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meetthetank · 3 years

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Cruciamen Chapter 8: In the Shadow of the Primordial Lords

Rating: Mature Archive Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Categories: F/M, Other Fandom: NieR: Automata (Video Game) Relationships: 2B/9S (NieR: Automata), A2/A4 (NieR: Automata) Characters: 2B (NieR: Automata), 9S (NieR: Automata), A2 (NieR: Automata), A4 (NieR: Automata), Emil (NieR: Automata), Kainé (Nier) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, genre typical violence, On the Run, Monster of the Week, 9S is a half demon, 2B and A2 are shapeshifter Dragons, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Smut in the future, inaccurate depictions of medical procedures, Fantasy Biology, A2 is Nonbinary Ao3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25104214/chapters/7522249

A2 wakes to a searing pain in their wrists and ankles and a disorienting sinking sensation, as if their stomach is about to drop through their back. Their body sways back and forth, dangling from whatever holds their arms and legs in place. They slowly open their eyes, fighting past exhaustion and caked mud, and see a mangrove canopy come into focus, along with their hands and feet bound to a thick branch with rough, hempen rope. Panic shoots through their body and they try to tug at the ropes with what strength they can muster in this position. All they succeed in is digging the coarse rope into their skin further.

They hiss quietly as they become more aware of their pain and the world around them. There’s multiple sets of footsteps that break through the din of nature, the clattering of wood and bone against each other, and whatever language their captors are speaking. Some of the women, clad in bone and hide armor, glare at A2 as they struggle but make no move to stop them yet.

Despite the hopelessness of the situation, a desperate escape plan begins to brew in A2’s head. If they can at least break through the ropes around their wrists then they could twist themselves around enough to undo the ones on their legs. They’d have to be quick; the witches are watching every so often, but seem to be confident that their prey can’t escape. Maybe A2 can use that to their advantage.

Straining their chest and arms, A2 pulls themself up to their tied wrists and bites at the ropes. Whatever the material is tastes horrific, like mud and rotten bone, but it’s brittle and easily sheared apart. With their mouth full of rope, they gnaw at their restraints like a desperate rat. Each bite makes the rope’s grip looser and looser, their teeth easily pulling it to pieces. The more success they find the more anxious they get, caution being replaced by frantic desperation.

Suddenly, one of the large warrior women shouts something in her harsh tongue. A2 hisses a curse in their own native tongue, before the witch slams her club into A2’s skull. They don’t even get to finish their insult before their world slips into darkness.

This time, A2 awakens to a vile stench and an ache in their whole body.

There isn’t one source they can place the smell at. It is an acrid melding of mud, stagnant water, feces, and corpses. The sting of smoke lingers in the air as well, but it’s different than a typical campfire, more harsh. The witches aren’t burning wood.

A2 cracks their eyes open once more, this time to the sight of a strange village settled in a rare firm stretch of mud. A well-worn path of soft mud and stone twists through the mangroves into a clearing; a barren pit of sludge dotted with structures constructed of gnarled branches and uncut boulders and decorated with grim trophies; skulls, horns, skins, and dried organs. Animal hides cover the roofs and hang above doors; bones and skulls provide support for long leather pelts. In fact, whatever isn’t made of wood or stone is made from bones and hides. Crude benches and stools stand above piles of corpses freshly picked, bare of all meat and skin, leaving bloodied skeletons to dry in the sun. It doesn’t take long for A2 to discern what this means for them.

The witches don’t seem to notice that they’re awake, and A2 plans to keep it that way for as long as they can. If they can get their bearings and search out some kind of escape route, then at least they’ll have a plan in some capacity.

Exploiting a weakness in the guard patrols doesn’t seem like it’ll be viable. There are countless women wandering around the village doing every sort of task available. Some are weaving, carving bones, and mending furniture; others watch the few children that scamper around the proud huntresses and their catch, yelling at the kids if they get too close; and even more skin and gut fresh kills, tossing the bones aside to the ever growing piles. Though only a few of them have weapons, gruesome crude blades and spears similar to the ones the huntresses carry, there’s enough to give A2 pause while they contemplate just fighting their way through the village. There’s no telling how many of the witches are competent fighters or archers.

A2 considers simply transforming and flying away as soon as their limbs are free. The canopy isn’t as dense here as it is in the untouched sections of The Bog, and even if they couldn’t fit through the branches they could at least jump from tree to tree and glide into denser portions. But with the witches’ pet rats and arrows that could be a problem too…

Before they can decide on a plan of action that wouldn’t immediately fail, something sinister comes into view.

A wooden cage, surrounded by skulls on pikes and inward pointing spikes, covering a gaping hole in the earth. The stench of feces, urine, and death attracts a swarm of huge flies that hover around the cage, enticed by the smells that make A2 gag. Another witch, this one wearing a mask made of a rat’s hollowed out head, grumbles something to the huntresses in a raspy voice before opening a section of the wooden cage. A feverish chill runs down A2’s spine as desperate, longing moans drift out of the pit.

The huntresses cut A2 down from the log suddenly; they land in the mud with a wet splat, before a brutal kick sends them over the edge and plummeting into the filth below. They land in a puddle of murk that seeps into their scales, clothes, and hair. Whatever the fluid is sticks to them in sick clumps of… A2 doesn’t want to know. It stinks of so many things that it’s hard to pin down a single source.

It’s hard to stand. Whenever they put their foot down the ground itself gives, either sinking and engulfing their foot or sliding out from under them. It takes a few attempts, one of which has A2 falling face first into the grime, but they eventually manage to stand and get their bearings. Their first order of business is to toss away the scraps of rope that still cling to their wrists and ankles. The second, is to address the men huddled together on the other side of the pit.

If A2 didn’t know any better, they would have thought that the men were all the same person. Each one has the same terrified, starved, desperate look about them. Like rats, they think. The men are covered with festering sores all over their bodies, some crudely wrapped with scraps of cloth just as filthy as the rest of them. Only one still has hair, but not much. Whatever is left looks as if it would fall out at any given moment. The same can be said for their skin, discolored, sagging, barely hanging onto their skeletons. Each man looks like they’re on the brink of death, or on the brink of rushing A2 and devouring them whole.

“Poor soul…” One man, the oldest it seems, says and steps forward from the group. “What is your name?”

A2 stares at him, watching his gnarled hands and twisted fingernails. They say nothing, but they stand tall, unwavering. They can’t show weakness.

The old man looks at them with sunken, sad eyes. “Can you speak, child?” His voice is raspy but gentle and nostalgic. It reminds them of one of their village elders.

They nod, but still refuse to speak. The other men relax a little but still stay close together, shivering against each other. The old man shivers too, but manages a calm facade as he steps closer to them.

A2 can’t read this man, or at the very least there’s too much to read on his wrinkled sagging face. There’s a sadness etched into every crease on his skin, but he smiles with such warmth that they wonder how this kindness survived down here. “How long have you been here?” they ask, their voice low and cautious.

The old man sighs, “I have seen at least three full moons come and go. The others arrived not long after myself.”

A2 watches as the other men begin to approach them and the old man as he explains his story.

“I used to be a cleric for the theocracy,” he says, sitting cross-legged on the ground. “I was escorting a group of Old Empire refugees to the Blessed Grounds and cut through a part of this place. Obviously, it did not end well.” His expression darkens, eyes fixated on the mud. “The lambs were the lucky ones. They were taken by the swamp creatures well before the Bog Witches found me.” He gestures to the other men, who now sit beside the old man. “These knights were snatched from their troop as they cut through the Bog as well.”

A chill runs through A2’s body, whether from fear or the cold mud seeping through their clothes they can’t tell. Part of their mind runs through escape plans while the other festers in a creeping dread that weighs down their limbs.

“Have any of you tried to get out?” they ask, though in their heart they know the answer.

