#legionchallenge

   “J'ai entendu. Sur vous et sur les hommes. Dégoûtant les choses.”

   Her own gaze trailed the ceiling. This was a moment she had expected for quite some time. Each day drew closer to it, the time the word would reach him; she had done things around town, garnered herself an unkind reputation. A deceitful seductress who ensnared men with her shabby farmhand frocks, her two braids like a milkmaid’s. Her creamy breasts, large for her age, that she bared with appropriate shyness and humility. They knew of her, yet still they wanted to have her—so great was her power.

   Beneath the bed, dozens of coins lay silently in a bed of cotton—wrapped tidily and then placed within a yew box. Her winnings.

   Now that the moment had come, she did not care to confront it. Instead, she smiled, lips not parting even as she looked at him, then away, then back again. A grin tightened with defiance, a show of sadistic merriment.

   A grin that dissipated as he gripped her tighter, growing red-faced with his rage. As he shouted, she was peppered with wetness:  “Dites-moi, Diane! Défendez-vous.”

   He was not inches from her. He smelled of the fields, of piss and shit and musky grasses. He smelled of man. She was suddenly acutely aware of the sweetness of her own flesh; of the aroma of the women in town, tinged in their perfumery and their florals and all the trappings of femininity. They were sublime, even without it. In youth, they were perhaps the sweetest, and it was a scent that was only stripped of them with age and use and abuse. A scent covered by the overpowering odor of a man’s world. 

   She remembered nestling her face into her childhood friend’s hair—Louise, lovely Louise—and catching notes of the ocean. Diane thought briefly, his shout still lingering in the air, that perhaps smell was the truest indicator of the goodness of a human being. Men smelled foul, and behaved foully.

   The theory did not pan out: after all, she—as saccharine as she was—had committed foul acts herself.

   Diane curled her nose in distaste at her father.

   “Au moins je ne baise pas les vaches.”

   The air shifted with the lift of his arm. A movement lightning-fast, and her cheek exploded into curious heat, the sensation of dozens of probes needling her skin. 

   The hit stung on her face. It had been delivered with a closed fist.

   She choked back any semblance of tears. 

   “Je suis diplômé de la gifle, je vois.”

   It was provocation. Diane was not one given to backing down. 

   She watched it happen; watched the transformation that took place within his features, bloated and indistinct as they were. His eyebrows seemed to curl at her very words, writhing like snakes. Teeth baring in unbridled fury.

   Diane had endured his slaps before. The yellowing prints upon her wrists were his doing. The scar upon her left cheekbone, not larger than a stitch, was shaped by his smallest fingernail. A chink in her ivory armor.

   What came next she was not expecting.  

   His palms were upon her, and they were roaming. 

   He tore viciously at her gown with hands short and hardened from use. He wrenched her legs open, spreading her wide upon the bed. She was eerily quiet; the only exclamations that escaped her were low, guttural things—sounds indescribable, like some foreign force had come into control of her body and now spoke the tongue of creatures long past. It was controlled agony.

   Numbness was her only escape.

   She had learned already not to let these men make a damaged creature out of her. To mar and scar and break her. Diane was a hollow woman, a phantom, a lie. One could not strike an apparition; try as they might, their fists landed in open air. Their blows were plunged deep into ghoulish fog. That was all she was. Fog. Deadly, beautiful fog.

   She was still near-silent as he threw her over, her bare bottom thrust into the air. The bed creaked beneath their weight, an old moan sounding in its wooden boards. He was on top of her, and she was squirming, and the weight of him would have had her gasping for air. Should have. Instead, Diane let it eek out, still utterly quiet, not gifting him with her suffering. Qu'il me tue, she thought. Je ne pourrai jamais voir ces vaches à nouveau.

   It was a welcome thought. A fantasy. A dream of escape, of renewal, of rebirth.

   Nothing came. Suddenly his hands drew away from her body, and she was left sprawled, disrobed, skin already reddened from his hold. Her face was pressed into the floral pattern of her bedspread, nose and mouth connected to vines of flowers with silken streams of saliva. All of her entirely open to the cold air.

   It was over. Though there was more fight within her, there was no battle; all that was left was for her to throb before him, chest heaving with new breath.

   “Ceci est ce qu'il est d'être une prostituée,” he spat, standing hauntingly still over her. She swore that beneath the gravel of his voice, she could hear the strangling sound of tears. A throat closed in dismay.  “Aimez-vous ça?”

