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hedonisthierophant · 4 years

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Unveiled eyes and bloodless lips -A skarsgard multiverse thing.

A universe of many Bills, a couple AHAs, and a few others.

@grandpa-sweaters You asked for fic with The Kid and instead I somehow came up with this monstrosity. I’m not sure if you’ve ever read my writing before but I’m sorry.

Dedicated to my literary soulmate @ill-skillsgard I hope you don’t hate it.

Warnings: Smut, mentions of pregnancy and childbirth, gore, spit kink, cuckoldry, degradation, injury, death.

Unveiled eyes and bloodless lips

The witch had lost this game long before she even started playing, the final result such a foregone conclusion that it might be more accurate in fact to say she had lost before she had even been born. Forces much larger than her, to call them even titanic in scope would be an understatement, had been attending to the moves of the board since time immemorial. To say her fate such as it was had been decided back then is to grievously misstate the situation. Her exact destiny was fiercely contested on the board of play, it could’ve turned out completely differently, unfolding along anyone of the infinite myriad of paths of kismet. But her doom? That became inevitable she drew the attention of the game’s players. Naturally she remained unaware of the inescapable quality of her demise, she fought against it until the very last moment, her ferocious zeal, her skill and talent, all of it amounted to naught, For what hope does in an insect have against flood? Through no fault of her own, her perspective on this eons-long contest she had the misfortune of being prescribed to enter was…limited. In actuality the word “limited” doesn’t begin to convey the magnitude of her ignorance, imagine if you will placing your eye at a keyhole and attempting to catch a glimpse of a room darkened to pitch black. Some less astute souls might say that her involvement in the affair was rather like bringing a deaf person to the symphony but you dear reader know better, I should hope. Someone who cannot hear will have a different experience with music to be sure, but an experience they will have, the concepts on display remain within the realm of understanding. In our case a young woman became the toy of forces so far beyond her ken that she was to them as an amoeba might be to one of us beneath the prying lens of a microscope. As you may have surmised the tragedy that brings my voyeuristic audience to me unfolded slowly, spanning two lifetimes. Of course, this is only slow from the mortal point of view, to the beings that brought this about such a timeframe was less than the blink of an eye might be to us, for their machinations make glaciers seem to move with haste. Oh yes, they lack celerity but in exchange their actions carry the gravity of unquestionable certainty. However, I have indulged myself long enough. It is time that I recount, to the best of my ability the story which is brought you here today…whilst I remain able to do so.

