0 comments/ 2216 views/ 2 favorites Solstices Obscurity "Dusk" Ch. 01 By: Unrequited_Evil "Oh, how ironically, fucking appropriate. I'm in Hell for sins of the flesh, and with my flesh I must record my sins. Delicious." ~snick of a knife to get blood for ink~ To begin with, introductions are in order. I am Viscount Reynold Alexander Volta Chanticleer, called "The Bastard" by most. And the very first thing you need to know about me is, most of you are going to despise me. I look upon that near universal-contempt with an equal level of contempt returned. In life and certainly in this unwished for unlife, I never wanted, nor sought out...universal approval. Give me vile condemnation any day. It tastes far sweeter. Now for those of you reading this that are still clinging to that retched mortal coil I offer only this bit of advice. For fuck sake die already. Your pathetic whining about wanting to live forever would turn my stomach, if I had one. You're hardly worthy of one single lifetime of years above the flowers let alone your dreamed of "Eternal Soul" that will live on forever, even after death. Death? What do you know of death? I stop the movement of my quill at a scream. Looking up, I see a dog-headed beast drag a black-skinned woman from the gathered souls nearby and pull her to the ground. I smirk when the other condemned huddle back from the sight, as if such will soon not be common to their daily lives. When the horned beast rips and bites at her ebony flesh, they cry out. As if their bodies, not hers, feel the pain. When the thing drives its cock into the orifice of its choosing it is amusing to see the other lost souls cover their own bare genitalia, as if to shield them from such ravagement. I watch unimpressed the rape of the woman's body, of her bare soul. When a second demon joins in and they began to take her in both holes her pain-filled cries became...unamusing. "How, quaint," I mutter to the emptiness inside me. Dipping the quill into the pool of blood, I go back to my scribbling. YOU, want to know of death? I'll tell you about death. It sucks. End of story, but alas not the end of me, or certainly not of the hellish misery that is my life and my story. Before I left life I was a man, much like some of you, only I was powerful, beautiful, and without remorse. I shed not a tear in life at the death of another and none were certainly shed for me when I parted ways with the living. I walked the world with it as my banquet, and oh...I did feast! I hunted among the sweet and innocent, and the old and decadent, equally. Sparing none the touch of my cock should I so desire to touch...well, whatever part of them I wished. Beggars and thieves, whores and kings. Actresses and nuns, priests and lawyers. How similar those all are without their refinements, both genders begged for my seed to fill their bellies. Oh, and fill bellies I did indeed! My non de guerre came not, as some would think and spread vile, malicious rumors of, from my birth but rather from the huge numbers of squalling, sour-milk-mouthed brats I left in my wake. But my life wasn't without conflict. The world would often fuck me. And I fucked it right back. I fucked it and sucked and made it suck me. I made of life my whore. And like a whore it stank and ran wet at the end of the night, but it none the less reveled in its ill-gotten coin of the realm. The night. Solstice night. Had I know what waited after death was an endless Solstice night, a night with no dawn, would I have lived my life even more reckless than I did? Oh,yes! There were cunts I left untasted, cocks left unsucked, asses left unplundered. How many more maidenheads would have broken under the thrust of my uncarring lust had I known that an endless night of boredom awaited me. A living death, with the feted stench of the river Styx to forever fill my nose with its rank putridity. Oh yes, had I known then what I know now, I would have fucked the world far harder. I would have raped it into submission! Branded it my slave and milked it for every gilded penny's worth of pleasure. Another scream interrupts me. Looking away from the page, where letters in blood dry to a sickly brown spidery-script, I notice that the first woman is now either dead or fucked to unconsciousness. They left her to lie in the stinking mud and now visit their lusty greed up on the body of a man of middle years. By his fat belly a Bourgeoisie of some modest wealth. Leaning back and grinning, I watch them as they introduce his anus to a cock the size of my arm. How so very much like the cries of the people he fucked in life do his screams, now in death, resemble. He looks my way, as if seeking Au secours from the likes of me. "How little you know me, you fat fool. I'm more likely to help in your rape." When his screams are choked off, by the second demon's bloody, cum-dripping cock, I go back to writing. No coins for the ferryman. I look over towards the said ferryman, Charon or Phlegyas as some would name him. He silently pushes his oar into the feted, purified mud of the river bottom, bringing him closer to the screaming souls that beg for him to hurry. Oh, how they want him to hurry to get them away from the two demons that rape and claw at them. Hurry...to take them to where thousands just like these two dwell. "Fools." A leather bound journal for my atonement? And you lot for my only audience... groveling, sniveling peasant-born souls, more lost than my own! Lost in their own flesh and its simplistic needs. Who still think their strutting and endless preening upon the Stage of Tears has some greater meaning. That a higher power looks upon them, HA! What a fucking great joke on all of humanity that one is. THERE IS NO GOD! And if there was, why the hell would he care about you? Oh, what was that? He cared enough to give his only son to die for your sins? Sins...what exactly are those again? Oh, yes to