The Monster’s voice filled the cavern around us, danced along each lick of orange flame, caressed every thought in my mind.
The first and second parts of this story can be found here.
Reality, as it was, dripped back into my body. Like tiny shards of broken glass knitting themselves back together, but each particle was edged with fear, terror.
I recognized the ebbing of the drug, now that it was lessening. Pieces of my old self poured into me, drop by drop.
Fear crawled along my skin. No longer buffered by the sway of a chemical, terror leached into me as my ego solidified.
This was an abomination. I would not, could not. Horror at what stood before me bubbled up through my consciousness. Out of pure instinct, I knelt back up, willing my legs to uncurl so I could run.
Run to where, I didn’t know. Just… somewhere. Somewhere far away from this thing in front of me.
There was a quiet ache in my heart, for the loss of the DMT. I could still feel the last of it warping the edges of my thoughts, but my self had come back to me, only a little more bruised for the wear.
I missed it. And when I was safe somewhere, I would weep for the experience that I had had, the pure experience of being dissolved entirely and one with her. I would weep, for the privilege of that experience.
Dark shadows curled around me.
But I could not weep now. Every cell in my body screamed to run, to escape, this primordial being — whatever He was. My breath was ragged, and I swatted helplessly at the deepening shadow around me.
“You have taken too long, slave.”
The sentence was not directed at me.
At least, I didn’t think. I couldn’t think. The shadows were cool and damp, and left a wash of goosebumps in their wake where they touched my skin.
From beside me in the darkness, Katarina’s small voice answered, nervous as the inside of a bell. “I’m sorry, Master. We took longer than I had anticipated to find You.”
There was a shift in the blackness of the air before me, a movement that my eyes couldn’t see but that made my bones shiver. I heard her scream, and it held an agony that turned my blood to ice.
It was a sound that made me want to scream with her, to hold her hand and be swallowed up by the immense void of her own failing. I hadn’t seen Him do anything, but I knew that this suffering could only come from
Him. He held her mind, and made her scream out her pain, her desperation, her unending regret at failing her task. I had only realized I had been crying when I felt the coolness of my tears on my cheeks.
How long had she been screaming?
Time meant nothing, before Him. Time was His plaything, the same as matter and energy and the ripples of the cosmos.
Needed to get away.
He was a monster before me, cruelty incarnate. I needed to get away, escape.
That was the one thought in my head, repeating, panicked and desperate.
But I found my limbs immobilized, plastered to the floor. My breathing became quick and shallow, as I felt the adrenaline course through my body, readying, hopelessly, for a flight.
I thought of the stairs that had led us down to this place, the twisting hallways above.
I tried not to let my panic overwhelm me, even as my memory became more and more fragmented in the tide of Katarina’s pained cries.
“It makes little difference,” He said, sounding calm as eternity. I saw His fingers work themselves through her hair, and she screamed anew with each touch. Her hair turned glossy red in streaks, and I realized that there were claws at the end of his fingers. “You did as well as I expected, slave, weak and silly as you are. Your regret is beautiful, your terror, a feast. Scream for me, as you will scream for me every night, forever.”
Her terror and pain echoed in my ears, as her blood dripped into the stone floor. Every drop sounded like the crash of a gathering storm, and it made the hair on my arms stand up.
“Don’t…” I said, my own voice not sounding like my own. I didn’t know how I was going to finish that sentence, I only knew that I could not tolerate this.
Her blood had coursed through my veins, and she had been me and I had been her. Her pain was my pain.
My eyes narrowed, watching the two of them. “Don’t hurt her!”
She slumped.
My blood roiled. “Don’t. Stop. Stop hurting her!”
I didn’t think about the wisdom of giving this Monster a command. Even as the words fell from my lips, a shadow of my audacity prickled along my skin. But all I could see was her, the same as me, dripping her — my — blood onto the grooves in the stone below us.
He let go of her. She let out a choked sob and fell prone, her arms outstretched, as if begging His forgiveness even as she continued to bleed.
He let go of her, and I felt His attention shift to me.
If I had thought I had been panicking before, I hadn’t understood what panic was.
Those black, swirling shadows wrapped around me, curling around my arms, wrists, thighs, ankles. They squeezed until they hurt, until I could feel my circulation being cut off. And still, His power squeezed harder. Each shadow became a length of razor wire, pulling me apart and slicing into my skin.
Now it was my turn to scream.
I screamed, and screamed, and screamed, as He tore me apart. I felt my bones snap and warm rivulets of blood gush down my limbs. Pain erupted from every part of me, drowning out any other thought. A staticky buzzing washed over my mind, as agony overwhelmed me.
I knew that I must have still been screaming, still been crying, but the eerie humming quiet of my mind allowed me a moment’s respite.
