CONTENT WARNING:
This content contains mature situations, violence,
and what some may consider gore and inappropriate for children.
Discretion is advised.
Chapter 12
At The Grave Of Dreams
Wilhelmina steps outside her house just as Bernardo runs through the village. He screams frantically, "Everyone! Grab your lanterns! Grab your torches! The monster runs for the windmill!" Jacintha and Tessa step out of their homes as well to see Bernardo as he continues, "As one we must burn it down! Let us take revenge! Let us burn the monster!" Bernardo continues to the stables. Victoria is running. Chasing after Bernardo. She arrives in time to see him fire from the stables on horse back. He is holding a lit oil lamp riding in the direction of the windmill. Before she can reach the stables another horse runs out galloping into the open fields. Once inside she finds there are no more horses. She continues running. She goes after him trying to scream to get his attention but the cold is stealing her voice. Her muscles burn in exhaustion. Bernardo stops his horse just down from the windmill. He hears Victoria in the distance. "Stop! Refrain from this Bernardo! Please!"
She sees the glow of the vial in Bernardo's hand. "No!" She screams mid sprint. He pulls the cork on the glass vial and it's ultra violet glow disappears behind Bernardo's lips. With having drunken the vial she stops. Her jaw ajar unsure of what to do now. She can't stop what ever is about to happen.
"What did you do?" She utters wearied.
Bernardo rides up to the windmill. He dismounts with his horse tame enough to idle without him. Only a moment is spent assessing if his horse will run off. As he turns around the eight foot monster has stepped out of the windmill and stands before Bernardo. He looks upon it afflicted with fear while staring at the fireflies that flow through it's veins.
It grabs the horse with both hands trapping Bernardo in the middle. In the commotion he lets go of the oil lamp. It drops at his feet. Breaking. His legs catch fire. The flames spread quick engulfing mostly his clothes. Fighting the flames he breaks loose from between the monster and the horse. For a short time he runs blazing as a human pyre.
Victoria is catatonic as she watches helpless. Her heart steps outside her body now. Laying witness to the monster's astonishing physical power as it grips the horse by its neck. In a single turn around it is able to lift the horse off its feet. Swinging the horse horizontally like taking an axe to a tree. To Bernardo's misfortune he is in the way of its course. With a bludgeoning blow the horse's hide clobbers him. The thrashing hurls him thirty feet or so closer to Victoria. Breaking through her paralysis she runs to him. Both overwrought and brittle she crumbles as the resilience left in her burns out. Paying no mind to the mob of running villagers behind her. Their oil lamps and torches emerge on the wind mill like a herd of flaming birds soaring through the field.
Bernardo is a screaming bonfire as he lay burning to death. Victoria weeps while watching on her knees. Palms up and powerless. She cries to him, "Bernardo! Bernardo!" She weeps under his screams. To her, his screams challenge the thunder that bellows. Never has a sound cut away at her skin the way his screaming does now.
Suddenly his arms and legs stretch three times their length. In the mortifying sight Bernardo begins to kick and flail making Victoria cower backwards. She watches as his body changes inside of the flames. She can see morphing happen as his face grows with bone marrow. A snout extends out tearing the skin on his face. Within it there are teeth on top of teeth that sprout in rows of sharp daggers pushing out the normal teeth all at once. Then a phthalo green spreads in the form of elaborate scales like a snake skin. Taking on a dragon like appearance. Soon Bernardo's body starts to bulge as every muscle in his anatomy is growing. The muscles grow four times there normal size pulsing with vascularity. The growth turns into bloating and all his body becomes bulbous. With each change Bernardo reacts. He feels everything. The excruciating pain of his bones growing and his skin stretching… and tearing… and burning. The fire changes color and the flames lash in a deep vermilion red as a chemical like aura distorts the smokes plume. Countless large blisters start to rise before bursting with black ichor. Each pop sloshes and splashes when it explodes. Skin and muscle become untethered to the bone falling away piece by piece. The agony of his screams draw gradually toward an end. His bones crackle as they turn to cinders.
