deepundergroundpoetry.com
Prison of the Titan Queen
- Prison of the Titan Queen -
Within the pale vale of dolorous splendors, there did lay the fields beyond which the azure-blue mountains rose like ethereal, sapphire giants on some ancient gray battlefield. The moon that loomed in the distant skies on high above me as I walked… reverently… across that empty landscape, that albino orb did seem to be like a colorless dead titan trapped in a sea of utter darkness. For the stars did little to provide illumination, and indeed save for that terrible moon… I was under the impression that a storm was coming nigh. Through the dark forests that squatted to either side of the road I traveled, there the moonlight shone in ghostly radiance. A sickly glow it was, and in the depths of the vale I could well imagine the dead walking therein. I was bound for the very heart of the darkness, fearing it not… though well I should have. Frightful forms I beheld amidst the twisted trees that, themselves, were like no tress that grow or ever grew upon the face of the planet called Earth. Where was I? How did I come to wander hither! Such were my thoughts, and those sights I witnessed and the creatures that made such sights so awful… those same were both alien and familiar to my eyes. I ignored those night terrors, for like night terrors they were, having not any names, none as humans would understand anyway. And as I hastened past their hunting grounds and dens, they seemed to bow their angular heads in reverence. Was I like some angel or divine being to them, then? I did not wish to know how they saw me. In time, I came to a place where the slopes of the mountains could be seen. Why did those mighty bastions appear so blue in so black a night? Perhaps it was the peculiar light of the moon that made it so, and such an illogical assumption was what I had convinced myself of. The cliffs that dominated all sides of the vale were most evident to me now, and the clinging ivy and funguses that stuck to the rocky walls seemed a colorless white. This was a domain where nothing colorful or joyful could be seen, and it made me fearful that I might be in an awful purgatory of some sort. I swore I would escape it at any cost, though I could not remember how it was I had come hither and why I should wish to escape, or to where. It was a primal, emotional feeling. Nothing more or less than that! I could still hear the chattering and guttural noise of the fiends I had passes. Were they closing in on my location even now? I had no time to consider that, I reasoned, and so made all effort to look for a way higher up the nearest of the slopes that sat before me. There was an evil sensation in the air, and creeping shapes just out of the corners of my eyes. The stones of the cliffs were cold to the touch, and there was just a hint of frost coming into the air right about then. I looked for handholds and footholds in the rock, and finding ones that I knew would hold my weight… I climbed upward, in the hope of reaching the highest extent of the slope without making it easy for the fell things to find me. Upon clambering to the top of the cliff, I reached some solitary ruins that I did not see from below, which lay upon the cliff-top and just at the very part of the slope above it where the summit of that hilly mound could be reached by walking. I could not have reached this particular slope from the ground below after all, though it at first would appear to one as if you could. I was safe from the creatures, but I did not know if something more terrible awaited me here.
This had been a grand palace once upon a time, an abode of kings and queens. I could remember standing in this court and wearing my finest gown, my pale blonde hair cascading down to my lower back. When was this place last living? I could not remember, nor could I imagine how it might have become so forsaken a place now. Broken walls, blasted rubble, and the remnants of toppled columns were all that remained now. In the heart of the ruined palace lay a large black monolith that did have the look of an obelisk to it, covered in strange graven runes of some white etching that may have been silver or some alloy closely approximate thereto. I touched the runes, and they glowed beneath my searching fingers. I smiled, my curiosity piqued. Suddenly, as I traced the runic patterns, there was a warmth exuding from the obelisk, and a sound not unlike a sort of heartbeat. A distinctly human-like thumping that resounded audibly and not simply in my imagination. Was this monument alive somehow? I backed away from it instinctively, and it began to open. Panels slid downward, and a doorway formed in the monolith. I entered within, and discovered it to be a sort of elevator chamber that then sealed itself and bore me down into the ground, to whatever hidden chambers might be below. The door opened again, and I got out of the conveyance and found myself in a twisting black tunnel with the only light coming from strange fixtures on the wall every several feet or so. These fixtures must have been powered by something, and they gave off a blue light very similar in color to the blue of the mountains themselves. Blue seemed to be a significant color here, perhaps even sacred. Though why that should be so, I could not tell you. It simply occurred to me, like something remembered rather than reasoned out. I followed the tunnel, and noticed that the patterns of the walls were like immense ebony rib bones, with met at the ceiling where a serpentine spine ran the length of the entire tunnel. This gave the place a very strange appearance, like no architecture known to man’s masonry or engineering. I could hear a loud hissing sound, and saw blasts of air being blown into the tunnel by vents every so often. Though when first I heard the hiss I jumped, believing it to be some terrible serpent. This place was designed for a human being to traverse in safety, though I did not remember ever seeing it when the palace was still new. Was it a secret that was kept by they who once ruled here, or was this older even than those ancient monarchs? I could not imagine. No one could. It was enough that it existed and I was here, apparently safe from the perils of the vale on the surface. The tunnel widened after a while, and great tree-like pillars supported a high vaulted ceiling. More bone-like designs, and many organic-seeming ones as well, all ebony black, gave this place a frightening and wicked appearance. Was I meant to have come here, or was I an unwelcome guest? I feared what the inhabitants of such a domain might be like, though I suspected them to be as long dead as the ruins in which I had found the entrance to this secret region. The seemed very much, an abode of death itself!
