The Burning Banquet

For my death, as I had imagined it, there seemed to come an end. The darkness, which had extinguished every part of my longing for life. Would I not be seen as a savior of humankind, if as so, I had saved human kind from the descent into anarchy?. Other thoughts; of death, had surfaced so many times now compared to the short time in which it had occurred. How death must feel each time he took a life, and lingered when the body emptied into nothing but a shell, as hollow as before creation. Death must have laughed, and kept laughing for every time I had fallen into his arms, not weeping, but astonished to find that I was before him yet again. How he must have wept, to find out that he had yet again caught me out of this world, but in another. A world within this world, which was able to repeat itself again and again, where death usually was the only escape; just not for me, my above floating consciousness ever tormented by my own demise. 

The dermal cape of my body seemed unscathed by the previous events. Yet another proof, determining that I was beyond my body, inside an environment projecting the existence beyond what it was before into what it could be now. Instead the existence have denied the thought, thus the subconscious world is created. That I have read. I was lying down. Possible, explainable and logical. A stumble through the dark had in most probably circumstances put my ind a deep subconscious slumber. Soot and ashes filled my nostrils while I was consciously beginning to breathe. Before my mind ever could register the small particles clotting up my nose, the body convulsed in a great spasms forcing a cough over several feigning minutes. In my spasms, the the touch of skin on clothes felt different, lighter and cleaner. No light tickle of dead cells conjoined to the skin seemed to appear in my mind, first now registering the loss thereof. As I realised this a deep itching began all over, not from burning, but from something else, which probably was the loss of hair caused by severe burning.

I flailed my body up from the ground. The hands that touched the ground, did not touch what was floor, but rather that which had been floor at one time. Fingertips sensing the deep layers of soft snow, lighter than a feather itself. Imprints where in the hand as it dug deeper into the layers of ash, almost toppling the whole body in the upheaval from darkness. I saw, to my surprise, a landscape of grey. Dark moulds to all sides, as none of which was before, could be seen now. Was my dream the real end, and this before me death way of rattling me further down his spiral. A dance upon the edge of the grim reapers scythe? I had a queasy feeling of something to go about as wrong as it could get, and by my calculation the moment of truth to this feeling, would be about now.

They were all around in the midst of ashes – The bodies that had haunted the restaurant room in their casualness. Devouring the words to each other like they were common to the ancestors as the tongue was placed, moulded and expressed. All of them were nothing but charred meat, red bodies and spilled wine to their last moments in the heat. A fierce battle had obviously been depicted in real life moments and then again frozen. That was all you could tell by the screams that had stopped when pain had protruded, exclaimed itself in their inner blood systems. They crawled up on their feet, slowly taking in, gobbling up the part of the ashes around them. As an inverse breath of death, they were living by what had been fire, beings of ash and mold, muscles and sinew

This uproar should not get in my way, I now stood as I had not stood before; yet again a true stance, true to youth and creativity. The phoenix rising from the ashes of beyond.

Standing in the desert where the winds rushed over him and the ashes all moved to the earthly bounds, earthly reaches; I could see, or spot that there was no help in this no-man’s-land and the beauty which had ruptured him, had disappeared. There I stood, with nothing to remember but the fate that she had chosen to give him. Walking slowly out through the fences to policeman and woman who where placed to stop casual pedestrians from satisfying their curiosity to the outcome of events belonging to past tense. They could only think it as arson, indeed it could be nothing else when a man such as I walked past these mere townsfolk, like the fire had molded me and the devil had spat the body out again. There was nothing but empty glares in their empty bodies, of those bystanders who were there. In my own mind, the chaos raged. I had corpses rising behind, corpses of living flesh to the front, and every step I would be taking was as a hero of humanity. The cave was still behind me, and should the lions not be behind lock and door? I pushed forward in slow steps, ensuring that none would come running to alter my position in this truth among few. She was still in my thoughts among others, the demon harbinger of fire, soulless from heart to brain. Deep feelings from the afterdark kept pulsing into my mind, like a candle against the wind, but stirring again and again, burning the skin of the hand which sheltered it. It was cold yet warm; Only sin could relieve me, lust of the body between body was one of the dark burning thoughts I fought as true as I could. This pressure she put on me, was stripping me bare. I could feel how, among this, that every mental aspect of my being, slowly was nailed into a cardboard box, and hidden beyond my grasp.

Only one thought I could muster, it was heating my whole body, my complete existence to a point beyond control. But i had control, I felt how the impossible from before was possible. I had done it, I had become one with the fire and wreaked havoc among all these people. Sudden bluring images surged through my mind, fueling the feelings of control; different control - colors in a black and white world, light in the dark - uncontrolled and incomprehensible. Pulsating through my whole body, with the flow of blood, the heart controlling the power itself; burning. 

Lips of my mouth was twitching to form a cynical smile, part of my which was not me, had taken effort to create this. I spread cold blood through every vein, counterbalancing the anarchy, before it spread - a tumor that needed to be removed by freezing. The tumor itself was fire, not clean but something very different. Malignant blaze of heating to spread in the whole body. Cold control and logic was enough to spur the smile away at a blast of a frown.

