deepundergroundpoetry.com
In The Name of The Pale King
- In The Name of The Pale King -
Chapter One:
1. He was called the pale king. No one can remember his name, not even him. Clad in his black gown, his white skin glistening in the torchlight of his castle, he was the very image of living death. But although he in fact was of the living, some say even immortal, it was a terrifying fact… that not one of his eternally loyal servants and attendants were likewise. They were dead, but lived. He lived, but appeared not to. He was the pale king. No one can remember his name, not even him. No one, however, save one man in all the world... and it was that man who approached the castle near the end of that year so long ago that a true reckoning of the exact date would be impossible. The knight approached, snow thick upon the road and slowing the horse that carried him. The knight approached the castle of the pale king. Although the knight was a strong man and very well acquainted with many horrors, having been in war and having seen the terrors of the plague men called the Black Death, he knew fear this night. An unspeakable dread, for he knew! "I know thy name!" He called up at the towering gatehouse of the fortress. "As in that ancient pact with mine ancestors, thou must allow me entry… for I am the first to learn of thy true nature in seven hundred years. In proof of what I declare, I speak the word that I heard from my father and he from his before him…" and with that, his voice grew into a commanding growl as he cried, "Ad-das-voc-rah!" No answer came until he had repeated this word three times. Then, the gate slowly creaked open. Thundering across the wooden drawbridge that descended, over a stagnant moat, the knight was silent. Even as he entered the courtyard, with it's unnatural gray roses and sharp briars, which winter could not kill. With it's dead trees and nesting black ravens. With it's dead but animate groundskeepers and gardeners. Even with all this, the courtyard of the castle disturbed him but in passing. He rode on, in silence. Six times he crashed the knocker against the portals of the castle keep. Five times, not a single answer came. With the sixth, the doors swung inward upon their rusted hinges… the knight stepped within, his steed already tied at the post of the nearby stables. Black as the tomb was the keep… unlit and as silent as a grave. The creaking of bones heralded a pale and skeletally gaunt manservant, who bore a black candle. "Follow me, ye who know the word of passage. Follow me, my master awaits thee." His voice was hollow and wheezy. The knight knew the man was of the living dead… he knew, and felt a mixture of disgust and horror, but remained strong to look upon. "I must not falter here." The knight thence whispered, as he followed the creature before him. "For the sake of my sister!" He added. The throne room had been neglected so long it was in ruins… this was not, where now the pale king received visitors. (Which was not frequent, to say the least!) And so it was, the knight was directed up the spiraling stairs that led up one of the towers. Hugged by a cold gray wall on both sides… the stairs did pass windows of perfect stained glass on one side, the only proof that there was a world beyond the darkness of the keep, for a silvery moonlight illuminated them dully from without. The images upon them were of decadent sexual acts and highly depraved deeds. Some on the verge of being wildly sadistic in nature! Wicked. This was the knight's thought as he pondered what sort of people had once lived here, died here, and become enslaved even after to the very author of their damnation. Wicked folk. At last they arrived at a door near the top of the tower. The servant opened it, and thence the knight stepped within. It was a study… a well-lit study, but for all things of an arcane nature. Ancient books of blackly forbidden subjects, were kept meticulously on the large shelves that ran the entire circumference of the circular room save only where tall columns held up the ceiling before windows that were obscured by tattered black draperies. Tables held a massive variety of magical apparatus and objects of power, and seated in his elaborately carved oaken chair at the desk at the far end of the room from the door...was the pale king.
Chapter Two:
2. "A more fearful lich I hath not seen!" cried the knight in some alarm. The terrible snow-white man, with his colorless white hair, pitch black eyes, and thin black garments regarded his visitor silently. Nay, the eyes were not black… only the hollows in which they sat were black, like deep vacant caverns… caverns in which a certain glint of blue flickered like the torchlight on the walls between bookshelves and bookshelves. Or like the candle at the king's desk. But blue, as blue against their whites as to be like unto a sky frozen before a monstrous storm. He was handsome once, this king. Perhaps in way, he still was. But terrible, so terrible to meet those eyes! He was never a large man, not even before… but now he was almost corpselike in his appearance. A terrible, but handsome corpse is what the pale king appeared to be. His voice was as cold as his eyes. "In thy words is fear, oh man. Fear!" He laughed… and that laugh was a cackle of (sadistic?) pleasure at the knight's discomfort. The knight spoke in a shaking voice that trembled in an uncontrollable way, "Nay, not fear sir… more like some frightful pity I think… aye…" but he found it difficult to even form words just now. It was fear indeed; a chilling fear! "Thou dost pity me?" chuckled the king, "Then end my pain, oh man. Tell me what is my name, that I may rest with my people in death at last… that the curse laid upon us by the gods for our sins may be broken!" Tears began to form in the knight’s eyes… "If thou wilt promise to release my sister and harm her not, this will I gladly do, sir. But only the case being that she is alive and well!" He choked back his tears long enough to say most of this with some authority. The king was deadly serious all of a sudden… "She is well, if that pleases thee, man. She is well. I have not claimed her for my bride, not as of yet anyway. She slumbers, in the catacombs below. Wouldst thou that I should take thee thither?" The knight said to this, "Aye." But was in no hurry truly to descend into that place. Few ever returned from there at all. Those who did were no longer wholly alive when they emerged. "Lead on…" the knight said, regardless: "Lead on, pale king, and may devils take thee if thou dare to lie to me." To which the king replied: "Why my dear man, they already have!" as he grinned, with his thin lips, in the most cruel manner imaginable. Just then, his face looked like a fierce demonic skull! The catacombs were the darkest part of the castle. In the light of the candle in it's pale silver holder, held by the even paler hand of the king… piles of human skulls were seen here and there, as well as slabs upon which the bones of entire generations lay. That… was not the horror of this place! That came later, when the knight followed his grim guide into the deeper of the vaults… past the slabs set into the walls where amongst the bones common elsewhere, could be seen what appeared to be women clad in exquisite dresses who were actually in the process of feasting upon what flesh remained upon some of the interred cadavers. The eyes of these women were feral and inhuman… and save for their mad actions… they thus appeared as dead as their master did. They did not speak. They shrieked. The knight then pictured his sister as one of these banshees, and wept bitterly. The king seemed surprised. "Why dost thou weep, ye man! Have I not told thee… that thy sister is untainted by my lovemaking?" The knight was disgusted… "Love, ye say! What manner of love, changes people into such beasts as I do espy within these vaults? Surely only hatred could do this dire working." At which the king became almost cynical as he said, "How little, ye must know of love, sir knight… that thou doth knot not the lengths to which it fills one up with madness. Is not thy attempt to save thy sister from living death, a kind of lunacy that thus drives thee on… into even this twilight domain, though it surely will be thy own doom ere long?" "What a monster thou art, pale fiend, to compare barbarity to chivalry!" The knight in this cared not if he dared his host's wrath. The pale man, however, only laughed and thus said… "All men and women can become monsters, when life hath no meaning for them."