Amidst the pillars, and entwining about them, were snake-like things with many tentacles. I could not describe them in any other terms, though their forms seemed to shift as I looked upon them. They pulsated, the slimy membranes of their outer skin oozing gruesome dark liquids. They smelled strangely like ammonia, or that might have been their leaking fluids that had such an odor. I did not wish to know what those things were! I looked away from them and focused on reaching the farthest end of the tunnel… or was this now a vast chamber? The walls seemed to shift somewhat as I walked along, the carapace-like material twisting and altering itself to form new pillars, new archways, new tunnels off of the main one I had been on previously. I knew I could never find my way back in the labyrinth that this place was becoming. I was trapped, and I most feared that I might end up a feast for those terrible monsters that clung to the pillars. I saw skeletons on the ground in many places, the snake-like things swarming about the bones. They were not quite of human stature, those bones, though in every other way there were human. Ancient bloodstained covered the skeletons, forming long-dried pools beneath them. Whoever they had been, they died violently, and it was clear what horrors had killed them. I avoided the remains wherever I could, for now they were nests of sorts for those horrible monsters. The stones beneath my feet were covered at times in a pale blue moss that had a purplish tint to it in various patches. It was the only colorful thing in this place, and that was far from being a reassuring notion. I heard a faint voice calling to me just ahead, down one of the arched tunnels that opened up as I walked. “Come to me, child!” it said, in a distinctively feminine tone of voice. I yelled in reply: “I am here! I am coming!” as I literally ran in the direction from which the voice had echoed forth. What purpose was this place erected for? I wondered if I was going mad, and perhaps following the voice of a ghost, mayhap of one of the builders themselves. A gray mist began to fill the floor of these nether regions, and it was not difficult to imagine specters in such a realm. “Come to me, child!” I could hear louder, and I knew then that such a voice could only be issuing from living vocal chords. I followed as best I could, and as I did so the place just kept shifting. Was this some automated mechanism’s doing, or was there some intelligence behind the twisting, turning, and sliding corridors and rooms through which I traveled? I was remembering a path I had walked long, long ago… far beyond my soul’s ability to consciously remember. I was remembering from instinct, without knowing where that instinct was coming from. “Come to me, child!” the feminine voice kept saying, and I followed it… deeper, and deeper. I heard the sound of rushing water, from some underground stream, and I reasoned it must be from the water of the river that ran the length of the vale on the surface. Somehow, water from the river was being directed down here for a purpose.
There was machinery in the vast circular chambers I found myself in next, which pumped water from above and fed it into channels that ran into dark recesses in the walls. The water was collected in some way, and used to feed what appeared to be a great garden lit by unnatural blue light from above. Trees, flowers, and plants of alien varieties, yet all beautiful beyond words to describe… thusly appeared the twisted paradise that met my eyes. The water was slimy where it met the grass that grew from the moist soil that had by now replaced the stone of the earlier tunnels and chambers, and peculiar lilies emerged from that wet earth. Within the heart of that subterranean garden there was a sort of shrine. Four arched pillars of the same black bone-like appearance as all the other architecture I had seen since arriving here… those did rise up from a marble base, and in the midst of base rose a dais upon which was a great throne of equally ebon material. Upon that throne was a towering woman in a white gown. Her skin was pale, and in this lighting appeared almost a baby blue shade… and her eyes were gentle and of an amethyst hue, which was both strange and lovely at the same time. Her head was angular and hairless, and various tubes and mechanisms kept her bound to the throne upon which she reclined. Very much like a prisoner! She did not move her lips, yet I heard her voice ring out once again: “You have come to me, child! Very good… now approach me without fear.” And I did as she bade. My sandaled feet clapped upon the marble and I mounted the dais with care and reverence. “Who are you?” I asked, and the strange woman smiled knowing but said nothing. As I got closer, I saw that the woman’s hands were claw-like, with sharp, jet-black fingernails. Her facial features were elfin and beautiful, and were it not for the angular shape of her head I would not have found her all that strange to look upon after all. The two tubes that were connected from her forehead to the throne seemed to my imagination to give the appearance of curved ram-like horns. But tubes they were, and they clearly were part of whatever mechanical means it was by which the woman was able to project her thoughts into the air around her, thus eliminating the need to move her mouth in order to speak. “What do you want from me?” I asked, and her voice boomed out: “I want you to set me free, so that you yourself can be free from this place as well. Be not afraid, child, for I mean you no harm. I am the last of the Titans who once dwelled here… the same race that once you loved so well, and this place you and I once called home in another age. Can you not feel how familiar all of this is?” I could, and that made me more frightened than anything. I had nothing to lose, however, in granting the lovely Titan’s request. I began to disconnect the tubes one by one, starting with the ones that bound her hands, arms, legs, and feet. Why she had been bound, I could not guess. I knew only that it was an unjust fate, and that she deserved to be granted her freedom now. Blood and other fluids issued forth from the tubes, and there was a hiss as each one was snapped away. Last, I undid the two that bound the woman’s head. Finally, she was free to move and speak without being so encumbered and constrained.
