Her flesh was pale and sickly, in places it rainbowed scarlet, blue and purple. She didn’t mind the bruises; she knew she had no choice but to suffer. She lifted her head slightly from the yellowed pillow and looked down at her lifeless naked corpse. Her bones, so brittle, clicked and popped as she strained to see herself as he must see her. She couldn’t feel her body but she could feel an iciness, which seeped out from her once radiant core. She had lost her soul. She had lost everything. She had been pretty, now she was hideous. She had been a child once, agile and lithe and robust, bursting with eternal energy. She was still young but her body was so disfigured it was hard to define her age. She counted her age by the poisonous skewer marks in her wasted limbs and torso. Sometimes, she couldn’t be sure that this polluted carcass really belonged to her at all.

She couldn’t move from the bed where she lay. She was delicate and frail. The man would be back soon to feed her. Then he would be back to abuse her afresh. She closed her eyes. She could hear her heart gently beating. She wished that it would stop. Listening to its faint rhythm she fell into a sleep where she dreamt of the heat of the sun as she turned gently in an orbit of calm and of candles lit in a church where she knelt and prayed. She dreamt of whispered voices of choirs and a crown of thorns. She remembered forests of green and a realm of light that she was once sovereign over.

When she woke he was there. He gave her bread and water. He gave her the drug. He gave her this quasi life. He sat on the wooden cot next to her, crinkling the starched linen and creaking the amber wood. He read to her from the book. She understood his words through a mist of vapour clouds. Soon it would be over. He was her god and he was her disciple. He held the book in one hand and caressed her face with the other. She knew he loved her, more than his own life, but still he would rape her, still he would come like a plague to strip her of all that was righteous. He would come to her like a child, clean-faced and guileless, but he would leave barrenness in his greedy careless wake. He would leave behind his legacy of desolation and devastation.

He had put down the book but still she heard his words. He spat out his sermon like snake venom spit from a bitten wound, chanting the lines, preaching in her face. Slowly he warmed her rigid flesh with his hands; slowly she felt her life course again through her veins. As the drug took hold and his words grew louder she felt herself rise to his touch, like a cat, she showed him how to stroke her. She ceded to his vehement passion. She glowed with fake new life, crisp but useless like counterfeit notes. An ersatz veneer skimmed thinly over a rotting and decaying body.

In the dim light she watched as he stood up and shed his black robe like a skin. He emerged from this jet membrane like a caterpillar, spreading butterfly wings to encapsulate her being. She closed her wearied eyes and yearned for their flesh to meet, only then could she attempt to steal his life, only then, while he was prone, could she end her suffering. At last he climbed on top of her, covering her small skeleton. She writhed in ecstasy as he penetrated her pitiful frame. Struggling against him was futile. He was too potent and too powerful. He had made himself master of all he purveyed, he had empowered his evil progeny beyond all morality. The meek shall inherit. Was she the meek of whom he chanted? She yielded to his needs, willing to absorb his evil, willing to sacrifice, willing to die here beneath him. She effervesced at his touch, but like champagne bubbles rising and vanishing, her vivacity was soon extinct. But as he ground his hips into hers, and scratched fresh wounds into her skin, and made bloody the wounds she already had, she knew she would not die. Every day she would survive, everyday she would bring new hope with her, everyday she would resist his attempts to overthrow her kingdom.

At last, his addiction was fed. He lay on her, his heavy weight crushing her puny lungs, while he took restorative gasps into his own. For only a moment he looked into her face, for only a second he would recognise his destruction of her. Fleetingly, her eyes glistened like molten rock; he would not look too deeply for fear of the mirrored reflection of himself that might be visible there. To be witness to his own evil would destroy him, better that he be blind to his holocaust. Better that he never bare witness to his annihilation of her. Quickly he removed his body from hers, leaving behind a string of slimy mucus pearls which carried his vile seed to her barren womb. His inheritance was now her subjugation.

It was over; nothing could now be done to save her. He would leave nothing behind but a legacy of oblivion. Like a killer in the night, he would slay her and pass on by. He would not look upon her wretched corpse again, never see the streams of blood flowing and caking on the dry earthen floor. He donned his formless robe and with his hollow weighty tome, he was gone. He would not return, he was lost to her forever. This naïve offspring that she had so lovingly spawned. His destruction and downfall created by his own hand. His books and his creeds the cause of universal wars, catapulting his doomed species into fatal famine and deadly disease. No meteor reign of terror this time. No nuclear Armageddon to wipe his memory from this orb, only a book of vacant sentiment. Tomorrow, a new dominion will come. A new demon will rise in ascendance. A new force will come to overwhelm her. The new seed will not give her time to recuperate her strength. The new army of evil will bleed her dry. It will ravage her and rip her apart while glorying in its tormented birth. Like the head of a new born child wedged and screaming in her vaginal passage. A new hideous species of decadence and devastation spawned from her own mortal loins. She closed her eyes and again thought of death. Tears fell and anger welled inside. Maybe it was time to die. Maybe it was over. She felt incapable of enduring this recurring horror, she knew they would slay her in the end, they could take but they could never replace what they stole from her. Maybe she could muster enough power to end it all here and now. Take her own life instead of them taking hers. A suicide to make her once again victorious. After all, there was nothing left for them to inherit. A poisoned sky, a barren soil, scorched deserts of wilderness in which little or nothing survived. A remnant of green here and there the rags and tatters of this once resplendent blue jewel which was so beautifully set in the mass of a black velvet void. She could be the thief. The robber of souls. The reaper. It was hers to give, and hers to take. It would be a just and pure retribution. And she knew now how she could bring this into force. Slowly she edged her limp carcass off the wooden pallet and slumped to the crusty earth floor. She gathered all her strength together as she scratched her way inch by inch across the dirt. Foul smelling soil rubbed into her gaudy wounds and tiny stones scraped her angled bony legs as they dragged lifelessly behind her. The stench of death filled her mouth. She reached the preachers room and retched as she witnessed his legacy. She saw his arsenal of doom. His clumsy dusty books, his needles, his guns, his hate for his fellow man. This was how she would remember him, but at least only she would remember him, and she would be dead soon. Soon he would be nothing, this intelligent protégé, her last hope of survival, how could she have known he would turn out so? Her nurtured creation was the raper and pillager of her sanctified light. She took a needle. She took the poison. She let the toxin-filled syringe enter her vein. Then she took another and another till the drug took over. Her existence was already so polluted, but this final contamination would free her at last. Exhausted she fell to the earth once more; she breathed the dust and let her life fade. Inside she wept like a child, through her inner tears she knew she was yet still a child, but she had to leave. Her suicide was at the same time a merciful matricide. Like a mother killing herself in order to abort her unwanted unhealthy foetus. Wiping out this mutant strain of genealogy. Massacring his lineage. No more would he come. No more would he feast on her life giving gifts. No more would he feel the glory and protection of her bosom. He poisoned her existence, but here and now she would poison her heart and destroy the new progeny to set her world and all other worlds free forever. Her breathing slowed to a faint whisper, she could hear him scream inside her as her body died. He had brought her to this, now he would die within her. A sparkling ice-cold tear seeped from her cloudy dead eye and like a diamond, it glittered brightly with life amid the rancid carpet of dust, then it was gone.