Life after death

Contessa wandered the chaotic crowd with the blood of a demonic immortal on her. Roedric's naked body lay motionless on the floor. People ran left and right in front of her eyes as they rammed into each other and some even got trampled to death.

There was a calm in her soul despite the chaos and evil permeated her with all the times he'd made love to her and roughly. She had no idea that evil had infected her too but she was glad to be rid of him.

All of a sudden she became painfully aware that things had changed for her. The people around her seemed to move slowly. they moved so slowly that when she moved through the crowd time seemed as if it would stop and then begin slowly again when she stopped.

She reached out and would circle men and women who ran with fear on their faces from some unknown terror that drove men mad. It wasn't the monster anymore because the monster was dead but rather the lack of monster that left good men to their own devices and left a void for a great evil that had to be filled.

She became painfully aware of the ground beneath her feet as she realized her shoes had melted off. Great cobblestones which should have hurt but the pads on her feet had grown thick and she began to realize that it was not her feet that she now walked with.

"Even in death, you plague me, Roedric," she mumbled.

A voice came from the dark recesses of her mind and spoke.

"You've invited me in sorcerer."

She instantly recognized Roedric's pet name and voice. They had been in the magicians guild together and she was no stranger to magic, however things were happening to her that were not in her normal repertoire.

"I killed you, monster."

There was a laughter in her skull as she felt her self moving away from the town at such incredible speed that the terrifying momentum became like a great vortex that tore her clothes from her.

In the spinning darkness, she saw something come through and run a gaunt gray finger up her naked side.

"You killed the possibility of good. For no man is an island once he's become what we are," said the dark creature in Roedric's voice.

"You see, Contessa, Man is given a second chance only so many times."

"I gave you second and third and fourth chances and you blew them all, Roedric!"

The great laughter reverberated through her again.

"Is that who you think I am?"

There was a silence as she was struck deaf.

"Roedric is dead. You killed him. All that's left is in your mind. You have a construct of what you remember about him but being infected with the disease he had, I am now you. I sound like Roedric because that is what you know to call this disease but your soul fights itself now."

There was a silence when she realized that she could no longer blame Roedric for the way she felt inside. The demon turned into a plague of fingers that crawled up her legs like thousands of spiders. They permeated her skin pours, they lapped at her sex. They caressed each sinew into growth as she began to rise a new.

The phoenix is said to rebirth from flames and the vampire sees each blossom of the night as if he were seeing heaven but this was neither. This was a rage that permeated her newly preternatural soul.

It writhed inside of her like a great snake that struck her heart with a fatal blow filling it with venom.

At twelve feet tall she was only a few feet above where Roedric stood but she was ten times as fierce. Her hunger for blood was fueled by what he had done to her and where she was once broken she filled the holes with rage.

The town stood quiet as a few kingsman went round picking up and fixing the destruction wrought from the earlier scene. It had been two days and there was still blood around the village that could not be scrubbed off.

"Out out damn spot..." sang a village custodian in bemused irony.

The royal blue and ashen flags were no longer waving but rather an eerie calm had struck the town at this moonless night.

There was a slight breeze but they only caressed the banners as much as a poor player whose jokes were told to a deaf crowd.

The giant doors that stood at the entrance to the town looked out into the woods like sentinels guarding a gold filled keep. From the woods, there were noises that befit the night and some that did not; however there was none like the explosion that came from a woman scorned and a demon born.

What thrust itself towards the great stocky doors was not, by any means an average Were. It had the body of a wolf but the wings of a bat and the head of a dragon. It was as if the changeling virus that permeated your average Were had mutated into what the scorned mind could make it.

Each transformation into Were was different as any hunter of them would tell you. That is why the legend varies from place to place but she was more dragon than wolf and as she slithered from the tall oaks, the doors seemed to cower in fear as the rocked back and forth with the wind that came from her movement.

There was first a loud crash as the bolt behind them fractured but held. Then the second crash blew them off their hinges and crushed half a house that stood not 10 feet away. Those inside were killed instantly not from rubble but from the shock wave which shook their nervous system loose and destroyed all life within them.

Her violence permeated the village as some ran from their houses and others simply stayed inside and prayed until they too were crushed from reverberations and falling debris.