She rose from the throne to her full height, at least eight feet tall. Her lower legs, I noticed earlier, were mechanical rather than flesh and blood. She put a hand on my shoulder with all the tenderness of a mother reassuring her child that all is well. She smiled happily, and attempted to speak unaided for the first time in untold ages. No voice came forth though, only a gagging and coughing from vocal chords unused to speech. She kept trying to clear her throat, and occasionally spit up some fluid unto the ground in order to clear her throat. Finally, after much laboring, she managed to speak, her voice no less lovely than it had been telepathically but with a mild rasp to it that was somewhat snake-like to hear. “Forgive me, child, but I have not spoken in many, many long centuries. The gods took my voice as well as my freedom, but left me the means to speak without a voice… though in their cruelty they allowed me no one to speak with. Until now!” I asked her: “Why did the gods punish you to begin with?” and she nodded her head gravely, refusing to speak of it. “Come, let us depart.” She intoned, and she led me by the hand along the twisting and twisted paths by which I had come. “What are those monsters I saw on the way here, the ones wrapped around the pillars? They seem to have killed some of your people.” I mentioned to the Titan woman, and she replied: “They are my punishment, to ensure my loneliness. I have become their queen, their goddess, and they will not harm me. Fear not! I shall protect you from them.” And as we walked past the remains of the dead Titans, the fiends seemed to cower before my guide. She confessed to me, admitting: “I am their mother, you see! They were bred from me, and corrupted into their present state by twisted genetic experimentation conducted by the gods in another era. My womb has been tainted as well, so that now such monsters are all I can produce for offspring. The gods used me to breed them, and then left me to rule them when they could not themselves master their own perverse creations.” The realization that such a beautiful goddess had been forced to produce from her own body, the very instruments of her torment… gave new meaning to the notion of Hell in my mind. “I knew the gods could be cruel… but this is simply vile!” I exclaimed, and the Titan nodded in agreement. “Come, child, let us go forth from here and leave such vileness behind us.” And then it hit me… what if we reached the surface and she was indeed free at last! Would she seek to produce more offspring there, and would those offspring then seek to kill at her command… perhaps as instruments of some vengeance she planned against the gods? I had to know her intentions, before I could risk such a terrifying thing being unleashed upon the universe. I decided to ask.