Her mother was possessed of a nearly singular lack of the talent that had been at the disposal to members of her family as far back as records would go. She did retain the gift of foresight. In the hands of anyone else this boon guaranteed an interesting life, if not necessarily a good one. The ability to see the future meant that so much of the world could be bent to your whim, fortunes raised, mistakes avoided, enemies destroyed before they even had the opportunity to transgress. For her mother though the only thing her visions brought was infinite sadness. She was many months pregnant you see. The result of an impetuous liaison with an excitable and impassioned thief several years who junior who quite literally stumbled into her lap, betrayed by his gangly limbs at a luxurious hotel bar he happened to be casing. He must have absconded with a waiter’s uniform for nothing about his outfit fit his exquisitely lanky form properly. Remembering the bowtie that hung limply and sideways from his collar still brings a smile to her face. The knave proclaimed she was the love of his life, his goddess and that he would devote his life to securing her happiness. It was quite a scene the tableau made certainly more…unconventional due to the fact that she was celebrating her first wedding anniversary at and sitting directly across from her husband at the time. Their marriage had been mostly a business arrangement, not entirely loveless but more cordial than intimate, but she thinks she could have grown to love him for the smirk that wound its way across his face after the blubbering young would be waiter realized his presence. She recalls watching the scene like a member of the audience at the theater, her face impassive, one brow raised. Her husband had a reputation for an incredibly violent temper, if you ever witnessed it though but she could never convince herself to entirely discredit the rumors. Both she and the scoundrel were frozen, he in fear, she in surprise. Her husband stood up, declare that their food had been awful and they were taking the waiter as recompense. Her husband, she couldn’t stand the pain that thinking his name brought even all these years later. He had made his fortune as proprietor of the “last heir to the great circuses of old, the man was a showman to his core and could have sold sin to the most pious of people. Sitting in the stands watching that man bewitch everyone around her, she certain she could’ve learned to love him had she been given more time with him. Her brother-in-law put a stop to any happy fantasies she might’ve entertained though, fratricide had a way of casting a pall over such things. Death took him from her, but that night he had been so very alive. He threw the reprobate onto their sumptuous marriage bed and ordered her in a voice that was equal parts chilling and gleeful to fuck him within an inch of his life. She did, hips canting madly as she struggled to match the thief’s exuberance for all he was worth, she was the only thing that grounded him as he shuddered through orgasm after improbable orgasm. His soulful eyes stared up at her as though she had hung the stars. After one particularly fierce climax she turned to look at her husband across the darkened room for all the while he had been orchestrating the performance as though being its sole audience member also burdened him with the role of conductor, she may have been having extraordinary sex but for all that the two of them were just toys for her husband. He controlled them with such precision a note here, a whisper there, advice for the two of them ghosting across the room. He was a master puppeteer, they may have lacked physical strings but that did not stop him. He ruled over them with the same exactness he employed with his beloved elephants, compelling them through routines to astound and amaze basking in the dazzled worship of the onlookers. That night though, he was taking full advantage of being the only onlooker. She still remembers the manic smile on his face and how his hair looked like flame in the moonlight spilling through the window as hysterical (euphoric) laughter echoed off the walls of their manor, as though her husband were the only one in on some wonderfully hilarious joke of cosmic proportions. Looking back on it, he may well have been. Following their final crescendo as her husband’s euphoria slowly waned into giggling, the criminal professed his love for her for the umpteenth time and begged her to come away with him to Florida, promising to dedicate the rest of his days to making her happy. His stirring gaze brimmed with imploring tears he unabashedly let fall from his eyes, his voice quavering beneath the immense wait of his need to keep her in his life. The scales she used to weigh her options were suddenly dashed as her husband took a great gasping breath, sprang up from his seated position in the sumptuous armchair he’d been occupying and began to flit around the room gathering things to him, mania rolling off him in waves. He’d hoisted the nude crook off her with little apparent effort despite being smaller than the rangy younger man. He spun him around and slapped the sex drunk visitor’s bare ass as the man squawked in surprise and indignation, pale globes of flesh flushing an angry shade of red and leaving a print in the form of her husband’s hand at the sting. Her husband crouched for on his haunches for a moment to admire his impromptu work of art. She couldn’t see him but she could clearly picture his eyes growing wide with fascination as the mark took shape, his hands twitched with restrained desire, she could practically feel him warring with the impulse to throw him onto their marriage bed yet again, but this time for the purpose of sowing sharper and deeper blossoms of suffering across the entirety of the canvas that was the other man’s body. Disturbed smile still in place as he ground his teeth he muttered to himself in hushed tones. “No Jer, be a good boy. Almost done now, you can do it. Just gotta ape him. He straightened the conflict within him tucked away beneath the impeccable veneer of the consummate showman’s mask. “Would that I could have joined you crazy kids. I’d have loved to use all my fun little tricks on a tall glass of water like you. I’d have driven you crazy, stark raving mad really, shown you just how wild gingers can get, I’m talking showing you where the animals go.” He said with a grin that was only matched in lascivious by it’s lunacy and air of danger. She was certain the young man with the innocence and coordination of a newborn fawn would not have survived such an encounter He clapped the sex drunk young man on the back, sensually garbed him in a ludicrously expensive silken kimono, handed him a duffel bag of cash as though he had one standing by for just this occasion. That torn expression came over his face yet again, this time he surrendered to his urges. Quite suddenly he brought their lips together with the force of a devouring hunger, grinding his crotch against the other man’s leg. Judging by the surprised sound that issued from their visitor, her husband’s tongue had embarked on an enthusiastic exploration of the other man’s mouth. Then as suddenly as the whirlwind of passion had come, it stilled. He stepped back, a deranged smile lighting up his face. A single thin and determined cord of saliva still bound them together in remembrance of their embrace, her husband broke it with his middle finger, and then brought the digit to the other man’s lips. He sucked on it with a dazed expression for a moment before her husband withdrew with out warning. He clapped him on his back, said in perhaps the most jovial tone a cuckold has ever used with his competitor “I’ve always loved a good fireworks show.” and sent the befuddled young paramour on his way with a wink. The next day her husband left on “family business” to some crime on the east coast submerged seven layers deep in corruption and crime, this business ended in his demise. She remembers looking at him in the casket, smirk fixed in place as though even in death he had gotten the last laugh after all.

