Forgotten Darkness
By E.S. Wynn
They had caught me, Hector’s men, and because they could not kill me, they had left me in that prison to rot, perhaps one day to fall before the slow scythe of father time, even if it meant keeping me locked up while generations upon generations of his descendants rose and fell according to the harsh rules of the mortal world. His words still echo in my mind to this day, spat from his regal, bearded countenance as his men sealed me away in darkness. Shame, that immortality should be wasted upon the likes of you.
For too long after that, tight straps of hard leather bit into my arms, my legs, my shoulders and my forehead. The strap between my teeth had grown tense and musky with a dozen dried fluids, saliva, blood, tears, and bile. Leather bindings, all but forgotten where they were cinched tight over pallid skin, had left only a hollow, aching numbness in their wake, the nerves having long since given up their futile, sparking protests of the pressure that was perhaps Hector’s most pervasive legacy.
Whether I was alive or dead, I was unsure– dappled grey vision fogged and slick with a milky crimson alchemy of tears and blood kept me in a constant state of unfocused half-sleep. The fluids, once hot, had long since gone cold, forming long dry streaks of faded scarlet that caked across my skin in thick, crusty trails and stirred rancid and jellied over the wellsprings of my eyes.
But occasionally, through it all, through all the darkness, the crimson fugue that glazed my reality and blinded me to the dark walls of my prison, thoughts of her managed to trickle through the damaged recesses of my tortured and fragmented mind. In that prison of naked, clammy meat and bone restrained by a prison of leather and bloodstained cotton that was kept locked away within yet another prison, one of granite surrounded by an equally unyielding prison of sky and earth, my mind sluggishly turned over, half dreaming of the woman that had been so close to me for so long, my one and only love even now, long after she had been cruelly slain by Hector’s own hand.
At first the memories came in tiny shards, as they always did, wicked little drops of intense light that burned like blinding rivulets of sickly sweet nectar and traced cruel lines across my famished and aching tongue. They brought an unwanted life back with them, infusing themselves into the cracked and broken tissues of my sinuous heart, a heart that beat sluggishly, and yet seemed only too willing to pump the thick, briny fluids of prohibited passion, need, and resentment into my brittle veins, every ounce of exquisite, smothering pain carried on a bitter soup brewed from the knowledge that she was no more, that I would never see her again, my lovely Panacea. The wide, shining blade that Hector had driven mercilessly through her soft and supple throat had seen to that.
Cruel as it is, I always seemed to be only too willing to open myself to those memories, to let the viscous, obsidian sludge work it’s way through my flesh, through my soul, awakening those higher areas of my mind and admitting the torrent of nearly forgotten moments eager to nest again in that decaying labyrinth of thick grease and sticky crimson that still hums faintly within my cadaverous skull. Every memory forms, glitters, golden and sweet, so wonderful, then collapses unceremoniously into the mottled miasma of death welling steadily upward from my core, bubbling wickedly with her sweet, gentle whispers. I love you. I need you.
The sound that escaped my lips was always pure agony, a painful, heart-rending screech that rips first from the bitter depths of my being and tears screaming through tube and membrane alike, rich with the hot, coppery taste of my own blood, my own pestilence, so wonderfully terrible and tainted. I always found a sick sense of glee in languishing in that sound, letting it pour out past the filthy black pegs of my teeth and the cracked and scabbed beds of my thin, sunken, and bloodflecked lips to blossom out and fill the room, echoing along every wall before it came ringing back through my ears again, an expression, a reminder, of all the death contained within this rotting, lifeless husk I dared to call a body; my body, my corpse.
How many years passed, I am still unsure. Perhaps it was only a day, a week, at most a few months, though every moment stretched on into an eternity of torment that was measureless in both it’s length and intensity, as if the dark, yawning maw of hell had me pressed firmly between it’s infernally savage incisors, forcing me to pay tenfold for every sin I had ever committed, every life I had ever taken, every gentle virgin I had guiltlessly soiled.
But the wards and the ancient magic of Hector’s time eventually wore thin. My bonds grew brittle and stiff with age, but even then I did not have the strength to break them. Time had made me weak, and I no longer had the will to live, content to continue waiting patiently for the death that I desperately hoped lay at the end of the cool grey tunnel of half-remembered hell I had spent far too long contained by.
Then, one day, my bonds were unexpectedly cut by an unwitting child, a boy of twelve, quick with a jackknife, whose clear blue eyes shined so pure and clean, intense and wet with fear as I feasted upon him, gorging myself on his warm, tender entrails; when I finally emerged from that prison, stretching and massaging warmth back into my thin limbs, my face wet with the child’s sweet blood, I caught a glimpse of myself in a pool of stagnant water. My hair had gone white, that pure bleached shade of death tinged with sickly yellow-silver, my eyes now a malignant grey at the bottom of a pair of hollow, sunken pits rimmed with black, my hands thin and clawlike as they traced their way over ghastly naked skin, and deep within my narrow, bony breast, my heart throbbed, now a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue whose surface scarcely remembered her name, even as it touched my wet lips. Panacea.
And then I drew the first deep, unrestrained breath I had drawn in what could have been centuries, and in that moment I felt truly alive again, my body tingling with purpose and intensity.
I was awake again, the world had changed, and as I stared out over the majestic, gently rolling grasslands and the ruined castle that had once been Hector’s, I smiled, eager to see what humanity had done with itself since last I laid eyes upon it.
- - -
E.S. Wynn is an elder unnamable that has been bound beneath a ring of stones carved with Proto-Akkadian sigils and the markings of a forgotten dialect spoken by a lost order of sorcerers. Occasionally his will leaks from his stone prison and inscribes itself upon the world, giving his readers just a hint of the madness that has eaten away at him for untold millenia.
