You Will

Blood.

There’s blood everywhere.

The maroon liquid fills the damp air with its strong, metallic odor, thick and sloshy as you gingerly step through it with your soaked shoes and dripping pants that rest against your torn flesh in tatters.

Strong.

The odor is so strong it makes your throat, that’s filled with dark slime and strips of rotting flesh, choke-up. A deep, guttural plea making its way from your drowned voice box to your parted lips as your punctured lungs beg for some fresh air, begging for the chance to confirm that you’re still alive… alive in the sense that you may not be so for long, but for this moment, alive nonetheless.

You know those pleas will be denied. That desire to take in even the faintest of breaths of clean air will never be fulfilled. You know those pleas will be denied. You know it. You know it because he’s still alive, still with you, still watching from a distance as you suffer in the aftermath of his latest rampage.

Why had you provoked him?

Why had you angered him? Disobeyed him? Hit him and screamed?

Why?

Why had you snapped at him? Why couldn’t you have remained silent and obedient? Why had you pushed until you pushed him too far, to yet another breaking point, to the point that he massacred and tortured once again so that you may be shown your place within his whelm yet again?

Why?

These are the questions that run through your head like a mantra playing on a broken record player as you rive in pain, bleeding out and choking on others' remains that he had forced into you during his charge.

You hate how it always ends like this, in the darkness of his lair, that unlit tunnel filled with bones and carcasses of once before lively people. You hate that your life always ends with your guts spilling to the floor, gashes covering every inch of your body, your ribs broken—jarred into your lungs or ripped from their rightful place, your throat covered in your own blood with other’s slathered over it, your mouth filled with pieces of the carcasses that lay around you in a heap of destruction, your eyes strained from lack of light despite the powers given to you.

You hate how it always ends with him revealing himself from his hiding place beyond the shadows, his crimson eyes focused on your crumpled form as you’ve slumped to the grounds while drawing your last breaths.

He always speaks to you then.

He always speaks to you in that soothing but searing voice of his that you imagine would be the voice to belong to one whose existence came to be on a once in a lifetime miracle day where a hot summer’s day and a dark winter’s night came together as one.

He speaks to you with that voice about the love he has for you, and only you, he chides you for being so stubborn and disobedient, he calls out to you—informing you of your inability to escape him, he reminds you that he’ll awaken you once again—giving you another chance to be his the way that you should be, the way that you already are without yourself even realizing it.

He speaks to you then and you hate it. You lay there dying, watching as his tall form approaches you with silent adoration, his crimson eyes still on you, his blood-stained mouth gaping open slightly just as yours had been before you crumpled to the ground like a used tissue paper. His mouth moves slightly as he continues to speak, kneeling down beside you as he pulls blood-soaked clumps of hair away from your face. He speaks to you then, and you wish nothing but to murder him for it.

You hate as you wait for him to appear.

You don’t want to hear his voice. You don’t want to see his face. You don’t want to feel his icy cold fingers playing with your hair or caressing your cheeks as the life drains from your very being. You don’t want to replay this scenario again as you have before so many times unwillingly.

But you know you will.

You have to.

You have no choice.

You’ll see him appear again, hear him speak, feel him touch you. You’ll take your last breaths, your eyes will close again, you will die again then you’ll be brought back again. He’ll make sure of it.

It’s how it always plays out.

It’ll never change.

Not unless you change.

Not unless you give in to him.

“And you will give in to me my darling” his voice rings out, his face appearing from the shadows just as you’d known it would “it may not be tomorrow, it may not be next week, it may not be for centuries, but you will” he says with certainty as he takes his ever so familiar wide and silent strides towards you, “you will.”

You look up to his face as he kneels besides you, pulling the clumps of soaked hair away from your face. Your eyes narrow in defiance at his words, the hatred coursing through your dying body too strong to kill no matter how many times he may kill you. You take his nonchalant expression into your memory as he continues stroking your hair.

For once you manage to speak before you feel yourself slip away.

“I will not.”

“I will not give in.”