The old man shakes his head. “I am afraid not. The walls are too slick to climb, even when the knights were fit. The witches only toss whatever rotten scraps they do not eat our way, to keep us weak.” His gaze shifts to a pile of shattered bones in the shadows of the pit. “Not even our dead can give us strength.”

A2 suppresses the bile that rises in their throat.

He rises to his feet, his joints creaking and straining under his emaciated body, and gently takes A2’s hand in his. “I am so sorry, child,” he says in a voice that wavers with the effort.

They rip their hand away, the old man’s warped fingernails scratching at their scales. He flinches away from their scowl and their bared teeth.

“I won’t die here,” they growl. “I am not going to die here.”

The starving men leave A2 alone for the rest of the day. It isn’t that A2 holds any malice to them, but to see these men waste away in a pit of their own filth is more than infuriating. There has to be a way to escape, and they won’t sit idle and wait to die. They pace around the perimeter of the pit, searching for stones, branches or roots, anything that the men could use to climb out. For a moment, they consider the broken bones of the consumed dead, but they refuse to touch them. Even looking at them makes A2 nauseous.

A2 carves a rut into the ground with their pacing, but losing themself in their thoughts has allowed time to pass much faster. Soon soft rays of moonlight filter down through the trees into the filthy prison. The chatter of witches and their animals fades into the darkness as the nocturnal Bog creatures begin their own songs. The torchlight that surrounded the rim fades to embers that barely illuminate the wooden bars of the cage. All of the men huddle together in a strange sleeping arrangement, possibly to stave off the cold. Besides the spasmic shivers that run through their bodies A2 would mistake them for dead.

If they are to escape, now is the time.

Their body feels tense. Each movement makes their bones creak and muscles strain. Perhaps it’s because they haven’t eaten in a bit, or the heavy, stagnant air of this place, but their mind feels clouded. For a moment they toy with the idea of waiting till they have a clear head, but they grit their teeth and launch themself into the air.

With a brilliant flash of light their form erupts into feathers and claws. The wooden cage shatters into pieces as the dragonic form of A2 bursts from their prison. From below, the starving men gasp as they wake to find the cage destroyed and a red feathered dragon launching into the air. A pair of mange-riddled dogs tied to a post of the ruined cage jolt awake, howling and snarling at the intruding creature. A2 makes short work of them with their claws and beak. The meat still tastes like rotten mud.

A2 takes stock of their surroundings as they touch down just beside the pit’s edge. Eerie silence replaces the din of nature. Whatever animals must have left at the sound of a larger creature, but soon A2 hears noises coming from the huts surrounding the pit. The moving of furniture, footsteps, and muffled voices. The witches would be coming out soon.

“Hey! Wait!!!”

Just as A2 readies themself to take to the air, a pained, desperate voice calls out to them. From down below, one of the starved men looks up at them with wide eyes.

“Please!! Take us too!! Don’t leave us here!!”

A2 gazes down at the man and every part of their body begs to bolt and leave these men for dead. The starved men are dying anyway, they’d most likely die in The Bog from starvation or some hungry animal if A2 does pull them out. And yet they find themself crouching beside the edge and reaching down their neck as far as they can. The man jumps, his fingertips just barely brushing the tip of their beak. They growl and hiss, the urge to abandon the men growing by the second, but they dig the claws on their wings into the mud and lean further in.

Suddenly a bellowing voice echoes across the village and a massive shape charges them. A2’s head snaps up just as a large net is thrown above them. Just before the weighted net traps them again, they revert back to their human form and dive out from under it. They skid across the slick mud a few feet before pushing themself back to their feet. Looking behind them, A2 sees a witch that easily stands over eight feet tall lumbering across the village plaza to retrieve the thrown net. She locks eyes with A2, bloodshot, collapsed pupils filled with malice. Not keen on getting caught again, they dart around the side of the pit to put an uncrossable space between them and her.

Something catches A2’s eye: the glint of black iron in the moonlight. A few strides away, discarded amongst a pile of filthy clothes, is their sword. The hulking witch seems to pick up on A2’s idea and bellows something they can only assume are slurs. She leans forward and in two thunderous steps launches herself over the mouth of the pit. A2 wastes no time, diving for their sword just as the witch lands. Mud and rotten plant matter splashes in all directions under the weight of the witch, but the bog’s floor gives too much, engulfing her feet in the soft mud.

The witch lunges for A2, the mud holding her feet steady. A2 throws their sword up as a shield against her, but the colossal witch falls, her sharpened fingernails just inches from the black iron blade. With a short step forward and a burst of furious strength A2 drives the sword’s point straight through her shoulder. The witch shudders and slumps forward with a dying gurgle, blood and mucus pouring out of her mouth.

A grim, violent pride rises in A2’s chest as they wrench the sword free from the witch’s corpse. It surges through their veins like fire and urges them to unleash it upon the village. This place had captured them, wronged them, disempowered them, and the whole of this wretched coven needed to pay for it. All the huntresses, healers, artisans, and children.

However, just as their rampage begins, a crude arrow dripping with poisons lands in their shoulder. Before the pain registers in their head, their arm goes limp. Their sword falls from their hand into the mud and no matter how much they try they can’t make their arm move. Then the pain ignites A2’s arm from the inside. They fall to their knees and scream, their arm thrashing wildly outside of their control. Their vision blurs and pulses in time with their rapid heartbeat, the poison and pain spreading further with each beat. Something yanks on their hair and with their body rigid with pain they cannot resist being dragged back towards the gaping hole in the ground.

Whoever found them, and most likely shot them, tosses them callously back into the pit. The first thing they see when they open their eyes are the sad, hungry eyes of the starving men they should have left behind.

#nier automata #nier automata fanfiction #A2 #fantasy au #fanfiction #tank fics

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necromantic13 · 7 years

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Rebirth of the Lost

It’s unedited and unpretty, but sometimes you need a bit of grime to get through a rough week.

Soul-eating swamp witches. Predictable queerness. The level of discomfort you should probably expect from the majority of my writing. This very nearly became NSFW, and it still might.

Related tags: Elishya

“It will not work. This is not the natural order of things.”

“And yours is?” Elishya said, casting a glance rife with incredulity at the fleshwelder. “Your homunculus cries in the light of the sun; something small, wet, and crafted from mud and mandrake has no business mimicking the pain of the living.”

“And you have no business twisting the path of the dead,” was her response, caustic but tempered by Elishya’s words. There was fear in her eyes, despite her own command over hideous magic. “Whispers in the village say you trap the souls of the people you’ve murdered inside you.”

“They’re true.”

“It’s blasphemy.”

“You can leave if you’re uncomfortable, Tirza,” Elishya said, gesturing toward the gaping expanse of the bog they stood shin-deep in. It was still light enough to see, but dark enough that the fireflies had come out en masse. They avoided the place where the two women stood; every native creature of the swamp avoided them. Elishya often joked that the bog itself would retreat from her poisonous magic if it could.

Tirza stayed where she was, rooted in place by the force of her curiosity. “It’s fine,” she said after a moment, chewing on her words in an attempt to save face. “I want to see.”

“Then swallow your judgment and be quiet.”

The small body twitched in her hands, stinking of swamp muck and rotten vegetable, cursed by some magic Elishya didn’t understand as it was wholly different from her own. It didn’t look human so much as a diminutive mockery of the human form, no larger than a premature infant but fully-formed as an adult. It was not alive, but it moved as though it were. If you pinched it, the thing screamed with lungs it did not possess.

“This creature is unsettling,” she said, eyes taking in the details of its hastily-carved face.

“You’re one to talk, soul-binder,” Tirza replied, arms crossed indignantly. “You rip the souls from the living and trap them inside you, and you find my earthen child distasteful?”

