Serpentine | ✓

9 | boy

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B O Y

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    MY NAME IS Nidus Serpentine born from ashes and gold.

    I am barred from within – caged in the outside, with a curse that’s a shadow of who I am not and a life I never wanted.

     Sometimes I would think if my mother knew all along, how much I resented the solitude and the aberration. How much I despised the lock that binds my fate – the life that was thrusted into me for penance on someone else’s sins.

    Yet, as I thought about it, the bitter life, the wicked curse, and the petulant freedom – it was a wonder how my heart hasn’t been tainted from the poison, from the evil, from the ruination.

    I supposed it was in my nature to be forgiving, or it was of my upbringing – one thing I learned in this dreaded life was to never bestow upon the wrath of my curse to mortals no matter how much they deserved it.

     For this is my curse, and mine to bear alone.

    However there are times when damnation is in its highest peak, clouding your mind with snares of violence. As you lose yourself in the sea of despair – hopelessly watching as you transform into a creature of malignant retribution, as you start to reek of decay and broken ambitions and. . . death.

    How the odds would fare for me I will never know – but the swirl of vengeance felt divine, the wrath so tempting and blissfully aware.

    I imagined a big ball of fire as it thrashed around with poignant purpose, pregnant with the offspring of virulence, malevolent and full of rancid despair. I imagined them all right before my eyes – in the form of serpents and their wicked fangs.

    My serpents.

     My edge.

     It was too late to control the swell of hysteria – not when it was in its strongest point, not when its minds have been polluted with the need to destroy and ruin and damage. My eyes have been stripped off from their barriers, naked with the truth and the power to petrify.

     Closing them would have been a moot point, for the eyes of Serpentine were many and alive.

     Do I feel a pull of remorse when the red hair – Gertrude – slowly turned into concrete? Graying with desolate hopelessness? Do I feel the tug of guilt as her entire form froze, eyes wide and terrified from the brunt of her mistakes?

    I might have, I might do. In the pits of my heart I will always have the feeling of regret and remorse and guilt – but not now, not when my snakes had been blinded by violence, lost in a fit of rage as they thrashed around and inflicted what it meant to be the son of mountains of horror.

    I am in my own world now – hidden beaneath thickets of slithering snakes. Muddled from havoc, a child of never ending curse. Standing so hopelessly, as the flood of anger drowned me. My head’s underwater, helpless and unmoving. The sight of reason fleeing, clarity riddled with delirium.

    However, as I continued to sink in the bottomless Ocean of despair, with my head screaming of murder and death and the need to kill, there was a certain light that brought a certain decline to my edge. My eyes had been focused on them – as it grew larger and nearer and stronger, as it sounded of masculinity and concern and—

    “Serpentine, my love, look into my eyes.”

    Just like that, I had wrestled from the grasps of feverishness.