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Ruin
The serpent dagger killed the Dark One. For a time, the host remained, his human form revealed to Rumplestiltskin. Then he was gone.Where?Fear had muscled, liquid hold of Rumplestiltskin’s bowels. It was cold and it twisted, his insides trembled. It was a familiar feeling, one he kept trying to dodge. It found him again and again.The path through the forest was weirdly hushed. Clinging to his staff, the dagger uneasy in his hand, Rumplestiltskin looked around. No moon. The darkness was vast. In the quiet, a bird called out, whip-poor-Will.Then it began. The former host of the Dark One faded and disappeared, in a whirling of ashes and dust. The dagger in Rumplestiltskin’s hand became a part of himself, and something flowed from it. Not outward, but in. Into his skin, up his arm. It began to spread, a warm liquid, throughout the cavity of his chest and shaking belly.It brought him to his knees, the staff rolled aside on hard-packed earth. Now the dagger sent something out of itself, barely visible in the night. A long, looping and winding ribbon, another serpent shape, all black. Cyclone-like, it spiraled up above Rumplestiltskin. The sense of liquid warmth within his body began to burn. It shone, a beacon to the rushing darkness. The darkness made its own wild wind, a roar like fire. It howled.It came, flight-fast and unstoppable, into Rumplestiltskin. It rushed into him through every orifice. His eyes were blinded with it. His breath, his heart arrested as it poured into his nose and mouth, down his gullet and into the fear-ridden rope of his gut. It filled his ears and then the scrap-leavings of his mind. It slithered up his arse and forced a shocking intimacy. His spine lit up, tailbone to skull, the long cord of nerves sparking and crackling.He would have fallen over, but the darkness held him up. Ropes and ribbons of it. It kept him on his knees, head lifted to the sky, arms out. The dagger was clenched in one fist; it felt fused. The darkness kept his eyes and mouth open, his body open as it swirled and undulated, and eventually disappeared into him, entirely. Within, it purred, content.The night become quiet once more. No longer supported by the serpent, the river of darkness, Rumplestiltskin collapsed. It moved in him, still. It violated him to his core, stilling his mind with the freeze-burn of its takeover. It soothed and seduced, familiar with human parts that were vulnerable to petting, to suckle. Tears wept from Rumplestiltskin’s eyes, though he was too far gone to cry. His skin shivered with a touch that came from within. His cock ejaculated without the assistance of his hand, and a wounded moan came from his lips, sorrowful.The darkness showed mercy. It wanted its vessel, its house. It mustn’t break it to pieces with its presence. Feelers and gruesome tentacles stroked and clouded Rumplestiltskin’s thoughts. Curled into a tight ball, his insides throbbing with dark, with evil, he fell into a thick, deep sleep. He awoke, changed. He stared at his skin. It made him smile, and the smile was awful to behold. The forest shrank back in terror.He was not unnatural. He was older than time, well known to the earth. He’d been around, forever.He moved his fingertips, the pads of his fingers that were now monstrous and strange over his face, over his arm. He glittered in light like dragon-hide. He felt strong. So strong, so well… the feeling was difficult to recognize and name. He was ruin. It was glorious.Through darkened teeth, staring from mad, mad eyes, he whispered, “Horrors.”
