herself. The LORD had other ways…
“Until the day I tried to escape. To end myself upon the rocks when the LORD was upon me, and she espied my struggle near the window of the LORD that called me.
The silhouette’s head bowed in the light, and she bit at her tail nervously.
The man coughed, rasping the bile collecting in his throat. The spell cast by her story and enchanted by her sorrow gnawed at his innermost soul, massacring any remaining stoicism, and leaving a pool of blood and mercy in his heart. Without anything to offer, he reimbursed her the only solace he still possessed, his own story:
“I…I knew the LORD wanted it for himself…” the man began, and the deformity turned away to wipe a film of dew from her eye.
“But we needed warmth…we were hungry…it was winter…there was nothing to forage…only the wild beasts…” The man paused, realizing she’d recoiled at the word beast.
“I…I…” the man faltered, yet continued, “From the fields, even I could smell the fat of their feasts. Saw the hearth light flicker upon the window-sashes of their keep. I was madden with starvation. Hysterical and almost naked. Not in my right mind. For my wife’s ribs shone through the holes in the fragments of garments—there was nothing left of her to nourish our daughter, and the only warmth generated was the shiver of our whimpering huddle. I heard my daughter’s stomach consuming her body. In the end, it was the last sound she made, too weak to cry. It was after my daughter’s passing I went mad. Raving in tongues and foaming from the mouth. Deranged and feverish with bloodlust in my eyes, my soul craving vengeance.
“Ravaging and atrophied, I was barely able to climb the mount to the tower—fearing the road lest I be spotted. I waited for the guards to be entertained with their bone-dice, then stole into the keep. The LORD and all the citadel was cloaked in slumber, and I by the darkness of night. That’s when I saw it, glowing and teaming. Writhing in sporadic fits. Twitching and squirming and warm. Violently bright so I had to shield my eyes. As blasphemous as the sun burning at midnight. I grabbed it by the handle and ran. Fled so fast, with such terror, I couldn’t feel my legs or whether my hotfoot ever touched the forsaken earth in my confusion. I could barely see past the blinding radiance I carried.
“Of course the guards saw me. It was impossible to hide with the burning—confessing and unmasking my illuminated face. They were able to follow me for a time—following the light—but the weight of their armor betrayed them, and the woods were my friend and kept my secrets. Sprinting in the bounding tussle and villainous hie.
“It was only a matter of time, I knew they would ransack the land, hunt and identify me, but not until I delivered the purloined—”
Just then, she reached out and touched the man’s hand. Rather than recoil, he felt the warmth of her kindness, because even broken bodies in the hold can {if the LORD allows it} sometimes stumble upon a mislain moment of reprieve.
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