Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

LXVII. Lady Of The Lake

  The Portuguese abbey was incandescent with the light of ghosts. On the precipice of the Scottish highlands, above a forest of wooden crosses and King Finlayʼs dirt road trade routes across the Orderʼs commonwealth, was the terrifying Jerónimos II, the mother of monsters. Modeled after the Santa Maria de Belém location, it came bejeweled in black diamonds, carved with the promises of Jesus Christ.

  And yet, Christendom bore none of its teeth in this place. Wil watched the sea of thick green tree tops swallow the abbey whole, the dark chasms and deep gorges stained in the blood of Portuguese slaves, and the abbey also sing to him. But a more menacing tune than the lady in the lake.

Wil traveled through time like a viscous gust of wind, black and sharp, ghastly and shadowy through the night. Night always had a thousand eyes, this is what he knew, but they seemed to sparkle at the sight of ruin.

  The slaves King Finlay brought into Scotland were brown-skinned woman, chests bare, nakedness a lecherous gift to hold the moon at bay, and as Wil traveled through the skies – a hungry ravenʼs flight – Wilʼs eyes landed on two women. Their feet dug into the earth, leaving tears of blood in their weak. An ouroborous, the Orderʼs symbol of currency – two snakes, devouring each other in cannibalistic pleasure – stood at the feet of the abbeyʼs earth.

    There, front-and-center, was a dark flower and her dark treasure. He had studied the legends of Vyolèt Domingo, from her curly cinnamon brown hair to the bitemarks that etched itself into her dark skin, from the fabled stories of a poor slave girl to the legendary Bajan pirate who wore her Polynesian and Caribbean treasures alongside the livers and spleens of her enemies.

     However, the woman next to her, who stole the moonʼs eyes and the obsidian waves of the ocean and wore it as her own, the woman haunted by the sins of the past and the violence of her present, he did not know her.

    And yet, he heard the calling. Saw it, in flashes.

    The clouds, rolling in.

    "My dark, heathenʼd knight. Yes, oh, yes. Give me your seed," she whispered in Portuguese, a shadowy figure on top of her. "Give me everything."

    She consumed the tongue with a divine, filthy lick, and brushed her lips against his; the pulpy tanginess like a syrupy taste on her mouth. A killer approaching her slaughter. She tore, yanked, gasped – lushly breaking the tongue with the carnality of her teeth as blood dripped onto her lips yet again. Coating them in crimson. Oozing out of her mouth, flooding it with warmth, relief, and a painstakingly torturous hunger that consumed them. Evil incarnate.

    "Give me everything. Protect me from our enemies, meu amor."

    And the demons danced. She spread her legs wider, only not wanton. Brands of crimson kissed her flesh, golden silk spread across the floor, tracing demonic symbols onto her body; her dress snowy white as marble, but smeared in sanguine blood, red as the angry day. Pregnant, she was, and her body felt wet and tight as he liked it...but the pain he felt was rancid, raw. She chanted in Latin, sprawled against the dead, damp earth. The earth whispered to her, whispered to Wil.

    "Give me –"

    The ghosts wove their story in her skin. Marred her flesh. The dark flower stood in her nakedness, defiled by Scottish greed and usury. The whips the Scottish slavers sliced into her skin with were born from the vilest tangles of nature, sanctified by the licentious, starving men that craved debauchery and deceptiveness of power.

    They painted the most horrifying pictures, they derived pleasure from the darkest corners of pain and humiliation. Power was the source of her pain, and yet she fed on the sadism with the promise of punishing the wicked, to bring forth the daughter of suffering. Vyolèt and her shared a kiss, then two, then three, in secrecy.