Chapter Three:
3. She was lying as if in state, upon what seemed a plain altar of smoothly polished stone, beneath an immense statue of a wingless weeping angel… whose widely outstretched arms, and haloed countenance, seemed to be pleading for a mercy that will never come. But unlike most angels, this one had horns that curved sharply upward from her forehead. All in all, the effect was that this was a shrine to some fallen divinity long ago cast from out Heaven. And she was asleep… the knight's sister was… asleep, in a dreamless state as if induced by the deity that appeared to cry endlessly above her. The knight looked delighted at the fact that his sibling seemed to be alive at least outwardly… her breaths came and went in regular fashion. Asleep, she seemed indeed, clad in a voluminous white gown that clung to her small form, it's puffy sleeves loose upon her thin frame. Banshees knelt in prayer, at the foot of the altar. The only passing sane act the knight had witnessed such perform. "She lives." said the knight, caressing a handful of his sister's dark auburn hair, as he looked her over approvingly. "I do not lie." said the king, "Now, for thy end of our holy bargain..." and the knight replied: "When thou didst live as men do, thy name such as it was in those lost ancient days… was Ezra Ka." At hearing this, memories flooded across the mind of the pale king. Indeed, he was once called Ezra Ka… a son of Pagan Canaan, long before the coming of God's Old Law to that land. Ezra Ka… driven into exile by the followers of an angry and tyrannical Jehovah. Driven into Egypt… there, to become one of the darkest sorcerers of that ancient age. Discovering the secrets of alchemy, he attained the literal philosopher's stone of an obscure rite that granted him his tremendous burden of eternal life, but at the cost of his living appearance. A burden that once he saw as a gift, but now as a curse… for in order to remain alive, he was forced to feed upon the souls of others. And in recent years it so had become that even though he longed to die, the curse compelled him against his will: to kill, in order to live. To live, so that he must kill… endlessly, for so many, many ages of mortal life! Worst of all… after the first five hundred years, the curse had robbed him of all memory of who he was before he became immortal. For that was the key to his liberation from it. Then came the covenant with this knight's ancestors, who discovered a means to break this accursed cycle… they allowed him to reign as a pale king over their lands… for seven hundred mortal years, withholding what they knew. Testing Ezra's patience. He did prey not upon them or their women. Instead, the people within the castle sustained him. But in time, he was forced to hunt beyond the castle walls; and thence his minions took many in the night who had before grown secure in their safety. One day, he himself came and took this knight's sister. The seven hundred years ended. "But nothing is happening to me!" as he said this, the pale king himself became afraid. "Yet… this is my name, thou art aright." All of a sudden, one of the banshee women made to take a bite… out of the slumbering maiden's hands. Ezra went mad with fury. "Unhand her, thou wretched she-bitch!" he screamed and struck the banshee hard across the face, knocking her to the mildew-stained floor. That... was when the knight struck her through the heart, with his sword. Ezra… went even paler. "Fool of a man, thou canst not kill such as we… but merely anger the dark goddess whose eyes even now watch us with no end of infernal amusement!" As if on cue, a horde of rats poured forth and then engulfed the knight in a ravenous clawing, scratching, and biting mass. The man screamed. The banshee did laugh at him, even as her wound healed. The beasts had come from tiny holes in the walls and they had come at the will of a higher, and darker, power than the pale immortal mind. He slashed at them the knight did, but it was not enough. The king could not interfere! It was with the very goddess who had declared his life's own fate in an earlier era. Now it was this knight's turn to know the cruel hand of that black and unfathomable will. And it was ever terrible!
Chapter Four:
4. Only a bloody skeleton… with tatters of flesh left upon it… remained of the knight. The banshees fell upon those scraps like a pack of ravenous jackals. Ezra turned upon the fallen man's sister now that the knight himself was dead and gone. Why not consummate his desire and make her his bride? The covenant was a lie… for he had regained his memory, but retained his immortal life… and his curse. One of the knight's family lineage, had to say the name… but he had, and it came to not a thing. And with the knight's foolish impetuousness having led to his death, no hope could remain for Ezra Ka the pale king. Ezra Ka the sorcerer. Ezra Ka the lich. Ezra Ka, the two times damned. He waved a palm over the maiden's face, and she did awake with a fright. She screamed, as he bound her arms and legs to the altar with chains that lay nearby... she lay spread-eagled as the king and the banshees drew closer and closer about her. Her gown and her delicate skin beneath it were drenched with slick, warm sweat. She felt an incredible wave of that kind of nausea that comes only with the scent of blood and the stench of death, both now heavy in the dank air of the catacombs. She saw what little remained of her brother in his gore-spattered armor, and she swallowed her own vomit, nearly choking to death upon it. But she did not die. Oh, how she wished she would! But she did not. Not even when one of the banshees raised her brother's heart over her breast and squeezed it, drizzling blood all over her. Her own heart, safe and secure in her body began to beat terribly. Boom-boom! Boom-boom! But it was not her heart alone… something was so thundering close nearby. The pale king cared nothing for the sounds, whatever they were. He was focused upon the unholy rite and could spare no concentration. He tore open the bodice of the maiden's gown and smeared the blood all over her breasts. Against her will… her nipples did begin to become excited as Ezra licked the blood from them… holding her breasts as his tongue lapped here and there. She ceased to scream, and began to moan. It was a fearful moan… but tinged with a kind of hellish ecstasy. "What is this devil's power over me!" she so wondered. The banshees tore other parts of her gown as they too began to lick and lap. "Oh gods…" As the maiden was lost in mindless insanity, brought on by the satanic sexual energies being released from deep within herself and her tormentors… the pounding faded, but did not entirely disappear. Boom-boom! Boom-boom! Was it, then, merely her heart after all, and so the closer she drew to death the less she was to hear it? Frenzied now, Ezra began to tear what remained of her clothing from her. He smeared the blood all over her maiden blossom… she cried out loudly at the touch of his hands down there, between her legs. Banshee tongues did unspeakable things to her, ceasing only to spare her virginity. Angered, the pale king had each struck to the ground. "She is mine alone!" He did thunder at them. "Mine… alone!" He cast his own clothing aside and clambered atop the altar, a vial of some strange and enigmatic fluid in one of his hands. The torch in his other hand, he cast aside. It sputtered until the light dimmed, threatening to plunge all into inky night. He uncapped the vial and a bizarre green liquid issued forth. Once Ezra had anointed the maiden with this, he had a notion to kiss her between her legs… she closed her eyes… and screamed for death to take her now. But death hath the occasional cruel habit, of taking us only when we least desire it to and not before. She felt his wet hardness upon her inner thighs. He intended to enter her! The claiming of her virginity, the releasing of her cherry blossom, would mix with a goodly enough portion of his semen, her brother's blood, and that vilely abominable fluid he had covered her with… to begin her transformation. But it would not complete it! No, he would have to make her taste of human flesh first… a scrap of her brother's would do. But first things would have to come first! Of course, he never got to enter her. Rumble… rumble. Boom-boom! Crack-crack. Cracks began to form… in the statue of the dark she-devil.
