The Dragon's Blood (Part 71)
During which Reginmal shows his leniency...
71
Brian Wylde felt fear, great and powerful like he'd not felt since he was a child. Oh, he was a creature of fear himself, and deep down inside him he knew it. He did every deed, committed every action because of it. If he feared something, he disposed of it, crushed it like an insect and removed it from his path, leaving the route clear for his fear to find another target. This was not that fear that drove his every act though, this was something far greater, far deeper. This was a fear of something much more than he was, something that could snuff him out as one snuffed out a candle, quick and easy.
Reginmal towered over his kneeling form. This was no frail old man, though it looked like one. This was heaven and hell incarnate, this was what he'd known during his past life as Lucifer, bringer of light, cast down from the Christian God's glory. This was the source of darkness, the source of evil itself. He knew it, knew that he served it, and knew that he was damned.
While that third eye watched him, focused on him, raped and pillaged his mind, he tried to move. He tried to turn, to find Bishop or his two Lieutenants, to see if they knelt as well, to confirm if this great and terrible weight had brought them to their knees alongside him.
He couldn't move. He couldn't turn his head, couldn't even twitch a finger if he wanted to. There was nothing but he and his master. And Reginmal was his master, absolute and almighty, Wylde was certain of that. He was naught but a tool, a puppet, held aloft by strings, nothing more.
“First, let us dispense with the pleasantries,” Reginmal's voice, twisted and ancient, like the sickly screeches of dying alley cats, finally broke the silence.
Behind them he heard his lieutenants, no his friends that he'd known since childhood, who'd followed him across the vast expanse of that damned ocean to this world of darkness an eternity from their home, scream at the tops of their lungs. He tried to turn his head, to witness their destruction and Reginmal glancing down at him and apparently sensing his intent, released him from his invisible bonds so he could watch.
He caught the last bit of it, what remained of Thomas Phevens and Henry Rufoote was now nothing more than smoldering skeletens, still somehow writhing, reaching their skinless arms out to him, their eyeless sockets begging for aid.
As quickly as he'd turned to watch, he turned back and away from it, wishing to see no more of it. Brian Wylde may have been a monster, may have been one his entire life perhaps, but as he watched his two friends disintegrate into ashes, even he felt anguish, deep and cutting, pull at whatever remained of his soul.
Now was not the time though, he told himself, keeping the tears that threatened to shed from overcoming him. He had to be strong. Brian Wylde was nothing if not a survivor and he'd come this far, become a bloody immortal and he'd be twice damned if he lost it now.
Reginmal turned his glowing blue eyes back to Wylde, focusing his glare on him, that hideous third eye unblinking.
“Now Mister Wylde, now that the sacrifices you've brought me have been dealt with. I will ask you, why have you disturbed the meditations of Mister Bishop and myself?” He asked, his voice soft, as soft as that terrible sound could ever be.
Wylde suppressed the sudden rage Bishop's name threatened to incur within him and braced for his answer. In truth he wasn't certain anymore what he was going to say, his previously carefully prepared presentation had been forgotten to the wind the moment he'd laid eyes upon his terrible master.
“Milord,” he began, hoping beyond hope that he'd used the proper title. “I come before you with news of the utmost importance. I would never dare interrupt your--- meditations without great reason, I assure you.”
Reginmal nodded, his ancient eyes, sunken deep within his cranium, unreadable.
“I come bearing news of a stranger in our midst, a traveler, but not of the natives of this land... he is a European, here among us. And he is no man, Milord, no, not a man at all.”
End Part 71
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