That had all been eight months ago exactly. Now here she was at a comfortable cruising altitude of 30,000 feet returning from a sojourn to the place where so many of her sisters had famously died along with innocents and hapless victims of circumstance. She buried her husband in the cesspool city and then communed with nature and the spirits of the sisters who came before her in Salem, now all that was left for her to do was return to her family’s modest estate in Canada and continue puzzling over the odd provision in her husband’s will for any child of hers regardless of whether that child was part of their union or not. The trouble began in earnest on that flight which should’ve been an entirely unremarkable trip from Salem to Halifax. The first unusual occurrence was that her water broke and quite suddenly she was in the process of bringing a life into the world some 2000 stories off the ground suspended in what she’d always considered to be fragile contraptions held aloft by little more than a prayer. Her situation was odd and certainly less than ideal but not unheard of. The flight attendants rushed her to the back of the plane and by what many would like to think was a happy accident there were several members of an obstetrics team present aboard that very flight. The delivery was much more difficult than expected for the culmination of what had been by every reckoning a model pregnancy, with nary an over-enthusiastic kick. Whatever creature was inside of her head suddenly gained the claws of the most wicked of fairytale crones, and the weight of a giant every movement brought only piercing agony and precious little relief. Her screams echoed through the craft that was a dedication to mankind’s hubris as her pain intensified so too did an incredibly unforeseen bout of bad weather, the radar which just hours ago prior to takeoff had promised skies wonderful for flying was now proving itself to be a liar. It was as though passing above some insignificant little town in Maine that caused the storm spring up around them. Their vehicle was buffeted from every direction by winds and frost that were unseasonable even for harsh winter in upper North America. Around her people cursed and prayed, screamed and shouted as the pilots fought to deliver their charges to the ground in the same amount of pieces as they left it, rather than in so many more as was becoming increasingly likely. The town against all sense did have its own infinitesimally small airstrip, it wasn’t until many years later that she would begin to understand just how long ago the pieces had been set in play. As they began their harried descent people were struck by falling luggage and other debris that comes when you compress the lives of hundred people into the space of an aircraft and then turn it into a topsy-turvy. Some were killed, she even took a piece of glass to the jaw but any object that got within striking distance of the newborn child swaddled in a washcloth suddenly lost all momentum and dropped to the floor, this sort of power was most definitely beyond her she had no gift for telekinetics but she was simply too alarmed at the gravity of their situation as Earth’s own gravity began to make its power and its displeasure at having been flaunted known to the passengers. Someone with much more than was at her disposal was looking out for her daughter. And so, their airplane limped down from the sky thoroughly chastened by Zeus and his ilk for its trespass into their domain and Moira and her mother crashed into Castle Rock.

Moira and her mother had always been considered oddities by the town. Two outsiders literally cast out of the heavens and dropped into the midst of unwelcoming townsfolk. Her mother had made the best of the situation, for she had tried, made a very valiant attempt to leave this town but the moment that she crossed the boundaries she was wrapped in agony which would not abate until she took a step back into the town, this phenomenon persisted whether she tried by car or on foot and she refused to give air travel another attempt. She was no fool, she knew well that some incredible force was bent on keeping her and her daughter entrapped in this little nothing of a hamlet. She may not have had the gifts that her family had taken for granted but anyone could make rituals work with enough determination, she used her dead husband’s well to secure a small cottage on the outskirts of town for her daughter and set about turning it into a mystic fortress brimming with occult defenses. Oh the villagers looked at her askance when she went asking strange herbs or when rumors, true in this case, swirled about that she desecrated graves looking for bones or danced in the moonlight bared skin flashing as she circled her home and chanted in forgotten tongues. Castle Rock had a history with which is in their neighbor town of Salem’s Lot you see, they knew the signs even if many had forgotten precisely what they meant. When her mother realized she was potentially in the territory of other practitioners her theory became that a powerful coven existed here and they wanted her for as of yet unknown reasons, but the more she doubt the more it seemed that any true coven had long since died out or moved on to more fitting pastures. The occult in community the town consisted of one or two charlatans, and a few like herself with barely an iota of true power between them, capable of little more than the simplest cantrips, certainly not the massive feats of magic required to both down and trap her here. The first night she performed a ritual of crying beseeching a cracked bowl she’d stolen from the motel to connect her with her mother. Her family had always been a nest of vipers they were immune to their own poison but that did not stop the backstabbing that took place as soon as one was no longer able to defend oneself. Her mother made it clear imperious tones bringing out into the forest and stirring the leaves although in truth she was many miles away, that by allowing herself to be brought low and trapped in a backwater with even a lesser one of her families grimoires by unknown parties she had shamed the family and would be forgotten. They would not come to her aid. Cast out of the one coven she had known since birth she went about forming a tighter knit one as its replacement. She had asked the two charlatans out of town and gathered those with inklings of true power to her, she lacked her family’s innate command of the mystic arts, but her deficit had made her a master ritualist. And so she doled out their precious secrets to a few peasants in this town and made herself a new family. With helpers at her disposal she was able to enact more complex magic and had soon carved out a niche for herself and her followers as the area’s sole authority on matters of the arcane. People flocked to see her from all corners of the continent and a few from even further. She didn’t doubt that her mother, the rest of her family and their retainers were trying their best to end her life but as the years went by it occurred to her that whatever was keeping her here was also keeping her alive, the town seemed to repel anything more than passing outside influences and her family feared to enter its boundaries and become trapped themselves, better to let whatever invisible enemy had brought her there finish her off eventually. Their judgment proved correct.

