Saturday 22 June 2013

Cross your heart (hope to die)

Prologue

The language, you see, isn't important. It's the sentiment behind your words that will save you. Or the scent-he-meant, as my maker endlessly quipped.  He could sniff out cowardice from the underside of his coffin lid even as he slept.

It never ceased to amuse him, God bless his tortured soul. Or rather, bless whichever other-dimension to which his soul has been dispatched.

Ha! I remember it vividly: his gurgling screams competing against the greedy, gobbling flames of damnation that, eventually, silenced him.

How that blaze crackled and spat in fury, Nature claiming back that abomination of a 'gift' She bestowed upon him, upon all of our kind.  For we chosen few, that gift, that Trojan Horse, has rendered Heaven and Hell places as much a folklore unto us as we are to you.

My maker's twisting, clawing silhouette, overwhelmed by the orange, yellow, white furnace, is burnt onto my retina forever. And the flames' roar of triumph, a glorious backdrop to the inferno as it consumed his immortal soul: it shall haunt me until the day I…well, let's just say for a very long time.