fuck. Because of course, it must be a sin to take a piece of yourself and shove it rudely into another human's body for your own pleasure. And of course it has to be a "sin" if they, should somehow, gain some small pleasure in return for being so impaled. My question about this though, is this...why the ever-living-fuck would a being, so powerful he could create the whole of creation in seven days, give a shit that you're wanting to spew your pathetic teaspoon of spume into the orifice of your choice? Why? Why would he care? No. No, I hate to be the barer of grim tiding...no, that a lie. I'm laughing my sick, dead-ass off...but you are alone in the dark, and no dawn is coming. Not for you. And certainly not for me. Which is all to the good. I have no wish for one. No wish for a sanguine-handed Savior, to forgive me. I have more use for the wood and nails of his cross than I have for him. What a lovely little bed is a Crux decussata. A perfect fit to tie an unwilling morsel to, her legs all a sprawl, her breast press hard into bloody, splinter-rich wood, her most delicate of delicates agape for my perusal. My touch, my tasting should I so wish it, certainly for my ravishment and eventual painful degradation. Ah, the dark and twisted path I am going to lead you, my most humble of sexual accolades. Tortured and shadowed trespassed into places your mind would shrink back in horror from but that I leaped into with gleeful abandonment. To those places I will take you and to so many more in the coming...well, what is time here? There are certainly no days, weeks, months, or years in this marshy stench. Looking over, I raise a glass of vinegary wine to the ferryman Charon as he loads another boatload of passing bags of anal gas to be taken to their eternal torment or to a mindless, plebeian Paradise. He ignores me, but then that's fine. I care no more for his opinion...than I do of yours. As the two demons are left alone on the dark shore one glances my way. For a second only does his fanged mouth break into a grin. When he starts towards me his equally blood-soaked companion fiend grabs him, forcing him to take a longer look at me. The first's bloody-red dog-like eyes go wide in fear. He gives me a low bow of respect. I nod that I saw it. Then then both shrink back away, to go hide and wait for the next boatload of lost souls to come trembling to the dock. Their Viaticum clutched in tight fingers. I notice movement. The woman they raped is still alive. Of course she is fool, nothing can die here! I ponder if I have any itch that needs to be scratched. She looks up and see me, sitting on my dead tree stump with my book and quill. For a second, her dark skin a glint with specks of mica, her face has that same hope the fat man showed. Such a lovely face. A face bearing all the dignity of the kings of Africa. My eyes follow the naked curves of her body, such midnight dark nipples must taste of chocolate. Such plump hips, that are crisscrossed with claw marks from overly eager hands. Her dark rose must be agape still! And her cunt must reek of demon spume. When I look back up, she is cringing back from me. "Remember Madame Noire, things are never so bad that they can not get worse." Remember, I am Reynold the Bastard. Your personal Virgilius, to lead you through my own delightful levels of Hell. And I must warn you of two things. One, I have not Dante's companions maiden-like modesty. And two, that before this little sojourn is over... ...you will despise me. "Par la mort de dieu." Solstices Obscurity "Dusk" Ch. 02 All characters are over the age of 18. ***** "Sandious! Jabber-talking, slack-jawed, lemmings. The lot of you be silent!" I sling a stone across the short distance at the queued retches. Standing on the ebony pier into the murk that is the river Styx, the gathered crowd of regret-squalling, tear-burbling, religious-postulating souls finally goes silent, when and only when my stone clips one of them in the head and he pitches into the river. Whatever lurks under those tepid waters, swirls up hungrily. I know not what it is, nor am I inclined to seek that answer. But it...or they, swarm over the fallen object lesson to my ire and frothy red the dark waters boil. And of course, that starts the screaming again. "Mordious. Pocapdedious!" Leaping to my feet, I pull my rapier and stalk towards the huddle mass of the naked souls. I set the steel point into a half dozen posteriors, making them jump out my way, till I'm standing in the very middle of them. "Listen to me, you retched bags of pus! I have had enough of your caterwauling about how this isn't the afterlife you were expecting. Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news to the lot of you...fine, upstanding, not-doubt loved in life and missed in death...people. But...YOU! ARE! FUCKING! DEAD!" Snarling, I run my rapier through one of them. Through her left tit! I don't do it to be cruel but just to be sure I have their attention. She falls screaming to the muddy ground, clutching at the bloody mammary. I lean down, and after a moment, smile at her. "Hurt? Yes? Tell me, why aren't you dieing? I just drove two foot of steel through your nipple and then straight through your heart." I hold out my hand, and before she can stop me, catch her by the hair, and pull her to her feet. I use that tangle of golden locks to direct her. "See? You are all fucking dead. Cold-corpse dead! Your time to make decisions, to complain about the way that the world has done you poorly...is over! Now, I want you plebeians to stand over here quietly, till your slimy boat to the...afterlife...appears." "Turn her lose." With a grin, I look towards the voice. A man. A tall man, nicely formed. Dark of hair. A chest sculpted with a craftsman's level of precision, marred or enhanced by a trail of ebony hairs running down to a well-formed cock. He has about him the air of a man used to being