Elishya shrugged, wasting no breath on words with which to defend herself. At least she knew from whence her magic came, even if the ways in which she wielded it were black with blasphemy. Despite this, the fleshwelder’s skills were prized by their kin for use in rituals and sacrifices, while hers were reviled. Typical human hypocrisy. She was well accustomed to it.

Plucking a talisman from her pouch, she set to work.

“Don’t come near me,” she warned, raising the crude bone rune in her hands. The old, sun bleached bones with their black porosity and cracked surfaces vibrated with power, threatening many times to leap from her grip. She held the thing, fingers curled around it so tight that her joints ached. It burned like a chunk of lit charcoal, and she gritted her teeth against the pain. It was powerful; more powerful than even she, the creator, had anticipated. Certainly more powerful than her Voracity should have enabled.

She smiled and thought of the story she would have to tell Solomias. He would blanch and pretend horror at her actions, but underneath the mask of his holy affront would be a jealous longing for deeper understanding. It’s why he kept coming back to her, after all; why he kept visiting the exiled witch despite it being grounds for banishment himself should any of the other Voracious find out. Just like the fleshwelder and her forbidden curiosity - they all shunned her, but could not turn away from the wonders she could perform.

But first she must succeed.

Standing before the moss-covered bog that had raised her, she placed the homunculus she’d purchased on the waterlogged ground within a cradle of viscera prepared to give birth to a vision from the void. This, as with most of her endeavors, was new territory; a plan compiled of folklore and personal experience and executed off the cuff. She would know very quickly whether her efforts had been successful; shortly after that, she’d find out if they were sustainable.

She looked at Tirza where she stood by a tall, creeping vine. The fleshwelder looked sick.

Elishya turned to the thin stone bowl she’d placed on the rock beside her, lifting it into her hands.

“That looks like black oil,” Tirza said, nose upturned.

“It’s remnant,” Elishya replied. “The corpse of a dead soul.”

“Souls don’t die,” was the welder’s reply, weak in its conviction.

“So everyone keeps telling me,” the witch chuckled ruefully before dumping the contents into the mess before her.

The swamp’s labor was as uncomfortable to watch as it was to conceive; a roiling, bubbling mass of foetid mess-turned-flesh, the homunculus swallowed into a green and brown viscous sludge that moved of its own volition and defiled every decency of nature by its very existence. The raw skins and greasy bones she had added for substance melded with the remnant, called to the carved femur she’d enchanted to keep it all from dissipating into the mud.

As they watched the muck shiver and twitch, it began to coalesce, slowly and meticulously, into a larger humanoid form. It was knit together by sheer power of will, molded on the bones of the dead and given form by the lingering essence of the rotting black souls she’d vomited the past three nights. They had a power that lingered past death; a power she would now test for herself.

“Quiet,” she whispered to herself and the stolen souls rebelling inside her, their dwindling life recoiling from the bubbling thing taking form at her feet. Soon they would end up like all the rest, dead and decaying, cut off from the void for which they all longed. She thought, perhaps, that they knew this was their fate, and they feared this separation in death as they had loathed the specter of the grave in life.

Eventually their symphony of screams died down as the homunculus re-emerged from the ground: larger, well-formed, complete.

Reborn.

Elishya pulled the abomination from the mud and laid it on the ground before her, bare knees astride the lithe body of the woman-shaped effigy that had formed at her feet within the sucking mud of the swamp. There was blood in its veins and warmth to its flesh. She pressed a hand against its cheek.

“Leave,” she whispered, not looking at Tirza. Her eyes were locked on the prone form of of the swamp-born woman that looked so very much like her murdered lover, now whole again and waiting for the spark of life to be reignited within her.

“You did it,” Tirza gasped, her horror propelling her closer to the abomination on the ground. “You raised the image of the dead. You ripped it from the void itself.”

“Leave!” she hissed, whipping her head to shoot a glare made of fire at the fleshwelder. Tirza hesitated, stepping back and swallowing visibly.

“This is wrong,” she said, feet squelching in the thick mud. “The dead should remain dead.”

“She’s not dead,” was Elishya’s biting response. “She was never dead. Only lost.” Turning back to the form at her feet, she inhaled slowly. “You don’t get to see this part.”

A high trilling echoed from amongst the trees as Elishya’s soul-bonded companion, a giant eagle, appeared at her distress, wings outstretched, golden eyes flashing unnaturally. It flapped cumbersomely down toward the fleshwelder, talons curled. It did not make contact with her, but its threat was heard loud and clear.

The welder left without another word.

Elishya turned her attention back to the body before her, pristine in its newly-created state. “Come back to me,” she whispered, holding the smoldering rune to the being’s lips. It was not truly dead, not truly alive, but with the latent potential for both, lacking only for the life force of the soul that now lay screaming in the charm she held. The woman’s lips began to bleed as the charm burned with an impossible internal heat, scalding her skin, chipping into bits of charcoal that slipped into her throat.

It was the force of Elishya’s will pitted against the laws of nature, and her will won out. With a sputtering cough and a gasp, the woman sat up, blood dripping from her ragged lips, her eyes hazy and searching for recognition.

Elishya, witch of the wilds, taker of souls, put both hands on either side of the confused woman. Holding her head straight, she looked her in the eyes.

“Welcome home, Azaria.”

Elishya took her home, watching every faltering step with a clinical care. Azaria spoke little, wearing shock in her expression for the better part of the trip. Going home would be familiar; it would give her some grounding. At least Elishya hoped this would be the case.

They stepped inside, Elishya paying no attention to her filthy, bleeding feet, leading Azaria immediately to the washroom. She stank of death and wrongness, and while a bath wouldn’t eradicate the stench of blasphemy, it might do something about the sweat and fear.

She washed her gently, in silence, terrified that she had done the wrong thing by returning her soul to flesh; terrified that she’d somehow locked her within an unsustainable form. Azaria had lived outside a body for so long, lost in cold metal cage. Elishya did not know what that did to a human soul, but she did not imagine it was anything good.

Brushing Azaria’s long black hair, she could do nothing but hope that there was a future left for her to live.

“Elishya,” she said after an eternity of silence as they sat on her straw bed. She turned to the witch and reached out a shaking hand. “What am I?”

“Azaria,” Elishya whispered back, taking her hand in hers. “You are alive. The Parables lie; transmutation is possible. Something about that metal beast I found you in kept your soul from dying.” She swallowed, throat dry with fear that her love might crumble in her hands. It had been such a long dream, this day.

“I don't feel real.”

Elishya’s took a beath and looked Azaria in the eyes. “What do you need?”

“Please touch me,” she whispered.

Elishya leaned forward, pressing her lips against Azaria’s, and complied.

#original #elishya #swamp witch

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wherestridestheworld-girdling · 7 years

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The Composite Black ch.1

He crackles with such abominable laughter. Emblazoned on his mulish mask of tapered sinew, hate-hewn flesh folds caked with dust and brusque are wide swathes of topological erosion. This is the dermatological attrition of ghouls and goblins, creatures of depravity and denizens of sacrilege, monsters whose skin weathers and bleaches in the divine of the daylight. His garish façade is the embossment from a nightmare, a face that haunted the sculptor’s sleep, ensnared eternal in gothic stone gargoyles or the twisted grimace of an amputated stub adorning a tortured ashen oak. His wrinkles purse like snake pleats, shivering subtly, coiled around his contemptuous orifices, intermittently blustered about by the intake of his olfactory snot-pits and wreathed around a rancid gyre of dental shards. Pan up but avoid the swallowing riptide of his gawk, those arrested by the shifting guise of his lunatic looking-glass eyes are often burnt asunder in smears of soot. They are eyes of caged aggression, of molten wrath, volcano eyes that sear what they see. The color of spent fuel, of cadaverous cinders, broken glass and smoke damage. Encircling this myopia is the crown-of-thorns of his brow, framing his persona like a band of spear-spiked dagger-tooth crags. These are accelerated geologic processes, flexing tectonic plates which know not the placation of a tranquil lull; their beveled furrows exist in a duality of disgust and mockery. Cast-iron rims lipping twin cauldrons, forever bubbling.