Moira was an unusual soul, daughter of the town witch and perpetually mistrusted. Despite all that she had a sunny demeanor and those that matter couldn’t help but be charmed by her. For as long as she could remember her mother had forced her, even as a barely aware child to partake in odd rituals, from filling purple gossamer bags of strange herbs sends unknown objects and placing them in various spots throughout the house to keeping a bowl of water by the door and flicking a drop against the wood once it was shut to bathing in oils and strange concoctions by the light of the moon. She did all this because as she told Moira “Something was out to get them.” Moira always found it odd that her mother chose to say something as opposed to someone. Moira had always dreamed of being a doctor but her mother forbid her to leave town for any reason and although she could not explain why to herself even after all these years she’d never even thought of disobeying that particular rule. Her few friends in town and her mother concurred that she would’ve made a brilliant doctor but in a town like Castle Rock the closest she could manage was to be a nursing assistant at the local prison. Some days she bemoaned her life stuck in this little town, so small that it did not even merit a dot on most maps of the area. But she would gather up her natural cheer, take her sketchpad and pencil, sit in the park and draw on those days. Since Moira began drawing she’d been a prodigy, but even from earliest childhood when one has no attention span to speak of after she would dally with the subject and that she would return always to her first. A pair of haunting blue-green eyes, a slightly upturned nose, and your whispering pair of lips, cracked and dry, parched even to the drawings one got the impression that no words passed between them for a long time. The drawings of course worried her mother but try as she might she could puzzle out no theories as to their significance, the last time she’d tried describing ritual on the mysterious subject her bowl had been gripped by a powerful kinetic force shattered from the inside out embedding pieces of cheap ceramic into the wall around her and a few into her body as water that had been cool and tranquil moments earlier became scalding and improbably rose up to splash her in the face. It was then she decided that the drawings were out of her power.

Whenever she was outside of her house Moira always felt the faintest buzzing against her skull, the local doctor had considered it a prodromal symptom of a migraine, but the element never progressed beyond an irritating sound. Until the day she disobeyed one of her mother’s rules. She always looked forward to Fridays, it meant that she have the weekend to draw, but more importantly she would get to see Adrian. Adrian she suspected, that been an enigma from the moment he was born. A Scandinavian street rat with far too much charm and intelligence for his own good and somehow grifted his way across the Atlantic and ended up in her life riding a steed of criminal charges for allegedly attempting to traffic young women across the border. Adrian claimed he had been trying to rescue them and the promised jury of his “peers” such as it was appeared to have bought that story, but Adrian could sell water to a drowning man. Even Moira was unsure what the truth of the matter was. Still Adrian was a charmer, and incorrigible flirt and she had fun bantering with him, although when she asked about his plans his thoughts always turned to getting out and making enough money to support his little boy. About a month ago, Adrian had complained of awful whispering noises splitting his skull during the day while Moira was not on shift. She walked into his cell the later at the start of the graveyard shift and found him sitting as though he were a wounded lion whose legs had been caught in a trap, through his quick pained breaths he greeted her in a melodious accent that was related to but unlike Adrian’s own. She saw that his legs were twisted, broken and fractured at various intervals as though someone had taken a chisel up and down the length of bone within his limbs. No one at the prison could explain the origin of his injuries and beyond a cursory visit from the institution’s uncaring physician no one tried to. As long as word did not escape these walls no one cared, Moira had thought about telling but who was there to tell? How did one even begin to do that? She’d never even left this town once in her twenty-something years. He been an able-bodied, athletic young man at lights out, and had awoken as…

