Solstices Obscurity "Nightfall" Ch. 01

"You! Out of my way, fool! You..hey! I'm talking to you!"

As those cold dead eyes shift to me most would falter under that dread gaze, but not me. Not The Bastard. I quell before the eyes of none, living or dead.

"Good of you to take note that I was addressing you, swine." I walk down the quay till I'm almost stepping into his boat. He moves to bar my way, as he did the first day I arrived here. The day he handed me this journal that I thrust back into his face. "I don't want on your putrid craft, ferryman. Though my pocket are filled with coins I would not waste a single one to travel to where you're taking these trusting fools. Unlike them I don't care about a golden afterlife. Nor a burning lake of fire. I simply need to know how I'm to write in these wretched pages when I can't see the quill before my eyes? It is as black as the deepest parts of Satan's anus here, when you're not at the dock. What do I use to see by?"

There was a sound from within his robe then. The first sound I have heard him make. It was a soft breathy noise, less than a whisper loud.

This wretched fucker was laughing at me?

Me!

My hand dropped to the hilt of my rapier lightning quick, but before the blade could clear sheath his hand was on my wrist stopping the draw. My teeth drew back in a rictus, skull-like grimace as I struggled against that unmovable grip.

His laughter died when set to match against my fury.

From within his robe his other arm arose and before my eyes he held the stub of a candle. His face turned from mine to the lantern behind him. Then he looked back at me. I understood, but didn't agree

"A single candle? That will help for all of an hour, then be nothing more than wasted wax, " told him, my need to draw blade not truly lessening.

Slowly his hooded head moved side to side. Releasing my wrist, he turned and lit the candle in his lamp. The light from that single flame should have been as nothing, but it blazed bright enough that I saw the shadowed outlines of a face within his cowl. A grim countenance, of a man long lost to thing like sunlight and skies of azure. He thrust the flame out to me, pushing me back as I tried to peer closer.

I take the little stub of a candle and move, backing away from him. The lost souls waiting on their passage, to whatever is coming next in their benighted lives, move to board the watercraft only once I've gotten out the way.

Carrying my little spark, I move back to my tree stump and picked up my quill. I don't even wince as I reopen my wrist for ink.

I guess I'm fortuitous in that that such a common born bastard of a Reeve as my father employed took the time to sell me straight to the owner of the foreign brothel. I was spared the humiliation of the slave auction. The indignity of standing nude on the block, while other humans who think themselves so better than what they buy, tell you how little your life has value. No the wagon, with the wood lattice bars between me and freedom, took me past just such a place on my way from the dock to the gilded-lead and white-stone building that would be my home and prison for the next two years of my life.

I close my eyes for a moment, wanting to push back those bitter memories. But I can't. I have to relive them to put them in these pages. I look around in the dark for my flying friend, wishing for even his meager company while I remember those terrible days. But alas Stygie is off somewhere else in this deepening murk.

I was washed that was first. The stink of the ship and the sailor's abuse was scoured from my skin. Water flowed from hoses, drive by hand pups, to hit my skin with stinging pressure. Then, no matter what protest I made, such a hose was jammed into my arse. The cold brass nozzle a viscous pain given the rough usage I had been enduring in that normal place of egress. The warm water, almost soothing at first, filled me till I screamed at the cramps and could hold no more. They then washed away the earthy detritus from my arse and legs and did it again. And again. Till I was quite sure I must soon vomit out those befouled waters from my mouth.

Still whimpering from that treatment I was dragged, boneless a filleted fish, to a table where I was then subjected to an even more foul procedure. All the hair, with the exception of my head was ripped from my flesh with a mixture of clothe strips and scalding hot wax. It was, I soon learned to my dread, to be a common thing for me to have to endure.

Glancing down at my arm, I take note that the hair has never returned to the backs of my hands. Even all these years later I remain all but shorn over most of my flesh.

Looking around, how black the night seems to be settling in and how quickly I'm being engulfed by it now that Charon has pole his boat away. I keep thinking it can grow no darker then it does, and then does again a few moments later. Darkness knows no peer outside of the pits of hell. Beyond here what we think of as dakness is but common shadow.