I asked what had been on my mind, and the Titan woman looked at me very surprised. “You seem to know my mind well, child, and indeed once upon a time we were lovers so that should not be surprising in the least. Would you not desire some measure of vengeance, if you were treated thusly?” I asked her to tell me her name. “Why?” she asked me, and I replied: “So that I might remember our past together before I must kill you.” The Titan smiled broadly then, and for the first time I noticed that all of her teeth for sharp serrated fangs like those of great predatory animal. “I no longer remember my name, child, nor yours. What I do remember is only certain impressions… certain traces and remnants of memory that yet linger within me. Why would I seek to keep my memories intact fully, when the gods could use them to torture me further? I have stripped myself of anything that ever made me weak. Would you truly kill someone who loves you, and whom you once loved?” I knew not of what she spoke, and if I had memories of her then I knew them to be from before she had been made into this monstrous new form. “You are not the woman I remember! Not the woman I loved.” I told her, and she wept and shrieked bitterly as she heard me say that. Her cries were inhuman and came from no human vocal chords, but sounded as if something reptilian had uttered the noises. “You need me to escape this place, and we have a long way to go before we ever reach the surface once again! If you kill me, you too will be trapped as I was once trapped. No one will come to rescue you as you came for me. Love me or not, you need me!” And I hated to admit it, but she was correct. I needed her for that very reason. I agreed for now, and let her lead me onward. Flashes of old memories kept coming back to me… of a time when I walked these very same corridors hand in hand with a beautiful Titan goddess, when we stole kisses in that garden together. There were no monsters there back then, only us. “Ariel!” the goddess whispered to me, awakening me from my reveries. “Your name was Ariel.” And I remembered that this was true. “Yes, it was. And I did love you, goddess, with all my heart.” And I knew that I did, and this is why I had to end this mockery of her former existence and so grant her peace. We were approaching the place where the elevator back to the surface could be seen, and the goddess extended her left hand, which seemed to trigger the elevator to open, where before it had been closed. “Come, Ariel, let us go forth and be avenged upon the gods for their crimes against the Titan race! Olympus itself shall feel the bite of my children, and verily know the error of the ways of the gods.” And I swear she was laughing under her breath as we entered the elevator hand in hand. Her right hand gripped my left like a vice, and I could not have hoped to free myself of that clasp. I was her prisoner her, for better or for worse! And I was terrified. For though I had the outer appearance of a woman in every way imaginable, and the soul of a woman to match it… even so, I had still been born male and that part of me could still impregnate her if we made love. And so, the monstrous woman could surely breed with me in order to produce her horrid children. The way she looked at me… I knew her intentions were precisely such an intercourse. “Willingly or not, you will help me.” She stated, as if reading my frightened thoughts. I needed to find a way to break free of her, and to somehow put an end to her accursed existence!
As the elevator slowly ascended, I looked and noticed that connecting the Titan woman’s mechanical legs to her thighs were various tubes like those I had extracted from her flesh in order to save her. In desperation, I reached out with my free hand and began to yank them out one by one. Each time I did, a torrent of dark fluid poured forth, and there was a terrible hissing sound. The Titan screamed in agony, and let me go while trying to repair the damage this had done to the various internal systems that operated her lower legs. I noticed that there was a small sheathe upon the silver girdle she wore about her waist and in that sheathe was a dagger of some kind. I pulled the dagger out while the Titan was preoccupied, and attempted to slash her throat with it… but the fallen goddess noticed my attempt, and raised her arms to deflect the blow. The uncannily sharp blade slashed across her forearms instead, and the pain made her howl in agony. She looked at the cuts this produced with shock and terror visible in her eyes, and I used that moment of surprise to stab her through the left breast, driving the blade home into her heart and twisting it. It cleaved flesh, muscle, bone, and finally the meat of her heart… and I knew I had dealt my former beloved a mortal wound. I let go of the weapon just as the elevator reached the surface and opened. I got out, and the dying Titan woman lumbered out after me. “Why did you do this to me, Ariel! Would one more embrace have been so terrible?” She shrieked and hissed, falling face down upon the broken stones of the ruined palace. I knelt down as kissed her lovingly on the lips as she breathed her last. I whispered to her before she died: “I did this, because I loved you and love you still. I did this to set you free. Free of the monster that you have become!” She nodded her head, finally coming to this understanding, and then she was gone. I never even learned her name… but even so, I cried for her. For who she was, what she once meant to me, and for what she became and what had to be done because of it. I cursed the gods for having done this to her, and for having forced me to do this to her now. And I labored long with that dagger, which I took out of her bosom… I labored long digging a grave deep enough to receive her so that no beasts could dig her up. I could not leave her for the creatures of these wilds, after all! I buried her twelve feet deep, and it took hours and hours to do so with such a small implement to dig with. It was well into morning already, and it was mid-day by the time I had finished the burial of the Titan woman I one had loved and yet whose name I could not remember. It took some time to fill that grave in, but at length I finished this labor of love and was able to move on. I sent the elevator back below without me, and doing so I knew would seal the underground garden forever. I wanted it sealed, so that even I could never return there. Once this too was done, I decided to keep the dagger and go upon my way. I put it in the pouch that hung from the belt that cinched my dark green gown at the waist. It would be safe in my care, and protect me against whatever creatures might imperil me as I made my way through the blue-hued mountains, towards more hospitable lands beyond. There are many worlds, and many realms beyond those known to humankind. This was a tale of a journey I undertook through just one of them, and of the horror and sorrow that awaited me there. Be mindful should you find yourself in such realms, lest you find what I left behind!
"O mighty Titans . . . in Tartarus profound who dwell, deep merged beneath the solid ground . . . avert your rage, if from the infernal seats one of your tribe should wish to visit our retreats."