“A cripple! I am but a poor humble cripple and I throw myself on your mercy, my dear sweet Moria. How must I abase myself before you to obtain another of these wonderful puddings? I am willing to do quite a lot, to serve…no that’s not quite the right word, oh your language is so silly…Service! I am willing to service you in oh so many ways!” He said in his singsong voice, appearing quite proud of himself for hunting down his lexical quarry. He he had used the provided spoon merely an implement to tear the thin film of plastic keeping him from his prize, flung it away and for lack of a better descriptor… began preforming cunnilingus on the pudding pouch in his hand, his performance was complete with moans and groans and little contented sighs. All the while never breaking eye contact with her, blue orbs burning into her own filled with indecent proposals. Unwilling to tolerate his antics anymore she snatched the offending pudding cup from his grasp, for the shadow of an instant she could have sworn a terrible look of feral rage had flashed across his countenance but it was gone before Moira could register whether or not it ever truly been there. “I am so terribly sorry dear Moira for my offense, it is just that in my day, we did not have such…culinary delights. He’d slowed to get the word “culinary” out properly but hadn’t stumbled and looked satisfied. In his day, that was the other thing, in the month since Adrian awoken the entire prison wailing about whispering in his cell, according to the doctors he developed a dis-associative identity. The young man that now occupied the cell which officially belonged to Adrian, called himself Ivar Lothbrok. He had been doing his best to convince Moira that he was the spirit of a long dead Viking who had for reasons unknown even to himself woken up in a body that was so similar to his own that it had frightened even him. The prison psychiatrist couldn’t have cared less about the situation in that cell, but to Moira it was quite the engaging mystery.

Today Moira decided to challenge him. “If you really aren’t Adrian, prove it if you’re not him then your innocent of the crimes that got him put in here and you should be angry, you should want out.” The smile that split the face in front of her should have been a warning. “I may be innocent of his petty crime dealing in flesh and weird…potions,” Moira decided to let the odd word choice go to spare his pride. “But I have killed and maimed, and lied, and stolen, and coveted many times over. You’re correct though, I do want out of the cell but for the moment I’m right where I want to be.” Moira, ever quizzical couldn’t stop herself from asking “Why do you want to be here?” “Because here is where you are.” he said as if he were speaking to the dullest child in all the world. “I will indulge you however, I am not Adrian, Adrian had pure wholesome thoughts about you, he was going to be free, tell you that he wanted you to be his little boy’s mother, beg you to start a family and run away with him to whatever little speck of a town he found someone foolish enough to care for the child while he was here. He’d have trafficked poison and flesh slaves or slaughtered swine for the rest of his days for you. He used to touch himself here in the dark fantasize about reaching through the bars of the cage and touching your skin, used to dream of having pure loving sex with you on a blanket by fjords illuminated only by the stars and the moon, lest he seemed to greedy to want to see you in all your glory. He wanted to fill your cunt with his seed over any over until the two of you made a brother or sister for precious little Patrick. One big happy family.” He spat out the infant’s name like a curse most vile, and treated the world family as though it was unconscionable poison on his tongue. She took a breath intending to halt whatever sick game he was playing, but the moment she drew breath and opened her mouth his eyes blazed with danger. “Keep your tongue behind your teeth if you wish to keep it all wench!” He roared. “You asked for this, now you will listen. I am not Adrian because never in his wildest dreams would he have contemplated the fantasy of using your uniform to tie you down and spitting on your face over and over forcing you to swallow what you could, and what you couldn’t would slide down between those perfect breasts of yours and they would glisten as I played with them, sucked and bit until they were raw, then I would have kept spitting until your cunt was drenched from the inside out, I would have laid siege to it like it was my traitor brother’s last stronghold. Oh, the sounds and squeals I would have pulled from you. I would have lavished you with my tongue and fingers, bit and sucked and twisted and slapped and pulled and made you come over and over again until you understood what it is to be ravished by a god!” He broke off into a fit of chuckling then capped with a wistful sigh. “But alas all that is denied to me, and indeed you, for you belong to someone else, and as sweet as you would be, you are not worth the effort of challenging his claim.” He stated this with such nonchalance that it broke the terrible spell that she had been under and she fled the prison with eyes burning and tears streaming.

Ivar smiled as she fled, finally, finally. he was one step closer to being free of this accursed in-between place, he was getting home to his beloved Eira and their little girl. Or perhaps another sojourn through life with his healer who had the body of a tower. Or maybe he’d meet that lippy little puppy of an entitled young man in Pennsylvania again who secretly craved discipline. Whatever happened he would be home again, nothing would stop him.

