Witnessing his metamorphosis soaked her monstrous forked tongue in blasphemous tastes of venom and honey, as if a thousand yersinia had torn themselves apart, dissolving into gravely, sugary sap which now pulsed through delicate veins of her throat. Such was the ecstasy of clenching her slender, ivory fingers around his neck, and slowly lifting him into morbid luminary of endless, primeval might, hearing every fiber in his ailing, fragile body shriek as incandescent iron sept into it’s very essence, stagnating and building an abysmal colosus. The False Messiah marveled at him, at his frosty soul engulfed in pale green hellfire, at grim visage grown handsome, twisted by maniacal rapture, and at his sable, fractured halo - wallowed in him like a sculptor basks in the sight of splendidly shaped marble.
The sneering hound was at last skinned, it’s rotted, decayed carcass bathed in shimmering dawn of molten gold - the dawn of Year Zero. Auroral drops wept away, leaving macabre white footsteps on naked bone, out of which had evolved an imperial wyrm clothed in scales of platinum, slowly raising it’s wings sewn out of billions and billions of squirming bacteria - both young and ancient at the same time. A diabolical grin crooked the Antichrist’s face of ethereal beauty - there he stood, her First Horseman, her lawless, almighty Conquest. Helpless Christ shall lament his precious flock burning alive under his merciless gauntlet. If God had not yet perished, then he will - consumed by haunting echoes of his collapsed reign, and the Holy Ghost will fade into nothingness.
With the feather-light caress of his diseased lips against her satiny hand, silvery, sinister laughter vibrated her velvety lungs - the melody of victorious satisfaction. “For a thousand eternities, and then a thousand more” she nodded, almost in amusement “Come now, my Deadly Pestilence. Let us deliver the glorious news of your rising to my Beloved Father. And then…” fondly, she caressed his bloodstained forehead, brushing away a stubborn strand of hair poking from under his shimmering crown “I am to grant a gift to you, sweet Archangelo of Armageddon. I know that for years you have withered under a prideful foot of bloodline falsely holding themselves above you. Not anymore… Tonight, you shall unleash the Black Death upon them, thus they are reborn, and reborn below you…”
As he stood he felt power rise with him and it was like glorious fever enraptured, the fall of Eden yet to come but so close the Cardinal, PESTILENCE, could taste its tar-like nectar on his insipid, profanatory tongue. Regal & chaotic. A zenith that’d enveloped them both; The hastening of CHRIST’S demise. The manic sounding within Babylon’s belfry, the groveling of crusaders who now welter . . . Bliss. She had delivered to him a revelation, a behest like none other before. He questioned not why him —— The STARS maligned spoke of it for aeons. He knows this and he knew it always just as fire knew it could burn. A world without end would learn of its mortality. Feeble, as is its inhabitants. The Antichrist’s gentle hand upon his flesh was akin to a mother’s touch —— wise and warm as the embryotic sac. Natural. Fate. She is his REBIRTH. Pushed forth from the metaphorical womb into a world reclaimed. Again he bowed his head taking on a dutiful disposition; The ephemeral realisation. ❛ I am ready. ❜
His voice shook not with apprehension but FERVOUR. How long had mankind peddled slander and conjecture spitting them as truths used to manipulate and subjugate? How long had the arrogant ‘ God ’ and his trinity smashed open the skulls of Lucifer’s most adherent, using their BLOOD to paint sacrilegious falsehoods known as the Biblical word, insistent is was they whom knew right from wrong? The creature still blanketed in verdant flame shrieked as though it knew Copia’s intention, its enthuse for his virulent plan. Its gaze met his, and for a short interlude their affinity had been known, this thing is borne from the SHADOW of his heart, crafted from his marrow —— Reborn, like him. It thirsts for the blood of the lamb.
❛ The Black Death, ❜ Like having been reacquainted with preternatural aura visions of thirteenth century doom befell him. Miasma, empty prayer, mound upon mound of BURNING corpses littering the cobbled streets. It brought something of a pleasurable sensation to goosepimpled skin. Disease did not discriminate; It struck like a knife to jugular sacrifice. Nor did it act swiftly —— Pestilence, the sadist, feasted on pain and SUFFERING and in the name of Satan, Belial, Valefar, Astaroth, Pazuzu, Nergal . . . his power would be widespread once more.
❛ It comes to me like a wanton. It’s mine, ❜ His elation overwhelms him. He glanced to her, cold grin a testament to his bequest.
❛ And I won’t allow it to abscond me again. Long has Heaven subdued us, but our time is now. I can feel it. ❜ The skies will split apart and bring spears of blood rain with its darkening overcast. Copia nods, readying himself. The itch he can’t scratch, the URGE he can’t fulfil, soon it will take shape in the unleashing of devastation.
Of course the False Messiah needed but a mellow moment of temptation, and Copia collapsed at her feet, ready to coil around her neck, remaining candied as honey if only she allowed him to bask in bloodstained rays of might. This man was a starving dog, Ophelia had long noticed so. Wounded, ailed and drolling as he sneered at unfolding spectacles from the shadows, longing to be their shining star. The Antichrist cut past his shell, past his rotting heart into the depth of a venomous spirit, thus oh, she knew he bit hard. Deep down, Lawless One admired the Cardinal - after all, only a naive lamb would fail to recognize how genial was he in the theater of playing a fool, meanwhile slowly climbing the golden steps one by one, leaving a trail of rat-devoured cadavers behind. Once his mask was torn away, that is, which could not be easy.
