The sheets were hot dead prisons - Kingslay

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

They are such good company when he sleeps.
—some nights he dines with them, around tables made of old wood and splintered bone, on jellied liver and sweetmeat.
—some nights, he stands in the center of their pyres and dances; even with the ones who made it out, whose holes are as uncovered and expectant as a virgin’s. (In time.)
—some nights, they pay tribute to the bacchanal god; wine, seed and madness, just for its sake.
—some nights he quiets them, each in succession, and then builds gothic fantasies in peace, so like a god tinkering away.

That is, when he sleep. Because when he does not, they surround him like ghouls with many-claws and many-lips – Medusas, with their many-heads. They are insidious, disquiet and disruptful things; like air, except with tiny teeth that bite and drive him to distraction. Their screams mutate from chamber music to banshee wails and everything that was once holy and good turns to ash around him
—death is not enough.

Pollock has brought it upon the earth like a plague-bringer, scythe-handed and discerning
(they were the best: jewel skins and soft crowns)
—and he has seen it undo itself.
He has seen it repaired, imagined a seamstress (perhaps it is She, the bitch of land and sky) pulling the hides together with cords of arteries and sinew. Turning his fine work into defiant adversaries. 
He can understand this, admire it even. He had done the same thing in another universe. He understands war. And consequences. So when he saw her again – though it had been like seeing something beautiful defiled – alive and well, he had been almost glad.

What’s better than one night of fun?
Opportunity! Doors thrown open, again.

The ones who were never purged? They walk like second courses with life breathed into their lungs. (Jellied liver and sweetmeat.) And always, he finds their lambs, and is reminded that their nature is inflexible and monolithic. Such carelessness.

Such neglect
Fine. He’ll take them.
(‘My name is Etro,’ she had said, and then she sucked the fear from his heart
and Etro begat Bruise, who came to his father like an apple dropped so very close to the tree)

He watches his breath on the air, those great, glossy wings hugged against his sides. He cannot deny the quiet of this place. It is not the endless, whistling quiet of Pangea, but a smothered, close quiet, one that writhes with memories. Every once in awhile, they are good company.
(‘No, oh god. Please, no. Don’t leave,’ she had whined, and then she had fallen into him
and Etro realized he was not who she thought he was – he had taken her anyway)
he exhales from his nose, and the air clouds in front of his face like steam.

POLLOCK
the gift giver

@[Kingslay]

[Kingslay]

KINGSLAY

He was a king (his crown made up of the bones of his unwilling subjects - his throne, their funeral pyres.).
He was a god (cruel without conscience, and subject to the whim of his changing moods.).
He was a reaper. The reaper.

But they usurped him.

They kissed him once, those witches made of shadow, and made of him a wicked, malevolent god when they’d forged him out of greed and wrath and fire and sickness - and he’d shown them gratitude by painting the blood of those he’d slaughtered into poetry. The colour red, and the sound of cracking bone, and the flavour of marrow were gifts he had lain before their ugly, gnarled feet.

And they’ve usurped him - stripped him bare of flame and soot, and left him mortal again. He is different now, unmarked, save for those few lingering scars fingering the trenches they carved against his flesh; reminders of the raw, unyielding power he possessed, if only for a time. He is still not handsome - his face is too angular, his eyes too flat and black - but he is cleansed, if you can call it so much.

Punishment, perhaps, for knowing things he ought not to know (the slope of Her hips instead of the anatomy of her body, and the colours that Her eyes are made of rather than the way light looks falling out of them). Punishment, perhaps, for letting things live if they spoke his name in a way he wasn’t used to hearing it.

It isn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was to boil the blood of a nameless stranger until it bubbled from her emptied eye sockets, but his victim only cried, staggering blindly, and her blood did not move to yield to his command. What he wanted was to watch that boiling blood weep like tears down her muddied cheek, and out of her nostrils as though he were the plague consuming her. What he wanted was to look aslant his shoulders and see smouldering ash and licking flames behind him, and to douse what was left of her body with them until the forest ran thick with acrid smoke and the smell of burning flesh like she’d been made of gasoline. He had killed her anyways, piece by piece, but it wasn’t what he wanted (or how he wanted).

And now, instead of flame and fire and hell in his wake, he leaves only a road of severed extremities, of snow stained red, and the wreckage of bones, splintered and sharp.

Because they’ve usurped him.

Because of Her.

Because he had tried to forget Her, but she is a cancer, and even the memory of her name ate away at the atoms inside of him until all that was left was a whisper of all of the syllables that she once was to him (They heard. They heard.).

Because they knew that he was bending to Her will, that he was capable of it at least.

Because.

And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.

KINGSLAY BY NEVAEH | HTML BY MAAT | IMAGE © ILYA KISARADOV

he is a winning conversationalist