(№4.6)

And before the venerable counsel of numerous gods continued to arrange the glorifying, undignified debacle to a festive ostentation exhibiting the intense dimension of the extensively creative cruelty they could come up with, if any mortal was to dare answer the revolutionary call of mutiny, this drive secretly dormant in more humans than they would have ever anticipated, regarding the iron-clad ruling fist of parlous gods claiming a realm never ought to belong under their regimen in the first place, brazenly even destroying one of theirs to seal the sin of their fate.

Her fate, that is. Young gods were bland and dire with futility and void, circling thoughts, so of course it could have been only the girl instigating this horrendous ploy against his tried and true family.

First things first, they could not let a weakness, a loophole to their dominion flee and see to another idea, so they tackled the task of asking harshly how it was even possible to liquidate a god altogether, a god whom shall never wither and languish, decimated to the despicable tyche of the fragile living, forlorn a place they shall never follow, ironically quite, for humans would once all be united back with their loved ones, while they would not.

They could pout and lose and grieve now just like humans, definitely for now, while the human folk at last will never be bereft of any, borrowed time that seemed lost returned in a sense of infinity no god could ever fathom. Their sorrow unlike, would last forever.

Perhaps that made humans surpass even the ruthless, infinite, praised prowess of mere, floating energy and rendered them in a sense powerful, because they demanded and interrogated these devoted lovebirds, in this Ballad of the Origin, of their surprising fundamentally-rotating triumph in succeeding to defy a very goddess, and yet no answer escaped out of the pressed lips of that foolish brave little girl and alike no noise escaped the throat of the lost son they had fed and raised, invidious and insolent both these children attempting to withstand the probing claws of the gods to claim verity in a crime of deceit, but it would have probably offended them much less, if the defence hadn't been so terribly persistent and obnoxiously stubborn to make it quick for the both of them.

Torture, torment, mind games, hallucinations of how monsters and rabid animals gobbled up their flesh, horrible intense simulations showing the gods in the act of killing the other did not ease their tongues nor soothe the mind to cease such suffering. Somehow they curated an unknown source of strength prevailing endurance. 

Of course, they were strictly separated, not a word, not a quick glance was granted in the horror mansion only sparsely and  withstanding the aggravated effects of the bruising trauma inflicted on this world, unravelling while the gods failed to garner progress every counted day.

The girl – hung in the dungeons on her ankles, rusty nails in her shackles - upside down until the blood reddened her cheek the colour of effervescing lava and her feet gone to sleep – found comfort in the thought of them being in the unknown on how to kill a god, so at least he was safe, safe and sound as one could be with threatening apocalypse. No scars were laid on that flawless skin of his, no fracture that wasn't curable, wouldn't heal on his meticulous bronzed skin. Short answer: He was safe as one could be in the spotlight of rage.

On other hand were the Gods perfectly free to do whatever they preferred with her, something the boy was acutely aware of, albeit it was their highest priority if not neglecting the fact to make him painfully remember that, a daily token of her body was brought to him, ripped out of the remaining shambles miraculously left after the torture underwent, all due to the fact he fell in love and involved her in his personal misery. It was his fault the world would collapse, and his alone if they were to neglect the toll each action took on her body and would extend the point of bearable severity of her injuries till a point, where the damage was proven fatal and her mind would break.

It started with thick shreds of her long bloody-coloured hair, once sleek as silk, presently greasy and dirty from the lack of washing and care she received; a pair of underwear was specifically weaved for him out of her hair – the only piece of clothing he received during his stay. To say the least, it itched horribly and the humiliation turned betimes untenable.

But the unending throe didn't stop here. They opted for breaking the little human physically and their once loved and worshipped little divine prince mentally and abusively with things they'd do to her, shown in remnants of hazy hallucination he impossible could neither decipher for reality or atrocious deception.

They starved both, yet naturally had to feed the girl something or she who was all skin and bones now might as well turn into a gigantic thin meat sack cluttering with bones and muttering no more panted moaning. Useless, since the boy would gladly let all collapse if all hope of remedy had been forsaken with a last breath penetrated out of her lungs.