In her haste, she entered her home, ran to her bedroom and threw herself down on the bed without observing her mother’s rules. Had she been paying more attention she would’ve noticed that the water in the bowl she was supposed to flick at the door suddenly evaporated and the gossamer bags filled with protective elements suddenly caught flame and turned to ash in moments. It was then that she heard his voice. “Please don’t cry. I’m here now, it’ll be alright.” His tone was nearly plaintive. She didn’t bother setting up she knew that the voice came from no place within her home. “I’ve been waiting…eternities for you Moria,” He whispered inside her skull. “Let me make you feel better.” There was a hand stroking her face. Her eyes shot open and she beheld a figure that was both present and absent, there was wait to him but light seemed to pass through him through him as though he was merely a projection. Even trapped in the in between as he was, he was gorgeous. Her angel. A completely bare towering figure with the chest and leg and back and ass seemingly having been sculpted from the highest quality marble by da Vinci himself, with cheekbones that could reduce adamantine diamonds to dust, with lustrous hair and sinfully plump and pillowy lips. His eyes, so soulful that she believed he had lived a thousand lifetimes, she realized she’d been drawing this face for as long as she could remember. To feel his touch was to experience euphoria. He kissed her and all her senses were expanded beyond human potential, she saw a kaleidoscope of colors behind her eyes, he smelled and tasted of every single enticing thing at once but instead of a riotous discord of scents and flavors, they were balanced in perfect harmony. His voice alone could reduce her bones to jelly in a way that would make Ivar fear she intended to stake a claim to his epithet. He worshiped her with his entire being, fingers and hands and tongue and colossal endowment yes, but in the midst of their lovemaking she was certain that their spirits were melding even more intensely than their bodies. He spat upon her face one and she felt as though she were being anointed in holy oil by a deity. He scored her flesh with his sharp straight teeth the color of shining bone, drew blood, and she was happy to give it. His enormous hand encircled her throat closed her airway and if she hadn’t already been experiencing what she thought might be Nirvana, the oxygen deprivation would’ve taken her there. After fucking her through more than 20 orgasms and claiming all her orifices for his own each first with the gentle fervor of a virginal lover at the end of an idyllic courtship and then with a harsh brutality as though fucking her two within an inch of her life was the only way he could properly express the hatred for her that filled his entire alien being. He finally unburdened himself of his seed deep inside her and sighed contentedly .

When she awoke after their tryst, he was seated in a chair opposite her bed dressed in a suit and other finery looking for all the world like a high-powered professional instead of some cosmic entity to take an interest in her. He then told her of the tragedy of Henry Deaver, how a Titanic battle with his wife over his infidelity with a young woman he had met at a business engagement led to him driving fueled by rage and sadness while rain pounded the car and obscured his vision, he’d crashed into the lake and been thrown into a myriad of alternate realities, “other heres and nows where the dominos fell in different patterns. His stories of lives spent with Charlotte, Oliver, Westly, as a professor, a soldier from West Virginia, a bounty hunter who fought for his life in a dystopia, the life he’d almost lived of a Viking, a philanderer with a beer-based pick-up strategy, a gangster, the searching for true love based on a scientific assessment ,they all brought tears to her eyes. He entreated her with every fiber of his being to free him from his cage and put an end to his cycle of loneliness, to save him and others trapped in this limbo. She swore to do it.

That was the day the matriarch without a clan descended on the prison, her chariot of choice, a limousine flanked by a motorcade of four SUVs each bearing the insignia of an elite private security firm denigrated the world over for unsavory activities, their detractors though couldn’t question their effectiveness. She and the battalion she paid for advanced through the prison like a storm, the guards normally employed were deferential and out of their depth. The only sounds echoing through the prison with a click of her heels and the thuds of the jackboots that accompanied her for she had brought silence to the prison with her mere presence. Moira had heard of her, the interim controller of a ludicrously wealthy and secretive biotech firm following the scandalous disappearance of her son and heir. Allegedly, the young man whom the newspapers referred to as the Brat Prince had somehow veered off the course of normally accepted philandering ways among the ultrarich and powerful and become involved with someone his mother deemed unacceptable. The matriarch had come because the vast network of informants that she plied with riches and sharp promises had imparted to her knowledge of a prisoner found here who almost matched her son’s description. The only thing he had left behind was a wheelchair covered in the blood of its owner, a crippled faggot whom he had dared to take for a lover. He would pay for his insolence, for the damage down to her reputation and company, she would break this mysterious prisoner and learn all that he knew, she swore it. When she reached his unusual cell a young woman in scrubs was fumbling with the keys, her son’s face taken on a different path through destiny than the one she knew stared back at her. He spoke to her in an antiquated dialect of that language from the Balkans she had left behind so many mortal lifetimes ago, she was not that frightened, trusting girl from Wallachia anymore, she nearly charged the cage to make him pay for daring to address her this way, but the meaning of his words stilled her. “Madame Olivia, I believe we can be of help to one another once this insect has served its purpose.” Moria broke the lock.

