A Heart's Crucible

Joq jolted as her body thumped onto and tumbled across a chill, unyielding surface before being rolled. In an abrupt, coarse-handed manner—rough fingers unwound the grey cloak casing. The net remained. She blinked, thankful she couldn’t smell rotten fish.

As her unwrapping finished, Joq received an earful of curt whoopees! She felt anything but a birthday surprise! In the dim, her butterscotch eyes relayed a message to her heart and brain, and she shuddered. Her captor shaped as a frickin nasty piece of creation! Crocodile scales, whipping chains to spare, and a scourge of horns. He completed a ridiculous talon-clawed hand-stand. As he teetered on a scoured black basalt throne, facing away from her, his buttocks wobbled, minus decorum. Then turning, his evil tigerish leer was no laughing matter.

Joq’s view of horns turning a florescent purple made her shudder. But blocking garish prongs fast, a ghoul pointed a fiery blue-tipped finger at her shoulder. The touch sizzled her flesh as she flinched in immediate pain, unappreciative of the brand. Still, she wondered how this ghoul lost his ear.

The ghoul on her left appeared out of a nightmare. Black drool dripped from his mouth, and he drank from a skin. He waved a scythe, so stereotypical of the image of death. But the grossest bit, half his tongue, was missing.

Joq shook her head, believing the scene couldn’t degenerate until a prong poked her ribs through the net. A ghoul scratching the flaky skin at his neck menaced behind the bruising prod. He raised the pointy end, and Joq’s eyes followed the tip sweeping the walls of the vast gloomy chamber. Cages and Peri, as her eyes welled. The cavern loomed an abattoir, not a petting zoo. But, she wry mulled, why does evil have such terrible décor, a surfeit of black?

The ghoul’s haughty tour ended as the one-eyed fiend from the tavern rolled across the black floor, scattering endless knuckle bones. Then, kneeling, he tossed them into a colossal urn.

Joq’s blurred eyes scanned for her closest friends. She spied them high, Perdy and Zel, separated by an empty cage. The sole one in this chamber of horrors. Perdy’s torn earasaid held more colour than her greyish mould-flecked pallid wings. Zel looked defeated, as did every Peri. Her bronze skin dulled ashen in this pit of filth, resembling a mourner at a funeral.

“Untie and pin the bitch to the table, Dying Ember.”

The demon Lord’s arrogant tone grated on Joq as he threw his command and lorded on his throne.

The ghoul with the hot fingers obliged as the drooling one held Joq’s feet. He dripped a revolting saliva sludge across her toes, a ghastly nail polish. Her wings lay spread but useless, held at the joint by the ghoul, who shook and flaked desiccated greyness over her cheeks. Joq noticed the slab’s black sapphire lustre and saw the pitted scars full of dried blood. Her brow released sweat; she comprehended the stone’s purpose: a filleting block.

Inky, evil eyes stared into hers. Above them, horns blazed a putrid yellow with macabre crisscross runes. The demon Lord bounded from the throne. Joq winced, preparing for the inevitable.

“Your sword and no frickin poison on the tip,” demanded the demon Lord.

With a click of his talons, he said, “I have a busy single-minded schedule here.”

“Yes, Ahriman,” the ghoul replied, and Joq at least knew the name of her slayer.

The sword glinted, a nasty curved piece of steel designed for fine slicing.

The desiccated ghoul growled, “cut out her entrails first.”

A disparaging Ahriman scoffed.

“This is strictly an affair of wings and hearts. The soiled pickings can be yours much later.”

Joq attended to wailing. Peri moans filled the chamber as Ahriman raised the sword to sever her left wing.

He raised the sword high. Joq flinched and then huffed because the sod relished a power play. The blade swung in patterns, matching his runes. Sickened by the corkscrew swishes, her unpinned head cocked.

She beheld her brethren and confronted their collective demise. Her end loomed speedier than those captured at the mound. Joq glanced at Zel’s friend, Maite, her former sea-green eyes reduced to a pallid slate. And another bosom buddy, Anais, her primrose wings wilted, blanched. Confronting fate, she pondered the Peri’s existence. Was the world a better place without their skittish nature?

