The Maiden

Tony Farentino

tonyfsketches©

 

The Maiden

‘Frantically, he sprints after his life.

His beautiful love ripped away from his arms—her silky curls flowing in the wind.

Her hand, so fragile—outstretched toward his.

Her delicate body, so lovely—trapped in the talons of that demon.

Her gaze meets her Love’s, as all three beings scramble up the steep, black, mountain slope.

Bristles of fur cover the muscular back of the boar-like demon. His hooves launch the lovely maiden and his beastly form ever so faster than our hero of valor. 

With teeth grinding, a furrowed brow, Hero relentlessly charges forward, upward, toward the twisted peak of the mountain.

Clawing on all fours up the steep slope, Hero scrambles over the jagged mound of rocks—the same boulders which that goat-hoofed-demon so effortlessly leaped over.

The intense blue sky nearly blinds our hero as he lifts himself out of the darkness, onto the last plateau which the demon waits upon. 

Still clutching the terrified maiden, the demon leers through our hero’s eyes, piercing his soul and freezing him in his step. Evilness appears in the form of a smirk across It’s blackened gums, twisting his rotting fangs into a morbid smile. The grotesque demon, born out of an unholy primal lust between man and beast, can’t contain his throbbing red member as it spews his internal love for all things evil and vile.

The demon leaps from the cliff still clutching the blonde maiden.

Our hero diving behind.

Jagged rock shears pierce the water’s surface, worn to rough edges by a constant churning of wind and sea—in an instant warm with blood.

The beautiful maiden, crushed between eroding sea rocks and an overgrown brute. Her spine compressing, crushing, against the ocean rocks: her rib cage bursting and mangling through her flesh, tearing organs, pulverizing her divine body into mangled raw meat.

The demon’s weight grinds the maiden’s body onto the rock, as It’s abdomen is punctured through, fusing It’s vile, diseased innards with that of the beautiful lady.

The bloody mess of carnage splashes into the sea below, leaving behind parts of flesh and bone on the red-stained rocks.

Our hero screams in agony as he witnesses his beautiful love being destroyed before his eyes. The brutality of her death cannot truly begin to take hold as our hero plunges face first into his pulverizing death below. His face, skull, brain and hair become one clumpy mass of red mush as his body impales itself onto the spiked rock.

Contorting head over heels, his decapitated body sinks into the crimson sea.

Plummeting down a hole of darkness and fire, deeper they fall—through an endless void.

Our hero splashes into nothingness, drowning in its black pool. Gasping for air he frantically trudges to the surface. The weight of the abyss pulls down, sinking our hero deeper to the jaws of doom.

Suffocating, blind, he struggles towards the surface. His veins course with adrenaline; webbing through his hand, forearm; his muscles burn.

The more he struggles, however, the more he sinks. 

Squirming and writhing through the sludge, our hero inches through the blackness, like a worm through the earth. But the weight of the abyss is too much, and continues to pull down. 

Suffocating.

He sinks. 

Hero drowns, thinking only of his fair maiden. 

So deep he sinks into this Underworld that our hero eventually washes upon the shores of an existence on the lowest level.   

He pulls his body forward, digging his fingernails into the embankment of this Hellish loch.

He lies on his back for a moment, struggling to catch his breath: he coughs up a putrid slug from that drowning pool which has slithered into his lungs.

Staggering to his feet our hero gazes around. Complete darkness in all directions. A faint light emitting from a distant glow—slowly fading away: the only illumination of this world. The distant shriek of his love reveals the source of the light. Bounding after her screams our hero sprints toward this faint glow in the dark.

Our hero’s mind wanders toward brighter thoughts as he scampers through this Underworld . . . The outline of his fair maiden; morning light shining upon her face; planting a single kiss on her supple lips . . .

His memory flutters into the darkness like a fleeting firefly, burning-out and swirling just out of reach.

In it's place, two pairs of red eyes burn in the darkness, on either side of Hero’s path. Looming above from their imposing position, these two sets of eyes charge along, like the warning light of a steaming train: keeping pace, twisting, and turning, on the same path: the path of our hero.

He never reaches the maiden, only to be haunted by those pairs of red eyes: judging, waiting; always above him, circling, re-circling . . .

Do not travel the road of this helpless soul, cursed to an eternity of chasing his fleeting memory in the darkness . . .’ 

The toothless ghoul chuckles, “A warm tale for you on this chilly night.”

“That is not a tale I am familiar with, and I may have been better for not knowing,” replies the soldier. The unnerving story reminds him of his own troubles, something he was hoping to escape.

Stars twinkle above, flickering against the fiend’s eyes; the only spark of life to this poor creature, aside from the horrible story . . .