12
Wil
Norwich, England
City of Tonoho Oʼodham
Territory: Camelot
July 11th, 2004
Time: 07:06 AM
_____________________________
It burns.
Nightʼs thousand eyes brought Wil to the place of his nightmares. With the sharpness of a hangmanʼs knife, the ghastly city he had run away from marooned itself in a thick veil of fog, cutting into his eyes with a blinding darkness. The cobblestone roads whispered with a demon's malice as his feet broke the spine of skeletons that circled its walls. Tonoho Oʼodham, the hamlet of terror, beckoned him closer – from Bogotá to Kingston, it lured him to it, like a sacrificial lamb for slaughter – to relive the moments he fled England from. The darkness always called to him in those days.
The Black Dahlia killings in Kent. His brotherʼs Blood Eagle killing in Birmingham. And then, Inverness. Near the Scottish highlands. The bounty that nearly took his life. The lady in the lake lurked in the recesses of his mind, with a gravitational pull that only sucked him deeper into the depths of her watery prison. Her screams echoed in his ears, always ringing, always on a choked, dying breath:
It burns, William.
She lured him into Inverness fortresses. The spirits sung to him. The spires and towers towered over him, menacingly ready to strike. And Tonoho O'odham, in craving its bloody revenge, was resurrecting those spirits as he hunted Voltaire.
In his peripheral vision, her silhouette faded into the blackness. An arsonistʼs lullaby. The fires of hell burned black around him, and as voices in his mind whispered and screamed, he stared ahead at Tonoho Oʼodham. The Orderʼs playground for the demonic and damned. All the ghost that haunted had, that woman in the lake, was her fire. The cobblestone roads of Norwich were drenched in the charcoal, smoky fumes, the dimly lit streets howling with the winded moans of the ghosts that remained. The churches around him were in ruin, the cottages desecrated, the tombstones exposed wounds. The vultures swarmed their prey. Birds of a feather.
Robinʼs words rang in his ears, an eye to the storm.
Thereʼs a strange man in Kingston that I want you to find; they call him the Ifrit from Versailles...please, Wil, donʼt leave me alone in this.
"I wonʼt leave you alone in this, Robs," Wil told himself. "But f*ck the Ifrit from Versailles."
Hellʼs jaws opened to him.
And as the lady in the lake called to him, he jumped.
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Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)
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