Emptied, fleeced, and then given water I was left for an hour to bemoan my fate. Then I was whipped. No simple lashing, no leather carter's whip or sailor's knotted rope. A lash of the smoothest silk, dipped into water, taught me that terrible morning the true meaning of pain. It taught me suffering on levels I had never known was even possible, then I was educated further. I was take to levels of agony where a human mind can break, and then be broken over and over.

And it was done with no malice, or cruelty. It was simply a way to train me. The way a horse would be broken to saddle and cart. And just like that horse my spirit finally broke. I begged, I pleaded, I cajoled my keepers to let me show them I would do anything they wished me to do.

That had of course been just what they had been waiting for.

With the threat of a far worse beating hanging Sword of Damocles like over me I was enslaved to my own fear of pain. If not eagerly, I with no hesitation did as they asked...

I spit into the darkness at the memories of debasing myself to those foreign fiends. Oh, there can be no doubt of what I did.

I became a whore. No, less than that.

They dressed me as a woman. I guess there can be happiness that I was of such advanced age, when I was when sold, it probably saved my cods from being clipped. Once I learned the language I learned of the horrors that befell the eunuchs that guarded the slave quarters of the women. Such could have easily been my fate. My boyishly handsome face, and noble-breeding gave me a grace from that tortured tonsured life at least.

I was taught to make coffee. To this day, second only to turnips and that by a small margin, is a smell so unendurable nauseating to me. I was instructed in the preparation of the ground beans. In how to serve it without spilling a single drop, an offense that warranted a terrible beating, and one that could mean the life of a slave if it was to drop on a patron. It was once I had mastered brewing that foul juice that I was given instructions in how to use my mouth to service the drinker.

No matter how repugnant I found it I keep all such distaste from my face. Dressed in woman's clothes, with my face makeup besmeared, my hair tricked into the latest styles for the male-courtesan-whore I would kneel, lift their robes and take them into my mouth. I became quite skilled at it, to avoid the lashings that a complaint would give. I took them all into my mouth, teeth cover with my lips to guard against the least scratch. Young men, old men it mattered not. I pleasured them all.

Even the rare woman was given to my lips to please. Though I came to dread it when they appeared. Hooded and veiled they would be escorted in, served and then all but myself would be removed. My instructions simple. Do what they asked. No questions. Oh yes, that was a normal thing as well. Other than for male pleasure, and to scream when I failed at that, my throat was not to be used.

Then men would enviably have been to the bathhouse next door before they arrived to drink coffee. Some were even sated from their encounters there with the anuses of more common bathhouse slaves, a fate I was often threatened with, and wish nothing more than alight sucking from me. More desert than main course.

Others came here first and I was their appetizer. They were often foul of smell and taste, but I did not let it show upon my face that I thought such. Not after a full day of enduring silk whip lashings for one such slip of the tongue.

But the ladies...they were never more than a more pleasant face to look upon. Their quims were invariably foul and their manners towards a slave such as myself, dressed as they themselves were, were often brutal. As if they wished to punish me for looking better in their sex's raiment than Nevertheless, that training in licking the putrefactive gashes of the women that came for coffee stood me well in the decade to come when I had to apply those same lips to the cunts of the queens and mistresses of the kings of Europe. How often was praise given to my skill at bring their foul smelling wombs to paroxysmal spasm.

Little did those pernicious over pampered cunts know that those same skilled lips they so enjoyed and praised could have pleasured their husbands far more than they ever could have.

Letting the feathered quill fall from my fingers, I look unseeing at these words. Trapped in years of horror those memories seemed to stretch out decades long in my memories. Hours became days, days weeks and oh how endlessly long the simple passing of one moon seemed. Turning away from teh journal, I gorge up nothing...but wish it could be the phantom memories of ten thousand of spendings. That many at least filled my mouth in the endless day, after day that was that place. How strange that a youth born of nobility was kept a slave, not a stones throw from the palaces of the Ottoman Kings.

Men my family could, through much twisting and inter breeding, trace our family linage out to. But then that should be no surprise I guess. My family had been fucking me raw since that time with the maiden.

Leaving my endlessly burning candle, I walk away into the darkness hoping it consumes me. I should know better. Not even the darkness of Hell could stomach to retain such as I. Why else was I, Reynold the Bastard, spat out? Regurgitated amid so much bile, upon this retched shore.

"par la mort de dieu."