Lord Soth
Page 28
His flesh had burned too, but he had not died.
With each agonizing movement, his burnt and charred flesh cracked and broke off in pieces. The pain had been less these past few days as most of his skin had slowly fallen off of his body. In another week it would be gone completely, leaving only a cold, hard skeleton.
If anything remained alive in his new undead form, it was his eyes. They burned the color of the same bright orange flames which had consumed him. But they burned also with anguish, regret, and the pain of never ending torment, as he knew he would remain in this form for an eternity so that he might be properly punished for his sins.
The pain of it all was sometimes too much for him to bear. Orange tears fell from his eyes and sizzled like water on a hot iron as they hit the ground below.
To compound his torment, around him circled the banshee spirits, spirits he had brought to life when he so brutally killed the elf-maidens who had confronted him on the way to Istar.
In life they had tormented him with their words. In death they did the same, their words transforming into song.
They would never let him forget.
And now, as he sat on his throne pondering his former life and current unlife, the banshees’ keening wails continued to rip into his mind and tear relentlessly at his soul.
And though his heart did not beat, it was nevertheless shattered and racked by the agonizing pain of regret.
He tried to close his eyes.
But as death would not come to relieve him of this world …
Neither would sleep.
SONG OF THE BANSHEES
And in the climate of dreams
when you recall her, when the world of the dream
expands, wavers in light,
when you stand at the edge of blessedness and sun,
Then we shall make you remember,
shall make you live again
through the long denial of body.
For you were first dark in the light’s hollow,
expanding like a stain, a cancer
For you were the shark in the slowed water
beginning to move
For you were the notched head of a snake,
sensing forever warmth and form
For you were inexplicable death in the crib,
the long house in betrayal.
And you were more terrible than this
in a loud alley of visions,
for you passed through unharmed, unchanging,
As the women screamed, unraveling silence,
halving the door of the world,
bringing forth monsters
As a child opened in parabolas of fire
There at the borders
of two lands burning
As the world split, wanting to swallow you back
willing to give up everything
to lose you in darkness.
You passed through these unharmed, unchanging, but now you see them strung on our words of your own conceiving as you pass from night to awareness of night to know that hatred is the calm of philosophers, that its price is forever, that it draws you through meteors, through winter’s transfixion through the blasted rose through the shark’s water through the black compression of oceans through rock—through magma to yourself—to an abscess of nothing that you will recognize as nothing, that you will know is coming again and again under the same rules.
About the Author
Edo van Belkom made an auspicious debut in the horror field when his first short story was reprinted in Year’s Best Horror Stories 20. Since then, he’s sold over 70 other stories of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He lives in Canada, and his first book was The World of Darkness: Werewolf—Wyrm Wolf from Harper Prism.
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