Chapter Five:
5. He was thrown from the maiden… with a force that shattered the vial as it was flung from his grasp. The dagger on the ground, the one he would have had to plunge into her… once she tasted of her brother's flesh… to kill her so that she could rise up into un-death, began to hum. Louder and louder it hummed until at last it shattered into countless fragments. In that moment, the banshees fled back to their lairs. Ezra never saw, what had struck him. The statue cracked and cracked. The maiden screamed and screamed until her voice so became hoarse and strained to the verge of cracking, itself. She had all she could do not to urinate with abject fear as the darkness poured through the cracks in the statue and into her mouth. It filled her up… that blackness that had substance yet none… it was the breath of some horrible goddess being pumped into her lungs. She lost consciousness. Nay… her consciousness was pushed back into the inner places of her being. She was becoming someone else now… someone immortal, but of an uncountable age… someone who had never been human before. The statue erupted. As it exploded, the statue showered rocks and fragments everywhere. Clouds… of dust and chalky substance… obscured the pale king's vision. The dim fire of the torch through the clouds gave the catacombs the appearance… of an otherworldly hell. Coming towards him in that hell, was a woman's form. None of the banshees were present. It had to be the maiden. But she made not a sound. Had she screamed herself into silence? And what had happened here, anyway! Then, he heard an inhuman howl. At least, it sounded inhuman, coming from the maiden's injured voice at any rate. It was her voice, was it not? But the truth was, it was not. It formed words… words that came at Ezra through the dust: "I am here, Ezra Ka of Canaan and Egypt. I am here. Look upon me, and prepare to die." As the name of the lich came from the lips of the last living descendant of the knight's family capable to utter them… he began to weaken. "Look upon me, my child, and know I mean ye not any harm, but sweetest release at long last..." But it was not the maiden's face he saw. It was the face of the statue that was no more but which lived on in her. "Sweetest release, Ezra Ka… make love to me… make love to me now, if thou art not too afraid; make love to me and die." She seized him. He was hauled up unto the altar and chained there. He could not resist. His strength so faded whenever she spoke his name, which was frequent. The dust cleared from the air, he could see again. He could see the woman-goddess atop him. Dominating him. "Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka!" Seven times she spoke it; seven times, for the seven hundred years of his reign as king. He was hard within her by her seductions. Though within a virgin's body, this was a true goddess used to persuasion of the pleasurable sort… as well as the painful. Her cherry blossom broke forth the contents of it by their coupling, and his lower body as well as hers became covered in it. This did begin to work the spell of un-death as Ezra had originally planned. Ironic… since he now was about to die himself. His semen pumped into her again and again as she claimed him in her forceful fashion. She was draining him dry, drawing his life force into herself even as she kissed his lips and mouth. "Ezra Ka!" She whispered one final time as he aged and withered. As she withdrew from him, releasing his chains. There was no need for them. The lich was dead. His flesh disintegrated from his bones, his bones grew brittle and then crumbled to ashes. "Thank you, my goddess, my bride, my love…" were the final words he spoke before his spirit, which hovered over the ashes, departed for the realm from whence she had arrived. "I will not be long." She spoke. She would not eat of the flesh and complete the spell by taking her like in that way. The banshees were dust. So were all who the king had crafted in his own grim image through diabolical art. She was the only living soul in a dead castle. The thunder outside cracked and rumbled. There was working yet to be done, this night. Yes!