This was death.
I knew it, as one would know the feeling of my own fingertips.
And in that quiet space that I knew was my own death, hushed like a dark ocean, as I looked up at the glimmering lights of the surface, thoughts came unbidden. In the soft, tugging embrace of eternity, the truths of my life flashed behind my eyes.
I had wasted my life.
I was so lonely. Nothing that I had done meant anything.
I thought I was a scholar, a teacher, and I thought that had been important. But there was a deep sucking ache in my soul, and I knew, with the clarity that only death can bring, that I was wrong.
I was wrong.
My life was but one flickering candle flame in the universe, a blink of an eye. Nothing. I was nothing.
I was lonely. Alone. I had never devoted to anything but the study of a dead language. It seemed terribly ironic, now, my life’s work. I thought of all the tomes I had pored over, stories and lessons and songs. In truth, I envied those long-dead writers for the deep meaning and purpose that was so obvious in their words, their creations.
I had created nothing. My life had been wasted.
The blackness of death pulled me down, and I wanted to kick and scream my miserable regret for wasting my one, small life.
I was devoted to nothing. And now I was out of time. My life had been void of purpose, empty of meaning.
I felt my body fall further into the darkness, as I saw the glimmering lights above me fade.
And I… wasn’t.
There was something in the swirl of death that surrounded me, something even darker, even colder. A freezing chain wrapped around my neck and halted my descent into nothingness. I hung there, for a moment, before a new timbre of thought rumbled through my mind.
I knew it was Him.
His words arced across my dying synapses. “Submit, and service will give you purpose. Beg to accept your true position, and your life will again have meaning.”
Bianca’s words came cascading afterward. You will love Him. Of course I’m a slave. There’s only one place I want to go.
His chain let me slip a fraction of an inch further into oblivion. I thought about my wasted life, the eternity of death, my aching regret.
Submit.
I thought of the feeling of the blue mist, eating away my ego, and how right it had felt to prostrate myself before this Monster.
Monster?
God, demon, truth.
Meaning, purpose.
I saw, for the first time, the turning of the cosmos; the fall of death and the promise of life.
Submit, and have purpose.
Some tension melted along the lines of my still-corporeal body, and I smiled.
You will love Him.
There was only one thing I wanted to say.
“I submit. Take me, and keep me.” I realized that He had been talking to me, though it seemed to be a thousand years ago. “I’m sorry Your slave took so long, tonight.” The rightness of my words washed over me, and I felt the chain around my neck tighten.
His deep, amused laughter sounded like distant thunder. “Again, slave. Beg.”
My breath — my breath — came in painful, happy, guttural sobs. I looked at death below me, and meaning above me. “Please, I beg You, keep me. You are everything, every aching thing I have ever wanted. Please, allow me to serve You, and give the rest of my life purpose.” That became the refrain in my mind. Please, please, please.
His power wrapped tighter around my body, shackled my wrists and ankles and waist. The chain around my neck hauled me out of the black, sucking void of death, and I again found myself kneeling on the stone floor of the cavern beneath the house.
I shivered, ready to feel pain.
There was none. My body was whole.
No, better than whole. Thick pieces of warm metal encircled each limb and around my throat. They pulsed with His power, and I knew that the trajectory of my universe had been irrevocably altered.
Again, He laughed inside my head. “I am your universe. And you will spend the rest of eternity showing your gratitude for what I am allowing you.”
I began to cry, falling flat in the ground before Him. “Thank You, Master.”
I had seen death, and the truth of the meaninglessness of my life before Him, and now I was being offered everything that I had missed.
I had died, I realized. That was the truth. I had died, only to be reborn as His.
One week later
“You are positively glowing, Katrina!” The lead librarian leaned against the edge of my desk, in a conservative black shift dress. “I’m glad you could take some time off, God knows you needed it.”
I smiled at her. My God had known I had needed it, like He knew everything.
She looked at me, narrowing her eyes. “You look different.”
“Do I?”
She squinted. “Yeah, you do. Your eyes are… brighter, almost. Whatever it is you’re doing, keep doing it.” She cocked her head to the side and smiled back at me. “It’s working.”
I thought about how I had hung over the precipice of death, and the beauty of all that my Master had offered me. A deep, agonizing love spread through my chest. He was everything. My truth, my meaning, my purpose.
And I was nothing without Him.
I looked at the woman before me, at the curve of her waist and the redness of her lips and the brilliance of her mind.
A delicious thought occurred to me, then, as I slowly drank in her form, as if I had never seen her before. I drank her in, as He had drunk in me, my lifeblood, and made me His helpless thrall, wildly in love. “You should come over for dinner, Titania.”
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