This is a hardened, deadened man whose scars shroud his marred body and mind. Each patch of discolored tissue that tattoos him tells tales, mostly violent and cruel. But the companion text is tenfold the volume, bedecking disfigured corpses strung about his travels. Most he left horizontal but some he let vertical, a fate hardly better. Those who walk the world mangled by the bite of his blade speak a bit softer, keep an eye at their backs, wake sweaty in the night. He is the shade which haunts their periphery, cloaking uncertainty in fear and calling out to them from the shadows. Just a winking remembrance causes the heart to race, the pupils to dilate, and the past superimposes the present. A torture wheel of cyclical trauma, perpetual terror of a deathblow half inflicted. His victims are many; they line cemeteries and bar stools, numb and cold to the touch. Almost as if he burned their spirits on the flaming alter of his own vehemence then let them frost over, a sacrifice to savagery, a vulgar display of power.

No matter. “Let the dead rot and the livin’ scorn,” blistering words from his blistered lips, shaky and sun-sick in the dry heat of the early morn.

“I dare say yer yella hide won’t last til’ noon. Those buzzards circlin’ up there won’t waste a horse’s fart before they’re on ya like the flies, pickin your eyes out, digging through your gizzard. I bet even half past 11 you’ll look even more like a dimes worth of dog meat than your ugly mug does now. Matter of fact maybe when your boots stop kickin I oughta cut you down from that tree and drag your sorry carcass through the mud into town so that the strays can each get a good meal from ya. It’ll be the only good thing you ever did for this town.”

Even as he said this, serrating his speech with disdain, the creases of the undertaker’s neck shook with fright. He felt as he had as a little boy throwing rocks at tethered dogs, hoping that in their fury the stake anchoring them wouldn’t be snatched from the dirt. The evil within this man seemed unnatural, impossible. It was foreign to him, this relentless rage, foreign to this tiny town pitted on the outskirts of dusty emptiness. This tiny town, where Main Street is the only street and whose primary riffraff are a few rough tough cattle rustlers, vagrant out-of-towners drawing from the herd come the fat flock of Spring time. Enter this black frothing demon whose snide grin makes the white dressed church ladies sign the cross, a smirk which consumeth like hellfire, and paradise becomes pit. Anubis had seen his share of atrocities, sights which may have maddened one of fragile temperament. He’d been a field medic in the Spanish war. Seen, heard and sometimes felt the splatter of men being shredded into mincemeat, splayed inside out by scalding shards of metal. He’d repressed much of those wretched memories, loosing them on his past future, which even now harass every moment of absent rest. And the days were not long passed when he’d been called on as the chief embalmer to clean up after a few of the Union’s scorched earth campaigns, burying massacred Hopi women and children, of all the vile things, in yellow-earthen mass graves usually after weeks of decay and carrion pick-throughs. He’d even had to put down his only daughter when her body swelled up with gangrene, but the carnage left by this awful man, this brimstone beast, was the brutality of legend. This was the monster before him, the twisted serpent of the apocalypse, Apep, fettered in maat by Osiris’ noose.

Then the shark put away his sawtooth bouquet, pivoting his rope burned neck in the guillotine of the hangman’s hoop, directing his vociferous focus on another individual from the small crowd of the witnesses who’d climbed the hill to watch this dreadful man’s death. The old Indian woman Xmucane met his fiery craters with her own cataracted pupils, a challenge in defiance, adversaries horn-locked on the battlefield of all space and time. Their concentrated beams of perception met and clashed, smoldering with static energy.

The words rose out of him and blew toward their mark like a waft of chemical death, “Have you come to tell my fortune grandmother? I should hope that even a blind ol’ witch like you could see the signs of my fate today. Or maybe you’re just so disoriented and confused you just wandered up here on this hill like the geriatric ol’ hag you are. Too..” his lips began to leak a rotten-colored mucus foam as they flapped and pursed and sneered. Spurts punctuated his rabid barks as the muscles in his whole body contracted in spasms of steaming rage. His carapace turned a furious shade of boiled red. “young to die and too old to screw! I’ve seen moldy cow pies that…” a gruff fit of gravelly coughing seized the doomed man so that any further curses became just choking hoarse gasps. Minutes passed and the hacking only worsened until only a few caustic spasms and the muted gurgling of air being forced through thick fluid remained. Suddenly within the leather of the man, the smoke-blackened corridors of his body flooded with sludge, his air passages became expulsion channels for emergency discharge. Prison-food regurgitation geysered up the tunnel of his throat and waterfalled out of the cave mouth. The gastrointestinal flow sizzled down his jailbird stripes in chunks of grey dribble as eyes, nose and gob spurted like drainage faucets. At last, when the conniption ceased, the muscles holding him ridged loosed limp, letting his weight dangle from the rope collaring him for a moment. Coated in perspiration and exhaustion, all that was left of him was the furnace of his anger and a heaving breath. Air pressure writhed against the pressure of the lariat strangling his airway, lungs bursting in heft.

Xmucane was already halfway down the hill, strutting slowly and steadily, never looking back, never uttering a word; she just continued driving her cane into the dry earth followed up by each hoary shuffle step. This repeated in rhythmic synchronicity as her short precise movements churned the declining distance back to town, through glades and gullies, past rockslides and embankments, hugging the curvature of the trail and moving like the passing minutes. Somewhere, there amongst the bramble, a whisking river resided as an auditory undercurrent, a rivulet which had conveyed sediment from distant mountains for hundreds of thousands of years. This is the sculptor who carved Hangman’s Hill from bare plane. It reached out from within the drape of the trees at a spot perpendicular with the crook in the trail of the advancing ancient seer, Xmucane, greeting her with roaring thunder from the mountains. She continued on past the Road to Xibalba, with her descended her daughter-in-law the waning moon, fading into the light of day.

“In nomine Iesu Christi, Deus et Dominus noster, Immaculatae Virginis intercessione ab ipsis Maria..”

In the Name of Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, strengthened by the intercession of the immaculate Virgin Mary..

Back atop Hangman’s Hill, at the seat of the execution of this nameless man, the preceding spectacle of grotesque behaviors attracted like moth to flame the mercy of god’s instrument on earth, the surrogate of Papal presence, the local orthodoxical authority of godliness, the Catholic missionary Ruggieri degli Ubaldini. With the bluff as his sandy pulpit he exercised training he’d received in the seminary as a youth. Vocal muscle memory and gospel rigmarole drilled ad nauseam under the oratorical tutelage of the Head Father at the rocky coastline church of San Miguel. He fondly recalled praying to the Blessed Virgin those many years ago on bent knee, tightly gripping the Bible and rosary his parents had given to him, trembling with righteousness in that stuffy old adobe chapel as chartreuse swells of spray crashed against the rocks. There were times of distant recollection when the word of god resound within his mind like vivid hanging melodic lines of Gregorian monks bounding out of mass halls and cathedrals. But with the melting years his faith had become by jaded by dour funeral processions and exorbitant church politics. He clutched his indented Holy Book in one crinkled hand and the other pressed palm forward, shaking with a bit of the hall-hallowed vindication he’d once felt but mostly just the fear of an excruciating death at the hands of this tenuously bound hellion. He prayed as if blacksmithing a suit of armor.

“Mother of God, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beatis apostolis tuis Petro et Paulo, et omnibus sanctis auctoritate officii nostri potentem..”

Mother of God, of blessed Michael the archangel, of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul and all the saints and powerful in the holy authority of our ministry..

“suscipere fidenter impetus propulsare insidias diabolic..”

we confidently undertake to repulse the attacks and deceits of the devil..

