Solstices Obscurity "nightfall"

A single candle, and ten thousand shining eyes to watch its light. That's the way I feel now, siting here in my pool of light. I now only know when there are souls on the quay when I hear them scream, as the demons take one of them, or when Charon arrives and his lantern lights their frightened faces. Occasionally one of them comes to try and congregate at my light, but not as often as I would have thought they would.

I can only guess but that they fear the evil that they can see, more than the evil that hides looking at them from the darkness.

Stygie la Brix likes the candle. He will sit on my hand, draped across my wrist and sniff at the flame. Sometimes he like to dive at it, to make the flame flicker with puffs of air off his little black wings. Silly bat...but such simple amusements give him pleasure. Who am I to judge? I wish so simple a thing as flickering candle could amuse me.

I pick up my quill.

The faces of the patrons of the coffee house were after two years a blend of similar features. We often saw the same people two or even three times in a week. So I became jaded to what the men, and occasional women, I served looked like. They were all cocks or cunts, it mattered not. Till the day she arrived.

"Oh, she was no goddess." I tell Stygie as he flutters around my head and makes a dive at the candle. "No, not when I had the acquaintance of her. By then she was a matronly women, late in her years and giving to eating far too may pastry."

But I knew her face, and more to the point she knew mine. She had been a friend and contemporary of my mother's. When her eyes, above those plump cheeks, took first one look, then two at me I recognized her and she me. Now she was in the company of a wealthy woman of the Ottoman Turks and this coffee house visit was to be a decadent treat to her, this woman from the land of France. So when the coffee was served and the anise cookies and sweetmeats were being nibbled on, I was ordered to give her the normal slave's kiss.

Oh, how her eyes devoured my face when I went to my knees before her. She began to protest what I was doing but the Turkish woman next to her laughed at her prudish friends modesty and told her to let me work "My Magic" upon her delicacies With those familiar eyes still boring a hole in my face she relented and I rolled back her long dress from her feet to expose her plump calves, knees, and thighs. Then, when her thatch cover slit made an appearance, I leaned in and began to apply my skills. Ignoring as I did the retched stench of her.

"I know not what it is, my wigged friend, that makes the ladies of growing age neglect their quims so shockingly. Her's was the very bramble patch of wiry hairs and had the smell of a bog marsh in summer. Actually, rather similar to the smell of this river come to place it. But by that point after, two years of servitude I was so immured to anything so simple as smelly quim, that I performed up on her flawlessly. So it was that by the time her Turkish companion, far more familiar with such entertainments and who had more easily relaxed and simple enjoyed it had herself already spent, she, the lady rotund, came with a ferocity of voice that it shook incense dust form the rafters."

~Squeek~

"Exactly. Boisterous indeed. And then she nearly snapped my poor neck with her great thighs! Slamming them shut as she did upon my head in surprise at the feeling of exstacy I gave to her. Oh, you laugh but I was in a dire predicament. Her lady companion also thought it the very height of hilarity."

In the days to follow, I was to receive a second visit from that lady. This time she came alone to the coffee house, and when all but I had been remove to allow her privacy she spoke to me. In our native French, a language so sweet to hear after those years of gutters hacking tones that I wept, she asked me if I was Reynold, the son of the Peer of Gascony, the man-child heir thought dead and buried two years now gone by. When I confirmed that I was, she asked me how I can to be here in this land of the Turks, a slave? When I told her she was furious. Furious at my father for what he had done. Then she told me of my family and what had transpired in my absence. My younger brother elevation to heir, his fortuitous wedding to a lady of quality and wealth. My father's growing power in the camp of the King since gasping access to that wealth.

Oh, how my very soul burned to hear those things. To hear of the good fortune of the very one that had sold me into this retched existence. It was an old hate given new life and breath!

Seeing the effect of her words frightened her for a moment, but then I began to use the very skill of the slave, that ability to hide what you really feel and do what is ordered. I charmed her. How a voice so unused as mine was then, could have accomplished that feat I know not, but I did it. She promised to help me get out of there if she could, and at the least, if I could manage to join her in Greece, where she maintained a simi-im-permanent residency, that she would help me get back to France. Once there she promised to school me in just how to ply my troth-of-villainy, before the ear of the King. A confident of hers.

"Oh, my little furry friend if you could have been witness to what I did to her then. If she thought my paltry effort to please her the time before had been wonderful, I made it pale in pitiful example to the fierce tonguing I gave to her briny twat. She yelled so loudly the guards came running, thinking I was murdering her. Then they left laughing at her embarrassed shooing of hands, even as I brought her to a third and fourth quaking of her plump thighs and a shattering of nearby ears. In truth i may have been the one with the slave marks upon me, but at that moment, I owned her. My rescuer to be was little more than a slave to my tongue."

Looking at the riotous throng of glittering eyes out in the darkness, all looking back at me many filled with hate, I feel not a moment's apprehension. I've been in far worse places.

"After she left me there, that spark of anger her words had ignited in me, was fanned by the normal indignities of a life of a slave. Fanned to a rage, that took all of my breeding to hold in check, even as my mind went back to the days of learning stratagems at my father's side. I knew I needed a plan, and I soon found one. That night, Stygie, when I left the chambers were the slaves slept, far earlier than I normally do, the guard questioned me not. Probably cause I sucked his cock raw to keep him quiet."

Picking up the quill I drove it into the "ink well" and scratched fiercely at the parchment.

I went down to the store rooms exactly as I had done every morning since my cowedness had earned me a soupcon of trust. The bags of coffee bean, spices, dried rose petals, the enormous supplies of lamp oil...all of these were part of that plan. The fire was part of that plan. The dagger I had slipped from the guard while he was spending in my mouth was part of the plan. The panicked madness, when the fire was discover to be raging under their very arses, that was part of the plan.

"And that knife, driven through the teeth and into the throat of my owner that was so very much a part of the plan that I would have gladly died in the blaze, had it been required, to watch him gagging on Damascus steel as I had been gagged on so many cocks while in his vile, humiliating ownership."

Looking away from those malicious watching eyes, I focus on the candle flame and see again the flames licking the sky from that burning coffee house as I fled into the night. At the smile that then graces my lips...

...all those eyes vanish in terror.

"par la mort de dieu."