There is always the crawling in my mouth, like flies swarming over a carcass. It reaches into my gums, drowning out my thoughts with incessant screaming. It only stops with the clarity of my work, the certainty that comes with understanding, or the presence of she who is part of me.
I speak the words, the words that I have bartered and stolen and killed for. I make the signs, the signs I have robbed and butchered and made sacrifice for. I draw symbols upon the floor in goat’s blood, set alight the incense, and close my eyes so that they may open.
I see my father and my mother, sickening in their naivety and their lack of ambition. I watch again and again as they attempt to separate us, we who are of one soul. I watch again and again as the knife sinks into their flesh, denying them their self-assured sovereignty along with their misbegotten lives.
I see the river of blood that churns and sweeps away the screaming, the damned, and the sobbing, wretched dead. I see the verdant paradise of my Queen, a garden of carnal desires of every conceivable variety, many beyond the ken of mortals, a playground for Her insatiable appetites. I watch as creatures beyond my understanding work their unknowable and debased ambitions upon those around them, my visions tugging violently at the very foundation of my sanity. It feels like hours upon hours and days upon days and months upon months but I know it isn’t. I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen it a hundred times or more.
Bile rises in my throat and I swallow it down.
I see a dominion with two thrones, one of iron and one of bone. I see subjects, servants, and slaves ecstatic in their eagerness to please, shedding themselves of their autonomy for the simple pleasure of serving a monarch, desperate for the security that comes with ceding freedom to fierce sovereignty.
My eyes open and I hear frantic, high pitched laughter and it takes me a moment to realise it to be my own. My hands bleed from cuts I don’t remember making. My symbols were perfect in their perversion, in how depraved they were in defiance of what should be. They make me happy because they are mine and mine alone, derived not from Ezra but from my own audacity and daring.
The stone I sit upon is chilly and damp with mold.
“Nothing is without cost,” I muse aloud to the empty, silent air. I think of the blood I have shed for the privilege of sitting where I sit and seeing what I saw. I think of the future that will be of my own making and no one else's.
The flies quiver into a still and respectful silence for no more than a heartbeat.
