“And you loved yours, as did the rest of the husbands that once were wed to these women.”
Again Shigife looked across the scores of women, staring into their blank black eyes.
“It is why I chose them, it is why I chose your wife. Women that are strong, women that are tough, nevertheless they all screamed when I came for them.”
“I can say the same thing about those beyond this wall, I am sure you heard their screams.”
“Those beyond that wall are like weeds, doesn’t matter how many you kill, more will grow in their place. But my wife, my queen, is a different breed all together. In order for her to exist in this world, she needs a vessel, a human vessel. That is what your wife was, you should feel blessed because of that.” There was no arrogance in his tone, no condescension, a mere matter-of-factness so straight forward it was actually scary.
Shigife said nothing in response, allowing the silence to speak things he could never say.
“That’s something that you could never understand, her uniqueness was ultimate, yours, merely ugly. You are a monstrosity in more ways than one.”
Again Shigife said nothing, a demon calling someone else a monster was like a cannibal calling someone out for having bad table manners.
“You are the first and only husband for 900 years that would rather kill his own wife than allow mine to use her as a vessel. The blood of both of our wives are on your hands.”
Shigife glanced down at the white that covered his arms, the blood of the demon’s wife.
“My wife didn’t bleed, when I strangled her, because she was no longer my wife, she died when your kind took possession of her, she was not yours to use!” the elevation of anger in his voice, caused the whole room to tremble, while the watching women remained still.
“Tell me human,” the demon said, caring not for the anger in his adversary’s voice. “How did you know it was not your wife? Most human husbands only become aware of my wife when she sits down to eat their flesh, to gather enough strength in her human form to reach this city.”
“Because of her eyes,” Shigife replied, swallowing hard.
“The vessels’ eyes do not change until they reach this city.”
“Oh but they do, demon, they do. You may be powerful with your sorcery and your rituals, but nothing would be powerful enough to match the kindness in my beloved’s eyes.”
“My wife is normally brilliant at pretending to be kind.”
“She was, just not good enough. The difference between genuine kindness and acting kind, is like catching a fish with your own line and buying a fish from someone else. You can only imagine the thrill of hooking that sucker on your line, nothing beats actually doing it.”
“And how did it feel choking your own wife’s neck, until her throat ruptured, until my wife’s blood stained your arms, until a piece of her bled into you.”
“I imagine it felt the same way as using someone else’s wife as a vessel, it just had to be done.”
“I see,” the demon said.
But then Shigife’s eyes began to tremble, slowly shaking loose a single tear. When it fell and struck the ground, the sound of it shattering echoed like far away thunder all throughout the room. It was probably the only tear ever shed in the city.
“My wife was innocent, you had no right to use her, you had no right!” As he said this his voice went from weak to wrathful, back and forth like a wounded lion lashing out with its claws.
“And you had no right to use my queen’s powers, the ones you stole from her when you squeezed her life out of your wife,” though the demon said this in an apathetic way, he began rising from his throne in a way that was anything but apathetic. “You had no right to desecrate my city!” His voice grew darker, more demonic, causing the caliginous to scurry away from him and reveal his form.
His body was as strong and solid as steel, but there was something malice and morbid about this metal, like his body had been forged and then cooled within children’s blood as oppose to water. His head was without horns, a full scalp of black hair, so short and sharp it could cut through steel like skin. Upon his chest was a circle, painful purple in colour, like a bruise that had been beaten into the shape of a gem. It didn’t look all that different to the purple underneath Shigife’s chest, for it was the mark of a royal demon, a mark Shigife had accidentally taken when he had killed the demon queen.
The demon’s eyes began to glow that familiar ghastly green as his whole body began pulsing, like a heart that suddenly began beating. Now Shigife could see the demon’s mouth, it was more malice and monstrous than could ever be imagined.
“My wife should have been by my side,” the demon snarled, his voice still darkening as his muscles moved the way hair moves upon a cat when it was ready to attack. “Your wife’s body should be amongst these dolls!”
