Magenta Monster

The ether was swirling in patterns beyond perception of the uninitiated and even those priests of the dark veil who had risen to the most exalted rank struggled to see what lay beyond but it was there. The banished prince from so long ago, floating in the chaos of another world a breaths stroke away from them, sometimes he screamed in their dreams.

Tonight after thousands of years the alinement was right and the veil between the worlds could be torn, this was the purpose of their sect, they had waited and taught the acolyte and each died in their own turn though the oldest of them was ancient in his own right. They were the fathers of death.

Machtishal was awaiting his induction and would be the youngest in rite. A red headed lover lay at his feet her throat slit and her blood drained into the cut glass basin, he would miss her if he lived through the night. The elders ran sticks around the rims of bronze bowls that hummed the resonance of creation and he stepped forward to bathe in crimson. A mother of perl scoop set upon a silver ornate handle ladled her life essence onto his head, his white shroud matted to his chest hair in the soaked liquid. His long dark hair gleamed in greasy tendrils that slowly dripped. Chanting pulsed into him and he roared at the sky as the fire dragon was branded onto him.

The sinews of his arms stood out as he pulled his fists in pain and stood as if crucified. They placed the heavy black leather cassock upon him, unlike their’s it did not yet have a hood nor the silver adornments, those would be earned once priesthood was obtained. A pale thin imitation of his lover, her twin half starved and whipped to a pathetic shadow, she placed thick souled boots upon his feet carefully doing up a myriad of buckles and checking the composite of the heel were correct and suited to purpose.

The priests now stood awaiting him, each with a light wand ready to scrawl the signs on the sky itself, they nodded to him and then one by one shot into the sky. A trail of orange after burn left in their wake. The last of them had gone and he clicked his own heels together and felt the nauseating acceleration as he speeded sky wards. The congealing blood turned to flaking ice upon his skin, bitting into him a thousand little teeth gnawing but he saw the sky sign. An orange circle and star, writing and symbol, swirling in and through the clouds and he stopped at his appointed position, the centre.

This was were the heavens and the worlds beyond the veil would choose weather he lived or died. None of them knew what would happen, the veil was thinner this night than ever before in their practice with the Prince lurking and waiting just beyond. They scrawled themselves shields in the ruddy light and he waited heart pounding in his ears, would he pass out? The smell of tin and copper filled his nose.

They pointed their lightwands to wound him, to slice through his mortal flesh, when the veil was thin the cosmos itself would sometimes intervine and save one such as he, filling them with light and something else. He closed his eyes and the pain began to bloom, knocking him this way and that, and then silence, he looked out of a death mask now, his own blood dripping into the clouds to land as rain below.

And then the Master the eldest of them did something that was not scripted, or rather it was something that should not have have happened then, not at that point, he flipped his light wand and ripped the fabric of the sky, calling in strange undulating tones, singing the dark lullaby to the Prince’s soul, telling it to come and be born once more.

‘NOOO!’ Machtishal cried as the ghostly embers coiled themselves around him, fog solid and thick with annihilation pushed its way into his eyes and nose and mouth, flooding his ears with the scream of eons unhead. He lulled in his floating void and then thought with another’s thoughts.

The magi had not planned to make him corporeal, this he knew, they had wanted a deamon wraith to control and plunder the earth with, this was not the task appointed them. Red light blazed out of every wound they had inflicted on the lamb they had always had tagged for slaughter, the Master himself knew though and had built this moment, he screamed in anguish and ground his teeth, the World was not as he remembered it, it was bendable to his will now. He reached into the end space he had known and plucked a dark bow with arrows of cold death and it glowed ruddy and beautiful and he breathed a sword of ethereal flame, made of the same sky sign power and he blasted their shields. Meat, festering with ancient death fell to the ground. He turned to the Master.

‘Father?’ he inquired and the old man smiled, it was unpleasant.

‘Of you and the corpse you ride!’ it was a gloating boastfulness the Prince let it slide for now, he was new and vulnerable but a day would come when he was the King of Dark Star though the inhabitants had forgotten that was it’s name.

Posted: Wednesday, September 5th, 2012 @ 7:48 am
Categories: Flash Fiction.
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