Chapter Six:
6. No one of the knight's family outlived that long night. Some say it was made unnaturally long for the dark forces that required it to move about it and do their evil deeds. It was the kind of strange tale that becomes a legend over time. A naked woman… covered in blood… was seen, running through the forests with a large sword: her brother's sword, according to the tale. She cut them to pieces as they slept in their beds. In cottages and houses, in hovels and in homes… her own family met their deaths at her hands. An entire village perished this gruesome way in the fleeting span of a single night of horrors. No one had even the chance to scream. No one ever awoke from sorcery-induced dreams. But all died. They found her there, in the middle of all this carnage. A band of traveling merchants, who happened to arrive that morning, expecting to trade but never expecting to encounter this lunatic! She must be a madwoman, they believed. In her inhuman voice, she told her tale. As the story unfolded, the pious crossed themselves and the fearful shook. Some devil had this woman, to be sure, some devil that had lived in yonder castle. A large mob of them thus went armed with firebrands, and descended first into the catacombs and then elsewhere, until all of the forsaken and accursed place burned from within. The stones weakened by the earlier rumblings began to crack… and soon the whole of the castle crumbled and did crash down upon it's foundations. The catacombs could not withstand the press, and soon naught remained of the pale king's fortress but a charred and smoking pile of rubble. But it burned for days, ere the whole of it went thus. Only when all this was done, when it did become certain that there was truly nothing left of those towers, walls, and dungeons; and only then indeed, did the merchants tend to the slain of the village and burn them together in a mass pyre. The buildings, they left, for fear of spreading fire to the woods all around. The madwoman looked at them coldly and distantly. "What is thy name, madam?" one of the men asked. "I have none that Man did not ascribe to me of which ye could so know and understand the sound thereof." Was her reply! He rephrased his question. "What, may we call thee?" "Ye may call me Death, for this have I been and will be again." And the man looked, into her eyes, and knew her to be telling the truth. "Why spare us, then!" He pondered. She so answered him, "The covenant is fulfilled. Both parties hath played their parts and paid the price agreed upon centuries ago, though none today save those who lived in the castle did recall the dearness of that price. The maiden is all that is left. She will die without having tasted of human flesh. She will join her family in the hell that is prepared for them. I will depart her only then." The man now knew her for a witch, and it was agreed she should burn as with her family. She willingly leaped upon the pyre of that fallen, laughing madly whilst the flames ate at her flesh. The laugh became a scream, followed after a while by silence. "Who do ye believe she was… she never told us her name, or her family's?" the large fellow said, over his mug of ale in a small tavern near the Rhine river. "I believe that she was no woman we burned that day… but a specter of death itself!" said his skinny friend. "She seemed possessed, I still say she was a witch!" But the skinny man insisted on the more esoteric view: "No witch ever burned herself before. That was something that did crave death. Only a thing of death, craves it's own with that much relish." Another man walked over. He was the priest, who was with the merchants that day. "Good day to ye, father!" The large merchant said jovially. "Aye, good day, my lads." The priest replied, and said: "I hear ye talking; ye know little of what ye both speak." "Enlighten us, then." Said the skinny man. The priest cleared his throat before speaking again… "Seven days after we were back this way, I went to my church and heard confession. A woman came to me wearing a black gown and veil. 'I wish to confess my sins, father.' she said to me. 'Pray thou begin, my daughter...' I said. She told me a most strange, and familiar, tale."
Chapter Seven:
7. It was the madwoman: the one they had seen burn herself that day. No one had been told her tale but those there… of the lot, none ever spoke of it to anyone. But that alone had not convinced the priest. "It was only when she withdrew her veil…" he continued with the story, "That I was certain that it was indeed her. I shall never forget that face!" "What did she look like, father?" said the large merchant. The priest went on… "Her face was still covered in blood. Pale she was, though. Much paler than she had been as we saw her… I heard her confession, but I knew not what absolution I could grant for a creature that clearly had returned from the dead...from ashes, even! I told her as much." "What happened then, father?" interjected the skinny fellow. "She wept. Her tears as they fell, became blood. She seemed wracked with pain and began to cry out. She ran to the altar-place and fell before the cross that stands there. I began the rite of exorcism in effort to save her clearly damned soul… but no sooner did the holy water fall upon her, than it too became blood! I never knew such fear, such horror. Horns erupted from her forehead… two long and upward curving things of sharp white bone. Her face changed, and became the features of another woman entirely. She seemed like some bloody and fallen angel of the pits, to me. Or one of the forgotten goddesses once worshipped by a band of the barbarians who once inhabited so much of Europe. At any rate, she was all sobs and shrieks! She clawed at my arms with long fingernails like talons, and shredded my bible to pieces. I tried to stop her but nearly got my hands and arms flayed raw for doing so; have ye seen the scars, they be deep and horrible!" He removed his gloves and rolled up his sleeves. One of the nearby tavern goers vomited at the sight of what he displayed… "Like arms of the dead, they are!" one man cried. The flesh was withered to the bone, and deeply etched with lines and marks of all sorts. "My physician told me I now have a horrid rot that cannot be cured. In seven years, he said, I'll be dead of it. My whole body will go this way. No human woman could have done such a thing! No poison known to man, the doctor said. As to the fiend herself, she foamed and frenzied for hours, spouting all kinds of strange gibberish in more languages than I know… and I know many. Mostly how she despised what the Church hath done with religion, and this betwixt crying over what she called the 'old days' when 'her kind' was yet loved by Man and not hated or feared. The hours dragged on intolerably, until it thus began to rain outside. Luckily, no one else went to church on that evil day..." The priest shuddered visibly before going on… "And then, it ended." "Just like that, did it?" laughed the large merchant..."Too much ale, some incurable toxin in it most likely, and ye hurt thyself drunk!" But the priest was not yet finished… "Fool!" He screamed… and stood up at the table where they were all sitting. "Dost thou know nothing? I never said it was so simple as that. How I wish it had been..." Thence, the priest began to cry. The skinny man pat him on the back, calmed him down. Thusly, the dark mood passed and the priest was rational again… "She said that my death would be the slowest, but least painful. All who were there that day will also die, all of us who had watched her burn. Then, all who remember the location of the castle will have passed... only then, can she rest in peace. This told to me, she swiftly vanished in a dusty cloud." "Father, go see the bishop. Ask him to send ye to a monastery. Tell it to a scribe; it's bound to make for a yarn worth copying for posterity!" Said the large merchant who did not believe him even now. No one did. Of course, no one spoke of the matter. Strangely, that is what saved more lives than anyone knew. Over the course of seven years… all the merchants died bloodily by the sword. It was blamed on brigands, but nothing was ever stolen. And when the priest had breathed his last… the devil-woman was never seen again.