--- Orphic Hymn 37 to the Titans
Within the pale vale of dolorous splendors, there did lay the fields beyond which the azure-blue mountains rose like ethereal, sapphire giants on some ancient gray battlefield. The moon that loomed in the distant skies on high above me as I walked… reverently… across that empty landscape, that albino orb did seem to be like a colorless dead titan trapped in a sea of utter darkness. For the stars did little to provide illumination, and indeed save for that terrible moon… I was under the impression that a storm was coming nigh. Through the dark forests that squatted to either side of the road I traveled, there the moonlight shone in ghostly radiance. A sickly glow it was, and in the depths of the vale I could well imagine the dead walking therein. I was bound for the very heart of the darkness, fearing it not… though well I should have. Frightful forms I beheld amidst the twisted trees that, themselves, were like no tress that grow or ever grew upon the face of the planet called Earth. Where was I? How did I come to wander hither! Such were my thoughts, and those sights I witnessed and the creatures that made such sights so awful… those same were both alien and familiar to my eyes. I ignored those night terrors, for like night terrors they were, having not any names, none as humans would understand anyway. And as I hastened past their hunting grounds and dens, they seemed to bow their angular heads in reverence. Was I like some angel or divine being to them, then? I did not wish to know how they saw me. In time, I came to a place where the slopes of the mountains could be seen. Why did those mighty bastions appear so blue in so black a night? Perhaps it was the peculiar light of the moon that made it so, and such an illogical assumption was what I had convinced myself of. The cliffs that dominated all sides of the vale were most evident to me now, and the clinging ivy and funguses that stuck to the rocky walls seemed a colorless white. This was a domain where nothing colorful or joyful could be seen, and it made me fearful that I might be in an awful purgatory of some sort. I swore I would escape it at any cost, though I could not remember how it was I had come hither and why I should wish to escape, or to where. It was a primal, emotional feeling. Nothing more or less than that! I could still hear the chattering and guttural noise of the fiends I had passes. Were they closing in on my location even now? I had no time to consider that, I reasoned, and so made all effort to look for a way higher up the nearest of the slopes that sat before me. There was an evil sensation in the air, and creeping shapes just out of the corners of my eyes. The stones of the cliffs were cold to the touch, and there was just a hint of frost coming into the air right about then. I looked for handholds and footholds in the rock, and finding ones that I knew would hold my weight… I climbed upward, in the hope of reaching the highest extent of the slope without making it easy for the fell things to find me. Upon clambering to the top of the cliff, I reached some solitary ruins that I did not see from below, which lay upon the cliff-top and just at the very part of the slope above it where the summit of that hilly mound could be reached by walking. I could not have reached this particular slope from the ground below after all, though it at first would appear to one as if you could. I was safe from the creatures, but I did not know if something more terrible awaited me here.
This had been a grand palace once upon a time, an abode of kings and queens. I could remember standing in this court and wearing my finest gown, my pale blonde hair cascading down to my lower back. When was this place last living? I could not remember, nor could I imagine how it might have become so forsaken a place now. Broken walls, blasted rubble, and the remnants of toppled columns were all that remained now. In the heart of the ruined palace lay a large black monolith that did have the look of an obelisk to it, covered in strange graven runes of some white etching that may have been silver or some alloy closely approximate thereto. I touched the runes, and they glowed beneath my searching fingers. I smiled, my curiosity piqued. Suddenly, as I traced the runic patterns, there was a warmth exuding from the obelisk, and a sound not unlike a sort of heartbeat. A distinctly human-like thumping that resounded audibly and not simply in my imagination. Was this monument alive somehow? I backed away from it instinctively, and it began to open. Panels slid downward, and a doorway formed in the monolith. I entered within, and discovered it to be a sort of elevator chamber that then sealed itself and bore me down into the ground, to whatever hidden chambers might be below. The door opened again, and I got out of the conveyance and found myself in a twisting black tunnel with the only light coming from strange fixtures on the wall every several feet or so. These fixtures must have been powered by something, and they gave off a blue light very similar in color to the blue of the mountains themselves. Blue seemed to be a significant color here, perhaps even sacred. Though why that should be so, I could not tell you. It simply occurred to me, like something remembered rather than reasoned out. I followed the tunnel, and noticed that the patterns of the walls were like immense ebony rib bones, with met at the ceiling where a serpentine spine ran the length of the entire tunnel. This gave the place a very strange appearance, like no architecture known to man’s masonry or engineering. I could hear a loud hissing sound, and saw blasts of air being blown into the tunnel by vents every so often. Though when first I heard the hiss I jumped, believing it to be some terrible serpent. This place was designed for a human being to traverse in safety, though I did not remember ever seeing it when the palace was still new. Was it a secret that was kept by they who once ruled here, or was this older even than those ancient monarchs? I could not imagine. No one could. It was enough that it existed and I was here, apparently safe from the perils of the vale on the surface. The tunnel widened after a while, and great tree-like pillars supported a high vaulted ceiling. More bone-like designs, and many organic-seeming ones as well, all ebony black, gave this place a frightening and wicked appearance. Was I meant to have come here, or was I an unwelcome guest? I feared what the inhabitants of such a domain might be like, though I suspected them to be as long dead as the ruins in which I had found the entrance to this secret region. The seemed very much, an abode of death itself!
