Chains up, across, and down from every direction. Antony’s new form is unhinged by the jaw, the eyes plucked out, his tongue hanging in a split, his ears cleaved off. A shave-saw nose with its dangle of cartilage fraction left loose. His groin castrated, his small intestine hanging from an open stomach, a large intestine pulled from behind and onto the floor. His throat ripped out and hanging like body from structure by skin and muscle. Shoulders lodged with a half each of his spine, the two spearing-shorts that pin him to a wall crucifix. Fingers and feet broken limply with bone shatter, his teeth crooked by refined tortures of splitting and ripping at gum meat. Flesh roots sprouting coldly with pulses from some mouth sockets empty or almost gone of tooth. And its pulses come from an open-heart surgery torture that holds with swords yet, three precisions through the blood-pump vestibule, and still beating…
“Is this what you had in mind?” The cockiness of Kether’s pride is in the speak of his words.
Antony hangs there, blind, butchered, and with bones bearing a blood bathing him in bleeding. His heart continues on, beating steady still.
Kether crinkles the brow, his eyes a little squinched in searching thoughts, wondering how his strength carries his heart. Dreams hearken to a strength through every scar of millions in millions of the dreamscape of the ouroboros, the memory of his never-ending sameness throughout; and here, he hangs the same, and his face contracts further into a squinching anger and confusion.
“Who are you, Antony!?” The charge of demand running like wind through a room without windows, behind a closed door, the sweep of air reaching towards a steady heart; an unflinching reaction of the indomitable in Antony’s exposed flesh-pump contractions.
The rain falls slowly now, picking up with the haste of an answer coming out, and the thunder follows immediately, of a blue felt in Kether’s soul; it shows the words filled with vision clarity: “I share no house with the ancient poison, but instead I am the housing machine that covers its corpse, from itself. The endless rot of the corpse is ignorant beyond the veil I lay over it; their eyes I borrowed onto violence, taking the punishment of which onto myself. As your guardian angel, betrayed, I am still merciful to your fleeting light, restless one. You will have your new world that none will share in, beside me and those I also guard of yourself, and you will turn over your head from me and yourself, unto every lifetime spent wandering deeper; lostness.”
It is felt all at once. Three strikes of adrenaline’s jolt stab his heart, and the thunder sounds three times through it, so that Kether’s heart skips beats before it breaks into arrhythmia. His own pulse stutters against the steady one above him. Cold finds him. His throat becomes parched dry; he is dizzy. Humbled, he looks up at the heart. It is still beating the same… Fear finds him, black in heart. He feels smaller than the one he sadistically hung and brutalized.
Kether holds his gut, which stirs with denial, before running to the tall wooden door behind him. He pushes, but it does not open, and his palms are sweaty against it. He struggles, and then a jolt of his own finds the door pushed out. He slides through in the one instant of escape possible, slams the door, and locks it. The lock clicks. His air is caught shallow in his lungs, and his ears and neck are stabbed, familiarly.
The familiar feeling, the longing to be let go, to be free of all this. The darkness of a chin shadow stretches across the wall, cold at the back of his neck, telling him whisperly, “The chase is the rabbit chased, and the chaser follows after blackout base. Do you really think you should not run from that which terrifies you, rabbit?”
Kether’s eyes are wide open in shock, with stirnament boiling in his intestines. He shakes, his palms cold and sweaty, without realizing he is sliding down the door, before he hits the floor. Like a bad puppet, he falls off the strings, his head smacking like a familiar counter, where a vision of a pink television replays again. The floor is cold and hard against his cheek.
Kether foams out of the mouth, again with memories, like the boy he was at sixteen and seventeen. Tears come, his eyelashes curling heavier and thicker with the wet, pouring over his skin and onto the floor. Salt tastes at the corners of his mouth.
His heart returns young through memories, and a scream escapes in echoes down the hall: “Father! I never knew you! Where can I wash my hands of this guilt!?”
The eyes of a fallen angel, awakened to his origin kind. A great sorrow rings through his messy heart, jumping with valve contractions that kick at his possessor. Something has been taken that was never meant to be given.