   This is what it is to be a whore.

   Do you like it?

-❈-

   She dreamt she was sinking slowly into a vat of viscous liquid. When she finally came out of it, legs gummy with it, hands stiff with hardened wax, she found flowers poised in her hands, and when her body slowly hardened within the wax, she became fixed like a statue. Beautiful, but unthreatening. Without agency or control.

   Love had no place in her body, and so she pushed it out; rid herself of it like poison, little by little.

-❈-

   “Dahlia.”

   Her lashes parted to the sound of it. A false moniker that stirred pride within her.

   It was the name she had given him; the name that had seduced him, had made him hers. A name and a strategic bat of her lashes was all it took, despite all that told him she was dangerous. The ease with which she pulled him into her embrace. The devastating precision of her kiss. The experience in her loins.

   Her eyes opened to the film of curtains above her, slung high over the canopy bed like artificial sky.

   He had abandoned an Anne for her—a woman said to be pure, and good, and all that he was expected to want. Delilah laughed in the face of such claims: there existed no more pure women in this world. It was the necessity of womanhood that one abandon purity of heart, but keep its guises. That was survival.

   Her mother had stayed pure, she believed. Her punishment was an early grave.

   “My King,” Dahlia whispered, voice lulled to softness.

   It was truth, though not her own. He was a King. The King of the great land that she had called her home for the last months; but then Dahlia had been born there, raised there, and was loyal to Scotland above all. For Dahlia, there was great pride in wedding its ruler, and there would be great pride in beings its Queen.

 She was not Dahlia.

   When she looked at the man beside her, swathed in rich silks and exotic imported prints, all she saw was the twinkle of gold beneath his irises. The flash of silver in his smile.

   “How is it a woman like you exists,” he wondered aloud, hand stroking over hers. “How are you not an illusion?”

   A kiss was planted then, one rife with lust and carnal desire. He groped furiously at the curve of her waist, the bend of her hip. Devouring with hand and finger and touch, as if contained in the pads of his fingers were insatiable beasts clawing upon her skin. Needing her alone in order to be satiated. A wrench of his freckled limbs and her garment tore at the seams, flesh erupting from its split.

   She gave him all he asked for, all he wanted. She panted and whined and moaned when appropriate. She breathed his name into his ear, then nipped at its lobe. 

   And the answer to his question, words unsaid on her lips: Oh, but I am.

-❈-

   She no longer dreamt. Instead, her mind was silent. Overtaken by calm, empty darkness. All her false realities and lies erased into oblivion, and what was left was nothing at all. 

   Her subconscious no longer felt the need for dreams. 

   Or perhaps, she often thought, she merely willed herself to forget them. 

-❈-

   The sky was smoke.

   All over the rolling hills, the smog curled and twined like dancing limbs. It spread far beyond its origin in the village center, where it blossomed from the crowd like the mythic beanstalk. They all stood around it, watching dutifully—every well person in the area gathered together. Every man or woman who had working legs standing upon them, focus concentrated at the plume’s root. From the base of it, a man spoke with conviction.

   “A witch seduced our King,” the voice shouted, tone echoing over the flatland. “And now she burns!”

   The words were greeted with thunderous applause.

   It sounded like the very earth quaked in agreement.

   Burnt meat circled in the air. The onlookers inhaled it like the odor of rosebuds, of lilies—of dahlias.

   That was their reason for congregating, the explanation behind all of their blinding joy. She—Dahlia, the witch, the woman, the seductress—was poised upon a wooden post, face sheathed by thick burlap. All eyes were upon her. All shouts were angled at her. All the flickering fire that scented the air lapped at her feet.

   And she was silent.

   They filled the quiet with their furious words, spewed with venom that turned the air acrid and inhospitable. All their glassy eyes stared forward, glazed with something like hunger and another like horror and, deeper still, wonderment. They wanted to see the flesh grow brittle, wanted to hear the agonized shrieks. They wanted spectacle, and she had given it to them.

   She hid amongst them, grey wool cloaking her. A shabby hood hiding the ink-darkness of her hair. Dirt smudged upon her translucent skin. She looked as any of them: a poor lowlander, a farmhand, a sheepherder’s wire.

   Delilah watched in anonymity as the corpse was swept up in rich flames. Kept her cool gaze trained forward as the skin of the legs blackened, peeling off in patches like charred vellum. Worked her mouth into a tight, constrained line as the woman grew louder, her body half devoured by the conflagration.  

