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When Oro awoke, he was not where he should have been.
He felt it, deep within his soul.
The Queen Teresaʼs Glory harbored fear itself, the beginnings of something demonic, and when he awoke, the world was nothing but pitch black. The knowing hum of diseased water drip, dropping against the boatʼs hull. Smoke bubbled from floorboards, wrapping around his bones. The winds howled, the boat rocked more violently, he felt the darkest fear any man could feel. First, he saw eyes: hundreds of eyes, thousands of eyes, billions of eyes nailed to every wall, every crook and corner, the smoke swirling around the floor like the eye of a hurricane, their eyes, glued to him.
Then, he felt hands: rough hands, soft hands, knife-like hands stabbing into his skin, and his body seized up on him. They snaked around him like a cilice, slicing into his flesh without remorse, hungry to rip the skin from his bone. Finally, he tasted death: the body of a baby was at the hurricaneʼs eye, consumed in the smoke, with a blank face, his crown heavily bandaged, his decapitated head sewn together with blood kissing his throat, his face blank with cold, black eyes staring back at him. Scratched out.
This was not a sight to be held by men, nor wolves.
The beginnings of something demonic were here, crawling over him like spiders.
Papa, it whispered in his mind, the babyʼs voice ghostly, broken, and hoarse, as if woken from a deep sleep.
"Dios mío," Oro choked.
Pa-pa.
Dying breaths. Sickly waters. Shocked, Oro was suffocated by a swarm of androgynous men in ghostly white tunics and women in deathly black gossamer gowns, a violent storm of golden huaca icons in their hand and red paint bleeding around their necks and donning their masks. The earth inched towards the diseased dance of the Taki Onqoy, the Andean dancing sickness from the Quechua people of Peru, Oro felt the moonʼs shadows find alignment, the voices around him find damning harmony, their bodies that of corpses trembling, moving with the malevolent flows of the wind.
Liberarme.
With the makings of nightmares, the men and women merged into each other, penetrating each other with utmost demonic completion. They rocked back-and-forth as if in a trance, revering the baby in its deathly grasp, shouting, chanting, in unison:
LIBERARME.
The voices accelerated. Louder, faster.
LIBERARME. LIBERARME.
PA-PA.
The chanting grew steady, then crescendoed into a screeching, thundering. The men and women molded into one another, flesh now naked and stark to the worldʼs sins. It was a carnal act, a perversion of history, and that terrified was what terrified him. The draw to the intoxicating darkness, clinging to the babyʼs power, violating his body, the bodies of man, through possessing him completely.
Their bodies split in half around him, a bouquet of arteries and veins coiling at his feet, bones barbed like sharpened claws. Oro was paralyzed from the head down, his chest a grave of broken nails with his skin peeling back to the point where the pain he felt couldnʼt be shouted anymore. With a sudden roar, the entire room seemed to erupt in a climax of blood and guts, of melting skin and boiling teeth.
.ɐdɐd
Long gone was the lust that came from Peruʼs violent kisses.
LIBERARME. LIBERARME. LIBERARME.
Long gone was the golden blood from Chileʼs godly arms.
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Long gone was the warmth of Oroʼs wife and LIBERARMELIBERARMELIBERARME of the man whose bed she warmed.
They ate him alive, whispering:
Free me from El Dorado.
Long gone was life as we knew it.
YOU ARE READING
Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)
FantasyTHE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO LOUISIANA - And there will be killing until the score is settled. Tortured and exiled, Robin DeMarcus came back to the United States unscathed: a ruthless heiress to an antebellum empire with a hunger for revenge to carry on...