Chapter One:
1. He was called the pale king. No one can remember his name, not even him. Clad in his black gown, his white skin glistening in the torchlight of his castle, he was the very image of living death. But although he in fact was of the living, some say even immortal, it was a terrifying fact… that not one of his eternally loyal servants and attendants were likewise. They were dead, but lived. He lived, but appeared not to. He was the pale king. No one can remember his name, not even him. No one, however, save one man in all the world... and it was that man who approached the castle near the end of that year so long ago that a true reckoning of the exact date would be impossible. The knight approached, snow thick upon the road and slowing the horse that carried him. The knight approached the castle of the pale king. Although the knight was a strong man and very well acquainted with many horrors, having been in war and having seen the terrors of the plague men called the Black Death, he knew fear this night. An unspeakable dread, for he knew! "I know thy name!" He called up at the towering gatehouse of the fortress. "As in that ancient pact with mine ancestors, thou must allow me entry… for I am the first to learn of thy true nature in seven hundred years. In proof of what I declare, I speak the word that I heard from my father and he from his before him…" and with that, his voice grew into a commanding growl as he cried, "Ad-das-voc-rah!" No answer came until he had repeated this word three times. Then, the gate slowly creaked open. Thundering across the wooden drawbridge that descended, over a stagnant moat, the knight was silent. Even as he entered the courtyard, with it's unnatural gray roses and sharp briars, which winter could not kill. With it's dead trees and nesting black ravens. With it's dead but animate groundskeepers and gardeners. Even with all this, the courtyard of the castle disturbed him but in passing. He rode on, in silence. Six times he crashed the knocker against the portals of the castle keep. Five times, not a single answer came. With the sixth, the doors swung inward upon their rusted hinges… the knight stepped within, his steed already tied at the post of the nearby stables. Black as the tomb was the keep… unlit and as silent as a grave. The creaking of bones heralded a pale and skeletally gaunt manservant, who bore a black candle. "Follow me, ye who know the word of passage. Follow me, my master awaits thee." His voice was hollow and wheezy. The knight knew the man was of the living dead… he knew, and felt a mixture of disgust and horror, but remained strong to look upon. "I must not falter here." The knight thence whispered, as he followed the creature before him. "For the sake of my sister!" He added. The throne room had been neglected so long it was in ruins… this was not, where now the pale king received visitors. (Which was not frequent, to say the least!) And so it was, the knight was directed up the spiraling stairs that led up one of the towers. Hugged by a cold gray wall on both sides… the stairs did pass windows of perfect stained glass on one side, the only proof that there was a world beyond the darkness of the keep, for a silvery moonlight illuminated them dully from without. The images upon them were of decadent sexual acts and highly depraved deeds. Some on the verge of being wildly sadistic in nature! Wicked. This was the knight's thought as he pondered what sort of people had once lived here, died here, and become enslaved even after to the very author of their damnation. Wicked folk. At last they arrived at a door near the top of the tower. The servant opened it, and thence the knight stepped within. It was a study… a well-lit study, but for all things of an arcane nature. Ancient books of blackly forbidden subjects, were kept meticulously on the large shelves that ran the entire circumference of the circular room save only where tall columns held up the ceiling before windows that were obscured by tattered black draperies. Tables held a massive variety of magical apparatus and objects of power, and seated in his elaborately carved oaken chair at the desk at the far end of the room from the door...was the pale king.
Chapter Two:
2. "A more fearful lich I hath not seen!" cried the knight in some alarm. The terrible snow-white man, with his colorless white hair, pitch black eyes, and thin black garments regarded his visitor silently. Nay, the eyes were not black… only the hollows in which they sat were black, like deep vacant caverns… caverns in which a certain glint of blue flickered like the torchlight on the walls between bookshelves and bookshelves. Or like the candle at the king's desk. But blue, as blue against their whites as to be like unto a sky frozen before a monstrous storm. He was handsome once, this king. Perhaps in way, he still was. But terrible, so terrible to meet those eyes! He was never a large man, not even before… but now he was almost corpselike in his appearance. A terrible, but handsome corpse is what the pale king appeared to be. His voice was as cold as his eyes. "In thy words is fear, oh man. Fear!" He laughed… and that laugh was a cackle of (sadistic?) pleasure at the knight's discomfort. The knight spoke in a shaking voice that trembled in an uncontrollable way, "Nay, not fear sir… more like some frightful pity I think… aye…" but he found it difficult to even form words just now. It was fear indeed; a chilling fear! "Thou dost pity me?" chuckled the king, "Then end my pain, oh man. Tell me what is my name, that I may rest with my people in death at last… that the curse laid upon us by the gods for our sins may be broken!" Tears began to form in the knight’s eyes… "If thou wilt promise to release my sister and harm her not, this will I gladly do, sir. But only the case being that she is alive and well!" He choked back his tears long enough to say most of this with some authority. The king was deadly serious all of a sudden… "She is well, if that pleases thee, man. She is well. I have not claimed her for my bride, not as of yet anyway. She slumbers, in the catacombs below. Wouldst thou that I should take thee thither?" The knight said to this, "Aye." But was in no hurry truly to descend into that place. Few ever returned from there at all. Those who did were no longer wholly alive when they emerged. "Lead on…" the knight said, regardless: "Lead on, pale king, and may devils take thee if thou dare to lie to me." To which the king replied: "Why my dear man, they already have!" as he grinned, with his thin lips, in the most cruel manner imaginable. Just then, his face looked like a fierce demonic skull! The catacombs were the darkest part of the castle. In the light of the candle in it's pale silver holder, held by the even paler hand of the king… piles of human skulls were seen here and there, as well as slabs upon which the bones of entire generations lay. That… was not the horror of this place! That came later, when the knight followed his grim guide into the deeper of the vaults… past the slabs set into the walls where amongst the bones common elsewhere, could be seen what appeared to be women clad in exquisite dresses who were actually in the process of feasting upon what flesh remained upon some of the interred cadavers. The eyes of these women were feral and inhuman… and save for their mad actions… they thus appeared as dead as their master did. They did not speak. They shrieked. The knight then pictured his sister as one of these banshees, and wept bitterly. The king seemed surprised. "Why dost thou weep, ye man! Have I not told thee… that thy sister is untainted by my lovemaking?" The knight was disgusted… "Love, ye say! What manner of love, changes people into such beasts as I do espy within these vaults? Surely only hatred could do this dire working." At which the king became almost cynical as he said, "How little, ye must know of love, sir knight… that thou doth knot not the lengths to which it fills one up with madness. Is not thy attempt to save thy sister from living death, a kind of lunacy that thus drives thee on… into even this twilight domain, though it surely will be thy own doom ere long?" "What a monster thou art, pale fiend, to compare barbarity to chivalry!" The knight in this cared not if he dared his host's wrath. The pale man, however, only laughed and thus said… "All men and women can become monsters, when life hath no meaning for them."