Her siege lasted hours as she destroyed the village that failed to warn her. The people that failed to stop her from Roedric's charm.

As the siege ended and the town lay burning in rubble, all 12,000 souls who lived there lay dead in a barricade of rubble.

She sat at the center of the destruction and seemed taller than when the transformation first occurred. The fur burned off of her and the scales of the dragon formed underneath it to protect her from the flames.

By morning a full grown dragon sat atop the rubble and began to slowly shrink to a naked woman lying atop a pile of ashes. Not a soul had told so not a soul knew but as she lay atop the still warm heap of a life she had just burned to the ground, she felt alive again.

Not every fairytale has a happy ending

Royal blue sigils on ashen black cloth sighed atop wooden thatched houses around a stone square.  The worst kind of animals shouted from the open windows and around the circle of buildings hungry for the blood of the creature that was now dragged through the crowd and tied to two posts with thick rope.  The thick smell of the animal fat on the torches and in the fire pits around Eden permeated the air and his face looked just like any of theirs except frightened.  He wasn't afraid of the fight he might have.  He wasn't afraid of the people, but the hatred burned him to his core and made his skin shiver.

A hooded man walked out with a whip.  The magistrate stood on the stone alter that he was tied to and read off his crimes.  They were but dissonance among the jeering of the crowd and when he was done reading, there was a deathly silence that ensued.

"One!...."

A sharp pain tore into his back and rippled through him as Roedric cried out in pain.  His face stretched forward, morphing into the demon he kept inside and ripples of the wolf within him permeated his skin.

"Two!..."

The pain shot through him again and he saw their faces. His body transformed into a 10 foot tall beast that crossed man with wolf and he looked on the crowd through a red tinted hue.

"Three!..."

The faces of the virgins he had consumed flashed before his eyes and the lust for their bodies and flesh stunk like rotten meat between his teeth.  His memories of all those he had consumed and the absent pleasure it had given him ate away at his soul as that lash reverberated through his body like a knife.

"Four!..."

He saw his dearest Contessa in the crowd and heard her cries from the night she had caught him attacking a young girl of seventeen and though his eyes were that of the Were, she knew who he was and went to run.

"Five!..."

He watched her running from him and he could smell her blood through his nostrils and it drove him mad with lust and pain and shame that he desperately tried to end by grabbing her to show her that there was two inside of him; including the one she loved.  It was not him who attacked those girls...

"Six!..."

The pain shot through him and the anger arose within him that he could be so stupid as to not seek a cure earlier for the condition he had been in; if for nothing else than for Contessa.  For his love who his lust for blood could have been cured by her love if he had let it.

"Seven!..."

He swore that he would not be the beast anymore.  He swore that he could control the Were within him if he was just given another chance.  If he could just be given the time and means to seek Necromancy or any of the cures that could bring these girls back and reverse the damage he had already done.

"Eight!..."

God! if it would only end, he thought.  Roaring out in pain and tears towards the crowd.  His soul sank and he submitted to the death happening within him as he realized no one could see his tears from the wolf's eyes and he could think of nothing more; save the pain from a broken heart as she stared at him with a cold gaze.

"Nine!..."

It would appear that depression was where he would live for now as his world faced him and spat at him and threw literal jibes and rotteness at him.  He fell to the platform and thought of nothing as...

"Ten!..."

"Eleven..."

"Twelve!..."

Half the crowd thought the thirteenth lash would kill him as a demonic creature of magic and evil but he was laying there on the slab not moving and gathering a storm of darkness that could break with...

"Thirteen!...."

The ropes snapped free and he arose on his hind legs as his giant claws hung at his sides and a pair of wings erupted from his back to fill the square.  He grabbed the rope and threw it down and howled at the crowd who understandably assumed their deaths were imminent.

A silence fell over them and people literally froze with terror mixed with his force of will that forbade their bodies of movement.  Before any of this had happened he had been a skilled magician and that power to captivate people into freezing was apparently only amplified by the Were within him.

He threw the whip down and concentrated.  He concentrated harder than he ever had before till his form began to change again.

