Finding Contentus

Chapter 81: The Funny Joke About Power (2)

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For over a year, Ramoth's mind deteriorated in the desecrated desert of the night like a malnourished hamster on an endless wheel that got tortured endlessly inside his imprisoned Hell Cell.

Instead of riding and sailing on the waves of the sea, shimmering waves of winter pulsed through Ramoth and abused him relentlessly to where he could see the demonic waves coming for him like unrelenting primals. It was so cold. The white sands were like snow.

The veins across his body would burst like cracking guavas. The chains around his body would tear his limbs apart like a stretched slave. Ramoth would clutch his head, peer at the sky that had thundering clouds of fire, stretch his mouth to be as wide as possible—

And scream.

He screamed as loud as he possibly could until his voice became brittle, parched and hoarse grains of sand.

It was bone-chilling to the raging core and raw like hardcore reigns of terror. He didn't care how many times he ripped his own throat out. He did it purposely. He released every inch of suffering out of his soul, and welcomed every aspect of agony imaginable.

"Do you love pain?" The mocking voices of his perpetrators haunted him in the cold desert winds, rebounding to never leave him.

Their shameless laughter bounced up and down his crooked spleen, as did their sweaty bodies and wild movements that entered into him feverishly, painfully and unmercifully.

The pain it—

The pain became an addiction for him. It made him laugh as though his nerves had become one long ulnar nerve in which his funny bone was rammed into, over and over again like an army of hammering gongs.

He gave up on escaping and gave in to the clutches of agony. The more he struggled to escape the sand pits, the stronger the pits dragged and weighed him down through the hateful demons that rammed him. So, he found a new home each time he sank and evaporated.

The pain became — his one and only sanctuary when he had no other sanctuary.

The pain was... peaceful, like mash potato. Every fresh wound of salt, pepper and starch would simply get reopened, carved down, cut up and exposed to decay in the raging winter.

He cried out when the cockroaches went into his nine openings. Guffaws could be heard when the rats ate him from the outside. They ripped his intestines out like ropes and squeezed his lemon tasting eyeballs like scavenging vultures that found his body of biltong beneath the tides of the moon.

Each day he got sick with a new disease, and each day, he made a new joke and wrote new lines for every gag, right down to the punchline.

After all, laughter was the best medicine for everything. Severe withdrawals developed as a result. It was crucial that he laughed through the ghastly pain and at the persistent pain. Otherwise, he couldn't cope with the strong stress.

"Where oh where is my one key? I wonder and wonder when I shall see my one key. One key, one key, come out and play with me! One key, one key, reveal yourself to me! One key, one key, come, come and find me!"

Ramoth cackled when he saw the final joke that killed him in his own reflection of blood.

He was bald.

His thick hair was burnt to dust. He looked like his father, in his youth. He became his father, in his youth. The Moth in his name was gone, and he was simply — Ra.

He had never seen his father without his nemes headdress, but somehow, he knew that this was how he used to look like, more or less. Only then did Ramoth lose everything in an atomic explosion that purposely destroyed the hell he had been living in.