   They were chanting as they burned the false Dahlia upon the pyre:

They wound their way through a strangely barren market; the streets were alive with activity, surely enough, but it was nothing close to what Abel was truly used to. Brows furrowed for a fraction of a moment, a mere breath of uncertainty, for this was not the Sforza he was used to. Too many shutters were closed, too many curtains drawn; the music seemed far away, as if siphoned through a filter that Abel could not quite place. He could smell the baking bread, the freshly caught fish simmering in a pan beyond a cracked window, but the joy was muted, dampened, strange. But he did not wish to quell the excitement he’d conveyed to Raphael so willingly just hours earlier. It was his turn to impress, to show off, to take the lead; too often he followed Raphael from point to point, and he was proud of his Sforza and all it had to offer. But it was not his Sforza, it seemed.

Abel led them along the upward winding street, over worn cobblestones and around corners crammed close with food stands unoccupied. The dip of his brow grew more and more prominent with every passing moment, every step, until they turned a corner and came upon a wall of backs along the outskirts of a crowd. The square was here, the square which was made for dancing, for picnics, for great public works of theatre, and speeches, and life.

“What is this?” Abel muttered, tightening his grip upon Raphael’s hand as he slipped between two sets of hunched shoulders, pulling him along behind as they hastened to the center of the crowd, to the fountain in the center of the square at which he could get a better view of what every soul in Sforza seemed to be focused upon. Hanging onto his Raphael, he clambered to the edge of the fountain, eyes cast down as he stepped carefully over wet stones -- he could barely feel Raphael’s grip tighten in warning.

But when he looked up, he wished dearly that he had heeded Raphael’s silent warning.

Upon a scaffold at the far end of the square were three bodies -- two men and one woman -- with hands tied at their backs and loose ropes in nooses around their necks. At their right stood a rather gaudy caricature of what Abel could only imagine was an executioner; the black hood was certainly a touch passed through history, to the detriment of those around long enough to see it evolve. In hasty Sicilian, the executioner read off a list of grievances, each worse than the last -- but such words fell on deaf ears, for Abel’s breath had already caught in his throat, his blood rushing in his ears as his vision swam and pulsed before him. His free hand flew to the distinct scar upon his neck as his face drained of all color, trembling fingers slack in Raphael’s grip and marked throat burning with startling familiarity.

“Oh no, no, no,” his voice was a harried hiss, as if sharing a disparaging secret which he could not quite stomach; he could feel the heat behind his eyes, prickling at the severe lack of color in his cheeks -- and before he could think to quell the impending tears, he was running, ripping his fingers from Raphael’s and falling into the fountain with a great splash that no one seemed to notice. He tumbled through the fountain, water soaking his trousers and spraying the crowd that surrounded with little affect. “Stop!” he called, voice drowned and absent in the murmur of the crowd and beneath the booming voice of the executioner. Only those with nooses around their necks seemed to see him. “Don’t do this! Stop, please! Please!”

A name nearly tumbled from his lips, but he was strong enough to stop that from falling, at the very least.

Strong arms caught him in a vice grip, but they were not Raphael’s. They knocked what little breath he possessed from within his lungs, turning his shouts to unceremonious gasps as he reached up toward the stage on which the victims stood. Executioner unaware of the protesting angel at his feet, he rolled the list of grievances into his robe and turned to a tall lever on the side of the stage. Abel’s voice returned as the executioner’s fingers curled over the lever, and he cried out again, reaching for the three noosed mirrors like a child reaches for its mother in a storm -- with terror.

They all dropped at once with a sickening crack, the lever pulled and the floor dropped from beneath them. Abel let out a wordless howl as he crumpled in the arms of the guard, who held him aloft; perhaps the silent man had though that Abel should see what it was that distressed him so. Desperate, tears streaming down pale cheeks, Abel wrapped his hands around his throat and held fast, the scar burning mockingly beneath his fingers as he watched the three before him. The woman had died immediately; it was her neck that had snapped so unceremoniously upon the first drop. But the men struggled; the men fought, as he had. Their eyes bulged from their skulls and lips formed a wordless “O”, like a fish gasping for air. They writhed and kicked with all the fierceness they still possessed, gurgling gasps underscored by the wailing at the foot of the stage -- and the crowd; why were they not crying? why did they simply watch? -- though they quickly began to dwindle.

“Help them!” Abel sobbed, knees buckling, though he remained upright, “God, please! Please help them!” 

