1 comments/ 3422 views/ 3 favorites Solstices Obscurity "Nightfall" Ch. 01 By: Unrequited_Evil "You! Out of my way, fool! You..hey! I'm talking to you!" As those cold dead eyes shift to me most would falter under that dread gaze, but not me. Not The Bastard. I quell before the eyes of none, living or dead. "Good of you to take note that I was addressing you, swine." I walk down the quay till I'm almost stepping into his boat. He moves to bar my way, as he did the first day I arrived here. The day he handed me this journal that I thrust back into his face. "I don't want on your putrid craft, ferryman. Though my pocket are filled with coins I would not waste a single one to travel to where you're taking these trusting fools. Unlike them I don't care about a golden afterlife. Nor a burning lake of fire. I simply need to know how I'm to write in these wretched pages when I can't see the quill before my eyes? It is as black as the deepest parts of Satan's anus here, when you're not at the dock. What do I use to see by?" There was a sound from within his robe then. The first sound I have heard him make. It was a soft breathy noise, less than a whisper loud. This wretched fucker was laughing at me? Me! My hand dropped to the hilt of my rapier lightning quick, but before the blade could clear sheath his hand was on my wrist stopping the draw. My teeth drew back in a rictus, skull-like grimace as I struggled against that unmovable grip. His laughter died when set to match against my fury. From within his robe his other arm arose and before my eyes he held the stub of a candle. His face turned from mine to the lantern behind him. Then he looked back at me. I understood, but didn't agree "A single candle? That will help for all of an hour, then be nothing more than wasted wax, " told him, my need to draw blade not truly lessening. Slowly his hooded head moved side to side. Releasing my wrist, he turned and lit the candle in his lamp. The light from that single flame should have been as nothing, but it blazed bright enough that I saw the shadowed outlines of a face within his cowl. A grim countenance, of a man long lost to thing like sunlight and skies of azure. He thrust the flame out to me, pushing me back as I tried to peer closer. I take the little stub of a candle and move, backing away from him. The lost souls waiting on their passage, to whatever is coming next in their benighted lives, move to board the watercraft only once I've gotten out the way. Carrying my little spark, I move back to my tree stump and picked up my quill. I don't even wince as I reopen my wrist for ink. I guess I'm fortuitous in that that such a common born bastard of a Reeve as my father employed took the time to sell me straight to the owner of the foreign brothel. I was spared the humiliation of the slave auction. The indignity of standing nude on the block, while other humans who think themselves so better than what they buy, tell you how little your life has value. No the wagon, with the wood lattice bars between me and freedom, took me past just such a place on my way from the dock to the gilded-lead and white-stone building that would be my home and prison for the next two years of my life. I close my eyes for a moment, wanting to push back those bitter memories. But I can't. I have to relive them to put them in these pages. I look around in the dark for my flying friend, wishing for even his meager company while I remember those terrible days. But alas Stygie is off somewhere else in this deepening murk. I was washed that was first. The stink of the ship and the sailor's abuse was scoured from my skin. Water flowed from hoses, drive by hand pups, to hit my skin with stinging pressure. Then, no matter what protest I made, such a hose was jammed into my arse. The cold brass nozzle a viscous pain given the rough usage I had been enduring in that normal place of egress. The warm water, almost soothing at first, filled me till I screamed at the cramps and could hold no more. They then washed away the earthy detritus from my arse and legs and did it again. And again. Till I was quite sure I must soon vomit out those befouled waters from my mouth. Still whimpering from that treatment I was dragged, boneless a filleted fish, to a table where I was then subjected to an even more foul procedure. All the hair, with the exception of my head was ripped from my flesh with a mixture of clothe strips and scalding hot wax. It was, I soon learned to my dread, to be a common thing for me to have to endure. Glancing down at my arm, I take note that the hair has never returned to the backs of my hands. Even all these years later I remain all but shorn over most of my flesh. Looking around, how black the night seems to be settling in and how quickly I'm being engulfed by it now that Charon has pole his boat away. I keep thinking it can grow no darker then it does, and then does again a few moments later. Darkness knows no peer outside of the pits of hell. Beyond here what we think of as dakness is but common shadow. Emptied, fleeced, and then given water I was left for an hour to bemoan my