After watching the horror of Bernardo's demise she is shattered. Her nose scorched in the scent of his torched body that carries the aroma of rusted iron and rotten potatoes. Sobbing, she trembles in the cold. Only kept warm by the fire on Bernardo's bones. The language of fire is all she can hear as it rustles.
Darting past her is the mob of villagers as they descend on the windmill. The monster has disappeared inside. When they reach its foundation they begin to set the windmill on fire. They use their torches and smash their lanterns against it.
Victoria considers walking over to the windmill and burning inside. She ponders to herself, "I see no reason why I should not be in there as well. Tis me whom should be burned at the stake. Oh mother, I am sorry. I know you would shun such speech but I speak so fowl having given the world nothing but a creature of desecration. Father... I am sorry. You wanted but goodness from me but it is with a weary heart to which I propose that the goodness will die with children and has died with what life you made of goodness. There is no goodness my guilty soul can claim now."
Within the flames the monster emerges once again. It's figure silhouetted. It's emanation piercing the inferno. Making a victory in its defiance of death. Calling attention to its firm will and pure force it returns outside. Making a mockery of such a dangerous element as fire by passing through it unimpressed. The villagers that make up the crowd gawk in seeing the monster's mountainous body. They stare in disbelief of it's radiance.
The electrical storm is at it's angriest when it starts to discharge bolts of lightning. Lightning that is attracted to the monster. Lightning that then cracks the ground multiple times. Bombarding around the wind mill. Victoria takes notice that the onslaught of electricity is in fact causing a reaction in which the monster's lumination brightens. The brighter its veins glow, it seems the more violent and uncontrollable her creation becomes.
The blitz of lightning bolts sets off the monster into a rampage. It goes from one villager to the next. The first few were slow to react and were robbed of the possibility to escape it's vicious wrath. The creature drops it's closed fist down on a woman's head that unimpeded it's inertia. Deflating any boning. The creature's knuckles cut through the air colliding with a man holding a torch. The assault is so calamitous that the right side of his torso is obliterated removing his peck, shoulder and arm all at once. The man falls, dropping on his torch and setting him on fire. The creature reaches both palms out to grab a man by his rib cage. It lifts him off the ground. Like a dough it squeezes through him till the man is torn in half.
Shock seizes Victoria. Her hands shake involuntarily. She could decide to get up and run away if she wanted but instead she is staying in place. As still as stone. Willing herself not to move from this spot and be the recorder of testimony. Documenting the horrors. Viewing the bane of gore as it massacres the people of Rhode Heuvals. She holds herself responsible and therefore will not allow the benefit of looking away from the slaughter.
Villagers run to elude the brutality of its clutches and in a ferocious tirade it tramples them. Tearing people limb from limb. Squashing bodies beneath it's feet. Flattening some. Crushing others with their bare hands. Folding people in on themselves. There are few screams because the monster kills with a speed of eradication that leaves no time to express pain. The witnessing of a tyrant stomping out the existence of those it deems void of value.
