if the heavens ever did speak
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
His screams fill the air in handfuls, until the master tires of it, and suddenly the scream is gone, snatched from his lips. The pain is still there, radiating from his broken leg, but it subsides, and then becomes nothing but a dull itch as the master heals him.
He rises, slowly. The smoldering corpse at his feet turns to ash, and blows away on the wind.
Suddenly, the master is there, beside him, a palm laid flat on his cheek.
My greatest creation, he says, and the words send a sick thrill through him – and why shouldn’t they?
It’s not like he hasn’t been remade before.
He follows the master, docile as a lamb. His legs work again, whole, and his mane no longer burns (though it is singed, bits of it falling away, a trail of himself leading away from the battleground).
And so, the days pass.
He sleeps in the master’s room, on hard wood that leaves him aching every morning. But he doesn’t mind, he is used to aching. The magic does not leave, it continues to weave itself amongst his veins and arteries, and he learns to wield it. He becomes the sun, over and over again, shapes himself into gold and silver, a body of light, burning but not burnt.
The master lays hands on him, strokes his crest, tangles fingers in his mane. It feels good.
It feels like love.
They build.
They fortify for something the master does not explain, says only, make us safe, Sleaze. Keep me safe, and that is all that needs to be said, because Sleaze is a good boy, he obeys.
They shape the house – it is a house – into a twisting atrocity that defies nature, defies physics. They build staircases to nowhere, secret rooms behind paneled doors. On every floor, there are panic rooms, voice-activated by a password.
(The password is Pennywise, the master’s own private joke, he laughs when Sleaze chokes on the word.)
The house becomes a maze, full of trick steps and nowhere places, secrets and shadows.
Outside, they build more mazes – hedge mazes that twist and turn every which way. In them, they place monsters – a pack of wolves, a gibbering creature that walks bipedal but whose form never entirely straightens. Overhead, they release a flock of birds – vultures and eagles and hawks, all flying as one, all keeping watch.
They all obey the master.
They build watchtowers, great towering things that let you see out for miles. They build a fence of stone, impassable, top it with razor wire.
They dig a moat, deep, fill it with brackish water. Things swim there, dark shapes in the murkiness. Sleaze does not look at them too closely.
It’s as much a prison as it is a fortress, and Sleaze doubts he could get out even if he tried.
He doesn’t try, though. He sleeps in the master’s room, right by the bed, like a dog. A loyal beast.
They practice, too.
Sleaze is made to return to the battleground over and over again. He fights whatever monsters the master can imagine – fairies with sharp teeth and screeching voices, panthers that move like shadows, a dinosaur with feathered skin and teeth almost as large as he is.
We don’t know what form they’ll come in, murmurs the master, so you practice. You practice..
Sleaze fights himself, again and again. He fights everyone he ever loved. Killing them becomes second nature. Killing himself becomes easy as breathing. The magic makes him powerful.
He is the sun.
Sleaze was never meant to be a fighter, but that doesn’t matter to the master. The master makes him a fighter. Through fire and blood and magic, he makes him. Sleaze learns how to turn his body into a fearsome thing, how to make himself strong, filled with great and terrible power.
“You’d do anything to save me, right?” says the master one day, as Sleaze stands victorious over a slain monster.
Sleaze, whose cheeks are stained in blood, nods.
The master slips down from his perch, pulls something from his pocket. A red pill. Out of his other pocket he pulls a small object, puzzling at first, until Sleaze realizes – a fake tooth.
“In war,” says the master, “they used this for agents, gone behind enemy lines, in case they got captured. I may lose you, Sleaze. Or they may take you--”
Sleaze shudders at the thought of being separated.
“And if they do, they might ask you things. What I’ve done to – with – you. Where I might be going. And I know you wouldn’t tell on me, but they have…they have ways, Sleaze. Magic.”
The master holds up the pill, holds up the tooth.
“Cyanide,” he says, twirling the pill for a moment between thumb and forefinger before slipping it inside the fake tooth, while explaining, “one hard bite should do it. Really chomp down.”
The tooth snaps closed. It almost gleams in harsh light of the arena.
“Now, open wide.”
Sleaze does. When the master is finished, there is blood on Sleaze’s lips and his mouth tastes faintly of bitter almonds.
They’re coming.
The thought crashes into his head and he jerks. He had been idle, almost asleep outside, in between the house and the hedge maze. The sky has gone a dark, bruised purple color.
They’re coming.
The thought comes, again. It’s the master’s voice, it’s no one’s voice, it’s everyone’s voice.
They’re coming.
The master, he must find the master. He turns and runs back inside, heart thudding wildly in his chest, the desire to serve – to protect – overwhelming.
From one of the watchtowers comes a cry that is silenced with an abruptness that turns his stomach. Klaxons begin to blare until the world is a nightmare of sound.
They’re coming.
The master lays a hand on his neck. It feels warm. Sleaze leans into it, and thinks, as he has so many times before, this is love.
His mouth still tastes of bitter almonds.
“We’ll see,” says the master, “well see if I’ve done enough. If you’re enough.”
Sleaze hopes he is. He doesn’t want to disappoint.
The sky darkens further still, the bruise-color deepening to a near blackness. The air seems to hum with electricity. The master’s fingers curl tighter in his mane.
They’re comi-
sleaze
cancer x garbage
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