fate. Then I was whipped. No simple lashing, no leather carter's whip or sailor's knotted rope. A lash of the smoothest silk, dipped into water, taught me that terrible morning the true meaning of pain. It taught me suffering on levels I had never known was even possible, then I was educated further. I was take to levels of agony where a human mind can break, and then be broken over and over. And it was done with no malice, or cruelty. It was simply a way to train me. The way a horse would be broken to saddle and cart. And just like that horse my spirit finally broke. I begged, I pleaded, I cajoled my keepers to let me show them I would do anything they wished me to do. That had of course been just what they had been waiting for. With the threat of a far worse beating hanging Sword of Damocles like over me I was enslaved to my own fear of pain. If not eagerly, I with no hesitation did as they asked... I spit into the darkness at the memories of debasing myself to those foreign fiends. Oh, there can be no doubt of what I did. I became a whore. No, less than that. They dressed me as a woman. I guess there can be happiness that I was of such advanced age, when I was when sold, it probably saved my cods from being clipped. Once I learned the language I learned of the horrors that befell the eunuchs that guarded the slave quarters of the women. Such could have easily been my fate. My boyishly handsome face, and noble-breeding gave me a grace from that tortured tonsured life at least. I was taught to make coffee. To this day, second only to turnips and that by a small margin, is a smell so unendurable nauseating to me. I was instructed in the preparation of the ground beans. In how to serve it without spilling a single drop, an offense that warranted a terrible beating, and one that could mean the life of a slave if it was to drop on a patron. It was once I had mastered brewing that foul juice that I was given instructions in how to use my mouth to service the drinker. No matter how repugnant I found it I keep all such distaste from my face. Dressed in woman's clothes, with my face makeup besmeared, my hair tricked into the latest styles for the male-courtesan-whore I would kneel, lift their robes and take them into my mouth. I became quite skilled at it, to avoid the lashings that a complaint would give. I took them all into my mouth, teeth cover with my lips to guard against the least scratch. Young men, old men it mattered not. I pleasured them all. Even the rare woman was given to my lips to please. Though I came to dread it when they appeared. Hooded and veiled they would be escorted in, served and then all but myself would be removed. My instructions simple. Do what they asked. No questions. Oh yes, that was a normal thing as well. Other than for male pleasure, and to scream when I failed at that, my throat was not to be used. Then men would enviably have been to the bathhouse next door before they arrived to drink coffee. Some were even sated from their encounters there with the anuses of more common bathhouse slaves, a fate I was often threatened with, and wish nothing more than alight sucking from me. More desert than main course. Others came here first and I was their appetizer. They were often foul of smell and taste, but I did not let it show upon my face that I thought such. Not after a full day of enduring silk whip lashings for one such slip of the tongue. But the ladies...they were never more than a more pleasant face to look upon. Their quims were invariably foul and their manners towards a slave such as myself, dressed as they themselves were, were often brutal. As if they wished to punish me for looking better in their sex's raiment than Nevertheless, that training in licking the putrefactive gashes of the women that came for coffee stood me well in the decade to come when I had to apply those same lips to the cunts of the queens and mistresses of the kings of Europe. How often was praise given to my skill at bring their foul smelling wombs to paroxysmal spasm. Little did those pernicious over pampered cunts know that those same skilled lips they so enjoyed and praised could have pleasured their husbands far more than they ever could have. Letting the feathered quill fall from my fingers, I look unseeing at these words. Trapped in years of horror those memories seemed to stretch out decades long in my memories. Hours became days, days weeks and oh how endlessly long the simple passing of one moon seemed. Turning away from teh journal, I gorge up nothing...but wish it could be the phantom memories of ten thousand of spendings. That many at least filled my mouth in the endless day, after day that was that place. How strange that a youth born of nobility was kept a slave, not a stones throw from the palaces of the Ottoman Kings. Men my family could, through much twisting and inter breeding, trace our family linage out to. But then that should be no surprise I guess. My family had been fucking me raw since that time with the maiden. Leaving my endlessly burning candle, I walk away into the darkness hoping it consumes me. I should know