Lowliness and the Fool
The instructions dictated as such: position powerful and precious crystals on a plate of silver, then burn a fire underneath. Having done so, one of the infinitely great, one of hell, shall be awakened to potentially grant access to your desires.
Many have attempted the ritual, enticed by greed-sodden hopes of wealth and excess. Others have attempted the ritual, deceived in their weak state by sheer desperation. All have failed; whether they had used too weak of a fire, or had mistakenly opened the wrong doorway into hell.
It is unwise to touch the mere concept, for it has gravity, and can draw you into its orbit, soon to crash hyperbolically into its heart.
The concept has dark claws.
That seized a woman, twenty years of age, poor, beautiful but unblossomed.
She found the ritual as anyone does anything, through word of mouth and imagination. She thought to herself, "Maybe it'll help with something, it couldn't harm to try."
So she performed the task. She was a brave woman; she had seen much that is not meant for people of such an age.
Despite her bravery, despite her virtues - hell has no mercy upon the unwise.
She took the crystals and gingerly placed them on a plate. She lit a candle, a black one to suit the occasion.
As her hands positioned the two compents together, her heart flickered, as violently as the candle in her right hand, but it was too late.
Her hands moved without conscious control, moved by the strong fingers of hell.
And suddenly, it was complete.
However the torturous process was far from its cessation.
She tilted her head back, as if suffering a seizure; her extremities trembled, and appeared cold but in fact her body was burning with a lilac potassium flame. It was not painful, but she could feel something. She felt something wrong.
Then, she stopeed. She laid on the dusty wooden floor and moved nothing except her eyes.
The door finally opened.
Her body fell, one hundred metres per second, through darkness, then through wet decay, and ultimately through fire. If she tried to scream, she would only make vague noises. The only noises that sounded human.
The glow grew stronger and redder, and she could see walls made of flowing magma, and when she looked long enough she saw men drowning inside it, their jaws black and clogged with both magma and their own molten flesh.
More screams erupted from her tiny mouth, but they were no longer audible. The gurgling demonic cries of the drowning men overwhelmed her inferior voice.
Then she landed, with a soft crash onto a sultry half solid lake. Immediately she was greeted by a slightly humanoid organism, with uneven skin tone and taller than her threefold.
"What purpose begets thy rude visit?"
The words rumbled and reflected, sounding like a mess of insects.
Her mouth was dry with dust.
"a-... I-..."
She could only cough and with each successive cough evoked more dust that stuck statically to her throat.
"Answer my query if you have purpose. If no so, thy being shall be taken as compensation."
She could not reply. Only a string of dusty hacks escaped her dead larynx.
"Very well."
With the final linguistic sound she would ever hear, the woman was taken and flung into a river of putrid and viscous magma.
First her skin blistered and charred, then her hair burnt and melted into a tangle on her neckline. It continued, burning magma entered her mouth she swallowed it and small abrasive rocks scathed the walls of her oesophagus.
The pain went away, like a bird from a branch. But it left the fear, rotting and engraved. More screams attempted to escape her new smooth, wide throat but any noise amalgamated with the gurgles of the men on the walls.
The river flowed further, and her eyes became open sores that barely sensed that the fall had no end.
There was no more noise.
Another failure.
At her corpse, perfect and cold, her family's tears extinguished the flame of the black candle and the woman was cremated. The news made her this weeks posthumous sensation.
A man saw the report on his television and thought to himself,
"Good lord, that's the woman I sold to yesterday. Poor thing... she used too many crystals."
Credited to Mabby Gwendoll
Originally uploaded on January 6, 2012
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