the most dangerous person in a crowd. "I said, turn her lose!" he demands. "Oh, I heard you." With a grin, I send her spinning off the pier and into the Stygian waters. "NO! Don't! Gagck!" The point of my rapier went through the underside of his chin easily. Like a blade into water, it slid into his bared soul. When he opens his mouth to scream I see that I have penned his tongue to the roof of his mouth. "Just because you can not die...does not mean I can not make you wish that you could." I look over my shoulder when I hear Charon's oar splash into the water at the end of the pier. The Ferryman is giving me a look of warning, I sneer in reply. Like the stick marionettes I played with as a child, I walk this fool I have impaled to his awaiting craft. "Here, I would hate for your to miss your chance at heaven." Ripping free my sword, I spin him by his shoulder when he grabs at the wound. Planting my boot upon his arse, I send him a tumble into the rancid craft to land in a whimpering pile at Charon's feet. With a smile, I bow to the Ferryman. Sending my rapier into its sheath, I walk back towards my tree stump. The other lost souls huddle away from me as I pass. They stand there looking at me, or at the boat, or at the red waters still churning under the quay "Get the hell on the boat, or I will feed all of you simpering, pathetic, slugs to the thing in the river." They scamper down the pier into the craft. Lemmings off the cliff just as I named them. They have no idea where the Ferryman is taking them, or what new horror they might have to endure...forever...when they get to that most final of destinations, but oh they will pile on to his craft. Pay his demanded coin, without question or comment, and ride out into those odoriferous mists. Trusting. Trusting that "God" will keep them safe. That they are "Saved" because they had water pissed on their heads. That their "Savior" has a "Plan" for them... I spit in their direction. Picking up my quill I sit down to write, what I was of a mind to pen down...before I was so crudely interrupted. I jab my wrist for ink and begin to write. As you might guess, I was a young man when I had my first joust into the lists of love and lust. Twas a Welsh maid of my father estate, she who had the care of the linen washing, that took my male maidenhead. Oh, she was no great beauty; had tits like a pair of meal-sacks, and certainly, to judge by my later exploits, not skilled at all in the act of the fuck. But what did I know then of the Forbidden Subject. Nothing. I was so much an innocent youth. But a month was I returned from the school father sent me to for my education. Hardly had my eyes seen, or my ears heard, and certainly my hands had not touched. That day, at dawn, I took my paints and went to the small rivulet, that crossed the property on its way to the family's mill-run, with the hopes of making a naturalist painting of the local waterfowl. As I set up my small canvas and laid out my oils, I was interrupted in my preliminary sketching of a most handsome Red-breasted goose when I heard a woman singing. She approached the stream, with a large basket on her hip and before I could warn her off had quite frightened off my avian subject. In a storm I went down there to give this bosomy maid a good-telling-off for disturbing my art, only to be greeted with laughter just moments into my diatribe. She, amid her laughter, began called me names that I did not like. English names. "Infant." "Baby." "Child." I was none of these! I was a Gascony born son of the Viscount! Catching her around her waist, I pulled her to me and planted a kiss upon her pert lips with all the authority of my position, rank, and title. When her lips met mine it was as if a gate opened and I felt a rise in my lance that only a severe need to piss in the morning, had ever brought about before then. It was a thing the monks at my school had hard words about. Hard words and harder punishment. I was about to pull away when her hand found that very staff of procreation, through my leggings, and then her tongue was passing within my lips! I felt my heart race. Laughing, she tumbled her basket of to-be-washed linens onto the earth, pulled me down and spread wide her legs. Between her knees, I found myself looking down into a woman's Temple De Virgin, uncovered, for the first time in my life. Hearing flapping, I look up to see that my little wigged friend has smelled again my "ink" and come begging for a meal. Smiling, I squeeze out a few more drops for him. He settle in to drink at the carmine pool. "You know my furry friend, between your appetite and my sins I might run out of ink." I laugh at the thought, and at his squeak of greeting. "I shall, if you keep coming back, have to find a name for you. If you keep up you gluttonous way perhaps...Nero. I could, always name you after family I suppose, that's a grand noble tradition. You rather have the look of my great uncle Vladimir" Taking my quill I lift his wing but can see nothing to give me a clue as to sex. "Or perhaps his daughter Belladonna?" I begin to laugh, remembering the rude pleasure I took from her and will no doubt have to pen down. "No, I think I will keep you clear of her name. You, have not her repartee...a woman most skilled with her tongue." I smile, remembering the sweetness of her fellatio, but that memory begins to blend with the rough sucking I received from my first gobbler of cock. I look to the drinking bat."I must think on you a name later, my friend. I must get this sordid tale out of my head. Not knowing what to do I stood unmoving before that temple door. She gave me an exasperated huff and went to work divesting me of trousers. Then into her mouth, quick as feast-day sweet, went my cock. How I did not pop my spume at that first tonging touch I will never know. Luckily, she only held me within her mouth for a few moment to wet my rod then