better. Not even the darkness of Hell could stomach to retain such as I. Why else was I, Reynold the Bastard, spat out? Regurgitated amid so much bile, upon this retched shore. "par la mort de dieu." Solstices Obscurity "Nightfall" Ch. 02 A single candle, and ten thousand shining eyes to watch its light. That's the way I feel now, siting here in my pool of light. I now only know when there are souls on the quay when I hear them scream, as the demons take one of them, or when Charon arrives and his lantern lights their frightened faces. Occasionally one of them comes to try and congregate at my light, but not as often as I would have thought they would. I can only guess but that they fear the evil that they can see, more than the evil that hides looking at them from the darkness. Stygie la Brix likes the candle. He will sit on my hand, draped across my wrist and sniff at the flame. Sometimes he like to dive at it, to make the flame flicker with puffs of air off his little black wings. Silly bat...but such simple amusements give him pleasure. Who am I to judge? I wish so simple a thing as flickering candle could amuse me. I pick up my quill. The faces of the patrons of the coffee house were after two years a blend of similar features. We often saw the same people two or even three times in a week. So I became jaded to what the men, and occasional women, I served looked like. They were all cocks or cunts, it mattered not. Till the day she arrived. "Oh, she was no goddess." I tell Stygie as he flutters around my head and makes a dive at the candle. "No, not when I had the acquaintance of her. By then she was a matronly women, late in her years and giving to eating far too may pastry." But I knew her face, and more to the point she knew mine. She had been a friend and contemporary of my mother's. When her eyes, above those plump cheeks, took first one look, then two at me I recognized her and she me. Now she was in the company of a wealthy woman of the Ottoman Turks and this coffee house visit was to be a decadent treat to her, this woman from the land of France. So when the coffee was served and the anise cookies and sweetmeats were being nibbled on, I was ordered to give her the normal slave's kiss. Oh, how her eyes devoured my face when I went to my knees before her. She began to protest what I was doing but the Turkish woman next to her laughed at her prudish friends modesty and told her to let me work "My Magic" upon her delicacies With those familiar eyes still boring a hole in my face she relented and I rolled back her long dress from her feet to expose her plump calves, knees, and thighs. Then, when her thatch cover slit made an appearance, I leaned in and began to apply my skills. Ignoring as I did the retched stench of her. "I know not what it is, my wigged friend, that makes the ladies of growing age neglect their quims so shockingly. Her's was the very bramble patch of wiry hairs and had the smell of a bog marsh in summer. Actually, rather similar to the smell of this river come to place it. But by that point after, two years of servitude I was so immured to anything so simple as smelly quim, that I performed up on her flawlessly. So it was that by the time her Turkish companion, far more familiar with such entertainments and who had more easily relaxed and simple enjoyed it had herself already spent, she, the lady rotund, came with a ferocity of voice that it shook incense dust form the rafters." ~Squeek~ "Exactly. Boisterous indeed. And then she nearly snapped my poor neck with her great thighs! Slamming them shut as she did upon my head in surprise at the feeling of exstacy I gave to her. Oh, you laugh but I was in a dire predicament. Her lady companion also thought it the very height of hilarity." In the days to follow, I was to receive a second visit from that lady. This time she came alone to the coffee house, and when all but I had been remove to allow her privacy she spoke to me. In our native French, a language so sweet to hear after those years of gutters hacking tones that I wept, she asked me if I was Reynold, the son of the Peer of Gascony, the man-child heir thought dead and buried two years now gone by. When I confirmed that I was, she asked me how I can to be here in this land of the Turks, a slave? When I told her she was furious. Furious at my father for what he had done. Then she told me of my family and what had transpired in my absence. My younger brother elevation to heir, his fortuitous wedding to a lady of quality and wealth. My father's growing power in the camp of the King since gasping access to that wealth. Oh, how my very soul burned to hear those things. To hear of the good fortune of the very one that had sold me into this retched existence. It was an old hate given new life and breath! Seeing the effect of her words frightened her for a moment, but then I began to use the very skill of the slave, that ability to hide what you really feel and do what is ordered. I charmed her. How a voice so unused as mine was then, could have accomplished that feat I know not, but I did it. She promised to help me get