No, they needed the girl to live. At present. Thus they could use her. 

They gathered her sweat produced in the commencing when they boiled her blood and killed Egyptians for the purpose of processing their meat with herbs and seasonings, mostly uncooked, sometimes fried to a crisp and made her eat her own kind and with what diabolical joy they regaled to bully her into munching the flesh of her own species, won brothers and sisters hungrily and rather greedily, heartache tugged away in a corner, for she knew she'd die and succumb to malnutrition, if she wouldn't eat that damned flesh and play right in the role the gods compelled her to.

After quite a long period of time, they reconciled to feed the boy a little too; They forced chunks of her ripped-apart skin down his throat, followed up by some muscle flesh stemming off her thigh they let grow back under the most excruciating aches, making her strong and noble resolve in keeping her mouth shut wavering and spinning with uncertainty and delirious pain clouding any decent, staunch thoughts.

And it was not just yet, for the boy struggled with the very idea of having her in blatant, excruciating agony everyday, every waking hour, knowing his cruel, horrible family shall do with her what they wanted. The taste of her, her blood, everything coerced down his throat, burned and ached, soaked in acid and kept inert, until he swallowed them that is. Making him cry himself to sleep, his mind wandering to his girl, mere metres away strapped in a torture dungeon, not unlike the one he found himself in right now. These stupid, terrifying inferno of emotions he gladly had accepted into the very core, strain of his eternal, timeless heart, now haunting him back in the behind, for approving of them once meant you had to take the good, the love, the joy along with all the bad, making you inferior, convincing you to be a victim, upon blood-curling hatred came first in avenging his relatives one day, then fear of the unknown, regarding the state of the tumbling, collapsing world right girding them in a cocoon of his once blooming ardour and fed now by the nightmares besetting the act of her death in all its macabre, harrowing details.

Besides the cruel feedings twice a day, where they usually had to pin him on the ground with the force of four elderly gods, violently forcing his meal down his throat, it was quiet. Too quiet. The kind making your skin crawl for the lack of any sound, shrivel and yearn in fact for the tumbling, peturbing noises and shouts and screams of metropoles who never sleep or rest, for constantly an inhabitant, a cackling log, a piece of the machine would oppose trouble and tedious work to survive. That is, at least a rare relic of the past he remembered and may as well cease to exist now too, in accord with everything else of the sin they committed.

No escape, no noise. Nothing to comfort him in his troubled mind or distracting from his rumbling stomach, who wanted by all means to let go of the humane contents.

The silence was bringing him one step each day closer to give in to complete lunacy. Not even screams that would prove her absolutely to be alive as appalling as it sounded were disturbing the innocent, quivering lack of sound.

He didn't give in, he shouldn't give in, he couldn't.

If he was forlorn to insanity, he may refuse even the slightest possibility, the minuscule sliver of hope, slinking around the cracks of the impenetrable armour, that they survived.

Besides, if she could be strong enough to endure constant pain, suffering and tearing of her flesh, he'd measure up to her strength and might as well do that too.

For the oath he'd sworn, for the love brewed between them.

He would not give in, until the universe finally ought to collapse.

And then they'd both be reunited in the afterlife.

He pressed his pallid cheek on the cold confines of this disgraceful, muddy fetid vessel of a cell and pictured more beautiful, wondrous days ahead, bathed in sunshine and slumberous from the entire day doing no labour, besides drowsing under a tree, sunlight delightfully tickling their noses added to many hugs and kisses and broken accords played of her tschang, resembling the chorus of angels, rather than a timber tool created by human hands.

He could dream still of remunerating glee to join them one day after all agony was at last overcome and these dark times not treasured as memories paining one in dire times, rather an unpleasant nightmare kept in check behind barred doors, yes, indeed he could only hope for better times to arrive, until that was, they brought him her toes for supper, when his resolutions began to falter drastically. As all joy left his heart and a cold dagger of ice bore his chest asunder. Some scars where so deeply plunged, ingrained in one's fibre, it would be downright impossible to heal them. Even he knew so, and his body never remembered any wound inflicted. 