A light breeze swept the hillcrest. Misty dew-laden air whisped up in thermal currents as the freshly angled sun warmed the valleys of wildflowers and sod below, cycling moisture. The breeze ruffled multicolored swatches of deciduous leaves stapled onto the fronds and twigs of the circular band of white oaks which surrounded the site of the hanging. Then the breeze tousled the silent crowd, flexing hat brims, swaying ties, brushing skirt tails, flapping pant-legs, bringing dusty tears to dry eyes behind the veil of handkerchiefs. Finally the wind rippled into the ganglion of the scene stirring its focal subject. The man’s limp unconscious body swiveled slightly in the stirrup of the noose strung from the single low-hanging splintered branch of the lone dead tree. However most of his inanimate weight remained planted to the earth, supported by locked knees atop an aged fruit box, its paint flecking. A crystalline snail of spittle oozed from the gape of his mouth and was blown and whipped around by the current around the side of his head, seeping into one of the few remaining haggard tufts of bristle on the back of his desiccated scalp.

“Deus oritur; inimici ejus dispersus est et qui oderunt eum, a facie ejus, secundum impellere fumum..”

God arises; His enemies are scattered and those who hate Him flee before Him. As smoke is driven away..

“ita pulsi sunt; sicut exustio ignis tabescerent, sic animam meam in conspectu Domini. Ecce crucem Dómini..”

So are they driven; as wax melts before the fire, so the wicked perish at the presence of God. Behold the Cross of the Lord..

“fugite inimicorum. Leo de tribu Iuda, radix David, qui vicit. Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos quanta speravimus in te..”

Flee bands of enemies. The Lion of the tribe of Juda, the offspring of David, hath conquered. May thy mercy, Lord, descend upon us as great as our hope in thee..

The diminutive old man paused after that line for a dangling moment, taking a rasped breath and wiping the sweat dripping down his forehead with a cross-embroidered handkerchief produced from within the folds of his black vestments. A few syllables still hung in the air, echoes of Medieval Latin ricocheting off canyon cathedrals, saguaro shrines, stain glass mirage. But the point of omni-ocular convergence remained the captive. The small crowd of tense observers were fixated, captivated by the captive, as if the depth of their focus was his only restraints. It had to be unequivocal, this man’s extinction; if even an iota of irresolute distress remained it would be catastrophic to these quiet people and their small agrestic community. It had to be confirmed, the light leaving his eyes, so they could live once again in their accustomed peace. Ruggieri continued..

“Adjutorium nostrum in nobis, quicumque haec legis, Et spiritus immundi, omnis satanica viribus, omnes invadentes infernali, omnia impium legiones, et coetus sectis..”

We drive you from us, whoever you may be, unclean spirits, all satanic powers, all infernal invaders, all wicked legions, assemblies and sects..

“In nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi et eius virtute, ut sit Deus et effugare ab ecclesia et ab animabus ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei, divini agni sanguine redemisti. Serpens callidissime..”

In the Name and by the power of our lord Jesus Christ, may you be snatched away and driven from the church of God and from the souls made to the image and likeness of God and redeemed by the precious blood of the divine lamb. Most cunning serpent..

“YEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS?!! You do well to utter such flattery but this meagre title leaves much to be desired by my parched discrimination. My sapless ear has reached but a fractional portion of its full satiation and demons these days just don’t grovel as they did in those glorious days of old, the Fall anew, when plague shadows of locusts and immortal armies of darkness smote the world under my blood blackened banner. Abbadon? Lucifer? Perhaps Wicked One? Or Deciever? Appolyon is what the Greeks called me or maybe you’re feeling particularly biblical, in that case the classic Hebrew is utter elation. Bleed your tribute and yield your dignity, lay paltry and prostrate before the infamous Beelzbub. Nothing says ‘Prince of Darkness’ like a black winged monster that manipulates buzzing clouds of ravenous flying insects. Although my personal favorite is good ol’ Satan, doesn’t the word just remind you of pagan blood orgies and violent fertility sacrifices cast under occult torchlight? Ssssaaataann. It rolls off the tongue, or hisses off if yours is forked I suppose. Let’s all say it together! Saaataan… Saaaaatan…”

“Decipere humanum genus ultra audeas, Dei Ecclesiam persequi, ac Dei electos excutere et cribrare sicut triticum..”

You shall no more dare to deceive the human race, persecute the Church, torment God's elect and sift them as wheat..

“Imperat tibi Deus altissimus, he, cui in magna tua superbia te similem haberi adhuc præsumis. Imperat tibi Deus Pater..”

The most high God commands you, He with whom, in your great insolence, you still claim to be equal. God the father commands you..

“Imperat tibi Deus Filius. Imperat tibi Deus Spiritus Sanctus. Christus Dei Verbum caro factum, imperat”

God the son commands you. God the holy ghost commands you. Christ, God's word made flesh, commands you..

“Your feeble crusader dogma and moral avarice is fetid muck pilled high by sociopathic old men, deceptively arranged to countervail their own perverted chastity and empathetic ineptitude. The theologic doctrines to which you egregiously prescribe, and to which you presume supremacy are just the bones and bits, carrion detritus, convenient canon leftovers that you have culturally appropriated and reconfigured from semi-legitimate religious heritages into a hypocritical, racist and sexist, anthropocentric cult of personality and fanaticism. The tyranny, genocide and mass subjugation performed by the filthy, bloodstained tentacles of your Holy Catholic Apostolic Church and all its puppet entities and dummy financial institutions is as heinous an act of malign villainy as has ever been committed, and it occurs in the light of day, applauded by boisterous mobs of enraptured subjects. It’s commendable, it really is. Such blood-draining callousness, such wanton barbarism, such murked wickedness. We are brothers you and I, legionnaires of death. Don’t you remember? We cut ourselves out from the same womb. Don’t waste your breathe Padre, let us entwine our barbed fingers, for together we can concoct such exquisite chaos and mouthwatering malcontent.”

“Qui pro salute generis nostri tua invidia perditi, humiliavit semetipsum factus oboediens usque ad mortem..”

He who to save our race outdone through your envy, humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death..

“Qui Ecclesiam suam ædificavit supra firmam petram, et portas inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam, cum ea ipse permansurus omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem saeculi..”

He who has built His church on the firm rock and declared that the gates of hell shall not prevail against Her, because He will dwell with Her all days even to the end of the world..

“Ergo, draco maledicte et omnis legio diabolica, adjuramus te per Deum vivum, per Deum verum, per Deum sanctum..”

Thus, cursed dragon, and you, diabolical legions, we adjure you by the living God, by the true God, by the holy God..

“Per Deum, qui sic dilexit mundum, ut Filium suum unigenitum daret, ut omnes qui credit in eum, non pereat, sed habeat vitam aeternam..”

By the God who so loved the world that he gave up his only son, that every soul believing in him might not perish but have life everlasting..

“Cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque æternæ perditionìs venenum eis; desine Ecclesiæ nocere, et ejus libertati..”

Stop deceiving human creatures and pouring out to them the poison of eternal damnation; stop harming the church and hindering her liberty..

“Vade, satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciae, hostis humanae salutis..”

Be gone, Satan, inventor and master of all deceit, enemy of man's salvation..