Vengeance
Everyone would pay. Everyone would die. Everything would burn. He started with the king’s guard, the soldier who’d forced him to kiss his boot. A big man, he’d taken pleasure in the act, a thinly veiled substitute for forced and public fellatio. Servitude and worship. Were he not so utterly repulsive to Rumplestiltskin, to the Dark One, that’s exactly what he would have had the soldier do, witnessed by his infantry.But no, the kiss was enough; the groveling posture, near tears. Rumplestiltskin smiled down at him, soaking in the high-strung, wounded beast scent of acid fear that gripped everyone. It gripped the soldier; his scent was thick and rank.It was power. The thought was a revelation. It was not nearly so simple as who was brave and who was a coward. Heroes and villains, or those who huddled in the relative warmth of their homes, keeping out of the fray.It was power, the tables had turned. Rumplestiltskin had the power; he was bloody well invincible. Gone was his fear. The night, the dark… evil lived inside him, now. He and Evil had fucked one another and were wedded. He was untouchable.It was the soldier who was afraid. Like the coward all the village believed Rumplestiltskin to be, the soldier sniveled. He knelt, head to the ground, lips woefully seeking to slobber on a boot.It was pleasing. No, it wasn’t enough. For a time, Rumplestiltskin smiled at the sight, the new and full presence of evil a moving hum throughout his body. Staring at the grovel and slurp, he felt himself getting hard.He didn’t want to fuck.“Papa, no.”It was Baelfire. Even filled with and cloaked in darkness, body a beautiful ruin and mind filled with hate, Rumplestiltskin felt the fierce love he had for his boy. The beautiful, big-eyed boy he couldn’t believe he’d made, and whom Milah left behind.She was next.Baelfire’s presence, sorrowful and frightened of his own father couldn’t hold Rumplestiltskin back. The soldier all but fornicated with the toe of his boot. His hands loosely cradled Rumplestiltskin’s foot, lips parted for wet kisses.Rumplestiltskin wrinkled his nose. His old injury felt far away, meaningless. Muscle and bone were strong. He was wired tight, taut with untamed energy. He was the lean muscle of a serpent, capable of striking so quickly, a body swam with venom before ever realizing the danger.His foot drew back, he kicked. It was solid. It was far more damaging than anyone might have anticipated. He heard the crack of the soldier’s skull, he felt the jarring and rupture of the vertebra in the soldier’s neck. It was still not enough.The soldier folded in on himself, gurgling sounds of shock and pain in his throat. He bled from his forehead and a trickle at his mouth. Blood dripped into his eyes; Rumplestiltskin knew the salt-sting of it. He was aware of Baelfire’s horror, his dismay. It didn’t matter. Rumplestiltskin raised his foot. With a power he’d never before imagined, the strength to overcome bone, he brought his foot down.The skull was crushed. Once bone was destroyed, the rest was like the pulp of melon. Shivers and something akin to orgasm shuddered through Rumplestiltskin’s body. He stared at the gore; his first act. His vision became hazed with a hot, moving film of crimson.The soldier was no longer a person. He was no longer anything. He was meat, his identity destroyed in seconds, along with his life.Baelfire was at first silent. He looked as if he screamed, but no sound came. Rumplestiltskin felt his heart squeeze, looking at his pretty son. His good son. He wanted the world for Baelfire, all of the things he’d never had. This was the way to get it.Baelfire’s voice was found. He took a harsh, painful and ragged breath, as if he’d nearly drowned, and the the hoarse scream arrived. His hands were buried to the curls of his dark head, Milah’s hair. The sound triggered Rumplestiltskin to action. He emerged from a trance that was both sex and death, the yawning mysteries of both. Instinctive, thoughtless, all muscle and bloodlust, he flew into action. He was the striking serpent. He stabbed and butchered one man after another, soldiers all. No one gets out alive. Blood flew and splattered. Rumplestiltskin tasted it… blood, fear-soaked sweat, the stink of men, spilled guts, offal. With each killing he grew stronger. The Dark One fed from it.Glory, glory, glory. His heart sang. His body sang. He was vengeance, and he couldn’t stop. He was incapable of stopping. He would kill until the end of days. He would be the end of days. He would eat the blood red sun and unleash the hordes of night.