back she went onto the spilled sheets, pulling me with her. Her hand was between us and with a skilled touch she directed the coupling of us, sex to sex. Into that wet grotto I plunged for the first time! Oh, even after a thousand such breaching I can still feel that first one. Nature and her guiding hand took me into that eternal rhythm, and I plied her gash with the very vigor of my youth. Her incessant, vapid laughter the only thing that caused me distraction. Which is to the good, since that distraction made that first time a joining of minutes, instead of seconds. Looking down at the drying words, I see my little friend move over to the page and lick away an "e" before I can stop him. "Here now, none of that!" scooping him up I bring him up before my face. "YOU, may drink your fill of the ink only when it is not on the page, do you understand?" His little dark eyes look at me. "I'm questioning a bat," I say to myself, softly. "So its come to that." Placing him gently back by the dried pool, I give him more of my "ink" then pick back up the quill I had let drop to catch him. I see the tip of the quill splatter the bottle of the page. I catch the drops blood and scratch out my signature with them before they can dry, then I move back above that swirling jumble of letters to finish this tale. Father and two of his men, one my father's reeve, arrived at that moment. Me there, with Burdock nettles stabbing me in the hip, and my cock to the hilt in a woman of his employ and he picked that moment to ride up. He said not a word, simply sat his horse looking at my naked buttocks. Then, when fear had made my cock shrink to the size of a piece of mezze maniche, he got down and walked to stand next to me. The maid was a scramble to push me off her but I was rooted to the spot as it where. The foulness of the next memory washes through my mouth. I bring my bleeding left wrist to my mouth and drink the red flow to kill the taste of the humiliation that still lurks there. "Do you know what my father did? My kind father, my gentle father, a man never known to raise his voice." The bat looks up at me, hearing my voice directed at it. "He placed his hunting boot on my ass and shoved me back down into her cunt. Then he took his riding crop and beat me to make me fuck her!" Unimpressed or uncomprehending...or more likely just still hungry, my friend goes back to his meal. I get up and leave him to finish it. Walking over to the river, I gaze out at it's murky water as my memories bring back the harsh commands of my father. "Fuck her! Fuck the whore! You wish to act like a man, then do as a man would and fuck!" I close my eyes to the memories of the Reeve laughing. Of the Guards' course suggestion of a spur up my arse to help speed me along. I tighten my hand on the hilt of my rapier, relishing their long ago deaths by my hand. All of them. Guard. Reeve. My...father. Killed, all dead by this very sword. By my blood stained hands. A soft weight lands on my shoulder. Looking, I see a sanguine smile. "Had your fill?" ~squeak~ "I found your name. You are Stygie le Brix." I scratch him under his bloody chin, as we watch the horizon for a sunrise...that will never come. Not to this place. "par la mort de dieu." Solstices Obscurity "Dusk" Ch. 03 That moment when you realize you have sat, poised to write, for the better part of the night and not written a word. That terribly dreadful moment when you must slice meaty chunks from your emotion torn heart and let them come to lay up a blank page to be inspected like so much butcher shop meat. When tears darken the paper more than ink. It's funny...when you're dead, that moment can last for decades. That's what this night feels like already and I can tell it had only just begun. The blank page is accusing me of procrastination. It may very well be right, but then who can blame me, most people can not even come close to remember the moment of their births it was so traumatic. That searingly horrible event horizon of bright light spiking into eyes that have never known light. A scream of pain as nerves that have never know anything but warmth experiencing the bone chilling cold of the world. Cover in bloody, and wet from the womb we all emerge into a world where we are already dieing. Tiss only the love of family that keeps newborns from becoming insane. I close my eyes to the biter memories of when I lost that famille love, and all for those few moments of banal pleasure in the arms of a whore. Tasting bile, I apply quill to page and let it scratch in a viperous manner.. Father had me and the maid taken to the stables, her across the withers of a guard's horse. Her open, sex-wet cunt being subject to his finger play the whole way no doubt. Me? I had not so gentle a journey. A rope was passed around my feet and, with my trousers still around my knees, I was dragged behind my father's horse. The broken rocks and knife-bladed grasses cutting and tearing at my skin as I tumbled on the end of that rope. Would that such a minor scourging was all the pain that I felt that day. But alas no. Upon arrive at the stable, Father ordered me hung from a rafter beam, my hands tied and the hook the grooms lift tack into the loft with passed through the knot. When my feet were just brushed the ground, I was left to beg forgiveness from an unhearing, uncaring world, while Father had his horses taken care of and he dealt with the maid. He cursed her, reviled her, "The very whore of Babylon herself!" Then, to my horror, that gentleman did what I would have never thought him capable of. He turned his guards and stablemen lose upon her. Swinging on my hook, like the very caught fish I was, I protested her rape. Her screams as they took her were daggers into my ears and the sight of her ravishment was like leaches upon my eyes. While I kicked at the air and screamed words that were unheeded, they took her, one after the