out of there if she could, and at the least, if I could manage to join her in Greece, where she maintained a simi-im-permanent residency, that she would help me get back to France. Once there she promised to school me in just how to ply my troth-of-villainy, before the ear of the King. A confident of hers. "Oh, my little furry friend if you could have been witness to what I did to her then. If she thought my paltry effort to please her the time before had been wonderful, I made it pale in pitiful example to the fierce tonguing I gave to her briny twat. She yelled so loudly the guards came running, thinking I was murdering her. Then they left laughing at her embarrassed shooing of hands, even as I brought her to a third and fourth quaking of her plump thighs and a shattering of nearby ears. In truth i may have been the one with the slave marks upon me, but at that moment, I owned her. My rescuer to be was little more than a slave to my tongue." Looking at the riotous throng of glittering eyes out in the darkness, all looking back at me many filled with hate, I feel not a moment's apprehension. I've been in far worse places. "After she left me there, that spark of anger her words had ignited in me, was fanned by the normal indignities of a life of a slave. Fanned to a rage, that took all of my breeding to hold in check, even as my mind went back to the days of learning stratagems at my father's side. I knew I needed a plan, and I soon found one. That night, Stygie, when I left the chambers were the slaves slept, far earlier than I normally do, the guard questioned me not. Probably cause I sucked his cock raw to keep him quiet." Picking up the quill I drove it into the "ink well" and scratched fiercely at the parchment. I went down to the store rooms exactly as I had done every morning since my cowedness had earned me a soupcon of trust. The bags of coffee bean, spices, dried rose petals, the enormous supplies of lamp oil...all of these were part of that plan. The fire was part of that plan. The dagger I had slipped from the guard while he was spending in my mouth was part of the plan. The panicked madness, when the fire was discover to be raging under their very arses, that was part of the plan. "And that knife, driven through the teeth and into the throat of my owner that was so very much a part of the plan that I would have gladly died in the blaze, had it been required, to watch him gagging on Damascus steel as I had been gagged on so many cocks while in his vile, humiliating ownership." Looking away from those malicious watching eyes, I focus on the candle flame and see again the flames licking the sky from that burning coffee house as I fled into the night. At the smile that then graces my lips... ...all those eyes vanish in terror. "par la mort de dieu." Solstices Obscurity "Nightfall" Ch. 03 It rained piss for an hour. A rain so stinking and warm it could be nothing less than the very putrid bowel of Hell pouring urination upon this shore. The lost souls, huddled together in the darkness upon the pier, jabbered in their mindless way about the fact that they were getting wet. Naked, dead, and in Hell and they still find the so very human wherewithal to complaining about the weather...to others standing in the exact same deluge. Why I should care about it I know not, but I hid my journal under my jacket and endured the moistening in the dignified silence of the noble born. Let plebeian peasants bemoan the finicky whims of gods, fates, and nature. I was most concerned for the normally real possibility of the loss of my flame. But the fire ignored the piss drizzle and flickered on without any notable melting of the candle stub. Not that I fear the dark, nor the things crouched waiting in it. Three years in the dark tough me far too well how to endure that. Three year in a place that could reasonably be compared with this benighted shore. Beyond the edge of mortal death on the very edges of Hell. When the rain stopped falling out the darkness, I listened to the drop of single smelly tears falling from the nearby trees into puddles. Drip. Drip. Drip. Strangely enough I find that sound comforting. Homely, so achingly familiar to me it warms me even as my wet raiment bring forth a chill. And strangely I find myself in need of that comfort to write of what followed the burning of the coffee house. I tried to run of course. I was stupid. But then the city was in such chaos I figured that such would have been the perfect diversion to allow me to get clear of that place. No, all it did was put normally lackadaisical guards on their curled-shoe toes to be watching for just such as me. I was young and foolish and did the things that young and foolish men do. I went haring off with no plan, no forethought and no escape rout planned in the event things went eyry, which of course they almost immediately did. My flight for freedom brought me an even darker form of captivity. "That I was not put to death is a fact that has perplexed me for half my life." There was the word of the guard, that I had taken a dagger from him , the very one found lodged into the