Heartbreak
Demons, or was it Titans? did not die. They shrank, they cloaked themselves. As in tales of a tall, magic race of Sidhe, they disappeared into a mysterious and unmappable underground. All subsequent stories of them were muddled, uncertain. Were they the dead? Were they tiny, insect-riding and winged humanoids? Were they a failed race, like Neanderthals?Form changed, manuscripts and artifacts were lost or destroyed so that no one knew what was real. Everything was tales and fancy.The Dark One was part of this. Those who found themselves in its presence felt the truth of it, but even then; who knew? Maybe the man, Rumplestiltskin, had been a part of some great spell. Maybe he sold his soul to a deal-making, crossroads devil. (Oh, close, dear people. So close.)No one knew the age, the size of the thing inside Rumplestiltskin. No one knew its rage. Once, it was a force like mountains and oceans; an original founder, one might say. It was a being that was vast creation, but also a destroyer. It ate its own children. It ate time and shit out other dimensions.It didn’t die. It could not (would not) die. As the Sidhe, it shrank itself. Its underground was a human host; human, no more.Rumplestiltskin had gone wildly mad, in the beginning. It was a pleasurable derangement as he was taken, as he learned to surrender himself to the demon.Oh, but it felt good. Madness. To be unafraid of anything. Why would darkness fear the dark? The wild madness said feed, feed, feed; and that was all he did. He thought not with brains, but with blood. He had a hard-on for murder, for torture.He entered any given establishment, incited a sickly fear within its people, then smiled at his audience. Pointing at each person, he said, “Eenie, meeny, miny, moe.” Silly sheep; there was no ‘moe’. They would all be slaughtered.To comfort them, he patted heads in a duck-duck-goose game. So many ways to pass the time and pick them off, singing to oneself. He patted and said, “One-two-three-four-five-six-seven. All good children go to heaven.”Who knew? Maybe they did. Now, with certainty, Rumplestiltskin knew there was a hell. It was part of his origin. It lived inside him. The wild madness eventually burned itself out and became embers. It was easily stoked, but the wildness guttered. Rumplestiltskin began to surface. He’d been content to remain in the shadows and watch through big, childlike eyes as the demon ran amok. He felt safe, sheltered; a different sort of love. He was quietly observing, learning on the fly.It was oddly like coming up for air. He and the demon slowly took on an even footing, and Rumplestiltskin began to think. Without the element of fear, of hunger to cloud and override everything, he realized… he was clever. He was a clever, thoughtful man. It had been out of place in a world where brute force was the key to survival.Now none was more brutal, more final than he. He relaxed into this fact. He had a clever mind and the force of a demon.The demon also gave him a long, long line of sight. It went far into the past and stretched far into the future. It also went up and down, it zig-zagged; time and dimension, other worlds, stories that walked and talked. Hello, I am Sorrow. Hello, I am Magic.He became very clever, indeed.But, not clever enough to keep his son. It was the first and not the last sorrow. It was the greatest sorrow.Why couldn’t the boy see? Yes, he was terrible, he’d given the Ogres competition when it came to mass killings. He laughed like God and purged the world of sinners. He couldn’t be caught or controlled.But, he was on Baelfire’s side. He protected his son; all of his power belonged to Baelfire. Once the madness subsided, he went about amassing wealth for him. They would leave the hovel. Baelfire would live in a castle, a fortress, and magic would do his bidding. He would never hunger, he would want for nothing. In no way would his son ever be subjugated.Baelfire was too good. His sense of right and wrong had been nurtured by Rumplestiltskin, himself, and was steadfast.But I didn’t know, Rumplestiltskin tried to tell him. When he was a man, he didn’t know people were evil. He could see it, now. The evil within him could scent it out like a bloodhound. People cared about themselves, alone. Some whom Baelfire might try and protect had done unspeakable things. Mothers were insidiously jealous of daughters. Fathers beat or fucked their children. Or both. Children, the elderly, those lacking power bore the brunt of one crime after another. They were sold, traded, neglected, left to die of hunger and exposure. Children could be currency; the elderly were merely useless.Protect these people? Unthinkable. Heinous. All of his old lessons fell flat in light of all he could now see. Almost no one was innocent. Almost no one was good.Yet Baelfire was innocent. He was good. He still loved Rumplestiltskin and wanted to save his father. He outsmarted his father when he sought out other magical forces. In goodness and innocence, so alluring to the Dark One, Baelfire had engineered the first sorrow.Away went his son, and Rumplestiltskin wanted to vomit with the memory of