Amidst the pillars, and entwining about them, were snake-like things with many tentacles. I could not describe them in any other terms, though their forms seemed to shift as I looked upon them. They pulsated, the slimy membranes of their outer skin oozing gruesome dark liquids. They smelled strangely like ammonia, or that might have been their leaking fluids that had such an odor. I did not wish to know what those things were! I looked away from them and focused on reaching the farthest end of the tunnel… or was this now a vast chamber? The walls seemed to shift somewhat as I walked along, the carapace-like material twisting and altering itself to form new pillars, new archways, new tunnels off of the main one I had been on previously. I knew I could never find my way back in the labyrinth that this place was becoming. I was trapped, and I most feared that I might end up a feast for those terrible monsters that clung to the pillars. I saw skeletons on the ground in many places, the snake-like things swarming about the bones. They were not quite of human stature, those bones, though in every other way there were human. Ancient bloodstained covered the skeletons, forming long-dried pools beneath them. Whoever they had been, they died violently, and it was clear what horrors had killed them. I avoided the remains wherever I could, for now they were nests of sorts for those horrible monsters. The stones beneath my feet were covered at times in a pale blue moss that had a purplish tint to it in various patches. It was the only colorful thing in this place, and that was far from being a reassuring notion. I heard a faint voice calling to me just ahead, down one of the arched tunnels that opened up as I walked. “Come to me, child!” it said, in a distinctively feminine tone of voice. I yelled in reply: “I am here! I am coming!” as I literally ran in the direction from which the voice had echoed forth. What purpose was this place erected for? I wondered if I was going mad, and perhaps following the voice of a ghost, mayhap of one of the builders themselves. A gray mist began to fill the floor of these nether regions, and it was not difficult to imagine specters in such a realm. “Come to me, child!” I could hear louder, and I knew then that such a voice could only be issuing from living vocal chords. I followed as best I could, and as I did so the place just kept shifting. Was this some automated mechanism’s doing, or was there some intelligence behind the twisting, turning, and sliding corridors and rooms through which I traveled? I was remembering a path I had walked long, long ago… far beyond my soul’s ability to consciously remember. I was remembering from instinct, without knowing where that instinct was coming from. “Come to me, child!” the feminine voice kept saying, and I followed it… deeper, and deeper. I heard the sound of rushing water, from some underground stream, and I reasoned it must be from the water of the river that ran the length of the vale on the surface. Somehow, water from the river was being directed down here for a purpose.
There was machinery in the vast circular chambers I found myself in next, which pumped water from above and fed it into channels that ran into dark recesses in the walls. The water was collected in some way, and used to feed what appeared to be a great garden lit by unnatural blue light from above. Trees, flowers, and plants of alien varieties, yet all beautiful beyond words to describe… thusly appeared the twisted paradise that met my eyes. The water was slimy where it met the grass that grew from the moist soil that had by now replaced the stone of the earlier tunnels and chambers, and peculiar lilies emerged from that wet earth. Within the heart of that subterranean garden there was a sort of shrine. Four arched pillars of the same black bone-like appearance as all the other architecture I had seen since arriving here… those did rise up from a marble base, and in the midst of base rose a dais upon which was a great throne of equally ebon material. Upon that throne was a towering woman in a white gown. Her skin was pale, and in this lighting appeared almost a baby blue shade… and her eyes were gentle and of an amethyst hue, which was both strange and lovely at the same time. Her head was angular and hairless, and various tubes and mechanisms kept her bound to the throne upon which she reclined. Very much like a prisoner! She did not move her lips, yet I heard her voice ring out once again: “You have come to me, child! Very good… now approach me without fear.” And I did as she bade. My sandaled feet clapped upon the marble and I mounted the dais with care and reverence. “Who are you?” I asked, and the strange woman smiled knowing but said nothing. As I got closer, I saw that the woman’s hands were claw-like, with sharp, jet-black fingernails. Her facial features were elfin and beautiful, and were it not for the angular shape of her head I would not have found her all that strange to look upon after all. The two tubes that were connected from her forehead to the throne seemed to my imagination to give the appearance of curved ram-like horns. But tubes they were, and they clearly were part of whatever mechanical means it was by which the woman was able to project her thoughts into the air around her, thus eliminating the need to move her mouth in order to speak. “What do you want from me?” I asked, and her voice boomed out: “I want you to set me free, so that you yourself can be free from this place as well. Be not afraid, child, for I mean you no harm. I am the last of the Titans who once dwelled here… the same race that once you loved so well, and this place you and I once called home in another age. Can you not feel how familiar all of this is?” I could, and that made me more frightened than anything. I had nothing to lose, however, in granting the lovely Titan’s request. I began to disconnect the tubes one by one, starting with the ones that bound her hands, arms, legs, and feet. Why she had been bound, I could not guess. I knew only that it was an unjust fate, and that she deserved to be granted her freedom now. Blood and other fluids issued forth from the tubes, and there was a hiss as each one was snapped away. Last, I undid the two that bound the woman’s head. Finally, she was free to move and speak without being so encumbered and constrained.