other in a very orgy of violation. Filling her with load of male seed, after load of seed till her cunt ran with white foam. Calmly, as if the maid's screams were nothing new to him, Father walked over to me. In an equally calm voice he explained why he was doing what he was doing. She could not now claim that the bastard conceived baby, that must be even now taking root in her womb, was a child of this family. His family. Better this sordid rumor, and the light scandal that it would bring, than the more humiliation loss that accusation would have wrothed. He had no intentions of letting a bastard have a claim to his estate. "Most certainly not one as ill-got as you. I will not have such as you take my place." Mindlessly, I mumble the words. That few collection of such terrible words with which my father sealed so many fates that ill-fated day. Mine, the maid's, his own, his guards, the Reeves, my mother's...so many lives to be devastated and destroyed over such few words. It should take many more to do the incontestable levels of damage that those few did...but then every avalanche begins with but a single snow flake. Every flood is but a drop of rain and its friends. How like hot irons those words seared me. But not so much as the lashes of that carters whip! The sharp flaying knife of one of Father's huntsmen sliced away my clothes, while I tried to wiggle away from it, succeeding in only causing myself to be cut by its edge. My feet were then tied together and to a heavy weight, a spare wagon axle, that was put beneath me and then with callous disregard I was soon stretched tight as a fiddle bow between weight and rafter. Then the blows of that whip began to land. Oh, to pristine virgin skin, that had never felt more than the birch rod of a school masters ire, that leather whip was living torture. White hot lines of fire that sprung up from a point of shock then burned to the bone, a lingering fire to be quickly replaced with another such point of shock. A bit of my torn clothes was stuffed into my mouth after the first few and tied in place with the lacing off my doublet. The raw cordage biting into the corners of my mouth fiercely. Over and over and over rained the blows. I screamed and was ignored as easily as the cries of the maid were still being ignored. I looked over at her, laying there now stripped to skin and stockings and found her eyes upon me. Eyes filled with hate and with a relishing of pleasure as she enjoyed the site of my whipping. My face wet with tears, my mouth stuffed with gagging clothe, my back alight with parquetry patterns of flame, I writhed and twisted. Doing nothing more for my struggles than giving them whip more fresh skin to taste. And the humiliation! I shut my eyes to the grinning faces of my fathers people, who one and all seemed to be enjoying the sight. The thrice damnable misery of it was that I could not keep them shut, the blows of the whip would send them springing open wide. It also seemed that after every such moment of self imposed darkness the numbers of people watching would have grown. First just the few guards, the Reeve and the stablemen, but then there would be others and still the blows of the whip landed, and then more and more lines of fire. Leaning back from my page I reach up and touch my hand to the pocket of my doublet, feeling the warm little bundle sleeping within. Stygie must think me his mother and that pocket his haven against the evils of this place. So be it. If I can keep one thing safe then I have done my singular angelic deed for my...unlife. "Father's arm grew tired." I tell my little friend, not that he stirs at my words. He sleeps the deep sleep of the contend and happily fed. Such a sleep as I knew when I was a child. "But not his anger. he turned the blood drenched whip over to his stableman, the one often given the task of breaking unruly draft horses to a yoke." Father directed the whipping to continue til the bastard begged. I was already doing such begging, had been doing it since the first blow...but then I understood. It was not the begging but the bastard part I would have to acknowledge. Oh, how my pride arose to fight that pain then. I was a Gascony born! His true son! But pride verses a whip? The winner of such a ballet of macabre was preordained. It was only after Father left to go take his lunch and I was left to dangle with the whimpers of the still being ravaged maid for my comfort did I get some relief. And that was so incredibly short, for he was not long departed when one of his guards took back up the whip. I shook my head and tried to pull away, causing nothing more than a swaying that tore at my wrists. I cried out when he ran the handle of the whip down my back; the hard knob of knotted leather a burning brand against raw skin. Laughing, he spun me around to face him. His eyes looked me up and down, a smirk bespeaking his mouth. With his chin he pointed me towards the maid, who was being taking in the way of the sodomite at that moment. Can you imagine how much that must hurt he asked, then with a laugh he let me spin back. I shook my head frantically when I felt the handle of that whip pressed between my cheeks of my arse. Even the gag could not contain the scream the moment of my impalement brought forth. The laughter of the gather crowd burned but not so much as that invasion. Looking down, I see a pair of glass-like eyes looking up from within the darkness of my pocket. I smile at the tiny fangs that appear with his yawn. "Away at last slowcoach? Let me guess your answer is going to be...squeak." ~Squeak~ "Exactly." Leaning back, I ponder the irony of that long ago day. How impossible is the fact that I received both my first and second feel of fellatio upon my cock in the same day, from the same woman, but that she would do it once for pleasure and then for bitter spite. That once should be gentle, if unremarkable, and