He could almost feel Cain laughing at him, even now. The mere thought of his name made bile rise at the back of his throat, not becuase of anything vaguely resembling hatred, but because of how easily the humans all seemed to favor him now, watching in fascination and indifference alike as their fellow humans slowly slipped into the cold grasp of mortality before their very eyes. Cain’s grin choked him, stoked the sudden burn around his throat, as if he was dying a second time alongside them. But he could do nothing about it, could do nothing for them -- he could simply watch, and cry, and scream, for perhaps enough noise would let them know that they were not dying alone. 

It was a rather unceremonious denouement, for the moment the men stopped struggling the crowd began to dissipate, as if nothing had transpired before them but a simple reading of poetry. The guard dropped Abel with a generous shove, casting him down upon the cobblestones as the executioner descended from his place upon the scaffold. “Take them down!” Abel insisted, voice pitched and raw, fingers grasping at the sleeve of the man’s robe as he passed, scrambling across the stone to reach him. In return, he received nothing but a shove and a shake of the head -- where had his kind Sforza gone? What had the humans become?

Abel clambered onto the scaffold, ignoring Raphael, hot on his heels, as he rushed to the first body, tears flowing in silent succession down his cheeks and neck screaming in reminiscent pain as he wrapped his arms around the first man’s midsection, lifting him with one arm and reaching desperately for the noose with the other. Raphael appeared at his side, then, reaching just past the reach of his own fingers to loosen the knot at the nape of the man’s neck; Abel crumpled beneath his weight, but nevertheless persisted in setting him down gently.

It hardly occurred to him that a few humans had stayed behind to watch.

He scrambled to his feet again, and persisted in the same pattern twice more, with Raphael at his side; he could not tell if Raphael was speaking, for his ears rushed with blood, the sound of a familiar laugh ringing below the roar as a reminder of just why it was his own neck burned to fiercely.

Once the three were laid upon the scaffold, Abel tore from Raphael to remove the ropes from their necks, nearly recoiling at the sight of glaring red burns across their throats, spotted with blood and doomed to scar, though they surely would be rid of theirs as soon as they reached Heaven. As carefully as if they still breathed, Abel removed the ropes from around their necks and cast them aside, fingers gently smoothing over the skin of their throats, hoping desperately that they did not feel them, wherever they were.

“Why did no one help them?” Abel demanded, his voice watery, small, weak; his fingers danced over the face of the woman, glad for a moment that she had not struggled. With careful fingers, he shut her eyes, fingers lingering upon the lids. “Why did they all just watch?”

He looked to Raphael, then, and for the first time, he simply began to cry. No protests, no fight, no barring arms holding him back; with hands still upon the stiffening bodies, he cried, vision blurred and chest heaving with belabored breaths. Abel could feel Raphael’s hand upon his back then, and without hesitation he folded into his chest, hands rising once more to clutch at his throat, trembling fingers pulling and scratching at the harsh reminder etched upon his flesh. “No one helped them,” he sobbed, voice muffled in the strong warmth of Raphael’s shoulder, “They died alone. They were alone.”

“Abel...” Raphael’s grip tightened upon Abel’s shoulder, and in response his gaze rose once more. Warm eyes directed his gaze to the base of the scaffold, where a pair of elderly women -- who he recognized; he had seen them just years before, though they had changed much since then -- approached with a cart, one usually used to carry food about the market. At the base of the cart was a pallet of blankets; it was at this that he understood.

“Sarà aiutare?” It took him a moment to realize just what it was that the woman has asked of him, for her voice was frail; she hardly looked strong enough to hold herself up, let alone the cart she shared with her friend. She repeated her query once more, and with a nod, Abel understood.

“Yes,” he wiped at his eyes, nodding numbly, “I will help, yes.” Glancing back to Raphael, Abel crawled back to the body of the woman, scooping her into his arms and resisting the urge to shudder when her head lolled back at an unnatural angle. Raphael dropped to the ground at the foot of the scaffold and held his arms up, ready to pass the body along to the waiting safety of the cart. “Thank you,” Abel muttered, punctuating each passage, once, twice, three times; each body seemed so small in the women’s cart, but they seemed much safer than they ever had lying on the dirtied floor of the scaffold.