She rose from the throne to her full height, at least eight feet tall. Her lower legs, I noticed earlier, were mechanical rather than flesh and blood. She put a hand on my shoulder with all the tenderness of a mother reassuring her child that all is well. She smiled happily, and attempted to speak unaided for the first time in untold ages. No voice came forth though, only a gagging and coughing from vocal chords unused to speech. She kept trying to clear her throat, and occasionally spit up some fluid unto the ground in order to clear her throat. Finally, after much laboring, she managed to speak, her voice no less lovely than it had been telepathically but with a mild rasp to it that was somewhat snake-like to hear. “Forgive me, child, but I have not spoken in many, many long centuries. The gods took my voice as well as my freedom, but left me the means to speak without a voice… though in their cruelty they allowed me no one to speak with. Until now!” I asked her: “Why did the gods punish you to begin with?” and she nodded her head gravely, refusing to speak of it. “Come, let us depart.” She intoned, and she led me by the hand along the twisting and twisted paths by which I had come. “What are those monsters I saw on the way here, the ones wrapped around the pillars? They seem to have killed some of your people.” I mentioned to the Titan woman, and she replied: “They are my punishment, to ensure my loneliness. I have become their queen, their goddess, and they will not harm me. Fear not! I shall protect you from them.” And as we walked past the remains of the dead Titans, the fiends seemed to cower before my guide. She confessed to me, admitting: “I am their mother, you see! They were bred from me, and corrupted into their present state by twisted genetic experimentation conducted by the gods in another era. My womb has been tainted as well, so that now such monsters are all I can produce for offspring. The gods used me to breed them, and then left me to rule them when they could not themselves master their own perverse creations.” The realization that such a beautiful goddess had been forced to produce from her own body, the very instruments of her torment… gave new meaning to the notion of Hell in my mind. “I knew the gods could be cruel… but this is simply vile!” I exclaimed, and the Titan nodded in agreement. “Come, child, let us go forth from here and leave such vileness behind us.” And then it hit me… what if we reached the surface and she was indeed free at last! Would she seek to produce more offspring there, and would those offspring then seek to kill at her command… perhaps as instruments of some vengeance she planned against the gods? I had to know her intentions, before I could risk such a terrifying thing being unleashed upon the universe. I decided to ask.
I asked what had been on my mind, and the Titan woman looked at me very surprised. “You seem to know my mind well, child, and indeed once upon a time we were lovers so that should not be surprising in the least. Would you not desire some measure of vengeance, if you were treated thusly?” I asked her to tell me her name. “Why?” she asked me, and I replied: “So that I might remember our past together before I must kill you.” The Titan smiled broadly then, and for the first time I noticed that all of her teeth for sharp serrated fangs like those of great predatory animal. “I no longer remember my name, child, nor yours. What I do remember is only certain impressions… certain traces and remnants of memory that yet linger within me. Why would I seek to keep my memories intact fully, when the gods could use them to torture me further? I have stripped myself of anything that ever made me weak. Would you truly kill someone who loves you, and whom you once loved?” I knew not of what she spoke, and if I had memories of her then I knew them to be from before she had been made into this monstrous new form. “You are not the woman I remember! Not the woman I loved.” I told her, and she wept and shrieked bitterly as she heard me say that. Her cries were inhuman and came from no human vocal chords, but sounded as if something reptilian had uttered the noises. “You need me to escape this place, and we have a long way to go before we ever reach the surface once again! If you kill me, you too will be trapped as I was once trapped. No one will come to rescue you as you came for me. Love me or not, you need me!” And I hated to admit it, but she was correct. I needed her for that very reason. I agreed for now, and let her lead me onward. Flashes of old memories kept coming back to me… of a time when I walked these very same corridors hand in hand with a beautiful Titan goddess, when we stole kisses in that garden together. There were no monsters there back then, only us. “Ariel!” the goddess whispered to me, awakening me from my reveries. “Your name was Ariel.” And I remembered that this was true. “Yes, it was. And I did love you, goddess, with all my heart.” And I knew that I did, and this is why I had to end this mockery of her former existence and so grant her peace. We were approaching the place where the elevator back to the surface could be seen, and the goddess extended her left hand, which seemed to trigger the elevator to open, where before it had been closed. “Come, Ariel, let us go forth and be avenged upon the gods for their crimes against the Titan race! Olympus itself shall feel the bite of my children, and verily know the error of the ways of the gods.” And I swear she was laughing under her breath as we entered the elevator hand in hand. Her right hand gripped my left like a vice, and I could not have hoped to free myself of that clasp. I was her prisoner her, for better or for worse! And I was terrified. For though I had the outer appearance of a woman in every way imaginable, and the soul of a woman to match it… even so, I had still been born male and that part of me could still impregnate her if we made love. And so, the monstrous woman could surely breed with me in order to produce her horrid children. The way she looked at me… I knew her intentions were precisely such an intercourse. “Willingly or not, you will help me.” She stated, as if reading my frightened thoughts. I needed to find a way to break free of her, and to somehow put an end to her accursed existence!