the next so brutal. Scrape and scratch goes my quill. Even as I felt my bowels clutching to rid themselves of that hard intrusion, the guard called to his friend the stableman, who laughingly dragged the exhausted, cunt-sore, hay-besmirched maid over to where I hung. Give the Lord's son a suck, they ordered. Do it and we will let you go, they promised. She looked up at me with such hate, such terrible hate. Then her mouth was upon me, but not with the gentle sucking of before...no. She gnawed at my cock as if to bite it free of my body. Her teeth clamping down. Laughing, the guard took hold of the end of the whip and pulled me around in an ever widening circle, making her stumble to follow. My anus burned at such rough treatment even as her sucking drew hardness into my cock. Finally the guard pulled too hard and she was slung off me with a horrid raking of her teeth down my flesh. In that moment to things happened. The whip came free...and my father returned. I scratch my fingernail behind Stygie's pointed ears. "So what did father see? Me hanging there, the guard with the whip in his hand, the maid upon the floor at my feet and me...with my cock hard as an iron bar!" Bitter memories of Father's disgusted look come rushing back. Pulling the bat from my doublet, I toss him into the air. To get it clear of me least I hurt him. In a rage, I walk to the edge of the river and start throwing large rocks into the water. "Vile! Perverted! Retch! No son of mine! No descendant of my bloodline! Churlish son of rutting swine! To grow hard from a whipping? Well, such will be your fate after this day! May you enjoy all such beating so, you mewling pernicious fiend, who took my child from me. Foul Doppelganger!" Turning, I see the soul of a young woman standing but a few feet behind me. Her delicate hand raised to cover her mouth. My eyes take in the honest charms of her naked flesh. I smile at her. "And with those words my father, my once so beloved by me father, sold me...his eldest son, the very flesh of his flesh, into sexual slavery." She brought both hands up to cover her mouth, but then noticing my interest in her body assumed Botticelli's "pose de Venus" one hand over breasts, one over cunt. The pure innocence of her face, the artlessness of her beauty, that virginal Simon-pure air of modesty. Oh, how all of those things make my cock rise to full staff and the often benighted lust, that has quicken my blood so many times, begins to reheat. My lips pull back in a dreadful smile, even as the images of what her face will look like in mid-ravishment come to me. I stop towards her only to hear the wood on stone sound of Charon's boat arriving at the end of the stone quay. The splash of his ore heavy in the murky waters. I wonder then what he would do, that grim conveyor of souls, should I take this prize from him? Take it and put it to such felicitous use before his ever-watching, soulless eyes. What would be the result? Would he leave his boat to try and stop me? Oh, would that he would do that! Such a fight I would relish. I glance towards him, standing there all dreadful looking at the helm of his rancid craft. Or would he rather watch, the unliving voyeur of death, uncaring of her suffering. Or maybe he would simply row away, leaving her to her fate in my hands... I look down at my hands, besmirched with my bloody ink. How thin, how deep the bone ache. How many days have I been writing? "Don't miss your boat ride, " I tell her, turning away from this innocent morsel before I consume her all. Slowly savoring every bite. "I'm sorry, for what your father did to you," she says in a whisper, "That was wrong." Then there is a soft patter of bare feet as she rushes to catch the boat away from me and this dismal place. The pity of one so innocent burns far more than the blows of that long ago whipping, the ache is no greater nor less than the ache my anus felt at that first rude invasion. But even her pity cannot equal what I felt when my father left me to his Reeve...to sell to a brothel, far over the waves. In a foreign land, where rumor of such an act could never make its way back to haunt him. As I watch the boat, with its single passenger, being poled away, my fingers close tight around the hilt of my rapier. The wire bound leather biting into my hand. "Or so Father thought," I whisper. I look down to see Stygie le Brix land on my shoulder. He looks up at me and squeaks a question about his rude earlier departure. Unable to answer, I watch the boat taking innocence away till it disappears from sight. "par la mort de dieu." Solstices Obscurity "Dusk" Ch. 04 "I know you." Looking up from my contemplation of a lizard crawling over my boot, I see a young man, naked like all such here except for me, standing a half dozen feet from me. "You're that scoundrel that betrayed the king!" He was pointing his finger at me like he needed to some how single me out in that massive crowd of one I was standing in. "Which king would that be? I can easily recall at least three that I have betrayed. Not that it matters, one royal cock of an arse is no better than the next. Their Majesties are one and all a collective pustular hemorrhoid upon the face of humanity." His face goes flush red at that. I sigh, it's going to be one of those. "Sir, I would beseech you to begone. Your peasants yammer is already vexing me with its lack of civilized tones, while the smell of your entrenched royal-loyalty is sickening and your obvious and tedious morality offends. You, sir, are in short, making my rapier itch something fiercely. Go wait for the boat like all the other plebeians and bother me no more." I wave a hand to shoo him away, and turn back t watching this lizard. By far and away a better conversationalist than the peasant. It was the warrior's instinct that turns me back around in time so that I duck my head out the way of the branch he picked up