By E.S. Wynn
They had caught me, Hector’s men, and because they could not kill me, they had left me in that prison to rot, perhaps one day to fall before the slow scythe of father time, even if it meant keeping me locked up while generations upon generations of his descendants rose and fell according to the harsh rules of the mortal world. His words still echo in my mind to this day, spat from his regal, bearded countenance as his men sealed me away in darkness. Shame, that immortality should be wasted upon the likes of you.
For too long after that, tight straps of hard leather bit into my arms, my legs, my shoulders and my forehead. The strap between my teeth had grown tense and musky with a dozen dried fluids, saliva, blood, tears, and bile. Leather bindings, all but forgotten where they were cinched tight over pallid skin, had left only a hollow, aching numbness in their wake, the nerves having long since given up their futile, sparking protests of the pressure that was perhaps Hector’s most pervasive legacy.
Whether I was alive or dead, I was unsure– dappled grey vision fogged and slick with a milky crimson alchemy of tears and blood kept me in a constant state of unfocused half-sleep. The fluids, once hot, had long since gone cold, forming long dry streaks of faded scarlet that caked across my skin in thick, crusty trails and stirred rancid and jellied over the wellsprings of my eyes.
But occasionally, through it all, through all the darkness, the crimson fugue that glazed my reality and blinded me to the dark walls of my prison, thoughts of her managed to trickle through the damaged recesses of my tortured and fragmented mind. In that prison of naked, clammy meat and bone restrained by a prison of leather and bloodstained cotton that was kept locked away within yet another prison, one of granite surrounded by an equally unyielding prison of sky and earth, my mind sluggishly turned over, half dreaming of the woman that had been so close to me for so long, my one and only love even now, long after she had been cruelly slain by Hector’s own hand.
At first the memories came in tiny shards, as they always did, wicked little drops of intense light that burned like blinding rivulets of sickly sweet nectar and traced cruel lines across my famished and aching tongue. They brought an unwanted life back with them, infusing themselves into the cracked and broken tissues of my sinuous heart, a heart that beat sluggishly, and yet seemed only too willing to pump the thick, briny fluids of prohibited passion, need, and resentment into my brittle veins, every ounce of exquisite, smothering pain carried on a bitter soup brewed from the knowledge that she was no more, that I would never see her again, my lovely Panacea. The wide, shining blade that Hector had driven mercilessly through her soft and supple throat had seen to that.
Cruel as it is, I always seemed to be only too willing to open myself to those memories, to let the viscous, obsidian sludge work it’s way through my flesh, through my soul, awakening those higher areas of my mind and admitting the torrent of nearly forgotten moments eager to nest again in that decaying labyrinth of thick grease and sticky crimson that still hums faintly within my cadaverous skull. Every memory forms, glitters, golden and sweet, so wonderful, then collapses unceremoniously into the mottled miasma of death welling steadily upward from my core, bubbling wickedly with her sweet, gentle whispers. I love you. I need you.
The sound that escaped my lips was always pure agony, a painful, heart-rending screech that rips first from the bitter depths of my being and tears screaming through tube and membrane alike, rich with the hot, coppery taste of my own blood, my own pestilence, so wonderfully terrible and tainted. I always found a sick sense of glee in languishing in that sound, letting it pour out past the filthy black pegs of my teeth and the cracked and scabbed beds of my thin, sunken, and bloodflecked lips to blossom out and fill the room, echoing along every wall before it came ringing back through my ears again, an expression, a reminder, of all the death contained within this rotting, lifeless husk I dared to call a body; my body, my corpse.
How many years passed, I am still unsure. Perhaps it was only a day, a week, at most a few months, though every moment stretched on into an eternity of torment that was measureless in both it’s length and intensity, as if the dark, yawning maw of hell had me pressed firmly between it’s infernally savage incisors, forcing me to pay tenfold for every sin I had ever committed, every life I had ever taken, every gentle virgin I had guiltlessly soiled.
But the wards and the ancient magic of Hector’s time eventually wore thin. My bonds grew brittle and stiff with age, but even then I did not have the strength to break them. Time had made me weak, and I no longer had the will to live, content to continue waiting patiently for the death that I desperately hoped lay at the end of the cool grey tunnel of half-remembered hell I had spent far too long contained by.
Then, one day, my bonds were unexpectedly cut by an unwitting child, a boy of twelve, quick with a jackknife, whose clear blue eyes shined so pure and clean, intense and wet with fear as I feasted upon him, gorging myself on his warm, tender entrails; when I finally emerged from that prison, stretching and massaging warmth back into my thin limbs, my face wet with the child’s sweet blood, I caught a glimpse of myself in a pool of stagnant water. My hair had gone white, that pure bleached shade of death tinged with sickly yellow-silver, my eyes now a malignant grey at the bottom of a pair of hollow, sunken pits rimmed with black, my hands thin and clawlike as they traced their way over ghastly naked skin, and deep within my narrow, bony breast, my heart throbbed, now a twisted mass of scabs and scar tissue whose surface scarcely remembered her name, even as it touched my wet lips. Panacea.
And then I drew the first deep, unrestrained breath I had drawn in what could have been centuries, and in that moment I felt truly alive again, my body tingling with purpose and intensity.
I was awake again, the world had changed, and as I stared out over the majestic, gently rolling grasslands and the ruined castle that had once been Hector’s, I smiled, eager to see what humanity had done with itself since last I laid eyes upon it.
- - -
E.S. Wynn is an elder unnamable that has been bound beneath a ring of stones carved with Proto-Akkadian sigils and the markings of a forgotten dialect spoken by a lost order of sorcerers. Occasionally his will leaks from his stone prison and inscribes itself upon the world, giving his readers just a hint of the madness that has eaten away at him for untold millenia.
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