This would require a considerable amount of paperwork. The references that the books held had never mentioned these words among their pages; they had never proposed the thought of his work working against him.

 The thoughts whirled like a pool as I now more than ever needed to orientation on where to go, for answering questions of bewildering origin; I needed to do so, because such a thing as the mind was indexed and catalogued as a filial system where only the reality of his work was stored. With the lot filled with zombies, an escape unnoticed would be an impossible feat even for a chameleon such as I, walking among those born in anything but void. Maybe I didn't need to escape? A part of  my body filled the rest of it with the warm embers of safety, making me stand ground to view through the plane of destruction.

The burned corpses and rotting flesh from the scene behind him had begun making the noises of something unmistakeable in the usual human mind; something that had been buried my whole life, now resurfaced in reality. There was still something rather horrifying about the sound - A distorted cracking sound which you only would be able to compare as the peeling of flesh from burnt wood - but there was only ashes left of every burnt building nearby. This was more than any part of a rational mind could handle, and enough to make some part of me lick my lips in godly calm to nauseating images, which would burn into any man’s mind. Oddities of human form were all around on the scene of the fire – a freaky horror show on television. The corpses had risen in pairs: soulless bodies of man to woman stood, controlled by the table mistress, to the king of reaping. While she stood there, far behind, on the top of the rubble, as one of the corpses, she had her black cloak and deformed body to stand out. From head to toe they were blackened yet in a reddish hue from the burning storm of a passionate lover, turning on the fire of every heart, blasting the restaurant into a hell of lust to abide by her command; she was to be more than a part of this story. Blood sprayed from the holed veins that the woman of fire had made. All the corpses, in pairs, were wandering about to be joined, letting the charred meat of the lips mend together, never able to part again. Each of the pairs twirled their fingers together in unity, where some digits broke off: Blood ran out on the ash-filled ground. Still they embraced like nothing had happened. They were the warm-blooded dead with no mimic and only the muscle bound flesh to aid them. Each person’s scorched flesh that bound and stuck to the other, would, like a sticker, fasten on the opposite sex, when any movement came from one in the pair.

Starstruck, paralyzed and even limp, I stood watching these horrid visions expecting a feint arriving any moment. Nothing as such, not even a blurred image before my eyes. Blurred was the images that formed in my mind, from a distant land, a vast world so horrid nothing but the creatures who had been born from it, was able to live in it. She formed from this dimension, or had always been just a small part of this world, among human; more than human. She stood among the corpses as the crouching tiger having caught its prey, gorging it open while grinding her body to the gluey skin in celebration of the feast, of life. After finishing her one meal of man she moved on to the next: Motions of feline grace themed her passage, purring, having been satisfied enough by devouring of a mere man.

Even I could not bear what moemnts of terror to be witnessed; in desperation and knowlegde of the impending doom yet to come I fell to my knees seeing this... this... insanity that had just happened. There was another she devil here, one that I had almost forgot from before, but had to remember as she now stood at my heels, with all the unloving corpses still rising, still touching, peeling off skin with each touch. She was behind me again, the temptress, the succubus. As god must have taken a part of his ribs to create man in his image, the devil himself must have taken a whole hand to create such a vile thing as her.

I
n laughing words she started “Silly man”
turning to a powerful yet controlled yell “If you will not have me, you must sin in another way!”

By the wave of her hand, she summoned a man and woman, and ceased the act freezing them in what moments of burned love they had been attempting to recreate.
A heavy yank and pull to my hair, raised the head tilting it back to force a submission from me, Edward Choice. It was not a grip of the usual kind, you could resist and let your power work against. Nay, it was a grip both of physical and mental restraining - a disempowering force of hopelessness welled into me, until I felt numb. With her other hand she ripped the head from the man corpse in order to bring it to her lips. In a matter of sheer moments she had fulfilled the cannibalistic course so horrible, sinful and pure evil, that, if it was possible, I would have closed my eyes, but could not.

‘EAT!’  she yelled, as she pressed this lifeless head into his. 

Tears welled up inside me, and soon came running down my cheeks: with this humiliating request she imposed upon me fulfill i felt hopeless, there seemed no option in this matter. Although I wanted to resist, all my strength had been drained in the subsequent events happening since she entered the restaurant.

“I said EAT! Edward Choice, man of losses” she said

The mind behind my mind talked, or tried talking. It was muffled, gagged or the like, and still held a power vaster than what my order could image. My mouth opened to her command and began piece by piece to devour the head. Even bones joined in like they were the tenderest beef I had ever eaten. It was easy chewing these simplicities. These Inca or Aztec traditions that I had to follow by heart – Or the other persons heart. A victim like I now was. A ritual like this occurring at this time made it all easier, made me remember who I was yet again. These delusional femme fatales should not win yet. The work had to be done. Everything disappeared into my stomach where it stayed, without even wanting to ascend again. After those moments everything stopped. The images of the corpses stayed still. In their awkward sexual positions. Just by watching you should think this was karma sutra illustrated for corpses.

Silence....