Mystik Legends

Pandora's Story

Chapter One

The bleak black void in her mind faded to gray, raining down a snow of ash all around the space. The place smelled of burning and char. She listened hard, to see if she could hear anything in the gray ashen daylight of her own world developed inside her mind. There was an asphalt road, cracked with age and tall trees on either side, surrounding it. She stood in the middle of the road, waiting, looking up at the green leaves of the trees. She took one step toward the darkest of the gray of some hidden place shrouded in mist and flying ashes. A great rumble from the ground below shook the road and her body so hard she fell onto her knees.

The gray day descended back into darkness quickly as if the mist was swallowed by black ink. She sat back on her heels in the road, watching the world around her change dramatically. She looked up at the trees who’s leaves burst into bright blue flames, illuminating the unspeakable horrors around her, only visible in the darkness of the ink-colored void around her. As the creatures grew closer to her, she saw their faces. Terror rose of from the depths inside her and she screamed so loud and with such ferocity, the creatures paused, shaking their heads and bowing to her as if she were their queen.

Pandora took a breath and coughed. The monstrosities gathered around her backed away slowly. One of them paused and grabbed a flaming branch from the tree beside it and used it to write a hieroglyph in the street before her. Oddly, she knew what it meant. “Master” it said. Pandora stood at her full height, fangs glistening in the dark.

“You’re my monsters?” she whispered.

“Yes,” they hissed at her. “We are also your demons.”

She narrowed her eyes at them and stood her ground. “Go,” she whispered at them.

No sooner had she told them to go, the scene began to fade from black to shades of gray with snowy ash falling from the sky once again.

***

“Pandora! Wake up!” Warren said, anxious, holding her tightly. “Please wake up, love.”

“What? What’s happening?” she asked him with the haze of sleep still about her.

“I think you were having a nightmare. You screamed and grabbed me hard around the collar of my shirt, nearly choking me.” He winced and half-smiled at her. “I’m all right. Are you?”

She sat up in bed and looked up at Warren with a little pain in her eyes. She shook her head, eyes welling up with tears. “No,” she whispered in a watery sob as she crumbled in his arms and put her head on his chest, shaking.

“It’s all right. I’ve got ya, lass. Promise.” Warren held Pandora while she cried and shook from the sobbing as it wracked her body hard for a minute or two. When it eased, he stroked her hair and pushed her gently away so he could see her face. “It’s all right. I mean it.”

“Yes. I know,” she said, grabbing his hand. “It was a frightening place. I feel like I’ve been there before and the things inside my head have a face and a body now. It’s hard to explain, but I think you know what I mean. Maybe. You remember me talking to you about depression and demons? Bad deeds? Any of that?”

“Vaguely. You saying your demons have a face now?” he asked her.

“No. They’ve always had a face. I just never saw it before now.” She looked at him with seriousness. “I’ve never been so scared of anything in my life as I was of seeing those monsters, being face to face with them. The funny thing is, those are my monsters, I rule them.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, in the dream, those creatures, they represent my demons or inner sins, whatever you want to call them, they belong to me and I to them, I guess. And the place from my dream was like a paradox version of Hell. My own hell...the Black Void,” she said, trailing into silence, staring back at him.

“I find it hard to believe you’ve done much wrong in order to have your own Hell,” Warren told her. He studied her face, grasping her hand.

“We all have our sins. I’m not innocent. I’ve done things I’m not proud of, Warren. You have to know that. I’m a vampire for fuck’s sake. Just surviving for some of us means killing your kind.”

“Yes, but that’s not you! I know better than that,” he said. He narrowed his eyes at her. “What are you trying to say?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she whispered, looking away.

“I would if you’d tell me.” He lightly turned her chin back toward him, making her look him in the eye. “I would if you’d tell me,” he repeated. “Please?”

She sighed hard. “Okay. You asked for it, mister. I’ll tell you, but you may not enjoy what you hear.”

“As long as it’s real, love. That’s all that matters.”

“Be careful what you ask for,” she said, her golden eyes glittering in the candle light of the small room.

Prologue

Visions enigmatic toward dawn, praising the early light, sprang free of trappings so boldly displayed in the blood of the young and old, splayed across the bow of a tree. Hanging low, the entwined carcass of a human no longer living, who’s soul has vacated his body. No one really knows where the life-force goes. We only ever hear stories because no one is around to tell us the truth about what happens after we’re gone from the world.

Some souls have yet to pass on into another state of being. Some people believe heaven exists, or a form of it does. Some people don’t. Reality spreads before them, thick as a quilt until they are shown otherwise, left questioning their own existence. What lies beyond? We always wonder but will never know.

Tendrils of tendons hang from the derisive corpse like tiny chains of a manacle with no need for a lock or key. Hands, feet, and head detached from the body and strewn above in the leafy May vegetation. The torso of the victim sticking in place, trapped by a metal short handled ax, the blade of which is sharpened so it might cut the fine hair off a man’s face in a single slice.

The silence surrounding the area is imminent. No birds calling, no insects chirping, and no people enjoying a lazy day by the creek with children laughing and playing. They’d been forewarned about the place for centuries. It was a custom to leave their world behind and vacation off in an area deemed safely far enough away from the place some of them raised their children, away from their farms and country homes. The legend was musty with age and gossip, but no one, not even the newest of residents took a chance, knowing in these parts, the tales had a way of showing their ugly truth.

Dawn sunlight lit the morning anew with rising colors. Flashing upon the ground, a site of darkened crimson, causing the mud below the tree to turn the deepest brown. Flies and mosquitoes hovered above the staunched area without making a sound, trying to gauge how best to absorb the moisture that was quickly drying as the sun beat down on it. The night before, in the middle of the darkened twilight, the blood was a puddle of rapid drainage as if the human body was the gutted corpse of a deer hanging upside down to be butchered for its meat and pelt. Most of the pool was soaked into the ground, leaving only a muddy spot.

Cutting center stage, the bodily functions necessary in dying, smells surrounding the corpse were a copious edifice of shock and surprise rendered helpless by nothing so much as the unwillingness to die swiftly. The victim’s last breath taken shortly only hours before dawn, shallowly among the stillness of the forest surrounding him. No one heard his gasp, his scream, or his cries for help as he begged for mercy that wasn’t granted. The last sight being an ax blade searing toward him, shining in the dark as his neck became severed from his torso.

When the day passed back into twilight, the corpse materialized into the cavern of a deep cave, cool and refreshing to living beings. The remainder of the blood residing inside the main part of the body being taken to an ancient place, for the hope that one day, a trapped spirit might once and for all be freed from the relentless struggle over the curse it’s been beholden to for hundreds of years.