Standing before the crowd was a naked man whose clothes had ripped from the transformation.  He looked out on them and wanted to hate them but he had accepted who he had become.

"You have hunters among you who could hunt me.  You have those among you who will still hate me once you learn what I have to say.  I am an immortal.  You cannot kill me thought you can wound and capture and enslave me.  You can torture me and throw me in a pit and I wouldn't fight you because I have accepted what I did to your town and..."

He turned to Contessa.

"and... a.. and to you, my love.  Ropes and chains can bind me and I would allow you to hold me accountable for what I have done but I am not the monster inside of me.  I will not let it define me no matter how powerful it is."

He sighed and sat down as the holding spell took a lot out of him and he began to lose a grip on the crowd as he let some of them go.  They stood still and listened to him.

"I have the power to fight the monster and it took thirteen lashes for me to even try.  I've been with it longer than many of you have been alive and though years of loneliness and monstrosity commanded my soul, for 5 of those 700 years, I have been happy."

He turned away from Contessa and to the crowd as more of them began to drop from his spell.

"There has always been a monster within me but for a moment in all my years there has been a light and for that, I am ready to kill the demon to live among you as any of you are."

"There is not a man who is without his demons and not a woman who has seen the torment of the soul.  I beg of you only mercy and love and forgiveness.  Should you seek to have a way to hold me accountable for my testament, I stand ready to submit."

The crowd fell deathly silent and he too fell the same way to look into their eyes as he dropped his hold of everyone including Contessa.  That was the moment she took the magistrate's blade and cut off his head.

Heaven on Earth

As I walked down the street, I felt his footsteps in the ground, I could see his soul glowing red with malice and my wings stretched out from my back.

The street was poorly lit in the witching hour of 3 - 4 AM but the brick walls on either side of me only about 10 or 12 feet from me on either side cast strange shadows of creatures unseen and unknown in a constant struggle for life.

His shock was apparent when I turned around and must have appeared to levitate to him as only those meant to see can see an angel's wings. Great blue glowing wings with three on each shoulder that I decided to let him see and he fell to his knees.

The wind blew and it was cold. Not temperature wise because the night was more than likely 70° or 67° at the most but the cold ran through me and I stretched it to him for the warmth of life is extended only to humanity and not God's chosen.

"You have been Judged Arnold Ramase and I have waited for you here. Your desperation drove you to this life but you began to enjoy it, didn't you."

As is the fashion, I awaited his response of, "yes, my lord... My angel... I don't know what to call you..."

"My name is Samael and you will know this as you will be one of few humans on earth to be taken by the angel of death himself. Know thy father, child and go with God."

He began to clutch his head and I let the light of the heavens shine upon his soul. In awe, his eyes opened and began to bleed. I cut the power of the heavens for a moment and as life slipped from him, I held him in my arms and cradled his dying body.

"Some have called me valkrie and others guardian, today if you might before your eyes close, call me savior. Call me savior child for your race is too small to be given such divine right as his love. You are all meant to be damned!"

He lay on the ground choking on the blood in his throat as his cells had been destroyed by the light.

"Damn you child, speak!"

It was too late and I watched his soul ascend.

"Why then do you not love your chosen as you would a criminal," I called to the heavens. "Why are we not worth the right of repentance?"

As I wept over the lifeless body of this vicious criminal who was with God, I knelt in the street and an animal from somewhere knocked over a trash can lid. The filth of the world covered my legs where I knelt and I was blatantly aware of how small I was. My wings swelled and strained in a stretch. The torment subsided and I stood up, lost the emotion to something I could not fathom and walked home shaking the blood off me as if it had never touched my garments.

This is the life of heaven on earth, I thought to myself as I prepared for another day amongst the living as one of them on disguise.

The tell-tale printer

In the cold, darkness of a poorly insulated house, the light from the power button of our wireless printer pulsates like the beating of a elderly heart. It sits there on the desk with as much dust as any antique and the same amount of judgement as it fills the room with light and then returns me to a resting room.

It repeats this action: light that fills the ceiling like some projection of a mid-summer dream and then darkness where I sense the calmness and verisimilitude of dignified reality. Then as I get used to the darkness the joy of the ceiling light comes back, only to return me to the now petulant darkness. Then light! Oh such light that lasts an instant and shows me all the things in my messy room I thought I'd lost. Now darkness! Wretched terrible darkness and light!...

