Demons and Monsters and Men

Used to the cold here and the silent shiver of the salt-flavoured wind off the sea. Used to the quivering masses, burnt embers of light to warm us in the long, northern nights. The screams would come, and the maddening; we were taking nothing but hearing so much. The moans and the memories, the torment and terror, are but slowly slipping away, less and less as the rocks and the grey-blue choppy water kept the calling at bay.

When the prisoners mumbled into dirty, shaking fingers, when I lurked off in the corridor, a brief moment of respite, of holding my hunger, they whispered of a prison.

How little they understood.

Man creates his own world, of fences and gates, of space and place and time but it's all the same, all a way of measuring off what doesn't truly belong to him. Monster and demon and pet, we all need to eat the same, need to breathe in the same air and feel the same warm blanket of shelter draped around our shivering form.

Sometimes I'd pretend that the gasp of prisoners, the tempting scent of the Kiss, a new one being brought by shuddering and crying no, maybe this one would be mine to take. A full meal, a night's rest at last.

But no, it was a simpering wasteland, and I tried to tell myself this rock was the world now, to cling to my earth as if pebbles and sand and rusted iron was all there ever was, as if a faint glimmer of sunlight was the same thing as satisfaction.

When He came, the gravel slipped, crumbling to the sand from its foundation. We glided outside, as if drawn by the glare of the sun even as it hurt our useless eyes.

I stood, fading heavy robe to robe with my kind, as if we were there to listen, as if we were there to serve.

The waves of the sea were choppy. I clung to the rail as the cold air blew across the lesions of my face. They fed us on the last of the quivering prisoners, the few at least that they had not taken for their own purposes. (I felt a thread stretch, a pain of loss as they pulled those away, washed them and fed them life and the brutal heat of hope.)

They didn't care for us, not at all, and stood back, guarded with gleaming silver that stung each crevice, that broke to the bone. But theirs were pretty words, so full of life and far from mumbles fading ever faster, out of reach, away. I could hear the echoing kerplunk (feel the burning emptiness) breaking the wake behind us several times through the journey and no one went back to find them.

"There will be more," a high-pitched voice sang, and I listened but knew nothing. "We will give you the world."

The world, he said, as if it were a jewel to hold tight between our callused fingers, the world. But there was only the rock fading into dripping memories behind us, only what was given.

I knew nothing.

Land was soft and sinking, melting in the late spring sun.

I hid from the sun at first, dwelled in shadows and hollowed rooms.

I must admit that I went for the familiar. For the old rotting structures, for the old and the ill, the almost-dead and the mourning.

It was so easy, so flush. A sneaking in, barely noticed, a shiver and a sigh and by the time they saw, they'd given themselves, prostrate and ready.

I became reckless. I lost track of my kind as we split south, through ant hills and villages and speckled bustling life clicking on the cobblestones. Still, I clung to the shadows, for that is where I felt at home after all those northern stony years.

Night had a life all its own, a life of shouts and whispers. There was no in-between, no soft slope upwards. It was easy prey fumbling alone nearly-dead and ready and loud shouts, blood poisoned by forced-in joy and wild groups. But the groups always scattered as I fell in with them, leaving the weakest hobbled in their silks for me to claim.

I could not see, could only hear, could only feel the heat as it came closer, as it warmed me to the light and as it burned me. I learned to live by scent in those days, the stink of surrender, the acrid smell of guards sent down.

As the time passed, as I grew used to the heavy bliss of satisfaction, the world came back to me. Began to feel more like the chilly rock I had learnt as the world, to the air that was thick between my raw fingers and the feel of readiness as I closed in on what I needed.

There were others now, and when I got close, I could feel the rubbing of the ice, the melting of the air between us.

Come to me, I would feel in my scarred and scabby flesh, in a way that never came at Azkaban. Come to me, and we shall make another.

The space closed, the night grew darker around my blind eyes, and I felt the earth sink lower as there was nothing. Nothing but this gravelly touch, this soft waving rhythm that felt like home, and this touch that felt like the fresh-brought meal always just out of reach until there, finally, given.

And new life came, and the night grew darker. I could feel it in my flesh as if I had the Sight.

Man makes a prison for those he cannot stand to see free, for the killers and the thieves and those who break the rules, who remind him that the rules are written in a thin, silken thread that glistens when the light is right and breaks when touched too deeply.

Man makes a prison of his demons, for that is where he feels safe.

And as the night grows dark and heavy, a veil around the terrors that I remember (the life just out of reach and the walls that crumbled but did not fall), I feel safe and I feel free as I walk the shadowy perimeter of the prison.