Samson’s socked hard, two loose teeth swishing around like food in his mouth, thick blood syrup caught behind a swollen bottom lip. The back of his hand wipes the overflow across his inflamed face. One hooved one, large at over seven feet, with horns like a goat and claws of hand like Satan. The goat devil also has blackened wings at rest. The monster is adorned in piercings across his nose and ears, with the head of a strong bull.
Samson is on his knees and winded with huffs. The fountain lies in the middle of a pond they fight beside, before a guarded wooden gate. Under a spell of her, he stands up past the fatigue pushing him down by the shoulders and into the legs. Sweat pouring across the cuts on his face with salted stings. The urge to puke is sulked down like nails by Samson.
Samson holds his axe as support to stand on, his chest in upheaval, searching for more needed breath. He feels powerless for a moment. He just breathes while the devil stands the same, confidently ready at the gate for him.
Samson, in his moment of desperation, walks towards the pond. The water is in between the rich soil covered in thick bristles, within the plentiful arcadium. Lotus flowers drift across it in a realm apart from the stars, past the winding green flats of the previous realm he came from. The sky is a vast blackness above, not reflecting its absence in the water. A blue and golden glow is always conjuring in glowing cycles from the ground, lighting the area.
Samson walks towards the fountain, seeing his own reflection. It is a form unseen, blotted out by a shadow not himself, unlike the human arms that hover beneath his sight.
Samson has the familiar feeling in his heart from another realm, like a guardian angel speaking without words: “Reach into the waters and grab.”
Samson puts his hand through, his fingers breaking the surface, but then he stops. He is half frozen. “No.”
The devil drags one of his hooves through the ground, dragging it with a deadly weight of intention. The devil shoots across the ground, charging at Samson. Samson looks up with his heavy head in exhaustion, unprepared. The concussive blow rings loudly and pushes through his head. The weight of his head is slung across his neck. His head bounces off the dirt once before skedaddling into one smaller jump and a stop. A tooth is now loose in his mouth, reminding him of a familiar haunted flash from the clouds before his death.
The hoof kicks him over onto his back, a breaking command. Samson rolls. The bottom of the hoof is placed firmly onto his chest, and Samson tries to grab it to move it off, but it is no use. The devil now looks down without emotion, like a slave to time, and he juts with the fire of the quad into the chest, his weight pushing down. Samson coughs and heaves as the air is knocked out of him. Blood rushes from the kneed half of his face as he chokes on a tooth and gargles on blood. He tries to put his decaying might as a mere cushion of resistance against the pain on top of him, but fails.
One moment, the bull-goat looks down with a slight arrow bend of brow, with the exhale of a bull, before retracting his leg up only enough, about some inches raised. Air rushes into Samson’s lungs for a moment in a desperate gasp, as if he were more than drowning for minutes straight. And then, the dropping of a hoof back down and into the sternum, like the dropping of a marble pillar through the gates of rib. Samson lets out another heave, but it sounds almost like the dry heave before vomit. Gargled blood is spit up out of his mouth, covering his face in it like a grave. A tooth rolls down the side of his face through the thick mud of red rolling, following slowly, barely escaping.
The weight and crushing feel as if a hole will be pushed through the center of his chest, almost through him and onto the dirt below. Samson, now with enough blood out of the way, starts trumpeting a roaring battle cry, remembering the soul he fights for, and it strips away at his vocals with a scratching and shredding.
Samson, now rolling his shoulder into a stretch towards this pond at his side, reaches into the water with a loose hand unaccounted for. Samson reaches in and grabs what feels like a ladder of vertebrae. The Goat pushes harder into him, and the squeezing of an organ ruptures almost, before Samson pulls it out, barely, against the resistance of his spent body. His thought is confirmed: the large spine is from a towering kind.
When he holds it up, another message from the heart reaches from afar: “This is all you need. Now spit your blood onto it.”
Samson shoots out the iron taste from his bleeding mouth onto the wet spine in his hands. The stretch of the graceful spine straightens, and the end becomes sharpened as it lengthens; it has transformed… The smaller Samson now resists with the rush of faith reinvigorating him, then another second wind of energy, hope. The faith, hope, and love he fights for all swindle into one.
The spear grows longer as it lies in the cusp of his grip, where his other hand reaches to support the formidable power conjured. He lies below the beast while still on the ground, and in a jolt of thrusting vigor, lugs the strength into a lodge through a sternum without chance. It shoots up and through the beast. The blow causes blood to cough up through the devil’s mouth before his head rolls to the side, where the spine grows in stretching clicks and pops of a back. It continues to run through the goat—bull, where the beast simply dies limply on the spear, held up by Samson’s grasp… Its weight is too much, and so Samson yanks it left way, throwing the monster into the pond’s water. Splashes fly as the smell of a wet dog exudes, the water mixing into a dark blood wine.
Samson pulls the spine of spear out from the chest of the devil, where it was standing erect out from the body of water like a spined pole. The arena now houses only one person. Where the gate is, he walks towards. It stands taller than the now-dead monster he had slain. The lock shows the imprint of a rectangle, and the print on the padlock says “black joker.”
Samson’s face goes a little frozen before the word slips out, “Fuck.”