throat of the owner of the coffee house. A confession that I must laughingly note earned him a beating nearly as sever as my own. Oh and beaten I was to be sure. But by then I was no stranger to such. I endured it, holding onto that one fiery spark of revenge, as the wooden cudgels descended upon me in a blunt, bone-breaking rain. A rain that only ceased to fall when I was nearly dead and lost into darkness. And into darkness did I awaken. Darkness and pain. The pain was a familiar element to me by then, but the lack of light was new. I moved around the cell, I was in, with my hands trying to see. Hands that sent screams from my throat whenever I touched things due to the bones that were shattered in at least two fingers. "Hello, my new friend." I close my eyes as I remember that kind voice out the darkness. Yinsen, a man with no reason to be kind and every reason to take the meat scrap the jailors had thrown into the cell with him and derive what pleasure he could have from it. Instead he helped me to my feet and over to a rude bed of cloth, and rope. he felt my body and with apologies set broken bones to right. How many days did he care for my every need there in that cell? Long enough for bones to knit that had no braces to hold them steady. His hands were more often than not my braces. It would be him that kept me steady and in place till I began at last to heal. Yinsen. was the first man to whom I gave my body willingly. Not because I was ordered to, or threatened with torture, but because I wanted him to have some pleasure, and he gave me so much knowledge and compassion in return that I could never repay. There in that dark cell time had no meaning, judged only by the single bucket of gruel brought and passed through the hole in the door once per day. A bucket we would empty into aching bellies and refill from bursting bladders and bowels. "Never was sure if they emptied them or simply moved those retched buckets door to door. The contents didn't vary by much." I looked up at the near silent flap of wings and then laughed seeing a thoroughly drenched Styie la Brix land on my arm. "My benightly brother, thy art a besogged wretch indeed. Here, get thy furry self warm." When I pulled open my pocket, he crawled his way inside. "Wish you could have met my friend,Yinsen. He would have loved you. He had a pet rat, he would feed the pieces of meat that were too hard to chew." I stopped as memory failed me. "What was that worm-tailed beasts name?" When my bones healed it was his will that got me to my feet, there in that darkness. It was he that made me push through those bone searing levels of pain and move. No, more than move. He made me regain my strength. And in the days to follow to improve upon what I had once had. To get closer to the body I had before that first carter's whip beating in the barn under my father's hand. Then he taught me something I bless him for every time I draw blade. How to fight. Not the rough and tumble grab-as-grab-can of muddy peasants brawling but the nobleman's art of the sword. With two thin bed staves Yinsen, a former Captain of a Turkish nobleman's army, trained me with in how to fight. In the dark, with blade on blade, I learned to fight blind, to feel for the strike of my enemy, often before he even thought of it. Oh, I got far more bruises from him than I think even the guards ever delivered to me. We played with wooden staves all day, and each others "staves" all night. Yet, if he taught me a great deal I certainly taught him all the skills of a pleasure slave. The delicate art of the suck, the silky touch of fingers, when the hand must go firm; how to delay the orgasmic ending almost for eternity, till in the end a grown man will beg, like a broken-toyed child, for his lover to please allow him to cum. And it was in that moment, when those tears flowered and his cum finally was given to me, that I paid back his months of kindness. It was a matter that I could not leave repast as by that point in my life I was still burdened with a slaves mentality of give to get pain. Then came the day of light, and I saw his face for the first time. "He was a handsome man, though by no means visibly as extraordinary as I had found him to be there in the darkness. In that long endless night, when I nursed on his cock letting warm, veiny skin fill my mouth so completely, he had been so beautiful to me. A godlike man. Had that light shown me Prometheus himself with fiery bowl it would have still been a lessening." I listen, wishing to hear a single cricket in this dark murk. Any sound but that of growling demons and whimpering souls huddled on the stone quay. Even the splash of Charon's oar would have been welcomed since his lantern would have given some light to this stinking shore, at least for a moment. But then light does not always bring surcease from darkness. That day it certainly didn't. They beat us both, for the sick pleasure of beating already broken men and then, with his heels leaving red trails in the dust, took him from the cell, leaving me alone in the darkness. Alone to cry out for him, to cry out for