Explosively vaulted across the physical and virtuous distance between these two men was a putrid projectile, an expulsion of contempt, a gust its coconspirator. The coagulated salivary squirt was a conglomerate of gastric ebullition, nostril slop, fermented dental scum and various caramel colored pusses and oozes from infected teeth, gums and cold sores. The noxious cocktail erupted in a sticky spray that coated the clandestine breeze, commodiously transporting the range strike to its unsuspecting target. A toxic cloud of insolence and filth assaulted the castigating old man, penetrating his saintly demeanor. It splattered in tobacco tinged splashes across his gold rimmed spectacles, a bit of the acrid pitch inflamed the sensitive peripheral creases of his naked eyes. While most of the foul fluid doused his sun-spotted forehead and drooping cheeks, lathering them in slime, a portion cemented to his short lampshade mustache while another equitable fraction spewed into his articulating mouth via direct oral transmission. Vomiting ensued and part of the crowd rushed over to aid the collapsing Ruggieri until he waved them off, wildly swaying up from his knees with his bible clenched under his arm. The brown old skeleton doggedly rose to his feet and continued the exorcism, shaking in his robes, sweat pouring down the troughs in his face. The nameless man just laughed and laughed, a rapping sound like a fissure tearing open the ground or a mammoth wave slapping a stone shore or a shimmering bolt of lightning shredding the clouds, low pitched and decrepitating.

“Da locum Christo, in quo nihil invenisti de operibus tuis; da locum unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam, quam Christus acquisivit Sanguine suo pretio..”

Give place to Christ in whom you have found none of your works; give place to the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church acquired by Christ at the price of His blood..

“Humiliare sub potenti manu Dei; contremisce et effuge, invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine Jesu, quem inferi tremunt..”

Stoop beneath the all-powerful hand of God; tremble and flee when we invoke the holy and terrible name of Jesus, this name which causes hell to tremble..

“Cui Virtutes nomen istud et Potestates et Dominationes subjectæ sunt caeli, hoc indesinenter quem Cherubim et Seraphim..”

This name to which the virtues, powers and dominations of heaven are humbly submissive, this name which the cherubim and seraphim praise unceasingly..

“Dicentes: Sanctus Sanctus, Sanctus..”

Repeating: holy, holy, holy..

“HAAAHAHA HEHE AHHHHAAAAAAAAHAHA HEHE!.....”

“Better save your prayers for decent folk, Padre. This one here is just a few heel clicks away from feeding the worms at the bottom of an unmarked grave. I don’t reckon we’ll hear his sorry squawks when he’s buried six feet under being dragged to hell by goblins and ghouls. Why don’t you give it a rest son? What would your momma say, seein’ you up there spittin’ an’ laughing like a mad-man, carrying on so shamefully, right before you meet your maker?”

“Oh I don’t know if my mother would have much to say in the matter. She sort of lost her voice when I was born, as well as a heap of internal organs. What can I say; I was a very needy, grabby infant. But I’m sure it made for an eventful day for the country doctor at the county courthouse, a birth certificate and a death certificate all in one wagon ride!”

“That’s enough young man. No sense in speakin’ ill of the dearly departed now that my gavel’s swung and your noose fitted. The big judge sittin’ up there in the sky probably has enough scorned testimony marked against your spoiled soul as it is.”

What perfunctory sympathy he usually felt for those he’d sentenced to capital annihilation had completely eroded within the judge at this point, soured in his gut like green meat. This man was nothing to him, horse-shit stuck to the heel of his boot, malted hogwash foaming in the sun. Yet how could ultimate justice still feel so inequitable? Tragic pawns, passive hosts of death reproducing itself. Putting down vile men for vile acts leaves their stench on you, their skin under your fingernails, their curses echoing your ears. After being the eminent lawman, judge and jury with a chrome peacekeeper for nearly twenty years in this township, ghosts with bullet holes in their heads followed Yama around. If he looked over his shoulder he knew he’d see them standing there, garbed in caked blood and charnel dirt, forgotten children grown up. “Another for the spooks,” he’d tell the barkeep each night. With whiskey on his breath he’d sing to the sunrise, silky phantoms surrounding him. “There's blood on the saddle and blood on the ground, and a great great big puddle of blood all around; a cowboy lay in it, all covered with gore, and he never will ride any broncos no more..”

The sun beat down, acquiescing its focal zenith, heightening the midday heat. Its rays dissolved the gruesome gaggle’s shadows like the razing eye of god, whitewashing the hillcrest in solar bleach. High noon aproacheth, the awful hour of death. A brazen beam struck Yama’s copper badge, ricocheting off into the prisoner’s soggy iris, branding it like a blacksmith’s white-hot nail. The scorch only magnified as the lawman took limped steps towards the disheveled captive, his spurs and leather speaking softly. Nameless and noosed, the damned man recoiled at the brilliant bright, squirming in his chains, insulating himself under clinched eyelids.

“The time is nigh, boy.”

From behind the wiry judge approached the town doctor, a shriveled cob pipe pinned under his icicle white mustache and a hand restraining his charcoal bowler against the pull of the wind. His slacks brushed through the ankle-high wildgrass until the accused hinged faintly within arm’s length. Dhanvantari, the wizened backcountry surgeon, reached up as he had at countless executions to examine the machine of death. In a far off lifetime, or only what seemed to have been, Dhanvantari was a merchant ship’s doctor, operating on deck with rusty instruments in turbulent seas, pulling the captain’s teeth by crinkling wicks of sperm oil lanterns, sweeping puddles of blood into the sea. Those decades spent marinering the open ocean made his fingers as fluent with knots and lashings as he was with the braids of the spine or with tensile ligament musculature. This man had lost many lifetimes to the sea, swallowed by brine, swept overboard by swells, but somehow it always spat him back out, after due restitution. How many times had he thought he’d seen the sun for the last time as the waves closed around him and the surface fell away? Six? Seven? Perhaps he was still there now, drifting to the salty bottom and this, an illusion in the last rays of light, an eternity in an escaping air bubble. Regardless he thumbed the noose knot, testing its competence, ignorant of the murdering intimidation ensnared within it. He examined the loop, stretching it across the man’s Adam’s apple in strangulation simulation. By his determination death should be nearly instantaneous with the fracturing of the epistropheus. Dhanvantari removed his hands.

“Whaddaya say Doc? Humane?”

“Too humane.”

“Oh I wish that was up to me, hell I’d have him drawn and quartered already, each arm and leg’d be draggin’ through the desert in opposite directions by streakin’ stallions by now. But I suppose a bullet in the temple would get the job done too. No time to waste with slaphappy daydreams, we’ve got to adhere to the distinguished code established by our competent elect, those Washington monkeys and their executive goon. Is it whats-his-name Rutherford or wha-cha-ya ma-call-it Garfield after the last one of their confounded dog-and-pony-show elections? God only knows.. How’s about we get on with it? Next the accused is to be read their offenses but I’m sure all of us gathered here and now can well attest to the horrendous acts of brutality this man has committed. No sense in speakin’ of such evil since his deplorable deeds will undoubtedly torment our waking hours forever. But I won’t deny the prisoner his last words. Even an infernal devil can sequester some semblance of penitence from the Lord in his last hour if his voice holds even an ounce of goodness. What say you, rogue? Bless thy tongue and utter thy last words.”

“I have nothing to say to you people or your forlorn humanity. I was birthed among you but sever our kinship thereafter. Your bastard race of mutant hominids is the scourge of existence. You ungraciously tout your dubiously predominant intellect with one arm raised in self-admiration while the other quashes down your stricken brother, stepping on his pleading face and bruised throat. You feed each other into the teeth of the meat grinder for a few pieces of silver, sealing the audacity with a smile and a kiss. You’ve the blood of your father Ares and the fury of your mother Lyssa. Such horrific worm-like abominations of filth, I want no part of you unless you’re disinfected, dismembered, dissected and freeze-dried. But you have taught me much, much barbarity. Because of your imprint I am what I am, the distilled essence of your misanthropy, hate tincture. I am the anti-soul, the maneater, the devourer of fire and light, the siren of the necropolis, the falling reaper, Death’s dragoon. I am the one to whom the wolves howl and in my company volts of vultures and cackles of hyenas. Draped in my cape of babies’ bones and crown of thorns I have blistered the nightmares of the fearful since the dawn of man. In my wake spite suicides and human husks, desolation and brimstone. You cannot kill me, I am already dead.”

