the messenger-king

Pearl gray in dull violet, a full moon watched her oracle’s final vision:

Deep within the temple walls, she fell across the altar; windswept realities constricted in diminishing spaces, rooms painted deep slate and purple drab, images in ruin, fractured pictograms within which all realities bled into the holy and forgiving unicity of mortal life.

And what did she see?…

…the priest-king’s sceptre, contorted ash wood, beat a steady metronome in increments along post-industrial badlands, a tired thump in powdered ruins scattered teeth-white over beaten earth. He carried a message from his timid deity, his Paloma, his beloved. In all directions, neutral gray blanketed empty structure divested of any and all function, all meaning, all signs of life, abandoned before a rising tide of hostile probability.

Spinel red fog hid sulfur yellow stars brilliant in undulating madness, a punctured glow brilliant across all sight-lines, a living, breathing thing they called “the pale burnt light.” How long had things been that way? Just the two of them, the fallen goddess, and the lowly mortal, a pretend demigod betrayed by his flesh and bone, with little to show but domain over a razed forest, silent but for the sound of very small bones being picked by jackals, bleak hounds with blue eyes who paraded around in the memories of their victims.

And he, a messenger-king, a delivery boy carrying an envelope, inside of which, written on a scrap of paper (stamped with the goddess’ seal, a sprig of holly), these three words: “feed the dead.”

Where were his people? He’d failed them. As far as he knew, they were all gone, waiting now on the other side, coupled with their righteous grievances, alienated in that hidden world of the ill-fated, poor souls, lackluster phantoms whose destinies had been theoretically determined without their knowledge, decided upon behind sheets of black math, written down and kept in books by sickly elders, “their betters,” grandfathers play-acting as humble warlocks, thin-lipped and covered in sores, blistered old fools who lived every day of their lives, tens of thousands of days, every single one of them, in absolute fear.

He knew he should be looking for them, but where? And what about the letter? Betray his beloved? Or betray his people? Either way, there’d no doubt be hell to pay.

“‘Hell to pay?’ Uh-oh, sounds like you’ve really stepped in it!”

The voice came from a decapitated head upon a wooden spike.

“The name’s Merl! Merl N. Monroe! Ahahaha! Look at you! Frightened? Don’t be. Life’s not so bad out here. Not for you, anyway, your majesty. I’d bow, but, well—ahahaha! I am, as you can see, not much but spiked noodle. In this life, anyway. In my old one, I was a seer. The royal seer, indebted to the gods for the gift of sight and ever-loyal to my master. Ungrateful at times, perhaps, but that’s another matter. In fact, I’m still prone to the occasional vision. Sure am! As a matter of fact, even as I speak, one begins to form, emerges from the far shores of the back of my mind. Would you like to know what I see?…”

In the distance, he sees it: the crystalized remains of a 100-foot were-jaguar, “Dionysus,” a translucent skeleton glittering diamond hues, spectrum red and sea green points exiting the refractive index, scattered majesty in perpetual brilliant display, a stone age titan in repose upon a bed of glass straw, a physical nightmare in hulking form; in its paws, it grips a pair of lighting bolts that end in the heads of serpents, lilac and madder brown, with scales of gold and tongues of bronze; sharpened spears of silver for fangs, Dionysus’s mouth yawns wide open a black threshold, the gates from beyond which the priest-king could feel heavy breaths approaching.

 From the darkness, one by one, their eyes lit up ash white and scarlet…

...and what did she see? Everywhere: the pale burnt light.