For Victoria her thoughts have always been ever-voicing. But for a few moments that inner voice remains quiet. She wishes silence in her punishment to remember everything about this tragedy. Soon, her cognition becomes ever-voicing again when she thinks to herself, "I have rode through the sand storms of Egypt. Crossed the ocean to the Americas. Lived in luxuries that sound as profound as dreams to commoners. I have loved, I have seen love, I have been loved. Plentiful have been my trials and tribulations. A many harrowing battles. Some as a fighter and some of wit. Now, I anchor in the carnage storm. Clear here that inside thine life I have felt never such a ruination was my experience in all days on all my battle fields. Being chased by death had the presence of fear. There was a scared me that visited through time. Never like this. Such powerlessness. Unforeseeable Hopelessness. To witness what I never have seen before. At the undesirable destination here lie the graves of my dreams. All that was once flourishing is now put under for to be the soil of flowers. Time will watch them be abandoned and overrun with the dried up death of greenery. I sigh with sickness in my heart as I look at it. Look at it. My juggernaut. It kills, decimates entirely without so much as an ounce of anger nor joy. Labor of love can not define it either. It stalks, thrashes and bustles mindlessly. Not a bead of sweat in sight on it's glassy skin. Perhaps it is the disease. A force of nature running its course. Acting involuntarily and yet still, knowing that this could be a possibility… It does not change that I am in hate with it. Resentful… regretful. I wish I never gave birth to the destroyer of the world. I relinquish my welcoming heart for it. For the forever of nights darkness, for the forever of daylights burn, till time steals the remembering of the names of the trees and the air of the world depletes and all life that has ever been known is choked out. The pain of wanting you gone goes on for a forever and it is in that means of forever that I will be in hate with thee. My child. This monster I've created. Perhaps... it is more. Is there some inconceivable connection it has to nature? Truly a key to titanhood. Does it command the storm itself? Does it lay waste with purpose? Some goal it is unable to communicate? Or quite possibly, is there someone in there? Imprisoned. Tortuously transformed. Incapable of control? I wish I could know truly. Still I relinquish my love because of it. For in truth I hold some semblance of pride. It disgusts me. My creation, it is strong, without contest. It is alive. Alive in a way an inquisitor would define. Alive... it's alive. Moving forward with momentum exceeding expectations. How extraordinary that none of the foreseen drawbacks of motor functions, strength or speed are ever made present. How amazing. What a tremendous achievement. How fucking revolting. I decline with no anodynes. Fall away from things enamoured. I refute pretensions of pride therefore, any that of joy as well. I will be haunted for the precedence of my days with the sight of the emergence of that celestial fire that burns in its veins from under its lucent skin and the hot white pits of its eyes."
The windmill's fire is like a giant dancing in the storm. Victoria grips the grass and soil while swaying because her body is drunk. Her nerves are stinging spider bites. Her eyes wrung out of tears and her throat ripping dry. She would stand and walk to death now if only the ground would stop spinning back and forth.
"No. There is no blame better placed then upon ones head. I did this. These people gave me a life again and I took theirs away. As I watch the monster tear through them I wish for bolts of lightning to strike me down and punish me. There is no world coming that changes for the better. No world I could possibly create. Hence forth as I look upon a maker of death how foolish, cruel and stupid I am to have ever envisaged a destiny where one is to be idolized as an angel. I am ill of thee... that within thine self... there was ever a foolish conception... to dream."
***
1816, Antarctica.
Victoria stops from journaling to acknowledge that her fire has been out for some time. The will to keep it going has evaded her. It may be a seal on her fate if she does not keep the fire burning. Then again, she knows that. With hurt on her heart from recollecting the past she continues to journal. Damning herself on purpose. She writes, "As I rest upon the dirt, with my hands I grip the earth with panic as a drunken disorient takes over me. I feel nauseated and a dizzying spin disrupts my body. It was a sensation of gravity giving way. It was then I had finally given up. These weren't deaths. These were my neighbors and the flame of their lives were snuffed out in an evening. My neighbors, my friends. I still wish I had the strength then to get up. I wanted so terribly to give myself unto it. To let it do what I had feared most. To deny me my story and any legacy I could hope to have. I ran from death not simply in fear of a painful demise in truth I feared most to be erased. I lived with a hunger to obtain an extraordinary life. How awfully foolish of me to have squandered the last eleven years depriving myself of all its beauties. I remember nights of painting in the winter and the candle light reflecting off the windows. The dancing in the ballroom when we could dance till we fell asleep listening to the band play their cello's. But mostly sitting in spring at the edge of my garden, enjoying the heart of my life in the warm smell of flowers as they bathed in the sun. I feared all this to be erased. Lest I forget the horror, under the shroud of night's maw, I forfeited what was left of my dreams. Tis then I heard a quiet voice say, "Miss Victoria." as they grabbed my arm and help me to my feet. It was Knelis. He had survived with only a broken arm. He found me and rushed me away while there was still time to spare our lives. I did stop one last time to look back. Now arrayed in red, the grass, the water and all reflected the red of the windmill varnished in fire. The blood in the field glistened. The Juggernaut stood victorious in the fiery scene surrounded by death. Its wretchedness to never be brought to justice.
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