mercy for him, for compassion. Finally, when my throat was screamed to the point it uttered no sound, I cried out for the one thing in the world that I believed my slave-trained mind had given up on forever. I cried out for God to save my friend. Looking up, I feel the first drops fall again, warm, wet and as stinking as the rain before. Folding the journal, I tuck in back into my jacket. "And that was my answer to that hoarse prayer to God, my dear Stygie. Warm piss." With a shake of my head, I listen for, but don't hear the desired for squeak from my friend. Looking into my pocket, I find him asleep in the darkness there. "Sleep well, my friend. I will watch over you." I place my hand over him. "Because there is no God to protect bats in the rain...or blind men crying in a cold, stone holes. Begging God to try and save a friend who was probably already dead by the time that prayer was being asked. Begging...not be left alone in the dark. No my somnambulist friend, there's no God to keep you dry, there was no God to save Yinsin then. And I think that the only God that exists in this unholy place...is pissing on us both and laughing about it." "par la mort de dieu." Solstices Obscurity "Nightfall" Ch. 04 "What is all this blathering disquietude?" Grabbing my candle, I vacate my tree stump to go investigate. As I near the stone pier I pause and a slow sanguine smile begins to cross my lips. There are hundreds of souls, gathering there. No even more than that perhaps as more seem to be arriving as I watch. They look to my light but unlike the majority of the souls that have come here, these men do not flinch back. My smile becomes a toothy grin. "War, oh thou scaly beast. Thy doth raise thine grim head again once more," I say in joyful glee. A single man, somewhat grimmer of vicissitude, approaches me. "Who are you?" he demands. Somewhat taken aback by his crassness, I look him over. Features plain yet rugged. Masculine. Strong in carriage, but not noble born. A certain inbred set of the eyes I've seen before. "British?" I ask, as my had strokes my thin chin. "I am not! I'm an American you French Pig! Now, who the hell are you and where is this place?" "American?" Confused I look him over again till I find understanding. "You're from the English colonies in the Americas." "I'm from Virginia, you Frog! You call me an English man again and I'll toss your fancy-dandy-arse into the river." Smiling, I look past him at the milling souls piling up faster and faster. A few seem to look at this man before me for guidance. So he was a leader of some kind. Even better. "You are dead, man from Virginia. Dead and likening already, your body has beginning to rot on some battlefield somewhere." My words tumble past the laughter I'm feeling. Unable to tell my truths from a jests he spits at my feet and starts for me, proving once again the stupidity of the common man. For stupid indeed is any man, noble or Jacobite born that naked as a babe lunges for a man with his hand already resting on a sword hilt. I run him through with ease. But he does not quit! Not even when my rapier blade is sprung from his back like a porcupine quill. Laughing at the fiery joy of finally meeting again a man with a spine, I let loose my sword and tumble into the mud with him, us both grappling for my dagger. I'm as giddy as a child with a new toy. "Yes! Give me a fight, I've been in such need of this!" I scream, as I drive the shorter blade into his vitals. Then others are upon us, trying to pull him from me, but I let them not. I skin my teeth into his throat and tear the skin and flesh away in such a gorgeous way. He screams and so do I. When I decide that others should join this rancorous, I slash around me with my dagger, letting the blade taste again the hot flesh of other men. Then my rapier is back in my hand, ripped from the man as he falls and I lay about with it. Piercing with that diamond tip the most obvious hanging of targets till as last I have a circle of men holding bloody crotches. "Come on! More! I want more! No?" With my mouth filled with copper I spit my bloody contempt at the throng. "What are you? Deserters who died with holes in your backsides? Come on, I am but one man and you are many!" I watch with a smirk as the ones I wounded crawl away towards the safety of the others. Out upon the river Charon's light has appeared and some of them are calling for him to come all the quicker. I laugh at that. Calling for the very devil to deliver them from a demon, as it were. Turning I look down at the first man I fought. He is not trying to crawl but to get to his feet to have a second go at me. I drop my weight on top of him and pin his arms into the mud, my face just over his. "Do not get on that boat. I know not where it goes, fighting man of Virginia, but it takes away souls like a sheepherder taking his flock to slaughter. Do not trust it." Why I of all people give him this warning I know not, but perhaps I find in him something worth admiration. He struggles under me for a second, and then goes still. "But if I'm dead then is that not the way to heaven?" "Or perhaps