Lyg's Five Tortures

TORTURE I: THE ROSE OF XORU

In the morning’s first venom-violet light, Najwa sat in the long shadow of a necrolith. A salty lick of her home sea’s breeze tousled her garment, and stung the everwounds beneath the barbed wire that wrapped her head. Blood, once having dripped through her fingers, now crusted from many hours’ exaltation.

But then between those hands she held her head. Up she pressed, until resistance halted her. With a dread-stifling breath, and a setting of teeth, she pushed more; all the ache spiraling in her spine begged for ungiven mercy. A wheezing followed the snap of gristle, and bile spittled out onto her dress.

Finally, through the bruises banding her neck, the first gurgling breaches formed in the overstretched skin. Her flesh peeled like tree gum from itself, and falls of gore bubbled from behind her veil, and tumbled out. All screeching senses were overcome with a violent static, the last clinging cries of a spine; and then, a crack. From out the jagged stump slipped her esophagus still spraying vomit; it coiled and sprang like a split serpent until the end of her last blinking impulses.

WHERE IS DADDY

TORTURE II: THE VISCERAL CODEX

The necrolith’s shadow cooled away the noontide; towards which she lifted a scalpel as though it was a smoldering sacrifice. She had spent some morning hours fidgeting it in prayer-clasped hands, etching smooth and bleeding valleys in her time-tattered palms. The early breeze had chased the fog away, and not long after died itself; now, the crimson briars’ shadows were still.

Sternly beneath her veil she slipped a hand, and touched the eager blade to the tip of her chin. She waited until warmth trickled onto her fingers to shut her eyes, and press. Her tongue curled and cringed against her gritted teeth, but further down she took the blade and split apart her throat like the petals of a blooming flower.

Her nervous fingers let fall the scalpel, and took to the incision instead. There, they traversed breached meat into the throat; Najwa retched and bile scalded her, but yet she folded open her flesh like a tome. Inside, like upon a braille poem, her fingers adventured, and felt every tracheal reflex amidst the coursing blood, until the last.

WHAT IS ON YOUR HANDS

TORTURE III: MEPHRA'S INVERSAL

A distant star lay beyond the sun’s afternoon corona, just crowning the evening horizon. Najwa unwound her tiara of black-steel barbs, leaving shining specks of red to fill the holes, and cast it on the dusty soil, next to a coarse-toothed saw, iron-hot and gleaming.

She lay the saw along the rows of everwounds and discarded what ceremony arrested her to begin the earnest draw. Veil-cloth, black hair, and meat were sundered aside to hang in sticky flaps eagerly dripping; every new fissure, each new agony, only sured her grip, and hastened her visceral process.

And then, the last cut, and the cap of her skull rolled into the ground where bloody sand clumped beneath it. Foolish with pain, she dipped into the soup, and held her brain’s deforming viscera. Convulsions throughed her, her eyes went stupid, and her trembling grasps struggled to close. But though her coiling spine screeched, and the fluid within tossed as roughly as the bedouin sea, she turned her brain wholely, inverted in its splashing bowl, before it fell dark.

TELL ME WHERE HE WENT

TORTURE IV: THE BONE GATE

Najwa could scarcely tell the briars from the gore-red sunset, even as day gave remorseful way to twilight. She played around the nothing in her hands, cracking knuckles, twisting fingers.

A vicious roar was snuffed out of her chest by the first punch, and by the second. More she screamed, to deafen out all instinct, as she pounded her chest. The sun, ever more furtively behind the horizon, passed the sky to darkness before the thump instead became a crackle. Then, did she burrow her fingers through the shrapnel, augering through tense flesh, to pry.

Keening, she ruptured her breast and vised open her bones, until organs spilled out onto her lap. Blood-slick fingers adventured through lungs and livers to find it, every clutch slipping, until she found the thing. She tore it, and saw it thundering in horror, still bound by its aorta. Until when all those cords broke like little threads, and spigoted what remained of her life from her chest.

I DON'T LOVE YOU ANYMORE

TORTURE V: STERILITAS

The rough song of crickets crowded out a little boy’s mother-cry. A single star peered between the night’s clouds, to light the necrolith’s ancient visage. Beyond the ages’ rot and wear, Najwa saw something like a mirror.

Tears dampened her veil as she cinched tight the knife. Blood was through her dress like grim treacle as she pressed the blade to her belly. She bit what tongue could still speak for her, and split herself.

Her own haruspex, she tore past bowels and kidneys to reach the womb. Tears now ran riverly over a sopping garment, washing blood out of her wound. Between her fingers danced two clusters, until she cradled them in her palms. Then, with a bale scream and a vicious squeeze, gore overflowed her grasp; countless futures fell from her clutch like wind-stolen sand.

I HOPE YOU DIE MOMMY

And the star passed behind the clouds, and the necrolith was dark, and the boy’s shouts now echoed over the clamor of night-bugs. Into the mud made by her tears, Najwa fell.