it. Oddly, the Dark One would not allow vomiting; its host never accomplished any sort of upheaval or purge. Rumplestiltskin’s body retched, organs and bones shifting, but sorrow, shame and remorse stayed inside; vile, acidic, corrosive.His shame was that he could not (would not) be parted from his power. Neither he nor the demon would tolerate it. Up until the very last moment, Rumplestiltskin thought; there’s another way. I’ll find another way.Then Baelfire was gone, sucked into another world. There was no other way. How long between then and the little maid? The demon never died, never slept, and always fueled the man. Rumplestiltskin lost a sense of time.There was madness; Phase two. It was no longer a madness of bloodlust, though killing had not lost its place. Rumplestiltskin still fed from it, fed the Dark One. He could do it casually or righteously, a quickie or something more courted and committed. It had replaced sex; it nourished his body in a similar manner.Even so, he wasn’t driven. He wasn’t wild. Sorrow over Baelfire had long taken root and sent up bitter shoots. He occupied many of his hours trying to find his son. Time made him doddery. He became… weirder. He smiled a lot, and even he was uncertain of what it was that made him smile. Voices in his head. Bits of nursery rhyme. Some funny thing associated with duck-duck-goose. Memories of his life, of people, long dead, who still seemed to move around him.This was the new madness. It was quiet. It thought a great deal and tried to forget itself in books. It took the raw element of power that had fed Rumplestiltskin for so long and began to hone in on the magic.It was a crafty, busy, tinkering, magical madness. It hummed to itself, counted on its fingers and took things apart. Contraptions, magical objects, people. It stared at the chaos of all it had disassembled and saw new forms, new patterns. Sometimes it saw answers.As he’d wanted for Baelfire, Rumplestiltskin now lived in a fortress, a large estate. He was a lord; others bowed and scraped and hopped-to.He was alone. He had no real idea why he’d made the deal to end one random lord’s war with the Ogres. He’d begin to feel that Ogre take-over was a symptom of a land-gone-corrupt, driven by its people, worthless, who needed a good exterminating. He was content to let the Ogres run ramshackle and stomp them all, like grapes into a ghastly wine.Instead, he’d heeded an appeal and presented a contract to take the lord’s daughter in return. Why? They all assumed he nurtured unnatural fantasies of rape-in-captivity. The thought had crossed his mind.In truth, he hadn’t really had a plan. He took a quick glance at the girl; pretty. A bit May-December, but she seemed to have a brain. The lord annoyed him; he didn’t seem especially big on brains. The fiancé annoyed him even more.These people had nothing he wanted, certainly nothing he needed. He looked again at the girl and thought, well. Why not? It would be a pity for an Ogre to tear her to pieces, eat her up. In her case, surely the whole was better than the parts.He’d made the deal.It was like having a mere acquaintance over for a sleepover. Awkward, yet he’d danced around, hopped and clapped, for he had a bit of company to play with. He somewhat recalled play.Once, Baelfire would hide. As a toddler he would find a hidey-hole, then Rumplestiltskin would be the Big Bad Ogre. He’d lurch and stomp and bellow loudly about the aroma of boy-meat and picking his teeth clean with boy-bones. Baelfire always gave himself away, bursting into ticklish, nervous giggles, thrilled with the play-terror of near-death.Wasn’t that fun, Rumplestiltskin thought? He kept his new maid locked-up; she was his captive, his hostage after all. When he let her out he played stalking games. He became invisible and followed her, boots ringing out on stone. He pulled her hair. A time or two he lifted her skirt and took a peek at what could only be called bloomers. Puzzling. Must be a rich-girl-thing; Milah had always been naked beneath her heavy skirt.By then, the maid was onto him. She flounced her skirt back into place and blushed, very cross indeed. She shouted to the air that he was rude.All of the life he’d snuffed out, the blood he’d waded through and the minds he’d hopelessly twisted with a terrible onslaught of evil, and she settled on rude.He began to think her rather funny. He made faces, jokes. He was well pleased when she tried hard not to laugh or smile, but it happened, anyway. He found himself often in the act of simply watching her, studying her. Like his son, she seemed good. She was innocent in the same awful way, thinking the best of everyone,Even him.He enjoyed having her accompany him when he set forth on business. How differently his enemies, his business associates and victims looked upon him, a fresh and pretty thing on his arm. She was well behaved, docile in these moments. Others assumed he bedded her. He allowed the assumption.She claimed to have fallen in love. It was not possible. He knew it wasn’t possible; she was locked away with him, lonely and dependent on him for her survival. She was surprised he wasn’t inclined