He nuzzled into her touch aching a contented sound as she ran her hands through his hair, it had been eons since he felt the touch of another, his eyelashes fluttered and tears swam in his eyes, he would allow himself this one indulgence. “Loyal Moria, you have played your part well and in appreciation I give you the greatest of gifts, the fulfillment of your destiny.” When he spoke it was with the voice of 100 different people at once both cacophonous and whisper quiet. She screamed as his lips brushed her forehead, for this feather-light touch broke everything inside of her all at once. She fell as her skin froze and burned all at once, her muscles liquefied and her bones turned to jelly, her ears, nose, and eyes ran with blood, then her eyes began to boil in their sockets fluids running down into her still shrieking mouth as her body contorted it this way and that trying desperately to contend with suffering that was beyond human comprehension.

The last thing she saw before death mercifully claimed her were a pair of unveiled eyes atop bloodless lips, her final sight was one she had been drawing her entire life.

As the wretch finally had the good sense to expire Olivia Godfrey watched as the death seemed to fill out the prisoner’s gaunt and wan features until she could almost confuse him for an older version of her son. He drew in a deep breath, stooped to kiss her hand and issued a request, eyes glittering with dark promise: “Take me to Derry.”

#Bill Skarsgård #fic #roman godfrey #ivar the boneless #henry deaver #Mickey #axel cluney

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viralhottopics · 7 years

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Neil Gaiman: I like being British. Even when Imashamed, Im fascinated

The books interview: The award-winning author on his new book of Norse mythology, Brexit and being an Englishman in New York

Neil Gaiman wanders into the Crosby Hotels colourful parlour in lower Manhattan looking like the Platonic ideal of himself. Hes all wild hair and gracious manners, dressed in a lived-in black wool coat, which he keeps on throughout. He loves this hotel, he says, not least because the concierge writes a comic about Houdini with the former concierge.

Gaiman started out in comics, reading them as a child and eventually writing them too, including his famous Sandman series. So does this happen to him often, his very presence tempting out underground comics enthusiasts all over the globe? I wish I could say yes. It would be a much more interesting and sort of Pynchon-esque world. But no, its just here.

Gaiman looks a little tired. He has just come from feeding breakfast to his toddler youngest son, the progeny of his second marriage to the singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer. (He has three children with his first wife, Mary McGrath.) His creative life is a whirlwind of projects. The television version of his 2001 novel American Gods is to air in the US in April. He has also been at work on an adaptation of his 1990 collaboration with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, for Amazon and the BBC, on which he is serving as showrunner. Meanwhile, there is the matter of writing books, the latest of which is Gaimans retelling of Norse myths in the straightforwardly titled Norse Mythology, out this week.

It has clearly been a struggle to find the time. I would look up every now and again and go, OK, I have a week. Good, I will retell a story. These are drawn from the 13th-century source texts for many Norse myths, the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda, which he first read in his 30s, after absorbing the superhero stories inspired by them in Marvel comics as a child growing up in West Sussex. With such a haphazard schedule, it has taken around eight years to write the book, the idea for which was first floated by his American editor at Gaimans birthday lunch in 2008.

Listing all of Gaimans achievements could fill a book on its own. In addition to the comics, he is the author of novels for adults and children including Neverwhere, The Graveyard Book and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. He has written original screenplays and seen his work adapted by others, too, such as the 2009 stop-motion version of Coraline. He has been nominated for and won countless awards, including the Hugos, Nebulas and Eisners.

An illustration from Neil Gaimans The Graveyard Book

Gaimans love of Norse mythology surfaces frequently in his work, not least in American Gods, which captures a battle between Odin and Loki. But in embarking on the retellings in Norse Mythology, Gaiman found himself faced with new limitations, as much information about the gods is missing. On Greeks and Romans, for example, we have scads of stuff, but the Norse werent writing it down, he explains. They were telling the stories, so everything we have was written down after the event. The holes and the contradictions that result from the oral tradition presented creative choices, but he felt an acute responsibility to be faithful to the traditional versions.

