Solstices Obscurity "nightfall"

It rained piss for an hour.

A rain so stinking and warm it could be nothing less than the very putrid bowel of Hell pouring urination upon this shore. The lost souls, huddled together in the darkness upon the pier, jabbered in their mindless way about the fact that they were getting wet. Naked, dead, and in Hell and they still find the so very human wherewithal to complaining about the weather...to others standing in the exact same deluge.

Why I should care about it I know not, but I hid my journal under my jacket and endured the moistening in the dignified silence of the noble born. Let plebeian peasants bemoan the finicky whims of gods, fates, and nature. I was most concerned for the normally real possibility of the loss of my flame. But the fire ignored the piss drizzle and flickered on without any notable melting of the candle stub.

Not that I fear the dark, nor the things crouched waiting in it.

Three years in the dark tough me far too well how to endure that. Three year in a place that could reasonably be compared with this benighted shore. Beyond the edge of mortal death on the very edges of Hell.

When the rain stopped falling out the darkness, I listened to the drop of single smelly tears falling from the nearby trees into puddles. Drip. Drip. Drip. Strangely enough I find that sound comforting. Homely, so achingly familiar to me it warms me even as my wet raiment bring forth a chill.

And strangely I find myself in need of that comfort to write of what followed the burning of the coffee house.

I tried to run of course. I was stupid. But then the city was in such chaos I figured that such would have been the perfect diversion to allow me to get clear of that place. No, all it did was put normally lackadaisical guards on their curled-shoe toes to be watching for just such as me. I was young and foolish and did the things that young and foolish men do. I went haring off with no plan, no forethought and no escape rout planned in the event things went eyry, which of course they almost immediately did. My flight for freedom brought me an even darker form of captivity.

"That I was not put to death is a fact that has perplexed me for half my life."

There was the word of the guard, that I had taken a dagger from him , the very one found lodged into the throat of the owner of the coffee house. A confession that I must laughingly note earned him a beating nearly as sever as my own. Oh and beaten I was to be sure. But by then I was no stranger to such. I endured it, holding onto that one fiery spark of revenge, as the wooden cudgels descended upon me in a blunt, bone-breaking rain. A rain that only ceased to fall when I was nearly dead and lost into darkness.

And into darkness did I awaken. Darkness and pain. The pain was a familiar element to me by then, but the lack of light was new. I moved around the cell, I was in, with my hands trying to see. Hands that sent screams from my throat whenever I touched things due to the bones that were shattered in at least two fingers.

"Hello, my new friend."

I close my eyes as I remember that kind voice out the darkness. Yinsen, a man with no reason to be kind and every reason to take the meat scrap the jailors had thrown into the cell with him and derive what pleasure he could have from it. Instead he helped me to my feet and over to a rude bed of cloth, and rope. he felt my body and with apologies set broken bones to right.

How many days did he care for my every need there in that cell? Long enough for bones to knit that had no braces to hold them steady. His hands were more often than not my braces. It would be him that kept me steady and in place till I began at last to heal.

Yinsen. was the first man to whom I gave my body willingly. Not because I was ordered to, or threatened with torture, but because I wanted him to have some pleasure, and he gave me so much knowledge and compassion in return that I could never repay. There in that dark cell time had no meaning, judged only by the single bucket of gruel brought and passed through the hole in the door once per day. A bucket we would empty into aching bellies and refill from bursting bladders and bowels.

"Never was sure if they emptied them or simply moved those retched buckets door to door. The contents didn't vary by much." I looked up at the near silent flap of wings and then laughed seeing a thoroughly drenched Styie la Brix land on my arm. "My benightly brother, thy art a besogged wretch indeed. Here, get thy furry self warm."

When I pulled open my pocket, he crawled his way inside.

"Wish you could have met my friend,Yinsen. He would have loved you. He had a pet rat, he would feed the pieces of meat that were too hard to chew." I stopped as memory failed me. "What was that worm-tailed beasts name?"

When my bones healed it was his will that got me to my feet, there in that darkness. It was he that made me push through those bone searing levels of pain and move. No, more than move. He made me regain my strength. And in the days to follow to improve upon what I had once had. To get closer to the body I had before that first carter's whip beating in the barn under my father's hand.

Then he taught me something I bless him for every time I draw blade. How to fight. Not the rough and tumble grab-as-grab-can of muddy peasants brawling but the nobleman's art of the sword. With two thin bed staves Yinsen, a former Captain of a Turkish nobleman's army, trained me with in how to fight. In the dark, with blade on blade, I learned to fight blind, to feel for the strike of my enemy, often before he even thought of it. Oh, I got far more bruises from him than I think even the guards ever delivered to me.

We played with wooden staves all day, and each others "staves" all night. Yet, if he taught me a great deal I certainly taught him all the skills of a pleasure slave. The delicate art of the suck, the silky touch of fingers, when the hand must go firm; how to delay the orgasmic ending almost for eternity, till in the end a grown man will beg, like a broken-toyed child, for his lover to please allow him to cum. And it was in that moment, when those tears flowered and his cum finally was given to me, that I paid back his months of kindness. It was a matter that I could not leave repast as by that point in my life I was still burdened with a slaves mentality of give to get pain.

Then came the day of light, and I saw his face for the first time.

"He was a handsome man, though by no means visibly as extraordinary as I had found him to be there in the darkness. In that long endless night, when I nursed on his cock letting warm, veiny skin fill my mouth so completely, he had been so beautiful to me. A godlike man. Had that light shown me Prometheus himself with fiery bowl it would have still been a lessening."

I listen, wishing to hear a single cricket in this dark murk. Any sound but that of growling demons and whimpering souls huddled on the stone quay. Even the splash of Charon's oar would have been welcomed since his lantern would have given some light to this stinking shore, at least for a moment.

But then light does not always bring surcease from darkness.

That day it certainly didn't. They beat us both, for the sick pleasure of beating already broken men and then, with his heels leaving red trails in the dust, took him from the cell, leaving me alone in the darkness. Alone to cry out for him, to cry out for mercy for him, for compassion. Finally, when my throat was screamed to the point it uttered no sound, I cried out for the one thing in the world that I believed my slave-trained mind had given up on forever. I cried out for God to save my friend.

Looking up, I feel the first drops fall again, warm, wet and as stinking as the rain before. Folding the journal, I tuck in back into my jacket.

"And that was my answer to that hoarse prayer to God, my dear Stygie. Warm piss."

With a shake of my head, I listen for, but don't hear the desired for squeak from my friend. Looking into my pocket, I find him asleep in the darkness there.

"Sleep well, my friend. I will watch over you." I place my hand over him. "Because there is no God to protect bats in the rain...or blind men crying in a cold, stone holes. Begging God to try and save a friend who was probably already dead by the time that prayer was being asked. Begging...not be left alone in the dark. No my somnambulist friend, there's no God to keep you dry, there was no God to save Yinsin then. And I think that the only God that exists in this unholy place...is pissing on us both and laughing about it."

"par la mort de dieu."