A slave without limits....

December 23, 2023

With measured steps, He closes the distance between them, His hands clasping a collar…its significance immeasurable in comparison to its weight. His face is alight with fervent anticipation, His heart buoyant with the prospect of her acquiescence.

"It is time," He asserts, His voice brimming with conviction, I have found you…unfettered by hesitation, the one who will transcend all to cement her loyalty."

She listens, her soul engrained with veneration, ready to bend to His will, confident in the belief that, though His ways are enshrouded in mayhem, malice is not His essence.

"Ascend," He commands, His voice the key to her chains. He guides her through a serpentine corridor that culminates in a doorway, beyond which lies a cavern…the dwelling of an unspeakable abomination, the altar upon which her devotion will be proved.

In front of her, shaped from an amalgamation of carcasses and sewn together with coarse, raven hair a behemoth slumbers.

Its hide crawls with vermin that feast on the rot festering beneath its open sores. Its breath reeks of putrid flesh, while its three lacerated tongues, ravenous for the anguish they savor, twitch with a perverse sensuality.

Upon it, diseased flesh sloughs off in chunks, pooling at its claws, revealing squirming innards beneath, its barbed entrails writhe in agony seeking escape.

Its eyes snap open, revealing orbs that are clouded over with milky cataracts. They are a mirror of mortality reflecting her visage with vile intentions, in them her own body lies severed into a dismembered echo of the grace of life.

Its previously gaping maw now wretches wide to bring forth a primal scream, a cry that transcends anguish, a collective of lamentations torn from the throats of countless mothers, each holding in their arms the cold, still forms of their beloved children.

She gazes upon the beast before her, not borne of hell, no…this beast is hell incarnate, a corporeal rendering of the inferno that bellows beneath the veneer of existence.

"Approach and kneel before the beast," He intones solemnly, His voice echoing off the stone walls. "For all offerings are built upon sacrifice."

The sole pathway to the terror is littered with the discarded husks of those who once transgressed, whose misdeeds laid them bare as offerings to atone for their affronts. Their flesh torn asunder, they are now but fractured relics.

As she slowly approaches, the beast grows quiet, its primal scream now replaced with a slow rhythmic beeping, each tone a stark reminder of breath and pulse… an electronic echo of a living heart's cadence within the hush of a hospital room.

With each step, she feels the chilling embrace of the expired, their hands caressing her limbs in death's cold grip, the vile snap of ribs underfoot weaving a tapestry of destruction in her wake. She heeds not the wails of these bygone sinners, her vision solely encompassing the gargantuan terror before her. Reaching the beast's shadow, she genuflects in solemn offering, her every fiber resolute, presenting herself as a tribute.

As both knees kiss the ground, the creature implodes, collapsing inward into a voracious void, the terror it evokes is no longer bound by the chains of flesh and sinew.

It becomes the penultimate ***….the unknown, a chasm devoid of light, expectation, or conjecture. Kneeling on the precipice of this event horizon she moves to cast her form into it's unfathomable abyss.

"No," comes His stern rebuff. "Your offering, while noble, is not what this abomination seeks."

A second presence echoes her own, its steps faltering in the dim light. Alongside her...eyes appear, ones that brim with purity… untouched by corruption, a shining beacon of innocence. She must now cast this untouched soul into the beckoning void, serving as the oblation to this malevolent deity within the gloom. She, the executor of a grim command.

As she beheld the untainted, her heart plummeted, engulfed by a petrifying dread at merely the notion of such an unblemished spirit tainted by this inferno's touch…a tableau of virulent despair. The zenith of subservience had long been her singular desire, yet peering into the eyes of the guiltless, she discerned no blight, not a smear of sin clamoring for redemption.

Her breath stalled in her throat, a roiling nausea seizing her as the precipice of commitment loomed…one final act, one concealed truth, a secrecy to end all secrets. Her arms encircled the innocent with a tremble…the verge of proof, the consummation of allegiance was within her grasp.

Yet she wavered, for the brink was a mirage…a lure to a fallacy of limitlessness. With a tender embrace, she soothed the unmarred and unfettered them from the bonds of potential sacrifice.

"No," she murmured, a gentle defiance breaching the quiet. "True servitude knows its boundaries…that is no illusion, but reality."

In her repudiation lay her sovereignty, her spirit unshackled. Thus, she turned her back on the path of illusory devotion and treaded her way home, no longer a supplicant but a woman liberated.