The girl was in persisting pain. A never ceasing trip of torture, knives sticking and carefully striving, alining the paths where her most sensitive nerve buds ran along, to make it the most painful possible. Suffer, agony, blinking spots and hot, stinging, sharp and dull pain were her companions in the scenery day in, day out. Ha, laughable to say, for someone like her who had not been touched by sunlight in what seemed like years and appeared to never be caught alight by a daring, yellow ray. Her humanity, a strength she thought possessing rendered her stark, could now turn out to be the weakness that would rip her apart.

There was a fine line pain, hurt, anguish and utter, dissolving agony couldn't surpass, the fence of tolerance your brain wouldn't permit for you to cross, nerves exhausted and seizing slightly by the sheer finesse and aptitude the master of dungeon could put into his tortures to tantalise to the point she was screaming her throat abraded and ready to go to any lengths, to give anything she could grant and even beyond that, and even promises which she couldn't keep, just to have the pain and agony and woe disperse.

From hanging upside down on a daily basis, her legs became more and more sluggish, skinnier, skeletal, harder to move. If blood flow wasn't going to be restored soon, her limbs were at risk to decompose. And who knows if the gods would be capable of replacing sporadically defunct extremities or just sever them gone and slicing the bone into fine cut cubes. Boiled with vegetables as a stew, she classified the gods mean and disgusting and horrific enough to spoon-feed her the brew themselves.

When she wasn't being put under extreme distress and pain and kept in the leaping darkness so saturnine her brain imagined colourful, vibrant spirals to dissect the void right in front of her nose, being viscerally bored or simply encouraging her to move on.

And if the eddying swirls weren't currently conjured upon her eyes, the blackness stank of who would enter the door next, a door she could not see, until the lights would turn on, what unbelievably beautiful figure was to assume the tedious task of righting a mortal worshipping one of their own plenty too much. Her sweat penetrated and beat her nostrils in its reeking fragrance, blood and gore caked the floor beneath her head and her cold, salty tears stained her cheeks so frequently for the first few weeks, until she physically turned to be no longer able to weep, her jowl still dampened and moist, viscid in the display of her unending plight.

Whipping, hitting, tearing small portions of her skin was casually done to her, it turned soon no longer a deed of peculiar cruelty. She screamed until her throat became so hoarse and sore, she rendered incapable of muttering even a singular word.

Each day, someone new walked in through that wretched door, a door in taunting mockery and jaunty derision, a homage to her mortal incapability, a door that wasn't even closed, sometimes even more disgracefully left ajar (as no one expected her, a weak girl to escape, strapped to the wall), another method of torture, asked her a few questions, no, scratch that, asked her THE question in melodious voices, soprano till baritone, then only to start with the routine of scrutinizing agony, upon her silence and eyes closed in preparation for the pain.

She knew her lover wouldn't dare to say a thing, as the only good thing for them could fathom now would be the universe resolving their problems and instantly destroying itself. Better this than having a bunch of misshapen mistakes supposed for mighty leaders.

A big bang, a last fine itch of pain, accompanied by a sweet, sweet void.

To her, it sounded like heaven.

Bliss. Death no longer the unknown, terrifying constant hovering eagerly lecherously over their every mortal shadow, rather an inviting, attractive offer to escape, to be set free of the blood and tears mixing on her irritated cheeks and the smelly, oozing phlegm running the length of her extremities and out of pinching wounds, furthermore pinpointing her declining deteriorating and decomposition each day, hour, minute, second more, a sinking ship where the rats had sensed doom probably the moment her lowly, green heart had unbolted in an arch of raining drops of blood and fallen in love with a stranger whom meant her faltering undoing, unravelling the way her skin was lain bare each time a shining knife connected with her and tore her in shrivelling bows in unison with her screams.

Peace. Yes, it would be wanted, even in its silence, because of its silence. Even if eternal darkness or complete oblivion awaited her on the other side, it was a win attained nonetheless.