to rape or beat her, and it made her curious as to his true nature. Quick-minded, she was enamored by his books and enchanted by his magic.But, love? Rumplestiltskin found he wanted it to be true, and the want was an irritant. Love meant openness, vulnerability. In fact, she craved exactly those things from him. It wouldn’t do. Already he’d spent too much time staring at her pretty face, wondering about her. He should have been at his work, his great and endless project. A Curse that would cross dimensions and build a bridge to his son.The more insistent she became, hot and dewy in her need and frustration, the more he doubted her. She wasn’t as good as one might first believe. Her love was conditional.I love you, she declared, passionate with belief. Rumplestiltskin heard words she did not say; I will give you my love if you will change. I love you, but not all of you.He wouldn’t change. There was no longer room in his life for compromise. He was the Dark One and the Dark One was him, and this was his marriage, it was to this he was espoused. It was to this he would remain faithful. He spat ugly words at her, he called her a liar. He said she wasn’t good and he didn’t want her. He told her Baelfire was the love of his life; no other would hold his heart.Like Baelfire, she tried to extinguish the Dark One, to separate Rumplestiltskin from his power. To know her love, the warmth and comfort of her, he had to choose. He chose power.Well. What the hell did she expect? He’d thought, for a time, that his heart was broken. It wasn’t. After the loss of his son, there was hardly a heart to break. His heart was injured; he had regrets. He was now lonely in his aloneness and, for years, this had not been the case.True heartbreak came later. In another world. It came when he found his son and the lost him again, this time to death. The loss was final, a wound that would never heal.How could it be right? After so many years devoted to his Curse, so long looking, waiting. To find him, at last, and then…He’d housed Baelfire inside himself, trying desperately to stave off the inevitable. Yet more madness… alone within himself, yet with him, and it. But, it had happened. Baelfire forced his way out and was whole, unto himself. A grown man, he died in Rumplestiltskin’s arms.What remained of his heart died with his son.
No One
There were so many ways to go mad. So many ways to be weak or strong. After so much time, it was difficult to care.Belle appeared and reappeared, in and out of whatever her own story might be, no longer anyone’s maid or captive. After knowing him, she’d learned a measure of distrust and restraint. Sometimes she still declared her love, but her conditions remained. Sometimes she seemed to hate him, to dismiss him. Perhaps it was offensive that she wasn’t enough for him to change. She couldn’t understand; nothing would be enough.It seemed Rumplestiltskin was stuck in the land where Baelfire died. It had been a land without magic, but he’d changed that. There was magic enough and, in truth, some of it had been there, all along. Off and on, he traveled afar, but never for long. To be so far from his last glimpses of his son made him anxious.He felt tired. People, in particular, were tiring. Trifling. Their faces changed, but they never changed. Patterns were tiring. As in weaving, designs repeated. Like time, it was unending. Even killing was tiresome. He found it occasionally necessary… or the Dark One got pent up, blue balls throbbing, and cranked up an animal drive in Rumplestiltskin.Still. He put no effort into it. He looked at his victim and thought, oh you fucking idiot. He twisted a hand and let the Dark One feel the irreparable damage done to a spinal column. Mm, mm, good, said the demon. Sometimes it said, more.Rumplestiltskin was no longer fed by it. He was untouched by the sight of his newly human face and skin; human in appearance, again. Even magic lost any real appeal.Abruptly, his sleep had become true and deep, an unusual thing. He dreamt. His dreams were rich with light and color. He saw things of great beauty, galaxies full of stars and planets, a vast and unknowable dark matter. Beings in the depths of oceans that looked like monsters. He looked upon the grown-up face of his son, a man, with true wonder. How had it come to be? His son was painted in liquid light.The Dark one was getting restless. Tired of him. It woke him from sleep.There are doors, it said. You know this. Go through one, start anew. There is blood yet to shed, there are souls yet to eat. There is magic yet unplundered and power yet unharvested.Rumplestiltskin only sighed. Tired. It was all the same, over and over. He no longer knew who he was. Who was Rumplestiltskin? What did it mean? What was its purpose? Was he here at all, or was he only the machine by which the demon walked?How could he bear to carry on?The demon said, shhhhhh. Lay down, then. Dream. I’ll meet you in your pretty dream. I’ll show you a new world.It rocked him to sleep from the inside. Within the galaxies, the oceans, the demon came to him like love. It reintroduced itself like lust. It seduced. It awakened hunger.