“Damn this!” said the demon Lord, who refocused Joq’s attention as he dropped the sword, where the steel rattled on the floor.

Joq understood his action included no mercy or remorse. The prick, she suspected, revelled in the route of maximised mental torture.

“You, butterscotch eyes, will Peri-perish last!”

He trailed heavy barbed chains across her chest, which shredded her koylek, missing the silk pouch around her neck by the proverbial hair’s breadth.

The demon Lord chuckled.

“Soothsayer nonsense, bar none! Toss this airy fairy into the final cage.”

She watched Ahriman, hands on his hips, as his chains rattled a death dance.

Joq slumped in her cage, eyes averting the comrades she failed in her heart.

She listened to the unthinkable.

“The bloody redhead first.”

The Kazakh saw the ghoul from the tavern fill an urn with knuckles and pluck the top bone. He let the knuckle echo inside the bottom of another colossal jar.

The blue-fingered and half-tongued ghouls unchained but bound the feet and wrists of Perdita before they dumped her on the slab.

Ahriman chased away Crumbling Dust, “Fack off! Leave the ritual.”

The ghoul loitered in the shadows, banging the basalt walls with a prong.

Joq, chin on her chest, lowered her eyes for a farewell glance at Perdy, the cheeky Peri of the glens. She saw her red hair hang over the edge of the slab and her earasaid torn around her heart. Joq pressed her eyes; they refused to release a tear of despairing sadness. She shook her head to shake out a goodbye tear. She craved a final heart-to-heart affinity for her friend as her beloved Perdita faced the cleave and dice!

Joq hung her head, grappling with sincerity.

She lisped, “God help me.”

Then a pause to judge her selfish nature.

Next, eyes closed, unfeigned.

Joq said, “No, God help the Peri! Let it be me, so the rest roam free!”

She jerked and questioned her words. Over a thousand years of a carefree existence, she heard the dire cry to a God when humans were most in need. Individuals who ignored God daily. Yet, with a sole cry to the heavens, expected an immediate favourable response.

If we say, we believe- despite a life of imperfection.

Joq became the first and only Peri to pray.

I believe in Heaven.

A prayer uttered not out of desperation for herself but for her bosom buddies. Joq shed a single teardrop, which slid into the silk pouch hanging from her neck.

∗ ∗ ∗

Ahriman swung the sword to slice off Perdita’s wing.

“What the fack!”

Unbalanced Soul, his loyal boot-licking ghoul, pushed him — a stunned Ahriman, having never experienced a knockdown, cursed, spread-eagled on his rump by an unceremonious shove.

Smashing away old rib cages, he rose in an ire to his full chest-expanded height, prepared to flail his former one-eyed toady to Hell. He believed disloyalty on a par with Gasping Winds to be contagious!

Meantime, he registered Crumbling Dust’s caterwauls and pointed prong. And a blathered word, ‘escape.’

Annoyance scaled new heights beneath mount Kaf. Ahriman, in disbelief, scanned the high empty cage.

“Search every filthy crevice and every roach-infested crack. Gather the infantile Dev. Use their foul noses. Find the yellow-haired bitch!”

Shards of basalt fell from the roof, loosened by his high-pitched screech. Falling chunks bruised the ghoul’s shoulders and scattered to hiding spots, the succubus maids.

“Crumbling Dust, you stay, watch the rest, and by my empty soul harm a heart or wing, and I’ll frickin prong you!”

Ahriman threw these words over his shoulder as he joined the search inside Abandon. The only known exit by his ring in the gap at twilight or dawn. And now, at midnight, during the ritual hour, it was bloody well neither.

In a moment of sixth sense evil, he ordered, Unbalanced Soul “guard the seal of Mount Kaf.”

As Ahriman clambered, checking crags, ledges and the ceiling, he seethed.

Damnation, the facking Peri dematerialised!