Not a glimpse of light ever shined through her cell, her eyes missing the various coloration of plants, flowers, dirt. And orange light in autumn, dyeing everything in a peach volume, her hair a nesting spot for one of the wild, indomitable locks escaping a braid and framing her face in a cascade of illuminated, intimated slashes of flames protruding right of her head like she was crowned the Queen of the sun.

Her old delighting blitheness smarted when she recalled it with blinking, teary eyes blind to the blackness only cut in whirling bows by the monochrome spectrum of grey of her cell's walls and if it wouldn't have been for her blood a putrid stench the air and clinging like a creamy paste to every surface possible and shameful excrements soiling the floor, she might all together be jettisoned with certain jeopardy from the colourful world breaking apart in answer to her use of vice perpetrated in the countenance of lusting, pure, destructive, soul-wrecking love that marred her and every of her dreams in the end.

Fingers were stiff, muscles bulking in painful disuse, demanding to play another tune, just a last symphony of brought joy when perdition was all she learnt to know.

The sounds, the fire, the everything.

She had craved too much and was left with nothing but scrapes of memories. Maybe after all that was the purpose of life, who'd wager? Gather a gallery of the most gaudy pictures you can put out any time, watch and rewatch again only to cause further suffering for your heart and brain for once leap in accord certain you can never return, never go back to these instances.

Study how everyone around you becomes older and wrinkled, including you, yet the memories permanent don't change a bit, flawless imaginings of the past and of no use towards the very end.

The pain of life was worth it, she thought at the time when coherent thought still cursed through her exhausted mind, prepositions only reasonably muffled and softened at the selvedge the day they cut off all her toes on her right foot with a practised, singular chop, seasoned and fried them crunchy on top a hearth fire.

It's all worth it, really. Life, a disease that cannot be treated or cured – besides permanent Death.

Was it though really?

The gods were notorious to untangle even the strangest, strongest vigour and most noble candour of their poor attackers, challenging immortal life and their stern ever hierarchy, punishing and claiming, slaying and harming who they saw fit.

Perennial power circulating through their veins is intangible to the weak capacity of a human mind, in the appearance of a golden liquor desirable to mortals since every gilded item catches their eye in the affair of heartbeat. The illusion provided to sustain their immortality a mocking, ferocious gesture to embarrass the humans gifted with a mere spark of their fervour and intent and a lifetime the width of a thread. Simply in the manner of procuring and cooking up rages and ire, in matters of dispute and emotion were the hot-headed humans only superior. An ability as such hardly could allege what it actually must. Rather a peculiar, vacant debility than power leading to triumph.

Where delight once housed and proved robust and tough, indifference in its absolute form got her now through a day.

When fires arose on that particular day, the air unbreathable to respirate, swirling bows of smoke and debris, the Gods decided the last day of their endless magnitude of days had finally come, after bitter, bitter anticipation and feckless attempts to turn the tables, and figured their last mighty deed on this Earth should be to put in motion the common execution for the worst scum of humanity, liquidated off in terrible deaths and mostly punished such for far-fetched and far less crimes than the lover of one of their own who did nothing less than to defy the iron rule of nature itself.

And the scene of her death in fact would be spectacularly gruesome even for them, right in front of the boy's eyes so horribly vile, he'd never be capable of exulting the images himself in his last crucial seconds while being literally combusted and torn apart. At least that little spark, that particle of joy, of sutured revenge would sustain them when oblivion unfolded.

The blaze only rose in intensity and innocent zeal, burning as much as their passion and affection once had simmered and hissed.

