06-01-2015, 10:11 PM
KINGSLAY
She didn’t deserve the end that he gave her.
She was a girl. She was a child. She had the bright gleam of life in her eyes until he stole it away and swallowed it with her flesh, turned it to acid in his gut. She didn’t deserve for her last breath to be the smooth exhale of his name, for the trust to spill from her body in those two syllables like the blood, and the organs, and the bones. He wonders what her name was as he bothers the flesh between his molars. He wonders if it was as pretty as the light in her eyes.
He wonders if they will miss her, whomever she has left now.
He wonders if they will think about where she is now, and if they’ll guess that the last of her is stuck between his teeth, and the rest scorched and ash in a gully that she never loved, and the thought makes his body quiver and the flames run white with heat.
He doesn’t realize while he walks, and burns, but there is another coming. He draws them, always; moths to flames, wings to ash. She comes before him amongst the smoke and spiraled flames, and the cracks that score her body and dice her into fragments mimic the lines along his own (cracked charcoal and fire to her flesh and light). They don’t often run, even if they should, even if they are safer for it. They are as morbidly curious as he is morbid, and he catches them like flies secreting honey from the pores that don’t shoot smoke and ash.
‘You look awful,’ she says, and for a moment his lips will quiver as though he means to smile, but he never does. He is born of entrails and ash, of death and bone. He does not smile. He would not know how.
‘You look awful,’ she says, without knowing that he is inexplicitly, undeniably, uncontrollably awful. He licks the edges of his lips and wonders if she’ll taste the same stuck between his molars.
“I am Kingslay,” he says, because his name on the last one’s dying breath has grown his ego, and he wants it on her tongue, too.
They don’t often run.
They always should.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.