to Hell. Why go eagerly towards it not knowing which it will be?" I look at his bristled face. "I trust not to any priest's words in this place. Nor would I advise you to do so." For not better reason than I wish to, I kiss his lips. A gesture he pulls his face away from in disgust. I move just enough to shift my knee and ram it into his crotch. I grin in his face and revel at the scream of pain. Leaving the groaning man to be helped to his feet by the others, I watch from my tree stump as he foolishly boards the boat despite my advice to the contrary. I pick up my quill, and take advantage to a bloody split in my lip, to write. War, oh you sweet mistress, how I thank you. I thank you for the life I got to lead with all it's various sins and joys. For without your not so gentle touch I would have been left to die in that dark cell. To see light again only on the last day of my life. When the distant screams began I thought nothing of them. Screams in that place were not even of notable awareness, similar to the damp stone and smelly rats, just a part of that hell. But then the silence began. A silence so long and terrible I wondered if I had in fact died and not know it had happened. Then the hunger in my belly began to build, telling me I was still alive. Now hunger was also nothing new. The guards would often let us go for days without food if they were of a mind, but this stretched longer than that. I was licking a wet stone corner of the cell for moisture, for my cracked lips, when I heard the silence broken by a cheer of joy. Now that caught my notice for such had not been heard by my ears in so long, so very long. The sound grew and grew till it was right outside my cell, then the door was flung open. I stood with my back to the wall, my thin wooden bed-stave "sword" in hand ready not not be taken simply. In the months since Yinsen was carried off I had spend every waking hour doing as he had told and taught me. My body was lean, whipcord muscles, and I was not afraid. No fear held me in its grip. All that awaited me was death and she and I were old lovers by then. Pain I knew how to take, how to live through, how to fight through. The cell opened, light washed my face." With a smile I reach up and touch my cheek. So still even now, here, a tear can fall at the memory of the happy, dirty, emaciated, smiling faces of the other prisoners who released me. The joy in those men who had been as I locked into the dark to wait for death, only to be born anew. And that was what it was like. Being born. Those first steps from my cell, the bright light, the pain of it. Those hardy slaps on the back by other prisoners, the terrible turmoil of noise and sounds that assaulted my ears. Then the some what brutal treatment we were given when we exited the prison. The guttural speaking warriors who had taken the city, Russians I do believe by their language, were busy looting it and put us to work clearing stone blocked gates. They had us haul dead, already begun to attract flies and bloat, bodies from the street to a huge fire. To men starved for years on the thinnest of water gruel that was a sore task, to smell so much meat ablaze. If not for a simple meal were were soon given I think more than a few of us might have succumb to those beastly impulses. Myself, I'm honest enough to admit, would have been among them. With a tattered cloth tied into a script, a broken sword scavenged from the rubble, clothes I looted from the dead, and a single loaf of black bread I left that burning city of my captivity. "Can't say I didn't look back." No, oh no. I looked back. Looked back and smiled to see those high towers topple, the golden domes falling to shatter upon scorched paving stones. Smiled to see the black, oily smoke rising from the corpse pile that still smoldered. How many faces had I recognized in that pile as we built it. Men that had laughingly jammed their picks down my throat to use it in brutal fashion, when my slave taught skills could have given them far more pleasure. How wonderful it had felt to relieve my urine into the dead face of one lady of nobility; who I know never washed her cunt in the whole time I was at the coffee house. I would often turn and look at that growing column of smoke rising to the heavens and smile, till the night descended and I could see it no more. I found a rocky hollow and wrapped myself in my tattered rags to hide from the night chill. I sit, rapier still close at hand, and watch these strange warriors board the boat and get taken away. Charon is busy for hours to haul them to whatever fate awaits them. His light appearing and disappearing far more than I have ever noticed it to be, till at last the shore is silent and dark again. Save for my single candle. Bemusedly alone, I stare into that forever-flickering flame and wonder If I have the courage to write what is soon to follow. Oh, not of my time in Greece, that could almost be termed pleasant, but the months and years to follow. When the vengeance of the bastard...came home. Oh, how bloody a time is to come for this quill to write about. "par la mort de dieu."