I have to play fair with the Norse scholars and I have to play fair with kids who pick up the book and read it and think they know the stories. And so I may add colour, I may add motivation, Id go and put in my own dialogue. I may draw inferences, he says. All that stuff Im allowed to do, but I feel like Im not allowed to just go, OK, theres a patch of canvas missing here. Im going to draw something in

Even so, Gaimans personal sensibility is apparent in the text. His affection for Loki, for instance, shines through: Loki is very handsome. He is plausible, convincing, likable, and far and away the most wily, subtle and shrewd of all the inhabitants of Asgard. It is a pity, then, that there is so much darkness inside him: so much anger, so much envy, so much lust.

Gaiman attributes his love of Loki to his novelists eye. You always end up fascinated by who changed, and how they change, because the engine of fiction is who are you at the beginning of the story and who are you at the end. Thor, bless his heart, has no narrative arc: he is the same person all the way through. He is not the brightest hammer in the room, but hes good hearted, and you know he will die at the end, but he dies the same person hes been all the way through. In contrast, Loki is both the devil and the saviour of the gods. Almost every story where theyre in trouble, its because Loki got them into it. Also, an awful lot of the time, hes the only one smart enough to get them out of it.

He declares a real joy in passing these things on. Its like being given something that belongs to humanity and polishing it and cleaning it up and putting it back out there.

Gaimans enthusiasm for myths also extends to the Egyptians and the Greeks. He can reel off similarities between ancient stories, and says he doesnt just tell the stories, he feels them on some emotional level. The glory of some of these myths is that they feel right, he explains, although he also concedes that every now and then youll hit a myth and go, No, I cant really get behind that. Really, we get licked out of the ice by a cow? OK, if you say so. (Hes referring there to the myth of Audhumla, which he includes in Norse Mythology, despite his scepticism.)

As Gaiman wrestled with these stories, he says, he had no idea he was writing a topical book. But then, as political events unfolded in the second half of 2016, he could not help but draw parallels. For me, it was Ragnark, he says, referring to the apocalyptic end of the gods. It begins with a long winter, continues with earthquakes and flooding, and then the sky splits apart.

The view that Brexit and the election of President Trump have brought about chaos and even a sense of impending doom is widely held, but Gaimans version of it is particularly eloquent. I remember the 80s and the nuclear clock and the cold war and Russia and America and [thinking] I hope you guys dont press buttons and it would be very nice to not live in the shadow of everything ending, he says. But at least at that point, what you were scared of was just one action. Now one is scared of the accretion of a million actions and a million inactions.

He says there is a strange kind of magical thinking afoot and tells me about waking up the morning after Brexit in a hotel in Scotland and checking the result, then having that sort of moment at the end of Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston sees the Statue of Liberty … I was going, Oh, no. Are you really

Gaiman has, in recent years, divided his time between the UK and the US, but he is not an American citizen and has fallen off the electoral roll in the UK, so he wasnt able to vote in either the Brexit referendum or the US election. Im frustrated not being able to vote over here, he says. Im like, well, I pay lots of taxes to the US and the UK, but I dont want to become an American citizen. I like being English. I like being British. Even when Im ashamed, Im fascinated.

Indeed, he clearly is. He does a very good imitation of the cab drivers he encountered in London leading up to the Brexit vote, who seemed to believe that, ultimately, the thing they were about to do was of no consequence: The EUs not going to let us go … . Regarding the Trump vote, he says: At the end of the day, what I think was being voted for was change. People were saying Were fed up and were not being listened to, and unfortunately that wasnt being offered by the other side. The appeal of Bernie Sanders was he was standing up there saying This thing is fucked, and the problem with Hillary was she was standing up there and saying Things are good, theyre getting better.

Genuine worry furrows Gaimans brow, but he has plans to respond to current events. His following is huge, including 2.5 million people on Twitter and the millions who read his books and his blog and watch his television shows. He intends to use that platform to highlight the plight of refugees. He hopes, too, to double down on his longstanding activism to promote freedom of speech. I wrote an essay on my blog in 2009 called Why Defend Freedom of Icky Speech?, he says, Which just becomes more and more timely. I have a 14-month-old son, and a four-month-old grandson. I have no idea what kind of world theyre going to grow up in. Im going to do my best with the time and the intellectual effort remaining to me to do whatever I can to give them a good world, he says.

Ragnark, as Gaiman writes in Norse Mythology, is of course the end of something. But there is also what will come after the end, he adds. In his version the sun comes out. Something glitters in the grass. The gods children find a set of golden chess pieces waiting for them. They arrange them on a board, and then one of them makes a move. And, Gaiman concludes, the game begins anew.