The eldest of the two women, hunched and weathered, with spotted skin and wisps of hair, stepped forth to reach up for Abel; she took his hand without hesitation and held it tight, nodding to him once with all the understanding in the world. It was then that he had no doubt of the women’s ability to remember; they knew him, perhaps better than he had ever thought. And they would surely remember him for the rest of their lives; the two of them would earn glorious places in Heaven; there was no doubt about that. It painted him to release the woman’s hand, but he knew good and well, as tears dried upon his cheek, that she and her sister were to do God’s work, where he could not, where the others would not. Were he a man made of lesser stuff, he might have discounted them, passed them off as nothing more than slaves to obligation.

But he knew -- this was humanity, this kindness. This was what was worth remembering.

“How to speak about a thing that cannot happen but is happening? How to explain—oh, the sin of it—but is it? Everyone loves everyone here, l’amour! Love to love and love to hate and love to betray and love to talk—so much love in the Courts, but little and less in marriage. So much rides on duty and dowries, and a husband can take mistresses without so much as a raised brow! But heavens forbid the wife should ever be caught—no, that scandal would never do. But the King’s children and the ladies-in-waiting, well, we’re expected to be in one another’s company, are we not? Nothing to be overly concerned about, here. Except for, of course, the matter of our existence.

She was older than I, the eldest illegitimate daughter of King Louis XIV: Marie Anne de Bourbon. She was raised away from all the proclivities of Court life, away from Versailles—which of course made her desire it all the more. And who could blame her? What fun is it to be the daughter of the King and to never revel in its fineries? To never walk the halls and corridors of the palace, touching the walls, the jewels, the hangings, and daring to think—for a moment!—this, part of this, belongs to you, it’s in your blood though you can’t claim it. You can’t claim it, but that doesn’t make it any less yours. Of course Marie Anne wanted to come to Court. Marrying her off to her cousin at thirteen did her no services, nor to him.

And she was a widow made, smallpox took him—she gave it, to tell it true, so though while no ill-intentions, she got herself out of that marriage childless all the same. The day she came to Court, I still remember it, as if the whole palace had suddenly found its song. Even the King doted on her—and how could he not? But never could I dream of her returning my favours as I warmed her pearls. Never would I dare speak of it, not to she whose mother followed into a convent to marry God. We were religious people, good people, good souls. And even as Arianna stole my affianced away and marred my reputation, that I could patch up, I’d done it enough for my sister; I had experience—even as it happened, it felt like His blessing.

Social circles would’ve been her downfall; a new personality for each party. Would she spend the evening smoking with the skater boy or spend her time lip locked with a star quarterback? Who would she give a piece of herself to -- only to gain their favor in return? They would owe her the crown in the never ending popularity contest. They would be her chess set, ready to move and attack at any given command.

All Holly had to do was lose herself a little …

… lose a bit of faith,

              Innocence,

                      And time.

Holly pushed the empty feeling aside each time she was given the ribbon of victory; homecoming court, prom queen, Valentine’s Day princess of hearts, etc. More social prizes fell effortlessly into in her hands, yet her heart felt emptier by each passing day. People liked her… or they only liked a version of her. No one really knew Holly, they only saw what they believed. No one knew about the financial crisis at home, or the growing addiction to the tiny scars running across her thighs. The need – the desire – to feel ( genuinely ) loved itching underneath the surface.

More attention, more gimmicks, more more more.

The desperate attempt to run away flourishing inside her mind; people would miss her, right? Would they all mourn or sigh with relief? Would they write stories about her ( each unfortunate experience contrasting with another )? Would they care – or leave her in the wake, just like the forgotten memory of her sister.

The tipping point came at an after party, her drunk mind tapping into untamed emotions, dangerously close to revealing her true persona. Her hazy blue eyes locked with the group in front of her – were they the popular kids or the band geeks? – while her slurred speech questioned, “… If – If I wasn’t me, would we still all be friends?”

There was laughter throughout the room, confusing her. Had her question been funny? Or were her expressions ridiculous? Her brain tried to scramble for an answer until one of the guys in the group answered – oh, what was his name? Richard? Henry? Did it matter?

He smirked, reaching for another bottle of beer, admitting, “… we were never friends, Holly. Not until you – well – convinced us otherwise with your... charm. Unlike your sister, she was a prude. Rumor has it no one got up her skirt.”

Immediately, her hands reach for another shot ( to numb the pain ). Translation; they thought nothing of her. Only liked her for what she had to offer – a piece of her soul given to please others. Humans were cruel, cruel and selfish. No one truly cared; not her parents nor the students in school that chased after her every word. They had only wanted her influence, not her heart.