His taunt a command, Yama reduced him to mindless thrashing with a decisive toe-kick to the fruit box, sending it tumbling off before stepping back and affirming his capital judgement. Gasps ran through the crowd as the knot was tested for capacity for the first time, the charred branch held strong under the burden of the man’s now disintegrating ego. He expended his life force in feral flounders of wild muscle contractions, as if parasitic monsters within him wrestled to escape from their host’s diminishing body, spinning himself around haphazardly like a broken whirligig despite his wrist and ankle restraints. Clearly his movements were involuntary, spastic seizures of shocked nerve endings triggered by raging lightning storms of neuronal firing as distressed organ systems desperately faced shut down and annihilation. His already unsightly appearance became even more revolting in the absence of mental dispensation. Cloudy eyes pinched in their sockets, bulging outward in masses of crimson jelly as the blood vessels ruptured around flaked lids. Indeterminate sloughs of foamy fluids composed of various pasty consistencies, textures and hues leaked from his orifices, drooling off the dripping points on his face like subterranean stalactites. A scarred sliver of grey tongue draped from within his chapped lips. Eventually the jittery agitation ceased and the stillness was broken only by the swivels of his vacant body. His grizzled neck was crumpled in the noose, disjointed disks of irregular vertebrae pressed asymmetrically against the inner walls of his skin in nauseating bulges of obvious malformation.

In the crowd a woman began to wail, her immediate elicit reaction to the majority of external stimuli after such loss as befitting a victim who had been made widow by the now deceased bane. She pulled her black bonnet down over her eyes and reached for her threadbare handkerchief. Now what? A question she posed to herself, the fates, townsfolk, anyone who’d listen to her bereaved sobs. Her maternity scars and her wedding ring were the only remaining evidence of her curriculum vitae, her frontier family and their homestead ambition; stolen like the breath from her lungs. Somewhere along the wagon trail, abandoned in the gutter like a roadside attraction were the charred remains of her Manifest Destiny, a monument of torched wagon frame and scattered skulls. The thought of which drove her to nihilism. But revenge was an opportune emotional departure from the tragedy her faculties refuted as preposterous, incorrigible, a night terror to be expunged by the waking mind and the ascending sun. But confound it! There it was! That dastardly conflagration, a gleaming confirmation of calamity, the boiling skies its diabolic domain and drenched in its glow she simmered in survivor’s grief. Niobe willed the hellmouth open, to stride between its chasmal jaws. Her ample offerings of woe lured the rabid devils and unclean spirits from their untold ethereal realms but on upon arrival she was already of stone. A brooding destitute, an aimless golem of flesh and bone and tears.

From within the congregation Anubis stepped forth to dress and prepare the body for burial, a process which his coarse muscles and tired joints knew well. They were creased by the contour of the embalming tools, sculpted by a mortician’s toil; grave dirt under his cuticles from the raw tomb shoveled out this morning. He unsheathed a blade from his belt, feet advancing, to cut down the inert cadaver from its moored swing. Behind him his comrades held the reins of a bridled burro which had ferried the bound prisoner to this hill in life and would now from it in death. It shifted listlessly in its halter, braying nervously with whipping tail. He approached the hanged man serenely, detached, his mind distanced by the habitual funerary ritual he’d undergone so frequently this past fortnight with so many hideously slaughtered. But at rest his morbid vocation invaded the asylum of his slumber. Within the dreamscape he donned the suit of a jackal breathlessly devouring grisly messes strewn about by Death himself, scavenging meat morsels from innocents slain. But it was over now, the beast was vanquished and this would be his final burial. He extended his arms, blade in hand, to cleave the noose when the whiskers on his scruff spiked straight up.

The dead man frenzied into rampage by the scent of slaughter, riving the lull, summoned to survive by his colleague in chaos the razor blade. The tumultuous details of the next few moments can scarcely be spoken of, saturated with skirmish vectors and martial artistry but if one simply follows the slashes of the edge, its perforatory operation can be fluently plotted. In one swift motion his blueish corpse-hand swaddled the knife’s pommel, enveloping Anubis’. It then yanked upwards, burying the tip just underneath the undertaker’s chin, tickling his brain like a lobotomist. The next instantaneous flash of dynamism was the stiletto’s evacuation from his greymatter. It whistled as it arced through the air, tearing into the fiend’s own death-paled shatter-boned neck, sinking in and carving in a radial orbit around its circumference. In a splitting second the ruined mort had accomplished a series of obscene acts totally unforeseen, completely against the natural laws while still bound in chains, and as such, the throng was baffled immobile. Aghast with gaped mouth and opaque eyes before such ruthlessness, the man holding the burro’s reins barely noticed as it bolted off. Yama’s hand lunged for his holstered pistol as Anubis finally dropped to his knees.

As the last degree of girth was rent, gravity bisected the possessed’s brainstem, sending his feet to tread the earth and his dislodged cranium to roll it, unencumbering the blood-sprayed noose loop. At this point fright overtook the cluster and fugue became imperative. They trampled each other to flee this undead waif, careening down the hillside, never mind the trail with evil nipping at the heels. But one gallant soul delayed, familiar with the company of demons. Yama leveled his revolver at the headless monster loosing three rounds before it was upon him, lopping off his gun hand, hacking through his throat and spilling open his intestines in one mercurial, clockwise arm rotation of serpentine laceration. Like a tornado it bucked off Yama’s dead shoulders after trailing fingers relieved the weapon from his amputated grip, tumbling acrobatically through the gap between its next kill.

Scrambling to escape was Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, sprawling over his tailored robes, clawing the muck for leverage with gold ringed fingers. A cone of destructive force interrupted the priest’s bumbling with a tremendous boom of sound shattering. The slug pierced his temporal lobe just behind the ear, exploding from the other side in a plume of gore and smoke. Padre crumpled in the dust but his soul soared skybound on angel wings while cherubim and seraphim beckoned him from their hammocks, the clouds. Another righteous crusader of light skewered on the flames of evil and so sealed was his heavenly reward, obedient even in martyrdom to the cult he worshipped. The gates of St. Peter were thrown open upon on his winged approach, the celestial scene frescoed immortal by Nuvolone’s Milanese masterpiece. But the earth claimed his body, to the victor the spoils.

Twin claps of corkscrewing thunder plowed two more inconsequentials, their flaccid constitution summersaulted down an embankment in snaps of branches, dousing the underbrush with their blood. The doctor, Dhanvantari afforded a precarious over-the-shoulder peak at the proximate commotion between labored footfalls, just long enough to see Death’s skeleton-hand reach for his face. And then he was dragged to the frothy underbelly, towed from the shallows to breathless leagues of darkness, to the frigid depths, the domain of the leviathan and its swimming monsters. His cob pipe floated up to the surface like an epitaph.

Last alive was the half-hearted Niobe, tailed by her shadow of mourning. She fled on instinct alone, lusting for a peaceful deathbed to lay her head. She mused macabre that she’d be visited by twinkling visions of her loved ones, at last reunited in paradise after they carried her from her sepulchral bedstead, off and away into the white light. Her wits were unraveled by the poison of this unfulfilled conclusion, drunk with adrenaline at concept of such unimaginable pain of an undoubtedly savage mutilation. The tree line broke and a valley of Spring-bloomed wildflowers carpeted her clambering passage with purple street signs of knapweed and rushpink, golden sidewalks of butterfly weed and bahia, creamy bushels of loveroot and turkeypea. She sprinted through their syrupy bells with hiked dress and tapping laced leather boots, soon slathered with aromatic pollen. Their perfume seeped into her psyche, fumed by her exhausted inhalations, tousling her antediluvian reptilian cortex, the cerebral seat of fear and flight. The flowers drenched her in a calm, resonant bliss which relaxed her gait. Suddenly she stopped. Her shadow had dissipated and she found herself on the embanked edge of the lily field, below a river’s bellowing whitewater scrapped against huge agate boulders. A slight draft swept through the valley, undulating the buttercups and the tassels of her braided hair. Where had she lost her bonnet? She peered down and found it tangled in spines of sagebrush but her reach was interrupted by a blindsiding death. The monstrosity shoulder tackled her while her weight was unbalanced, tossing them both off the ledge of the cliff. It stabbed her repeatedly while falling, madly puncturing her face down to her abdomen with glossy lesions.

