"...and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears." - N.K. Jemisin
Like an all consuming burn upon Asia's soul, Alex was to remain with her for life, ever tightening, ceaseless and searing. Her treasured memories served now as a bitter reminder of her hopeless absence. Alex's sin-bound lips, her taste, the feel of her generous touch and all the muscle tensing pleasure that resulted from it. It's been a long two years since the split, with each day since callously contributing to the noxious sorrow that buries her alive. She slumps deeper within herself against the dirt dusted concrete wall of the derelict warehouse, sequestered from the world, obscured even from God's all-seeing eyes.
The wind hums an ambivalent tune of adante notes that whistle through broken window panes. "You were my soul..." Asia said with a spiritless sigh, "Without you, I'm just an empty meat puppet." Her eyes well and glisten from tears held back. She listlessly handles an ornate gold plated piece of antiquity. It was a gift from Alex to commemorate Asia's first full year of sobriety. A fallacious achievement... Asia had kept her relapse weeks prior to the milestone a secret. The box held in hand reflected its gilded gleam alongside of her broken promises. She charted the course of its elaborate designs with the same tender affection that she'd trace Alex's lips when she smiled. The waxing and waning of the cube's patterns were accompanied by touch. Its indents and eccentricities echoed Alex's body along webs of artistic conception that rivaled the battered beauty of their relationship.
The hum becomes a moan... Nature's pulse quickens. The windows tremble in their frames, rattling with the sound of chattering teeth. The moonlight that had snuck past the accumulation of dirt on the glass grew dimmer. Asia depresses a circular segment at the center of one of the box's four faces. To her amazement it responds, dividing a section of itself and intializing a new configurement. A tonal pattern snaps on billowing out from the tiny source with the cadence of a lullaby, yet carried along its subtle cords a sense of sickening dread. All light had now drained from the warehouse, and she was immersed in a darkness witnessed only by the dead.
The tune that was emanating from the box had left upon the issuance of its final note a silence that matched the starkness of the abysmal dark... Its appetite threatening to consume Asia's very thoughts. The titanic gears of Chronos' clock slacken, eventually stopping altogether. She was now deprived of two of her main senses, heightening the experience of the remaining three. An acrid iron after-taste of liver swirled in her mouth, surely from the speedball she'd boosted earlier in the day blowing out a vein. The hairs on her arms stood. Her skin was caressed by a tingling sensation as if charged by static electricity. She felt balmy gusts of alternating warm and cool air undulate around her, tinged with the unmistakable stench of decay with faint accents of vanilla.
The immense hush and blackness that had engulfed her, receded like a great wave drawing back into the night sea, bequething a brilliant glow several feet ahead. She then heard chattering, thinking at first it might be the windows again, but soon realized came from a single source within the light. Her eyes struggled to adjust to the radiance acclimating by subtle degrees. As the luminance subsided she could decipher the forms of three beings walking toward her, their steps sonorous and sharp. They had not emerged from a light source as her eyes had been fooled, but were themselves the source of light. Their flesh irradiated with a bioluminescence and varnished with the icy pallor of the moon's facade.
She was awed by the sublime atrocity of their appearence. As they edged closer, Asia observed a paradigm of perverse bodily modification. Naked flesh elaborately embroidered with pins served as the junctions for thin wires that peeled back segments of skin exposing musculature. Scarified with glyphic designs, their bodies were a work of grotesque art composed of stitched tissue, ligaments of cables woven through and around anatomy and other skilled embellishments. They stand over her bearing an air of victorian poise and elegance.
"Oh... How lovely." Lauded the one who stood at the center. Fastened around her neck was a brace that extended it beyond its natural length. At the midpoint of the throat was a mechanism resembling a pair of surgical retractors that outstretched the flesh at either side of an oozing wound, giving it a labial appearance. They all stared at Asia lasciviously, eyes glassed with lust.
"Exquisite." Added her companion, fondling the vaginal opening in her throat.
"Her eyes burn with sorrow." She shudders guiding his eager hand to the spiral contraption tacked to her areola stretching the nipple several inches. "Do you know who we are?" Asia's lips are palsied. She was further unnerved by the vexing chatter of teeth the wretch to the right compulsively engaged in. Struggling to mantain her composure, she bites her lip and focuses on the question.
"You're demons." Asia answered.
"To some..." said the female masochist.
"We are the habitants of Leviathan's dream... Members of the order of the Gash." The male leaves the nipple unattended. He leans toward her, his face filetted lengthwise with ribbons of stripped flesh. "Are you not content with earthly pleasures? Would you like to experience the pleasure we provide?" Her eyes are magnectically fixed to his, considering his vague proposal.
"What do you know about pleasure?" Asia asked, "You're monsters."
"A great deal more than you can possibly imagination." He says haughtily. "We can unbend the mortal coil... Join us or stay and rot with the rest." His statement resonated with a striking timbre that she couldn't ignore. Remain where she was as infectious human waste and chase the vaporous dragon or follow these devils into the beast's lair. "Know this, the labyrinth is a cruel domain... But your world is worse." Asia's eyes were burdened by consideration. Surely these beings couldn't be more insufferable than the stifling loneliness that ceaselessly plagued her.
"Okay..." Came the uneasy decision, "I'll go."