I can't take it anymore and I go for its life blood! I turn the overhead light on and the room fills with the dirty yellow light from the single room light above me. Half asleep, I rummage around the back of the printer for its jugular.

It's difficult to find and for a moment, I wonder if there even is one? Have I killed this agonizingly beautiful creature which pulsates vacillating light and darkness as part of its waking dream? Does it think of my snores as a paltry annoyance and wish it could turn me off as I sleep beneath it's heart beat and am bothered by its perturbing yet necessary life?

As the 1/2 second ends that I think all of this, I find its chord and it turns out it's just a printer and inanimate object after all. I rip it's chord from its backside and shout, "you're dead now you flickering bastard!"

Yet as I go to sleep, the thoughts of my friend the printer haunt me and I think of how it's been doing that for years now and never have I unplugged it. Yet in the end, darkness is truth and I tend to sleep better without light, however small or bright.

I drift off to sleep with the dead things all around me. Sweet sleep at last.

Highway to hell

The highway elongated in front of Jack's cranium. His eyes weighed like thousand pound weights. He felt himself swerve slightly as he held his neck from a shooting pain that seemed to arise when he had turned his head to follow an eager BMW driver; the sun, flashing in his eyes, he swerved back towards the road and away from the median.

"Goddamn BMW drivers! They're all assholes! Every fucking one!" He said as driving began to return to normal.

A fog began to gather as large bushy clouds rolled in overhead and Jack began to think about his family. His little boy smiled at him in his head and his wife said, "just come home safe," as he thought about her beautiful curls around his shoulders caressing him to her heavenly embrace.

He decided he would call her but as he called, the phone would just ring and ring and ring with no answer or even a message machine. He hung it up as he meandered through this eternal road.

He began to think about all the bad things he'd done in his life and the bad things he'd recently done on the trip he was on. The fog seemed as thick as water as he looked out on the road and couldn't see even a mile down the road.

As he tried to slow down to stop, he found that he couldn't move his leg; it was glued to a constant speed going down the highway.

He tried his radio and Enya began to play. He began to scream. He tried to roll down the window and the fog that rolled in was steam.

Suddenly, the Enya halted and a voice spoke, "welcome to hell, you cursed the Lord while driving and so you shall now drive for all eternity to remind you of your blasphemy."

The highway elongated in front of Jack's cranium. His eyes weighed like thousand pound weights. His heart raced and he only begged for sleep and a crash so the road would end.

OFFICIAL STATEMENT

The following message reads as dictated from Col. Ronald T. Harris of Baton Rouge LA to Stg. Michael Wayneright of Chicago IL. Their position at the time of dictation was unknown but is assumed as well into the country of Cambodia in Eastern Asia.

Boy... I mean Mikey... Mike or do you prefer Michael? In any case, I want you to copy this down as if I made it, y'see? I want this to be read to my kids, kids as if grandaddy was telling it to 'em, ya get me? Mike, what have I gotten myself into this time? Promise me you'll change that bloody outfit before you recount this tale. Oh I talk too much. Well, here goes:

Back in my war days, I used to tell the boys who were waiting to ship out, in officer's bar in Saigon: "you gonna wind up like Mikey," and I don't think any of 'em ever got it. You see, they'd all joke and clown about a lot but I only told this to the strong ones.

Of course, all they saw was that Mikey was a lower pay grade and they thought I meant that they would end up on the bottom of the barrel like Mikey: Doing the grunt work, digging out the latrine and making dirt pay to do it; what they didn't see is that the reason Mikey was assigned so many tasks, regardless of how much he made was because Mikey was the fastest to dig a trench or a fox hole; he was the quickest to go from cover to cover, he got the most consecutive gook kills and at the end of the war, he was the only one of those bastards still alive. That said, that last one is an achievement I couldn't even attain. I wish I had "been like Mikey" in that regard...

You take this message back to Saigon now. You survive and don't make a liar out of me. Be an example to my boys.