“No!” Shigife replied, the wicked worm like white swallowing the green in his eyes once more. “My wife’s body has been laid to rest, somewhere far more beautiful and brilliant than this cruel city.”
“I will find it!” the demon growled, now sounding more like a beast that had somehow learned to talk.
The purple underneath Shigife’s chest began moving towards his face, returning to the surface of his skin.
“Even if I have to dig up this entire world, I will find your wife’s grave!” the demon declared with a scream that shook the room so violently, it was amazing that the walls didn’t crumble.
From the demon’s forearms large horn like spikes stabbed through the skin, goring through it with the grace of boar tusk’s tearing through eye sockets.
Now fully returned to the fiend that had destroyed the city, Shigife said nothing, a new sphere summoning around his fist.
“You will pay for ever laying a hand on my wife!” the demon snarled, bearing its teeth, that actually looked like the edge of a rusty jagged sword, the kind that wouldn’t just kill you, but chew you up slowly and make you want to die, long before it took your life.
It seemed for all its darkness and depravities the demon still loved its wife, in its own brutal barbaric way. By the same token Shigife may have become a monster, but a monster that truly loved his fallen beloved.
The demon lunged away from his throne, the air carrying him as if he had enslaved it. With one of the protruding spikes leading the charge he came for Shigife who struck his sphere-swallowed fist out to meet it. The tip of the spike stabbed straight through the sphere, causing it to shatter like glass, and just like glass shards pieces of the sphere shot up in all directions, cutting into the bodies of the coconut headed women. The cuts were deep and nasty, blood pouring across their forms and still they did not move, unlike the spike.
It sliced into Shigife’s arm, peeling back the skin like it was an orange, revealing the flesh underneath. The cut was severe, enough to see the muscles moving under the skin, but not enough to tear it off the bone. Shigife’s other fist found the demon’s neck, like a wolf finding a rabbit’s throat. The blow was beyond brutal, giving birth to a barrage of bone breaking sounds. Yet the demon’s head remained on its shoulder, it didn’t even flinch, but it snarled as it brought across the other spike, its tip cutting through Shigife’s chest, like a talon tearing through a lamb’s liver.
Shigife snatched out with both of his hands, grasping the demon by both wrists and momentarily stopped himself from being mauled further. He drove his knee up into the demon’s stomach, summoning sounds more morose than a dozen death screams. The demon lurched forward upon the blow, like its body was a set of jaws trying to eat Shigife’s knee. Shigife shifted quickly, freeing his knee, his hands leaving the demon’s wrist before entering its back. His fingers finding the demon’s spine, as black flesh and blood poured out around his digits, like he had stuck his fingers into an uncooked pie. A creaking sound called out into the air as Shigife pulled on the demon’s spine, trying to wretch it free of the bastard’s body. The demon would not yet die, its arms swung from both shoulders, stabbing towa
rds its adversary.
Before the spikes could find his flesh Shigife threw the demon upwards, releasing its spine sending it to splat upon the ceiling. The sound of the impact was sickening, like a baby vomiting blood. Before the demon had even begun to fall Shigife brought his hand to his mouth, spitting a wet wad of green into his grasp. As the demon began to fall he flicked the green off of his hand, like it was a puddle of snot. The green smacked across the demon’s jaw jerking it so severely to the right that the jaw was almost ripped completely off of its face. However, by the time it had descended the demon’s jaw had moved back to its proper position, blood and broken bones be damned.
With the demon’s feet still not yet finding ground, Shigife spat a second lump of green into his hand, but before he could throw it, one of the demon’s spike stabbed into his palm, slicing up between his fingers, bringing bone fragments, blood and the green with it. Before Shigife could react the demon flicked the spike the other way, sending the blood and green upon its owner’s face. The green gnawed into Shigife’s cheek and for the first time since entering the city he shut his eyes. The scream that came from his morbid mouth wasn’t human, but it was hellish.