As the elevator slowly ascended, I looked and noticed that connecting the Titan woman’s mechanical legs to her thighs were various tubes like those I had extracted from her flesh in order to save her. In desperation, I reached out with my free hand and began to yank them out one by one. Each time I did, a torrent of dark fluid poured forth, and there was a terrible hissing sound. The Titan screamed in agony, and let me go while trying to repair the damage this had done to the various internal systems that operated her lower legs. I noticed that there was a small sheathe upon the silver girdle she wore about her waist and in that sheathe was a dagger of some kind. I pulled the dagger out while the Titan was preoccupied, and attempted to slash her throat with it… but the fallen goddess noticed my attempt, and raised her arms to deflect the blow. The uncannily sharp blade slashed across her forearms instead, and the pain made her howl in agony. She looked at the cuts this produced with shock and terror visible in her eyes, and I used that moment of surprise to stab her through the left breast, driving the blade home into her heart and twisting it. It cleaved flesh, muscle, bone, and finally the meat of her heart… and I knew I had dealt my former beloved a mortal wound. I let go of the weapon just as the elevator reached the surface and opened. I got out, and the dying Titan woman lumbered out after me. “Why did you do this to me, Ariel! Would one more embrace have been so terrible?” She shrieked and hissed, falling face down upon the broken stones of the ruined palace. I knelt down as kissed her lovingly on the lips as she breathed her last. I whispered to her before she died: “I did this, because I loved you and love you still. I did this to set you free. Free of the monster that you have become!” She nodded her head, finally coming to this understanding, and then she was gone. I never even learned her name… but even so, I cried for her. For who she was, what she once meant to me, and for what she became and what had to be done because of it. I cursed the gods for having done this to her, and for having forced me to do this to her now. And I labored long with that dagger, which I took out of her bosom… I labored long digging a grave deep enough to receive her so that no beasts could dig her up. I could not leave her for the creatures of these wilds, after all! I buried her twelve feet deep, and it took hours and hours to do so with such a small implement to dig with. It was well into morning already, and it was mid-day by the time I had finished the burial of the Titan woman I one had loved and yet whose name I could not remember. It took some time to fill that grave in, but at length I finished this labor of love and was able to move on. I sent the elevator back below without me, and doing so I knew would seal the underground garden forever. I wanted it sealed, so that even I could never return there. Once this too was done, I decided to keep the dagger and go upon my way. I put it in the pouch that hung from the belt that cinched my dark green gown at the waist. It would be safe in my care, and protect me against whatever creatures might imperil me as I made my way through the blue-hued mountains, towards more hospitable lands beyond. There are many worlds, and many realms beyond those known to humankind. This was a tale of a journey I undertook through just one of them, and of the horror and sorrow that awaited me there. Be mindful should you find yourself in such realms, lest you find what I left behind!
"O mighty Titans . . . in Tartarus profound who dwell, deep merged beneath the solid ground . . . avert your rage, if from the infernal seats one of your tribe should wish to visit our retreats."
--- Orphic Hymn 37 to the Titans
Published 12th Oct 2012
All writing remains the property of the author. Don't use it for any purpose without their permission.
likes 1
reading list entries 1
comments 2
reads 859
Commenting Preference:
The author encourages honest critique.
12th Oct 2012 4:29am
Your writing never ceases to amaze me...
Even if its a gazillion miles long..
Amazing story... (:
Even if its a gazillion miles long..
Amazing story... (:
12th Oct 2012 6:47am
Thank you very much, Kristany! I am glad you liked this dark tale of divine punishment gone severely awry. I am happy you took the time to comment! :D Very highly appreciated.