ADDENDUM:

I dug a fox hole just like he always told me I could and covered it with leaves. Then carried his body on my shoulders until I hooked up with an attachment at the border and we got on a bird to head back to Saigon for debriefing. On my way back, I had been hit in the calf by grenade flack but the wound wasn't as serious to me as it was to the medics. I was discharged to bring this letter home and am available for comment in Washington DC at REDACTED FOR PRIVACY REASONS.

Sincerely,
Stg. Michael M. Wayneright

Breaking the mold

Chapter 7: Molding a Human Brain

The synaptic functions of a human mind are extremely complex and even in a child brain, the wiring must be worked with delicately or you will kill the form you hope to become.  The easiest path, but difficult unless you see human beings the way I do, is to determine using heat signatures and the x ray spectrum who's actually pregnant at about 4 weeks old.  The brain of that adolescent will begin to develop at 5 weeks according to my research.  Therefore, what I essentially do is unplug that life before it begins and take over the human process of brain and spinal cord development according to the infant  blue print that can be found on most scholarly doctoral databases.

Due to the fact that I was not an infant when I became the form that I am, I had to truncate my molecular structure to fit the human form.  Even the child's body had to be enlarged in the development process in order to properly configure my consciousness into the humanoid structure.  This one that the humans call god must have been an incredible archetect because the complexity of building this body was one that took tremendous amounts of energy to acheive and even at that, I had to borrow amounts of energy from this child's mother just to properly develop.  In the end, however, the majority of the genetic sequencing was provided to me and all that was left was wiring in my own brain functions into this body.

The higher brain functions were too much for the human mind to handle.  After all, I had the vast knowledge of the cosmos stored in my individual atoms but ironically so did they, they just were born blissfully unaware of the phenomenal cosmic powers they were made of.  Forgive my non-sequitur but it is important to note that human beings, unlike the Taylorn possessed an evolutionary trait that made them so formidable that they even viewed each other as enemies.  Whereas my people viewed black wings as simply a difference in life position, human beings viewed such things as superior and inferior. It was as the japanese humans would refer to as ero-guro.

Ero-Guro translates to beautifully grotesque which I feel, as I began wiring myself into the container of a US diplomat's wife, aptly described human beings.  They had the potential for great good and great evil and as I described before, as energy beings we had no distinction between the two.  However, as I began to wire myself into the confines of a human spawnling, I began to feel not only human emotions but specifically, the emotions of this human mother to be.  She was kind hearted and had become a diplomat's wife through her devotion to international diplomacy as opposed to a desire to hold political power.  She gave more than she took and as I had observed in the international databases of Earth, she was truly a rare breed amongst the species of earth.

For 7 months and 3 weeks longer, I would grow in her stomach as she strained us both by continuing to work on some great international agreement of peace and prosperity between more than one violent culture.  She enjoyed books and that knowledge due to the nature of my connection with her during my initial occupation was translated to me through her synaptic impulses into my developing mind.  I had no idea what it was at the time but as I began to understand emotion, in that primordial soup, I realized that I loved her.

Love was a strange emotion and whereas it had the broad application of the formless Taylorn, it could be as secluded and limited as the human mind.  The more human I became, the more I forgot about the knowledge I had of the cosmos until one day, as I smelled the air of the human world through a human nose and realized that I barely knew that I used to be Taylorn let alone that I used to be formless.

Getting to understand Earth was not an easy task either.  Human beings were apparently not the only creatures on earth as a dog I greeted was a little off put that I knew how to speak telepathically which is how dogs communicate.  They are not engaging speakers either, as the one i greeted was afraid at first and then immediately thought only of the hot dog that the human who called me "dada"viciously consumed.

There were many other animals around this planet as well.  Lions do not care for Humans at all, they have nothing to say to us and although this one stared at me through the glass of a window at the Bronx zoo, I feel as though he was envious more than willing to talk.  Speaking of the zoo where many of these animals from around the globe seemed to reside, the humans seemed to enslave even species that were genetically similar to themselves which I found barbaric as we passed by the primate enclosure.

In my first year of life, there would be many unusual traits of humans but after a day at the zoo and 5 weeks of life, it was time I once again enjoyed the only connection to my people I could enjoy: dreaming…