Merlin 3:32 “The Agony Scene”
~ @mjbanks
Afore a facetious fascinating society, shallows and quicksand alas withal the wells, as many strategically placed within the wall of the city already disastrously dry, a genuine drought in every shadowy quarter with dust between and covering every stone. At night, the vampires rattle carriages to bloodlust attack, so that both vampire and mercenary may drink, thrive, and share with their gypsy wives. Retribution, equivalent exchange effortlessly transpires of each rebirth of an immortal, by evil graces consumption drains life from the city’s people that their undying captive would defend. Having much strength from fresh blood they release Nick to toy with him, cats and mouse, when he kills one they laugh and chattel him to his new prison, to feed their heightened addiction he is drained again to death. The reincarnation consumes the land, poaching the water and life from the manna, heretofore causing the same malady that shuns tradesmen and tourists from a dying city haunted by leeches and rubes. If Nickolas is to escape, the clouds will need to once anew breathe air and pour tears of joy, but until such he proves and provides exquisite suffering, fear and frustration, ancient Nick would make by on dreams and damnation by those who prefer to wake in casket.
Dire desperate plants in the dust despite the first day of autumn, only the summer succulents growing, arid is the wasteland and tired are the clouds, a xeric fortified town now of clay and infernality. A town amid a terrible drought, where the surrounding forest begins to turn to first faintly of yellows, this town is earthen and dying as if noon has overstayed its import. Of it a large double doorway, a blood-drunk harvester of innocence named Matteus with infinite degrees of destruction, looking at Nickolas with the malaise of drug-addled miscomprehension, staring but not seeing, glaring but not being, rife with sate condemnation and wroth. Aside, the den of dealers of death, sentries reminiscing of remnant centuries, infamous savages less than noble aspiring to dash the hopes of daybreak and pollute the starry breeze with rare potent poisons and powers, of the rose vines crawling thru their hallucinations cavalierly assuaging thru the ether, discussing what the crafted markings mean on the dagger belonging to Nickolas.
Their leader, Matteus, disconnected from reality most of all, to slight every tempted ethos epic in shelter of vision and preciosity. Coarse and indifferent to temperance and purity, success and nature, simply staring at the immortal prisoner, a sacrificial room in a prison in a fort, its times of distresses a mental perception to the common precept.
Nickolas stares at a ray of sunlight shining thru dusty air into his dark confinement, a sign of light, a ray of hope, the vampire thereof does not squint from its presence, the guard walks skin temporarily thru the light, the flesh does not burn brightly with flames of all vampires’ curse. Though unbeknownst to Nick and his close pacing captor, the flesh without fire spotted unsurely by Matteus, desperate to escape, prisoner begins screaming wretchedly angrily horrible.
Nick: “Fine, take my soul, thee fiends of Hel! Break the covenant of decency, strafe me from the unbalanced war, these lives, harlots, and roamers, wanderers, and nomads, vagabonds and devils-you drink my blood from my wrists and put your throats in my grasp forevermore!”
The guard looks to Matteus, who in leaving the second room of ruffians affirms permission to drink in default from an immortal Nick once more. They drink from him his pain imbued by rank and file the likes arisen to his screams in discourse to leave them ever continually their fountain of life, and by time do they depart.
Custodius: “You may have part of your request.”
The vampire turns his fettered hand and drinks from wrist, a pain splashes Nick’s face, struggling as the teeth pierce, and pain turns to sorrow as he imagines imprisonment. The vampire leaves blood spilt on Nick’s arm and stands, only to nearly fall backwards into the wall, colliding with some force just enough to roll his eyes unfixed, inebriation from the blood desire given. Nickolas begins to tear into his own arm in pulling shackles and gyves, slow to hide his efforts from the noisy room at open doorway, tearing at his hidden hand giving new blood mixing with what that had spilled in camouflage of intoxicate haze and blood-scent hidden from whetted thirsts.
In the ignominious and pale light of shadows and secrecy Matteus moves to an area alone, among the unnatural and disturbed abandonment of a town, emptied by a warring plague of rogue vampires paired with drought that leaves an unattended commune and the lifeless bodies of the brave in every street. He approaches a doorway flooded with light, pausing to look out at one of those bodies, then again to the light itself, aversively approaching, terrified encroaching, on some effortless reproaching of the brightly day of light. He outstretches his hand to touch the warmth as he had seen his comrade brush, and the joy of the sun is his, to hold in his palm, a thousand joyful memories of fascinations from a millennium ago fill his heart and mind, the warmth embraces sensation to help ignore the disgrace of humanity lost. Convivial expression and jovially taken for granted, the prints of his fingers and hand begin to redden and melt with pain of insidious curse, however learning that Nick’s blood drives his thirst immeasurable. Pulling his hand into the shadow a fist, opening his grasp to watch wounds heal, to his comrades he returns to guard possession retreating in contempt from the fantasy of his ideology.
Nick frees his own hand, and in the guard’s neglect, his other hand and feet, with the iron shackle he cuts throat of guard to silence scream, then dashes thru the room passed vampires now in chase, but he is stopped by Matteus, grabbing Nick by the throat and lifting him, without smile. Nick stabs the palm of Matteus and takes the piercing blade, the blood spills and minions try to catch the blood to drink from their cupped hands, desperate for only a drop of their elder, to know his memories, his undead strength. Matteus tosses Nick to them to stop their stealing of his blood secrets.
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