Finally finding its feet the demon strove forward slicing its spikes across Shigife’s frame, blood stringed through the air like cruel confetti, as it seemed the demon was trying to slay Shigife with a thousand different cuts. Amongst the annihilation Shigife’s eyes opened and his hands struck out, grasping the arms of his adversary. As soon as the demon felt his grasp it lunged its face towards his. Jerking his head to the left saved his face from further filleting, but left his neck and shoulder wide open.
The demon dined on his flesh, its teeth sinking into his shoulder like spears through cheese. Using the sheer strength of its legs the demon thrust its chest into his, slamming Shigife back into the wall causing the whole structure to make a scream like sound. The demon, satisfied that its mouth was full, ripped the flesh right off his form, swallowing it, before snarling and snapping towards his neck.
Before it could take another bite, Shigife’s hand found its throat, squeezing so strongly that the demon began spitting out the shoulder-flesh it had just swallowed. As punishment for making it surrender its meal the demon pierced Shigife’s arm, the spike stabbing straight through it. Shigife screamed while the demon laughed but that was before Shigife’s elbow entered its mouth, stopping its chuckle but giving it something new to chew on. While it bit down Shigife grasped his hand upon the spike through his arm, creating another chorus of crunching sounds as he crushed its base right off the demon’s bone, severing the spike from the devil’s arm, but not his own limb. He freed what he could of his elbow from the demon’s mouth, but its teeth took tears of meat as a toll. With the same arm that had been chewed on he batted it into the devil’s face, back handing it with enough force to send it right back to whatever hell it came from. The demon wasn’t driven that far back, but it was flung upon the far wall, its frame finding the brickwork, like a fish finding a hook.
Shigife was beginning to look like a damaged damn, the blood flowed like water from every wound. But no blood flowed more freely than from where the spike had once been, he pulled it out like a plug causing blood to powerfully plummet down his arm. But Shigife didn’t even see the blood, his eyes remained upon the demon as he charged towards it, holding the spike like a spear. The demon stepped to meet him, swinging its own spike like a sword. Shigife dodged the swipe before sending the severed spike straight through both of the demon’s arms, causing its hands to clap together as the spike pinned its arms to the wall.
Shigife then seized its head with one hand, driving it into the wall with all the grace of an ape trying to crack open an egg. He did it again and again, each collision more violent than the last. Between his fingers he could see one of the demon’s eyes, even this kind of pain was not enough to make it blink. After a dozen drives, the demon’s head remained intact, although more and more of its blood blistered upon the wall.
A sound then tore through the air at the same time the demon ripped the rest of its body away from its arms, blood and sinew stinking up the air. It whirled its newly freed body around, using the blood barreling out of its shoulders to blind Shigife, preventing him from seeing, but definitely not feeling the demon’s foot as it found his chest. Shigife was struck backwards with so much force it was like he was flying. He crashed into the wall before crumbling to his knees, there was so much blood blinding him that he had to wipe it off, his hands looking like shovels trying to dig a hole in red quicksand.
He cleared enough of it away in time to see the demon’s mouth open and the green grow within it. But this was a different ghost of green, it began to burn some of the blood in the mouth away, the steam rising and joining the green, polluting it into a bright brutal purple. Shigife had just gotten to his feet when the purple was unleashed, shifting into a stream and stabbing straight through his side. He screamed then, a human scream so excruciating it made all other sound go extinct. He collapsed onto his knees then, his hand desperately holding what remained of his side as blood now soaked both of his arms.
The demon stepped forward slowly, its mouth looking like mauled up meat and yet it spoke clearly, as if its words were so dark they couldn’t be denied even by a destroyed jaw.
“There it is, the sign that you are undoubtedly human. My wife would chuckle at such a wound,” he then laughed, the sound lurking across the floor and lunging into Shigife’s ears. “You may be a monster, but a human monster at that. Only men care so much about flesh,” the demon added, ignoring the blood that poured from its amputations. “That’s the problem, you humans are far too fragile, perhaps it really was a waste to use your wife the way I did. Such a weakling probably couldn’t have reached this city.”