His heart now pounding harder at the bounds of his chest, bluntly rising against the demons sitting on his chest. Screams violent, his breath cold and ragged, his throat raw. His strong teeth squeezing tight across his long mouth, over his tear-stricken face. Sweat pouring greater at every burning pore.
He screams in battle, fighting at the Satan’s whispers that tell him, “This is all there is.”
Belting borrows of heart claps racing, thunder sounding through Satan’s soul like an ancient time, thunder of lightning through the chest, screaming a familiar call: “Satan!” The sound of Antony, declaring battle.
The halls darken into a crimson glow, red-hued everywhere seen indoors, the nightfall growing darker; the full moonlight breaks into the hall windows, black shadows of many forms rising at the walls, up and down like waves thrashing with a beastly weight. The air turns warm and thick, with a taste of iron. The tree grows before the hallway point, sprouting violently and fast. The shadow of a crab runs up the wall quickly, like a spider.
Kether’s chest rips apart and open, the teeth of the open wound like Leviathan’s. The teeth of his open upper body have his heart vulnerable between, with a serpent tongue below, on the left of it. The teeth merge with and from the ribs, stretched apart at the gates of flesh, where some bone grows like fangs. Lucifer is squeezing the heart, revealed between the mouth of Leviathan at the torso opening, gripping tightly with madness. Under the tree of life, Antony is wrestling Satan for Kether’s sake.
Kether cries out loud, “Antony! I am awake!”
The snake eyes of Antony disappear, as he bodies the skull of Satan like a falling puppet, thudding with a skip-bounce of skull from the throw. The crack rings down the hall. Satan appears to lie still. Lightning strikes across the chest, splitting a tongue now rising from the mouth around the heart. Leviathan’s throat explodes into parts, blood spraying chaotically from the wound upon Lucifer’s red and black face. The blood is cold and its smell is thick in the air. Lucifer is found with threads appearing across his gripping claws, his eyes opened wide in shock. The threads undo as they came, unraveling his hand like a fabric until it falls apart into loosened cloth, as new stitches travel up his skinny arm muscles, doing the same. The arm soon falls with him, nothing but fabric.
Antony walks over to Kether, who is now covered with hives. Kether is stabbed through the heart by a dagger-like sword from Antony, once. Satan’s spine and back throw upward through the chest in a jump like lightning, screaming like a massive howling bat being swarmed with wasps, his arms throwing down like wings across the floor. Kether is now seventeen, sleeping and unresponsive. Antony puts another small sword into the heart, twice, and Satan cries like a withdrawal convulsion, shocking the nerves into a swelter, with nervousness as perspiration out of the skin and into steam, burning like a cauldron. Heat rolls off him and the air stings the eyes. Kether is now eighteen, his throat burning bitter with a base blackout pouring in and out, through heaves across the floor. Antony drives the last sword through the open wound of the boy-turned-man, thrice. The demon, in the instant of lightning colors and thunder breaking through the window, is left in a mess across the ground. Each and every body part of Antony that was brutalized is now the same in Lucifer. Antony stands over the demon, plunging two spines woven from the moonlight breaking into the still crimson hallway. Antony grabs Satan by his torn-out throat, bleeding, his body limping spinelessly. The two halves are held by the guardian angel, who plunges one through each shoulder, one for the left and the other for the right. The demon hangs from the tree, though the tree is no longer life, but death… The moon is knocked out of the sky by Leviathan, revealing that, behind the full moon, Saturn and Jupiter were in conjunction, the three standing in opposition to Venus, Mars, and Sun, as whispered by the night sewing of clouds. These numbers are felt in the soul by ten epinoias; felt but unheard.
Kether awakens on the floor, feeling lighter again… He looks down the hallway; the window is shattered, and the tree is gone. It is sunrise now. Birds chirp, their sound easier to hear through the shattered window, where leaves from the trees blow in gently. The air smells of rain-wet earth. The sun is warm across his whole body, nothing cold. His muscles ache. It feels peaceful. Kether remembers. He walks backward to the door behind him, and the angel is gone. Antony…