Chapter Three:
3. She was lying as if in state, upon what seemed a plain altar of smoothly polished stone, beneath an immense statue of a wingless weeping angel… whose widely outstretched arms, and haloed countenance, seemed to be pleading for a mercy that will never come. But unlike most angels, this one had horns that curved sharply upward from her forehead. All in all, the effect was that this was a shrine to some fallen divinity long ago cast from out Heaven. And she was asleep… the knight's sister was… asleep, in a dreamless state as if induced by the deity that appeared to cry endlessly above her. The knight looked delighted at the fact that his sibling seemed to be alive at least outwardly… her breaths came and went in regular fashion. Asleep, she seemed indeed, clad in a voluminous white gown that clung to her small form, it's puffy sleeves loose upon her thin frame. Banshees knelt in prayer, at the foot of the altar. The only passing sane act the knight had witnessed such perform. "She lives." said the knight, caressing a handful of his sister's dark auburn hair, as he looked her over approvingly. "I do not lie." said the king, "Now, for thy end of our holy bargain..." and the knight replied: "When thou didst live as men do, thy name such as it was in those lost ancient days… was Ezra Ka." At hearing this, memories flooded across the mind of the pale king. Indeed, he was once called Ezra Ka… a son of Pagan Canaan, long before the coming of God's Old Law to that land. Ezra Ka… driven into exile by the followers of an angry and tyrannical Jehovah. Driven into Egypt… there, to become one of the darkest sorcerers of that ancient age. Discovering the secrets of alchemy, he attained the literal philosopher's stone of an obscure rite that granted him his tremendous burden of eternal life, but at the cost of his living appearance. A burden that once he saw as a gift, but now as a curse… for in order to remain alive, he was forced to feed upon the souls of others. And in recent years it so had become that even though he longed to die, the curse compelled him against his will: to kill, in order to live. To live, so that he must kill… endlessly, for so many, many ages of mortal life! Worst of all… after the first five hundred years, the curse had robbed him of all memory of who he was before he became immortal. For that was the key to his liberation from it. Then came the covenant with this knight's ancestors, who discovered a means to break this accursed cycle… they allowed him to reign as a pale king over their lands… for seven hundred mortal years, withholding what they knew. Testing Ezra's patience. He did prey not upon them or their women. Instead, the people within the castle sustained him. But in time, he was forced to hunt beyond the castle walls; and thence his minions took many in the night who had before grown secure in their safety. One day, he himself came and took this knight's sister. The seven hundred years ended. "But nothing is happening to me!" as he said this, the pale king himself became afraid. "Yet… this is my name, thou art aright." All of a sudden, one of the banshee women made to take a bite… out of the slumbering maiden's hands. Ezra went mad with fury. "Unhand her, thou wretched she-bitch!" he screamed and struck the banshee hard across the face, knocking her to the mildew-stained floor. That... was when the knight struck her through the heart, with his sword. Ezra… went even paler. "Fool of a man, thou canst not kill such as we… but merely anger the dark goddess whose eyes even now watch us with no end of infernal amusement!" As if on cue, a horde of rats poured forth and then engulfed the knight in a ravenous clawing, scratching, and biting mass. The man screamed. The banshee did laugh at him, even as her wound healed. The beasts had come from tiny holes in the walls and they had come at the will of a higher, and darker, power than the pale immortal mind. He slashed at them the knight did, but it was not enough. The king could not interfere! It was with the very goddess who had declared his life's own fate in an earlier era. Now it was this knight's turn to know the cruel hand of that black and unfathomable will. And it was ever terrible!
Chapter Four:
4. Only a bloody skeleton… with tatters of flesh left upon it… remained of the knight. The banshees fell upon those scraps like a pack of ravenous jackals. Ezra turned upon the fallen man's sister now that the knight himself was dead and gone. Why not consummate his desire and make her his bride? The covenant was a lie… for he had regained his memory, but retained his immortal life… and his curse. One of the knight's family lineage, had to say the name… but he had, and it came to not a thing. And with the knight's foolish impetuousness having led to his death, no hope could remain for Ezra Ka the pale king. Ezra Ka the sorcerer. Ezra Ka the lich. Ezra Ka, the two times damned. He waved a palm over the maiden's face, and she did awake with a fright. She screamed, as he bound her arms and legs to the altar with chains that lay nearby... she lay spread-eagled as the king and the banshees drew closer and closer about her. Her gown and her delicate skin beneath it were drenched with slick, warm sweat. She felt an incredible wave of that kind of nausea that comes only with the scent of blood and the stench of death, both now heavy in the dank air of the catacombs. She saw what little remained of her brother in his gore-spattered armor, and she swallowed her own vomit, nearly choking to death upon it. But she did not die. Oh, how she wished she would! But she did not. Not even when one of the banshees raised her brother's heart over her breast and squeezed it, drizzling blood all over her. Her own heart, safe and secure in her body began to beat terribly. Boom-boom! Boom-boom! But it was not her heart alone… something was so thundering close nearby. The pale king cared nothing for the sounds, whatever they were. He was focused upon the unholy rite and could spare no concentration. He tore open the bodice of the maiden's gown and smeared the blood all over her breasts. Against her will… her nipples did begin to become excited as Ezra licked the blood from them… holding her breasts as his tongue lapped here and there. She ceased to scream, and began to moan. It was a fearful moan… but tinged with a kind of hellish ecstasy. "What is this devil's power over me!" she so wondered. The banshees tore other parts of her gown as they too began to lick and lap. "Oh gods…" As the maiden was lost in mindless insanity, brought on by the satanic sexual energies being released from deep within herself and her tormentors… the pounding faded, but did not entirely disappear. Boom-boom! Boom-boom! Was it, then, merely her heart after all, and so the closer she drew to death the less she was to hear it? Frenzied now, Ezra began to tear what remained of her clothing from her. He smeared the blood all over her maiden blossom… she cried out loudly at the touch of his hands down there, between her legs. Banshee tongues did unspeakable things to her, ceasing only to spare her virginity. Angered, the pale king had each struck to the ground. "She is mine alone!" He did thunder at them. "Mine… alone!" He cast his own clothing aside and clambered atop the altar, a vial of some strange and enigmatic fluid in one of his hands. The torch in his other hand, he cast aside. It sputtered until the light dimmed, threatening to plunge all into inky night. He uncapped the vial and a bizarre green liquid issued forth. Once Ezra had anointed the maiden with this, he had a notion to kiss her between her legs… she closed her eyes… and screamed for death to take her now. But death hath the occasional cruel habit, of taking us only when we least desire it to and not before. She felt his wet hardness upon her inner thighs. He intended to enter her! The claiming of her virginity, the releasing of her cherry blossom, would mix with a goodly enough portion of his semen, her brother's blood, and that vilely abominable fluid he had covered her with… to begin her transformation. But it would not complete it! No, he would have to make her taste of human flesh first… a scrap of her brother's would do. But first things would have to come first! Of course, he never got to enter her. Rumble… rumble. Boom-boom! Crack-crack. Cracks began to form… in the statue of the dark she-devil.