The highly tortured girl, barely held together by scrapes and bits and weathered pieces and at the ready to disintegrate in shambles, her fiery once red hair, a denounced taupe-brown, drooping in greasy, hefty coils sparsely, her scalp bare with bald patches where they ripped it out, and skin caked in crimson red blood in blotches and dried pattern, dark circles and incredible whitened, pallid skin, sulked-in skin, nothing more than bones protruding perhaps. Before she was the living, breathing likeness of health and vitality, timid charm and young beauty, and now a vengeful, broken spirit trapped in a monstrous, decaying, sickly body, monotonous eyes staring back at the unmoving, smug counsel of gods perching above in their seats of copper and soft leather, maliciously enjoying the fragility and self-compendium proposed in her, properties every human body could attain, being all the same, all the same fated to die alone and undignified, like whimpering, pathetic animals, their bodies to break down. Given the apocalyptic circumstances, they were not much better off indeed, but in giant contrast were all in their festive ropes and porcelain-like features the spitting image of life itself whilst the mortal girl in front bore more resemblance to the grim reaper himself, coming to go down with them in conclusion.

Even simply standing in front of them and breathing used air, on her weak, knobbly knees whose joints threat to pop out any second made her want to faint in weak stamina, yet she fought it down with even the faintest inkling of pride and anger immerse, the last reminder of resilient stubbornness she'd conjure bowing to her last scene. Snark and wit breathed back into her limbs and the satisfying, sturdy knowledge of victory against all odds, for she overcame all the sufferings and endless torture, the gods none the wiser, destined to perish in the matter of hours, just like her.

She'd love to tell the Gods something very naughty, but then again, what was it worth? Why waste exquisite air and lung capacity, when all she wanted was to enjoy the last precious moments of her life, where she got to breathe the tainted air and walk barefoot on the raw, hot soil. These bunch of savage gods meant nothing to her and could not hold any power or leverage over her for what it is worth, all that must be said what spilled in her cries or perhaps backstabbing, ranting monologues of her lover, assumed he broke under the probing pressure which she graded rather unlikely. The gods would not change her outcome, so they might as well just kill her now, the earlier the merrier really.

Her lover, of course present to the trials and carefully restrained and muted, was arranged on a balcony above this site of misery. As the boy's standards promised, he'd watch her die from far above, for her birth deemed her a creature inferior and common.

Her eyes locked his, with a base fraction on how they did before, an ardent intensity being projected into the air to slow down irrevocably and meet the target in an echoless thumb than rather the expected inferno, so weak, so frail the outside cannot grasp it and simultaneously couldn't deny, for prohibition might just be supported by detection, kindred in spirit and a love recognised. Or the least until rising hatred mixed, remembering, and her featured closed much alike after the raining, delectable applause being given by an impressed, utter worn audience after a rather during and testing drama with heartfelt, unique emotion and the long, sorry silence reverberating the amphitheatre, long after the last of the lot had set foot outside, a daring, triste, miserable silence after everything that had been said and done and commissioned and governed by the loved and adored characters played by actors, paid for the upholding of a farce, never to be born a thing of reality.

Every tear shed, every drop of blood fallen, every void word said, every meaningless promise made, it all was an act the lecherous hearts of the spectators needed to see, needed to feel, lack but in the moments outside of these chambers, an echo of the applause jolting through their chest cavity when sleeping, a longing to be real, an act still in the end, yearning for such delicious sadness as for the escape of this misery.

She hated him.

Oh, and how feverishly she hated him.

From love to hate indeed.

How easy that worked.

Their love, their affection, these heated moments of displayed passion, nothing more than fleeting instances in a collective infinity, an affair empty of consequences of meaning in his eternal life, but an exciting uproar of rebellion caused hers to end much sooner.

It might have been just that, if the world wasn't falling atwain as they spoke, her a mortal won a game she could not have profit off in any circumstances, a tale meant to be small and insignificant, a lore, a lecture to not commit to such fault for the descendants to come, even of lesser importance although, for their were no more children to be born to hear it.

A smile yanked her facial muscles twisting to a wicked grimace, smirking like the devil herself: She was free or would be, soon.

When the violent, reverberating seizures would twitch and divulge under the magic born to a crime, furtively reform and warp to shapes forced of the immense pressure, leading all to a most dearest final eclipsing climax where the universe would tear asunder decreed and final. 

Then she would be set free. 

They would all be set free.