Shigife lifted his head, but seemed only able to offer the demon a strong stare, something that wasn’t powerful enough to kill it.
And so the demon laughed again.
“Still my collection won’t be complete until I have her body, after that I will find another vessel and together my wife and I can rebuild my city. You may be the first male, whose head I remove, a gift for my wife, I am sure she got excited when you choked her. She would love such a reunion.”
The demon laughed again, the sound being carried beyond the wall and all through the city.
As the demon laughed, Shigife’s hand, the one not holding his side, picked something off of his pants, like it was lint. He then threw the small white sphere right at the demon, where it dove into the demon’s mouth. Whatever it was, not only made the demon stop laughing, it made the demon stop bleeding. Or rather it caused the demon’s blood to congeal, right inside of its mouth, freezing it like ice. The same could be said about the amputations, the blood became still and solid, before it began to spin. Like drills the blood drove upwards into the demon’s arm and into the demon’s mouth as before long its flesh began to bubble like stew. Surely even the demon king would’ve screamed, if its mouth weren’t melting.
The white within Shigife’s eyes slunk away allowing the green to see the world as the purple returned under his skin and somehow he found the strength to stand up. He stared at the demon’s eyes that wordlessly wondered what was happening to it.
“Listen to me demon,” Shigife said in his hard human voice. “I want you to hear this before your ears begin to erode. I want you to know why you are dying, why you will never see this city again. I don’t know if you can taste what I put in your mouth, but you might be surprised to learn that is salt. A kind of salt that my wife found.”
For the first time since his wife died he found himself smiling. Because this was the first time he had ever seen the demon’s eyes quiver.
“I wasn’t always a farmer and neither was my wife, we were once fisherman. That is how we actually met, a severe storm had stirred up the sea, waves crashing down on entire villages. When the storm was over the fish no longer seemed to be biting, it is what made me, what made her, lea
ve our traditional spots, trying to find a new spot to fish and that’s how we found each other.”
He paused to glance up at the dolls, who, even as the demon was slowly beginning to disintegrate, stood still and silent.
“On that particularly day we sat and fished together, at least we tried to, our fishing poles failed us. A first, for both her and me and so we decided that we would get to the bottom of the mystery. We dove deep into the water, deep enough to find the sea floor and that’s where we found it.”
Shigife stopped, just to listen to the sounds of the demon’s bones being destroyed, it was as putrid to the demon as it was pleasant to him.
“The reason why the fish weren’t biting anymore, we found their bodies, but when we tried to pick them up they turned to sludge in our hands, all because of a strange kind of salt, the very salt you just swallowed.”
He could see something else in the demon’s eyes for the first time, fear.
“Our best guess was this salt was normally buried deep within the sea bed but had been stirred up because of the storm. We didn’t tell anybody about the salt, it wouldn’t have done anybody any good. The bottom line was that we had to eat, and fish that have swam in this salt were no good for eating. Thus we went from being fisherman to being farmers. However, try as we might there was never enough work around from the local lords, so we went further and further inland, until eventually we found fields, the same fields you found my wife in. When we went to the closest markets, we found a friendly ear in a seed merchant. We knew he was friendly, because instead of taking our money, he told us about those fields, that the problem was only few of them were good to grow food on. The rest of the fields were filled with something called wrath weed, a kind of weed that kept growing until it reached crops and lived inside of them until they withered away. I am sure you can relate.”
Shigife paused, as if the demon could still answer him, even though he was fully away that was no longer possible.
“The merchant told us, that no matter what you did you couldn’t stop the wrath weed from growing. That is when my wife smiled and bought the seeds anyway. We returned to the sea and collected the salt and used it upon the wrath weed. Sure enough the weeds never came back, which allowed us to grow fine crop within the capable fields. We had a good life my wife and I. But even though we had become fruitful farmers, being fishermen never left our blood and so once in a while we returned to that spot in the sea. Even though we couldn’t catch any fish there, we would still put our lines in the water and remember how we first met.”
9 Tales Told in the Dark 18 Page 7