from by his feet. As that cudgel passed over head my sword cleared its scabbard. "Misbegotten son of a whore!" He shouts at me. "I'll do you right and proper for what yous did!" I let the tip of my blade snake a line of red up his cheek. "To begin with, my mother was many things, a whore however was not among them. She was at times a slave, both to fashion, certainly to drink, often to the consumption of opiates and of course to the pricks of a few men." My blade moved like a viper, to prick his shoulder, as he took another swing and it too missed. "But for the likes of you, son of a peasant farmer and a village slattern no doubt, to call me misbegotten is such an absurdity that I will not let it stand." My blood rising to a gentle boil, I felt alive! Yes, this was what I had been missing sitting here penning my life into those empty pages. The roar of the warrior's heart in your ears, that fierce thunder in your temples, the mad dash here and there. Would that this fool had a sword and not a stick, so that this could be prolonged and thus more enjoyable. The outcome was never in question, not from beyond his first swing but at least it would have been a diversion. Across the muddy, brackish pools of scummy water to the quay and out onto those slimy rock I drive him. Back and back till his feet were but inches from the end of the pier. Not willing to let him go easily, I lined up the point of my sword and drove its needle like sharpness between the bones of his forearm, right behind his wrist. As his club fell, from numbed fingers into the water, my poniard clears it sheath and I sent its point low and with hellish force into his crotch! His scream, when the blade sank to its full length, was a delicious music. He leaned his head in weeping upon my shoulder like a jilted lover might. Looking past his oily hair, I saw Charon approaching, pushing his pole into the deep muck of the river Styx. He was a good dozen yards from the quay. Pulling back from him, I looked into the face of this Jacobite fool. "You are less than the most common roach crawling under my foot. Did you for some reason think that simply because you were dead all would be equal between you and a noble born? That a peasant with a stick would be a match for one born with a sword for a birthright?" I give the dagger a twist making him scream again. "You see it is that very kinda of thinking that has you with a poniard for a pintle." Somewhere he found the wherewithal to spat at me, his face flush with pain and rage. "You'll get yours in the end, Bastard!" "Trust me, fool, my "end" has been more than gotten." Looking past him at a pair of hollow eyes, I grimace. "Your boat is here." Planting my boot into his gut, I yank my blades free and kick him off the end of the pier. He falls shrieking to the icy water, clutching at the side of Charon's boat as he falls past it. He grabs again for the side when he resurfaces and begins to try to pull himself up. Then he is suddenly caught from underneath and with a scream of terror and pain is sucked down into those so appropriately named, Stygian depths. I look to Charon, leaning there on his pole looking at me so very ominously. I give a half shrug. "Oops." Dismissing the Dread Ferryman and his ire, I head back to my tree stump. Looking at the red glut upon my blade, I pick up my quill and wet the tip. "Waste not, and thou shall want for not after all," I mutter to myself. When I apply the tip to the page, I watch in rapt fascination as the sanguine ink rolls off the page like a bead of water down the back of a geese, leaving not a trace of its passing. I try again and again to write with the blood from my blade but it will take no root upon the vellum page. Dropping my rapier, I wipe the point of my dagger across the side of the tree stump, letting the moss clean it. Then I stick it into the old wound on my wrist, reopening it. A dip of the quill. Well of all the most bitter of ironies! Ha, ha, ha! Oh, Fate you cunning bitches three!" With a laugh and a shake of my head I sit down upon my stump and begin to write in earnest. While I have ink, and before my winged friend shows up to put in a claim upon it, I will try to pen down a few moments of what happen after that fearful beating in the stable. Pain! I was in the greatest agony I had up until that point in my life felt. Would that I had known of the tortures that were to come, in the nadir years, I would have cozened that agony as a golden moment of joy. As it was, I was bemoaning my situation in a most contemptible way. They cut me down from the hook, and left me naked, crying upon the floor in the minute detritus of old soiled hay and horse manure, while they arranged my mode of travel. A sack. A sack of rough cloth, that had till just before the moment it was place over me been the home of a uncountable number of turnips. In the coming years I would never again be able to eat another turnip. I would, by far and away, rather starve than to take a single bite of one. Forever ingrained into my mind is the smell of turnips with my enslavement. I retch at the very odor. In that revoltingly odoriferous confinement, I was carried and rudely tossed upon a wagon and then, with many a shriek of pain by me when we hit poorly laid cobblestone or mud ruts in the road, I was taken from my home. Those screams would be quite often met with heavy "thwacks" of a large drovers stick and rough curses to be silent, or that a more vigorous beating that the last would be administered. Now, given that my back was a red whelp of agony, I did indeed ride in as much silence as I could endure. Hearing a flutter, I look down to see my dear friend licking at the bloody blade of my rapier. "Careful now, that is not so gourmet a meal as you have become accustom to, of late. More in the nature of black-bread and beans, than succulent roast of peacock. And mind you the vintage is more than a bit off, so come not to me, Stygie, with a sour stomach. I will give no sympathy to said sad plight, thou hath been forwarned." ~"Squeek."