Chapter Five:
5. He was thrown from the maiden… with a force that shattered the vial as it was flung from his grasp. The dagger on the ground, the one he would have had to plunge into her… once she tasted of her brother's flesh… to kill her so that she could rise up into un-death, began to hum. Louder and louder it hummed until at last it shattered into countless fragments. In that moment, the banshees fled back to their lairs. Ezra never saw, what had struck him. The statue cracked and cracked. The maiden screamed and screamed until her voice so became hoarse and strained to the verge of cracking, itself. She had all she could do not to urinate with abject fear as the darkness poured through the cracks in the statue and into her mouth. It filled her up… that blackness that had substance yet none… it was the breath of some horrible goddess being pumped into her lungs. She lost consciousness. Nay… her consciousness was pushed back into the inner places of her being. She was becoming someone else now… someone immortal, but of an uncountable age… someone who had never been human before. The statue erupted. As it exploded, the statue showered rocks and fragments everywhere. Clouds… of dust and chalky substance… obscured the pale king's vision. The dim fire of the torch through the clouds gave the catacombs the appearance… of an otherworldly hell. Coming towards him in that hell, was a woman's form. None of the banshees were present. It had to be the maiden. But she made not a sound. Had she screamed herself into silence? And what had happened here, anyway! Then, he heard an inhuman howl. At least, it sounded inhuman, coming from the maiden's injured voice at any rate. It was her voice, was it not? But the truth was, it was not. It formed words… words that came at Ezra through the dust: "I am here, Ezra Ka of Canaan and Egypt. I am here. Look upon me, and prepare to die." As the name of the lich came from the lips of the last living descendant of the knight's family capable to utter them… he began to weaken. "Look upon me, my child, and know I mean ye not any harm, but sweetest release at long last..." But it was not the maiden's face he saw. It was the face of the statue that was no more but which lived on in her. "Sweetest release, Ezra Ka… make love to me… make love to me now, if thou art not too afraid; make love to me and die." She seized him. He was hauled up unto the altar and chained there. He could not resist. His strength so faded whenever she spoke his name, which was frequent. The dust cleared from the air, he could see again. He could see the woman-goddess atop him. Dominating him. "Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka! Ezra Ka!" Seven times she spoke it; seven times, for the seven hundred years of his reign as king. He was hard within her by her seductions. Though within a virgin's body, this was a true goddess used to persuasion of the pleasurable sort… as well as the painful. Her cherry blossom broke forth the contents of it by their coupling, and his lower body as well as hers became covered in it. This did begin to work the spell of un-death as Ezra had originally planned. Ironic… since he now was about to die himself. His semen pumped into her again and again as she claimed him in her forceful fashion. She was draining him dry, drawing his life force into herself even as she kissed his lips and mouth. "Ezra Ka!" She whispered one final time as he aged and withered. As she withdrew from him, releasing his chains. There was no need for them. The lich was dead. His flesh disintegrated from his bones, his bones grew brittle and then crumbled to ashes. "Thank you, my goddess, my bride, my love…" were the final words he spoke before his spirit, which hovered over the ashes, departed for the realm from whence she had arrived. "I will not be long." She spoke. She would not eat of the flesh and complete the spell by taking her like in that way. The banshees were dust. So were all who the king had crafted in his own grim image through diabolical art. She was the only living soul in a dead castle. The thunder outside cracked and rumbled. There was working yet to be done, this night. Yes!
Chapter Six:
6. No one of the knight's family outlived that long night. Some say it was made unnaturally long for the dark forces that required it to move about it and do their evil deeds. It was the kind of strange tale that becomes a legend over time. A naked woman… covered in blood… was seen, running through the forests with a large sword: her brother's sword, according to the tale. She cut them to pieces as they slept in their beds. In cottages and houses, in hovels and in homes… her own family met their deaths at her hands. An entire village perished this gruesome way in the fleeting span of a single night of horrors. No one had even the chance to scream. No one ever awoke from sorcery-induced dreams. But all died. They found her there, in the middle of all this carnage. A band of traveling merchants, who happened to arrive that morning, expecting to trade but never expecting to encounter this lunatic! She must be a madwoman, they believed. In her inhuman voice, she told her tale. As the story unfolded, the pious crossed themselves and the fearful shook. Some devil had this woman, to be sure, some devil that had lived in yonder castle. A large mob of them thus went armed with firebrands, and descended first into the catacombs and then elsewhere, until all of the forsaken and accursed place burned from within. The stones weakened by the earlier rumblings began to crack… and soon the whole of the castle crumbled and did crash down upon it's foundations. The catacombs could not withstand the press, and soon naught remained of the pale king's fortress but a charred and smoking pile of rubble. But it burned for days, ere the whole of it went thus. Only when all this was done, when it did become certain that there was truly nothing left of those towers, walls, and dungeons; and only then indeed, did the merchants tend to the slain of the village and burn them together in a mass pyre. The buildings, they left, for fear of spreading fire to the woods all around. The madwoman looked at them coldly and distantly. "What is thy name, madam?" one of the men asked. "I have none that Man did not ascribe to me of which ye could so know and understand the sound thereof." Was her reply! He rephrased his question. "What, may we call thee?" "Ye may call me Death, for this have I been and will be again." And the man looked, into her eyes, and knew her to be telling the truth. "Why spare us, then!" He pondered. She so answered him, "The covenant is fulfilled. Both parties hath played their parts and paid the price agreed upon centuries ago, though none today save those who lived in the castle did recall the dearness of that price. The maiden is all that is left. She will die without having tasted of human flesh. She will join her family in the hell that is prepared for them. I will depart her only then." The man now knew her for a witch, and it was agreed she should burn as with her family. She willingly leaped upon the pyre of that fallen, laughing madly whilst the flames ate at her flesh. The laugh became a scream, followed after a while by silence. "Who do ye believe she was… she never told us her name, or her family's?" the large fellow said, over his mug of ale in a small tavern near the Rhine river. "I believe that she was no woman we burned that day… but a specter of death itself!" said his skinny friend. "She seemed possessed, I still say she was a witch!" But the skinny man insisted on the more esoteric view: "No witch ever burned herself before. That was something that did crave death. Only a thing of death, craves it's own with that much relish." Another man walked over. He was the priest, who was with the merchants that day. "Good day to ye, father!" The large merchant said jovially. "Aye, good day, my lads." The priest replied, and said: "I hear ye talking; ye know little of what ye both speak." "Enlighten us, then." Said the skinny man. The priest cleared his throat before speaking again… "Seven days after we were back this way, I went to my church and heard confession. A woman came to me wearing a black gown and veil. 'I wish to confess my sins, father.' she said to me. 'Pray thou begin, my daughter...' I said. She told me a most strange, and familiar, tale."