Ophelia’s judgement had not been clouded, it never was. The Cardinal was a pest, gaunt and contagious. By all means - ideal. A shadow of satisfaction darted over her almost ethereal visage, disappearing just as swiftly.
Slowly, deceptively frail in her long white robe as a halo of obsidian light pulses around her, fractured by midnight-colored feathers of her swan-like wings, Desolate One approached her chosen Apocalyptic Herald. Delicate hand raised, a shimmering bow of ancient, untainted gold manifested out of thin air in her grasp, and tenderly, she placed the weapon into his impatient hand. Orbs of burning crimson briefly met his oddly mismatched gaze, piercing and drilling, whispering wordlessly you are mine now. Yet she retreated, slipping behind the kneeling Cardinal, gossamer silk gently rustling with every elegant step. From a shimmering will-o’-wisp, morphed a glorious crown engraves with rats and ghastly, lifeless faces. Serpentine smirk, which had never faded, now grew, twisting into a sinister, heart-wrenching grin. Unholy Stigmata, never healing wounds tainting her pale wrists, now wept tears of blood, which splashed his forehead, soaking into his skin, marking him as the Kind of all Deadly Pestilences, releasing his very nature with an echoe of fading laments. Softly, she placed the crown on his head.
“Rise now, my Horseman. Conquer for me. Reign beside me!”.
Power. Ambrosia. A testament to the unholy. As her blood siphoned within the Cardinal he felt it wash over him, heavy, and DARK. As if God-sent angels in near vicinity had all been vanquished and sacrificed to him, for him, to receive this gift so BLASPHEMOUS and omnipotent. He could see a world on fire —— Those whom grovel to the light upon breaking wheels, God-fearing Christians plagued, blighted, disfigured by the Judas chair. Broken bones, tumoured marbled flesh. Flies and rats and maggots. SICKNESS of mind and sickness of body co-existing at the wave of his hand. There would be no sounding of the seven trumpets. There would be no TYRANT to cast judgement upon him as the Oppressor had done to the Morning Star —— Accursed be the dictator’s name. Spat upon is the cross.
His skin felt like ice and flame simultaneously, her breath snaking its way down his spine as though she were Winter’s first frost; Her coldness RIVALED his own. Or perhaps it was the Cardinal’s elation intertwined with eerie paroxysm. His lecherous need for power satiated like a man in Hell’s brothel. He rises to his feet, hands delicately caressing the crown ENDOWED to him and his moniker. His birthright. He can hear them and their skeletal fists pounding on the cerebral walls of his mind —— telling him to claim the millions in the name of Satan. They’re the SIBILANT voices of those who’d fallen before him, failed to do what he had done. But he needn’t any guidance —— he’d never stray from himself.
❛
Vedi, la ruginne rode e MicheleIl brando mistico ed il fedele, ❜ Copia makes the sign of the inverted cross and dipped his head in REVERENCE to the Antichrist, his bestower of fate.
❛
Tu spiri, o Satana, nel verso mio, se dal sen rompeni sfidando il dio. ❜ He took her hand, an ashen complexion such as his, and plants a gentle kiss. Bathed in the moonlight she was a Carpathian dream, more radiant than any false GOD had claimed to be. More puritanical than the Archangel Michael, defiled be his name. Copia simpered and felt a rising laughter in the pit of his stomach. He could have laughed himself to DEATH, intoxicated by supremacy.
❛ Privy to your beauty and power alike I forever accept & honour this epithet and what it means to be Pestilence —— Reign we shall, into a thousand eternities. ❜ He raised his gaze to brandish the PLEASURE upon his mien and the glint in his eye that’d been emerald green as envy now a pale, soulless white.
“I am not that tasteless to joke about such things, Cardinal” a venomous smirk crooked the Antichrist’s beautiful, burgundy-painted lips “Your… connection to the Bubonic Plague has captured my admiration. Thus I doubt, in flow of time, there shall ever come a better candidate to become my White Horseman. Think about it, Cardinal. All you need to do is stretch out your hand, take the Crown, and Conquest of every disease, every sickness in this damned world shall be yours”.
She is braying to the ambitious dogma that made a home in the deepest, most inherent crevice of his soul. At any cost the Cardinal Copia would place himself above all else, even cutting down those whom dared be a stickler against his agenda —— and worse, using them as pawns in his climb to higher power. Eyes wide as saucers he is drunk on his own greed, and could hardly believe all he’d dreamed of is being offered to him on a silver platter by none other than Satan’s beneficiary herself.
Copia for that very reason was the essence of The Plague. A pandemic that leeched people of their life blood, and left a trail of destruction in its wake wherever it had been. He looked as sick and cold as he was inside. Befitting. Kneeling with great aplomb the unholy Cardinal made a point of being humble. It was to show his gratitude and acceptance simultaneously. His heart a war drum and his mind in the throes of elation he vows to his insidious self that he’d stop at nothing to continue his rapport with the Antichrist and keep her happy with him.
❛ Gratias tibi ago, ❜ the genuinity in his voice lacked no need for sycophantic charades. ❛ I am certain I would be a wise choice, for the present and into the next millennia, and for eternity. ❜ Regardless of her words being literal or metaphor, Copia presents his open palm, gaze unwavering much like his avarice. ❛ I, Cardinal Copia, will be your pestilent auxiliary. I accept, with every inch of me I accept this gracious offering. ❜ A frigid wind drifts by, snuffing out several black prayer candles in their vicinity as if they were the very hoardes of victims taken by the plague. It filled him with bliss.
