SPIRES: Mephistopheles Exeunt
Posted: Fri Apr 09, 2004 11:28 amA hammer's mass splits the air, strikes with a sickening crunch.
All the world might have seen the body flipping end over end into the mud, face down. Drowning the last, victorious smile.
Mud on the perfect crimson coat, darkening, falsifying the blood seeping through its threads.
Cry to heavens far, for the world is broken.
Shattered ribs pierce dying lungs; the black heart they had once sheltered, betrayed, winks out.
Fly to hells within, for dawn has died.
She stands there above him, Quincy Randall, the innocent, the corrupted, the arbitrator and the guileless. The shock, the tears...they may as well be as stiffly carved upon her visage as that deathly smile is upon his own, for she will wear them for many days to come.
Mephistopheles is dead.
No fire from fell Tartarus rose to claim his abandoned flesh; no mist from cold Hades dissolved the tissue of his being. He lay as dead as a mortal man, prompting the question, of course, of whether or not he may have been but a man, inauspiciously named.
Even the slice of the now-deceased - as if in protest! - Half's terrible triangle-flames had only its expected effect, striking the head from the fallen body. But he is no vampire, doomed to fall into ashes at the bereavement of neck from neck.
Even as Khalika took his body and heaped it upon a wooden cart, she may have shuddered at the sight of the cruel and cunning smile still etched upon his lips; the glassy eyes are locked forever, now, their multitudinous secrets far from reach and fast fading into oblivion.
Yet the Spires still stand, witnessing the fall of their supposed master in mocking silence.
-------------
The earth's decaying womb screamed for him, but no shriek of cruel-entrapped and tortured child nor flesh-starved monstrosity could match the wail of sorrow and torment flung from the lips of Belaeus, Hierophant of the Cursed Grail.
No words, no curse entered into that cry, as the brown-robed monk with the thin, kind face flailed his limbs against the walls of bleeding matter.
Fingernails tore his clothes, opened his flesh. Not the talons of his unspeakable cohabitors but his own; scoring terrible, awkward lines of blood across his chest, his thighs, his face.
Belaeus collapsed at last, on the floor, if one could call it that.
Beyond him, the Pit's whispers continued with neither pause nor heartbeat. Belaeus hated and envied Them for their dispassion, for their detachment. They took his hatred and his grief from him, soothing in their fetid emotional vampirism. He could feel them growing subtly stronger from it, though his rage, for all its soul-tearing earnestness, was but a drop in the ocean of their malice.
How could They feel nothing, at the death of their own Master, and his? Belaeus longed for the Master's soothing voice and gentle touch, and the ferocity of his eyes. But it mattered little in the end.
His wrath cooled to vengeance. Soon there would be a new bloodletting, and a new Master.
The black pawn moves into place. The white bishop falls, toppled by his own Queen. Check is denied for now its mate.
All the world might have seen the body flipping end over end into the mud, face down. Drowning the last, victorious smile.
Mud on the perfect crimson coat, darkening, falsifying the blood seeping through its threads.
Cry to heavens far, for the world is broken.
Shattered ribs pierce dying lungs; the black heart they had once sheltered, betrayed, winks out.
Fly to hells within, for dawn has died.
She stands there above him, Quincy Randall, the innocent, the corrupted, the arbitrator and the guileless. The shock, the tears...they may as well be as stiffly carved upon her visage as that deathly smile is upon his own, for she will wear them for many days to come.
Mephistopheles is dead.
No fire from fell Tartarus rose to claim his abandoned flesh; no mist from cold Hades dissolved the tissue of his being. He lay as dead as a mortal man, prompting the question, of course, of whether or not he may have been but a man, inauspiciously named.
Even the slice of the now-deceased - as if in protest! - Half's terrible triangle-flames had only its expected effect, striking the head from the fallen body. But he is no vampire, doomed to fall into ashes at the bereavement of neck from neck.
Even as Khalika took his body and heaped it upon a wooden cart, she may have shuddered at the sight of the cruel and cunning smile still etched upon his lips; the glassy eyes are locked forever, now, their multitudinous secrets far from reach and fast fading into oblivion.
Yet the Spires still stand, witnessing the fall of their supposed master in mocking silence.
-------------
The earth's decaying womb screamed for him, but no shriek of cruel-entrapped and tortured child nor flesh-starved monstrosity could match the wail of sorrow and torment flung from the lips of Belaeus, Hierophant of the Cursed Grail.
No words, no curse entered into that cry, as the brown-robed monk with the thin, kind face flailed his limbs against the walls of bleeding matter.
Fingernails tore his clothes, opened his flesh. Not the talons of his unspeakable cohabitors but his own; scoring terrible, awkward lines of blood across his chest, his thighs, his face.
Belaeus collapsed at last, on the floor, if one could call it that.
Beyond him, the Pit's whispers continued with neither pause nor heartbeat. Belaeus hated and envied Them for their dispassion, for their detachment. They took his hatred and his grief from him, soothing in their fetid emotional vampirism. He could feel them growing subtly stronger from it, though his rage, for all its soul-tearing earnestness, was but a drop in the ocean of their malice.
How could They feel nothing, at the death of their own Master, and his? Belaeus longed for the Master's soothing voice and gentle touch, and the ferocity of his eyes. But it mattered little in the end.
His wrath cooled to vengeance. Soon there would be a new bloodletting, and a new Master.
The black pawn moves into place. The white bishop falls, toppled by his own Queen. Check is denied for now its mate.