Chapter Seven:
7. It was the madwoman: the one they had seen burn herself that day. No one had been told her tale but those there… of the lot, none ever spoke of it to anyone. But that alone had not convinced the priest. "It was only when she withdrew her veil…" he continued with the story, "That I was certain that it was indeed her. I shall never forget that face!" "What did she look like, father?" said the large merchant. The priest went on… "Her face was still covered in blood. Pale she was, though. Much paler than she had been as we saw her… I heard her confession, but I knew not what absolution I could grant for a creature that clearly had returned from the dead...from ashes, even! I told her as much." "What happened then, father?" interjected the skinny fellow. "She wept. Her tears as they fell, became blood. She seemed wracked with pain and began to cry out. She ran to the altar-place and fell before the cross that stands there. I began the rite of exorcism in effort to save her clearly damned soul… but no sooner did the holy water fall upon her, than it too became blood! I never knew such fear, such horror. Horns erupted from her forehead… two long and upward curving things of sharp white bone. Her face changed, and became the features of another woman entirely. She seemed like some bloody and fallen angel of the pits, to me. Or one of the forgotten goddesses once worshipped by a band of the barbarians who once inhabited so much of Europe. At any rate, she was all sobs and shrieks! She clawed at my arms with long fingernails like talons, and shredded my bible to pieces. I tried to stop her but nearly got my hands and arms flayed raw for doing so; have ye seen the scars, they be deep and horrible!" He removed his gloves and rolled up his sleeves. One of the nearby tavern goers vomited at the sight of what he displayed… "Like arms of the dead, they are!" one man cried. The flesh was withered to the bone, and deeply etched with lines and marks of all sorts. "My physician told me I now have a horrid rot that cannot be cured. In seven years, he said, I'll be dead of it. My whole body will go this way. No human woman could have done such a thing! No poison known to man, the doctor said. As to the fiend herself, she foamed and frenzied for hours, spouting all kinds of strange gibberish in more languages than I know… and I know many. Mostly how she despised what the Church hath done with religion, and this betwixt crying over what she called the 'old days' when 'her kind' was yet loved by Man and not hated or feared. The hours dragged on intolerably, until it thus began to rain outside. Luckily, no one else went to church on that evil day..." The priest shuddered visibly before going on… "And then, it ended." "Just like that, did it?" laughed the large merchant..."Too much ale, some incurable toxin in it most likely, and ye hurt thyself drunk!" But the priest was not yet finished… "Fool!" He screamed… and stood up at the table where they were all sitting. "Dost thou know nothing? I never said it was so simple as that. How I wish it had been..." Thence, the priest began to cry. The skinny man pat him on the back, calmed him down. Thusly, the dark mood passed and the priest was rational again… "She said that my death would be the slowest, but least painful. All who were there that day will also die, all of us who had watched her burn. Then, all who remember the location of the castle will have passed... only then, can she rest in peace. This told to me, she swiftly vanished in a dusty cloud." "Father, go see the bishop. Ask him to send ye to a monastery. Tell it to a scribe; it's bound to make for a yarn worth copying for posterity!" Said the large merchant who did not believe him even now. No one did. Of course, no one spoke of the matter. Strangely, that is what saved more lives than anyone knew. Over the course of seven years… all the merchants died bloodily by the sword. It was blamed on brigands, but nothing was ever stolen. And when the priest had breathed his last… the devil-woman was never seen again.
Published 11th Apr 2013
All writing remains the property of the author. Don't use it for any purpose without their permission.
likes 5
reading list entries 4
comments 6
reads 1202
Commenting Preference:
The author encourages honest critique.
11th Apr 2013 12:11pm
12th Apr 2013 7:51am
Why thank you, Grace! By all means, enjoy it at your leisure my dear friend, that's what it's here for. So happy you love my short stories! :D
I could never compare to your way with words. As much as I envy you, i applaud you as well. I have not read this completely through for I have not the time, however after the first two chapters, I can tell this is very well written already. I'm excited to read this to the end. I can't find to words to say how superb this is.
12th Apr 2013 7:55am
I am honored at your praise, Balefulmalevolence! I am delighted you are enjoying my short story, and I think you will find the twist ending to be very interesting and quite unexpected... but at the same time it's a logical conclusion to the story and the whole flow of it. Happy reading to you, dear reader! :D
Anonymous
11th Apr 2013 7:47pm
Such a complete and profound write, very powerful, illusive and creative from a brilliant mind and a divine soul!!!! Fascinating!
12th Apr 2013 8:03am
I am deeply honored, dear big sister! Your praise is a delight to read, and I am happy you found this tale to be so fascinating and profound too. :) It was both one of my darker writes, but also one of my most in-depth and interesting ones at the same time! The sort of grim and gritty fantasy story that has become such a popular genre in recent years, but it doesn't shy away from the magic, which is at the heart of the tale.