~ "Of course, your answer for everything." I was biting that befouled sacking, between clinched teeth to keep from screaming, long before we reached our destination. The eternal reek of the seaport began to make its way through the overpowering smell of turnip and gave me some idea what was going to come to pass. Still when the wagon stopped and I was, still in my sack, dragged from the back, and allowed to fall upon the docks I lost my breathe. Then, while I still struggle to drawn air, I was lifted from the fish-smelling stone quay, passed hand by hand and taken aboard a ship I was never to see. In a sack I was taken aboard it and it was in a sack, the same turnip smelling rag, that I was later removed. "Would that I had remained in that sack the whole time. How much fairer a journey that would have been." Looking out over the river, I wish I could close my nostrils to that smell of it. So many filthy memories to be had, while enveloped in that smell of dank water. I look around at the shadowed realm around me, the slimy pier with its empty or often crowded surface jutting out into the brackish sludge that is Styx. I look at the reflected eye-shine from a dozen pairs of demonic eyes. They watch me from the darkness, from behind other tree stumps like mine. They watch, but come no closer to me. The wandering souls they will often pull down and devour bloodily, but me they give a wide birth. I dip the quill with distaste and try to pen down one of the more retched times I had...well, up until that point anyway, in my sordid life. The ship sailed just hours later with me laid in the hold like so much bulk cargo. the sway of the ship, an unknown thing to me till that point, churned my stomach even as that continuing smell of turnips brought bile to my lips. Then I heard laughter. Coarse, rude laughter. Voicing profane suggestions in a language I did not speak fluently, but knew enough of to gather their intent. Kicking, fighting, trying will all my might to pull free of them when they emptied me from that sack, achieved me nothing so much a rougher handling, a hard punch to the gut and the face and a mouth full of blood. Then a hammer like punch into my crotch! Gasping for air from the low blow, I was dragged to a near by barrel and laid over it. I tried to fight their hands but their strength was that of men that worked the sea. Hands, hardened by salt and wood and endless days of adjusting sails, were like mahogany next to my own. My body, still naked from the earlier beating and abuse, rubbed on the barrel wood as they held me to it. Hard, splintery coarse-cut wood, they dug into the skin. I found myself looking into the grinning, bearded face of the man who held my wrists. He made kisses at me and winked. Then there were hard hands on my hips! Warm, hairy legs pressed into the backs of my thighs, and then harsh hands were taking hold of my arse cheeks, spreading me wide. I close my eyes to the memory of that moment of first intrusion in vane hope that I shan't recall it in such perfect detail. That rough taking of my anus, already wounded by the whip handle, by that foreign sailor's cock. The mocking laughter of the man that held me as I screamed. His grinning mouth, two teeth missing, I remember it so clearly. The burning pain, the hard rod, the tight grip of his hands one on my hip the other upon my shoulder, pulling me to him to make his cock go deeper. That terrible stretching that I felt myself doing to accommodate him. "And would that it had just been the one." I tell Stygie. He looks up at me all sanguine mouthed. " That could have been born." In what seemed like endless hours to follow I was taken, down there in that dark of that stinking ship's hold. My nose filed with the scent of old brine. By how many? Well I think the whole crew had a go at least once, that first time. When my feeble attempts to resist gave way to exhausted capitulation they let go of my hands. But a passive receptacle wasn't enough for a few of them, they wanted, relished hearing me scream. I was again whipped, this time with a knot-ended length of rope. It gave them the screams they desired, then when they were at their aroused hardest they would take me like a ravaging beast. Rough, quick and with utter brutality toward their mate of choice. Soon in their hole of chose as well. A fact that still brings rage to my eyes. No amounts of later fellatio, both forced and freely give, will ever drown away those first times. The smell of them. Their obvious gleeful joy at the rape of my mouth. Their sadly predictable jokes about the French making love with their faces I unfortunately understood all to well. And should my teeth touch their flesh in the slightest, I was again beaten with the the rope. In the long days and endless nights of that voyage I was trained by them. Trained in a dismally brutal school of the male to male fuck. "But certainly no more brutal than the schooling that was to come, when that voyage ended." I look down at my furry friend. "Only more remember for its begin the first such." ~"Squeak...belch!"~ "I did warn you my friend." I tell him when he makes a sad sound and licks at him lips with his minute tongue. "My own unwanted feast on sailor's smelly flesh was no less disdainful, or sickening to the stomach. But it did end." Looking up, my mind flickering with the memories of those fist glimpses of the place I had to call home for five years of my life, I take noticed of the fact that the landscape around me is grown more shadowed. A deepening of the mercurial dusk that has enveloped this place since my arrival. bending down, I pick up my bat and hold him close to my chest. "Stygie le Brix, my grumble-bellied friend, I do believe that night has truly fallen." "par la mort de dieu."