The white dashing crests of alpine water slapped the hurtling pair, bowing under their load and momentum. The sacred stream drew them into its clutches, buffeting their languid corpses with jagged rapids succeeding in the thorough pulverization of their now unrecognizable meat mishmash. Hunks of homogenous human peripherals floated downstream like the foodstuffs conveyer belt in a packing plant. A few flesh pocked bones flipped and twisted, arrested by the current as its skeletal companions swept by the festivities, a sanguine parade. Soon they were utterly mired on an outcropping of some rocks, the fisherman’s net of an eddy. Passing nearby Anubis’ knife head embedded itself in the iridescent quartz-spackled river bottom. Fast in pursuit, bouncing and bobbing like lost baubles in the whitewater, the two handcuffed fists of the nameless man inexplicably threaded a chain-link with the marooned blade. That duplicity of hand dangled there for years; shackled, shriveled rotten flesh, palpitating so near the portal to Xibalba. The subterranean aqueduct portion of the road’s journey began only a few hundred yards downriver, where the river water surged under the foot of the mountain. Underground, within its cavernous limestone bowels, the freshwater runoff engaged green, salty aquafers from the distant sea. An apparitional estuary, the nether-door to the underworld.

Unseeing eyes parted on the decapitated head of the desperado, pealing open the world. Though his awareness was distressingly limited, somehow the slurred outlines of shape and form came to mean something to him. A bush. An uncomfortable bush with prickly thorns and homely desert flowers, this was likely his setting, the bramble hemmed the borders of his peripherals like a picture frame. Central to his porthole of vision was the simple sky, an impressionist composition of sowed blots of buttercream and torpid sheets of blue. It was all too much, too weighty, too involved; it swam and swooned before him like a rocking bowl of water, filling him up, pressing him into the earth with its gravity. From his phantom body, he felt each toe, each patch of skin. Though he knew it missing, the nervous signals must’ve disseminated from a source, some sensory connection, or his brain seemed to believe so. The invisible air squeezed his surface area. Tightened tourniquets burdened him like a full body straightjacket or a collapsing cast. “A mountain must have fallen on me,” he spoke without lips a sparse cognition. The clouds seemed to descend from the sky, fused and swirled in milky stripes of fog and spewed into the man’s mouth, nose and ears. It retarded his lucidity and reason, soon laden with dusty dunes of bewilderment. The world was a mirage of dancing light.

Then the dam began to crack. He felt crooked fissures snaking across his skull and body like spreading vines, soon he would rupture and there was nothing to be done. Sure enough the bleeding cracks started to sweat the liquids from his body; blood, bile and lymph, and as they leaked they whispered a static hiss. Gushhhhhhhhh. The noise vibrated through him and up to his ears, he heard it as though underwater; berating, omnidirectional and boisterous. The gashes grew thick in sinuous ropes of entanglement, infesting ostensibly the extent of his being. And through them breached torrents of life-water overflow. The crevices poured out the viscous distillation with the cacophony of a thousand teeming waterfalls. There was nothing but the thunder, no room for anything else. Its density rose past any measure of volume until it overcame him, overtaking his presence by force of will. Suddenly it crescendoed and was gone, dissolving in a fizzle of diffuse ringing. The drainage had stopped as well, he was now presumably empty. He cried out from the hollow of his head but was not heard, his hearing had left him. What reverberated instead however was fear; a ping of hysteria. In absent mannerism he desperately reached for his face and found just ruined fragments, quivering lumps of lips and chin, like crushed scraps of a Mardi Gras mask. Hunks snapped off as his fingertips probed for a landmark, an eye socket, a cheekbone, something familiar to enshrine his ego but there was barely anything left. He broke his pointer finger off at the knuckle scouring a caved in nostril cavity in his mania. “Hell, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. What do I care?” his internal thoughts illumed apathetically, for his speech facilities were in white corroded shambles. From his powdered granules of ravaged carnage a breath of smoke arose, the rubble dust twirled up towards the void, suctioned into the lofty abyss where it surveyed from above.

Then flames reared up like pillars of plasmic light, engorged by the heat of combustion. Jagged tongues lapped hungrily at the abraded man whose consciousness was amorphous and unsensing, only dimly cognizant of self-presence. An incendiary holocaust raged sensation away. Every ounce of feeling was expunged in a deliberate eradication, neuronal overstimulation to excess until the connectivity wore through and the atomic structure crumbled in fatigue. The heap of blanched biologic matter was scarified to complete tactile stupefaction, unrecognizing even neighboring cells. Then the conflagration expired having extracted the last of its nourishment and his botch of body cooled off.

First the warmth left the deteriorated boneyard of his extremities, vanishing into ice like the last warm days of Autumn, blanketing the plaster hunks of disintegrating anatomy in inches of snow. Next to succumb to anesthesia was his chest of decrepit organs, frozen solid in their collapsed disrepair, forgotten now in the advancing permafrost of numbness. Last was his mess of frostbitten face, abandoned in paralysis, left to entropy. A nearly bare mindscape was the man’s totality now, devoid of light and motion, vibration and sound, texture and touch. His being was only tethered to locality by lingering senses of smell and taste which now dominated his concern. Driving columns of bellowed air churned in opposite directions within lungs and sinuses that he knew were imaginary figments, apparitional muscle memories, repackaged experiential data. Astral nostrils flecked with astral ether intake, sifting its contents. Each unlikely breath was a kaleidoscope of pungent samples comingled from various lifetimes and experiential encounters: a fresh peeled apple, steam off quenched metal, damp mattress body odor, a musty draft from the root cellar, miscellaneous tails of perfume on a street corner, etc. Soon faded had the aromas’ potency, gradually sojourning elsewhere. The circulations of invisible current also ceased and without its tidal oscillation there was stillness. But before its last drags a cloudburst of amber sparks, an eruption of fireflies to festoon the sparse canvas of nothingness. “Where do you lead, oh wavering stars? Abridge this inked abyss.”

That was when an even more extensive purgatory of nothingness descended on his bleak reality of senseless ambivalence. Abandoned in a crawlspace of the universe, dreary anathema, doldrums of inaction, his operative reality was staggeringly reduced to a naked impression of existing, as if lingering on the threshold of non-being. His lifeline was taste; last vestige of a world that had all but forgotten him. His formless presence diffused into the surrounding unknown at uncontrolled random, performing its forsaken duty because the possibility of anything else did not exist. Stimuli drifted in and out of his localized perception like a filter feeder’s chum, exotic glimpses of a fully realized world beyond this low dimension, rationale for perseverance. This continued for an imperceptible interval, perhaps ten thousand years, perhaps a hummingbird’s heartbeat. Over time the meaninglessness came to mean even less to the erratic coagulation of man, now only a remote ancestor of his worldly persona devolved and inbred. It tongued the grey brittle of its immediacy, probing the filth and cobwebs of its hermitage for traces of vim, for even a hint of neurological input or residual aftertaste, anything to subdue the mental paralysis. “I’ve no business left here. Take from me what you will but don’t leave me in this hall of mirrors.” And at long last the candle flame was extinguished, leaving the smoke to dissipate and disseminate throughout the universe, replenishing omission, stuffing lack, becoming again.

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