10-13-2015, 11:55 PM
KINGSLAY
There is a flash and then a crack.
The sky splits like mortal flesh beneath a sharpened blade. Instead of blood the sky pours acid clouds and indigo, and he drinks in the weather like he drinks in the wails of the dying – it satiates him, it charges him, it brings him to life. It’s only right that she find him now, here among the chaos and clatter of electricity and fire, here where the magnetic pole draws them both time and time again. “Kingslay,” she says, the way she always will, with a voice that could bring empires to ashes, a voice that holds more tension bundled tight through each syllable of every sentence it speaks than the building storm around it ever could, a voice that is the only beautiful thing about her.
There is a flash and then a crack.
He must hold the empire in his palm, because she brings him to ashes. He must hold the empire in his palm, because his resolve crumbles and falls like the walls of ancient cities. There is a flash and then a crack, and the dark sky breaks open and illuminates the silhouette of her body lying still among an ocean of meadow grass. She is split open, and the carnage is exquisite and laid bare against a ruddy earth littered with the glint of bone, the red of blood and muscle, and the putrid perfume of death.
He moves to see into her eyes. He wants to watch the light fall away, but her body has been dead for so long that the flies suddenly are swarming and the movement of weaving maggots drive his attention to the emptied holes that used to house her eyes.
There is the quiver of a smile that threatens the ends of his lips as he falls against the earth on his knees and presses his cheek close against her neck so that the wreak of her demise sinks deep into the cracks and pores of his skin. She cannot speak now, not through the severed vocal chords, but she has never been so beautiful in life as she is in these moments.
She might have loved him.
He might have killed her.
And then there is a final flash and crack, and he blinks his eyes to see her standing against him again – alive, speaking softly of the time. He feels his gut twist as the
animal buried in the cage of his xylophone ribs begins hammering against the bone and drowning the sounds of anything other than it’s hunger for slaughter, and so he does not answer her. Instead, he shudders against the feel of her lips on his neck and rolls a wave of charcoal flesh beneath them while she makes poetry out of his insides and porridge of his mental clarity.
He closes his eyes and pictures her among the grass and carnage.
He closes his eyes, and he breathes the sickly sweet fragrance of decay, but it isn’t real.
He hasn’t killed her, yet.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.