Liturgy Of Nobility

Warning: Scenes pertaining to abusive power dynamics with sexually suggestive themes are present.

There Will Be Blood is the title of a movie but only I know that. The man who spoke it to me in the graveyard last night does not because he doesn’t watch movies. None of them do. Preceding this dire warning forecast an address whispered to me was found to be nonexistent.

Up until now the addresses or coordinates for the next meet up spot were the last words spoken to me and acted as an adjournment of the meeting. But this last time the man had turned back and in plain view those four words uttered and these men are more powerful than any Oil Barrons in the early 20th Century. They are more powerful than Oil Barrons now. They call themselves Suzerains. Because of my birthright I’m called to join them. The hidden paths they designate to ensure secrecy of our various rendezvous remains are so specific, so vividly complex, ending up in places I did not know could possibly exist in this world is beyond inevitability. At some point on every journey so far things fall apart, all I know is lost, darkening quicksands begin to swallow up all around but then the man I’m supposed to meet is in front of me and I am where all is meant to be. 

But I can’t be where all is meant to be tonight. 

Which means they will find me.

They find me I don’t even know where. I cannot remember the last place I was before this. They do this on purpose of course. Everything must be left behind. Everything must now be taken from those existing under subjugation. This is the mantra. I’ve been breathing in smoke smelling something like funeral pyres from ceremonies commenced thousands of years before in tombs of stone. My father is the head of all this. A Suzerain of Suzerains. He alone will decide the fate of his son this night and his judgements are unerring. His hopes remain high but hope is faith and faith is sin. This is what I was told at the first rendezvous a now unknown amount of time ago. It could not have been long but time runs divergent in ceremonies scaled with the gravity of galaxies. Sovereign Celestials. Imperial Beings.

The walls now surrounding me are covered in moss and underneath the fading smell of sacramental ash a moisture hangs in the air. The walls made from ancient stones, the moss something even older. Six wooden chairs sit in front of where I am spent kneeling on the stone ground. From somewhere beyond the background a choir is heard, its hushed swell faintly rising and falling. Whatever drug they gave me is starting to ware. 

I saw this in a dream once. 

It was at the end, just before awake. I had been running through a dark forest which lead to an even darker field yet laid strewn with the bodies of soldiers in human and other forms. Some appeared to have scales and tales protruding out from their armor. Twisted in pools of viscera, human and all others emanating images out frozen harmoniously in agony.

My breath steaming, racing through them, feeling and breathing exactly as I do now.

At the battlefield’s end two men were guarding holding giant scepters what at first seemed to be nothing. A passing moment upon looking back towards the space guarded by that scepter cross a castle tower had emerged, grown up from the ground, upwards to the sky, and I was granted entry. 

Inside was a wassail. A banquet of the brass. A coronary carousal of such depraved decadence one wonders what might be left after this? My father sat naked at the end of a long table, drunk on wine which he gulped generously from an enormous golden challis bespeckled by jewels the size of fists. The length of the table was covered with the bodies of naked young women being used as plates. They lie motionless, cherub esque, sauces and juices of meats and everything else spread all over their figures. Men sit about them, dressed in garments royal stained with blood and drink alike. Wolves howled and the sounds of these beasts eating were like hyenas hearing a last call. They slurped bones white as new and stuffed in their mouths sides of ancient delicacies faster than any could chew them and they chewed vigorously yet seemed to swallow things whole. 

My father, sitting at the head, smiling. He wore a crooked crown and was the only one who seemed satisfied with what he had already consumed. At my first step towards his throne a shadow in robe came on from the left and swooped, turning me to the right, guiding me away from his gaze, blocking my view of this astride this holy banquet whisking we went away along on this new path and it smelled exactly as it does now.

He lead me to the room with the six wooden chairs with its aura of past rites and its decider of fates. 

I awoke when the bell tolled as it does so now. The robed figures filling up the six chairs before me sit stiller than statues buried in sand. The choir sounds have been replaced with a chant crescendoing steadily. The chant is in Latin yet to me its meaning could not be clearer.

The morning I awoke from the dream my father was sitting at the kitchen table and in time had a large breakfast served to us and I was the last to finish and just before I got up to leave the table I glanced briefly at him across the way and he smiled at me exactly as he’d done in the dream. Exactly as he does now. In his hands each one holds chains serving as leashes and in the collars at these leashes end constrained necks of two humans both on hands and knees like dogs. 

Your dominion lies in their subjugation is what is said, a reminder of what I must take in this ceremony of primacy. 

The man chained at his left appears homeless and is dressed in tatters. At the right angle adjacent is a woman young and clean dressed in revealing garments of silk. A sword is placed at the meridian me and these souls meant to serve as my subjects share. The six hoods in the six chairs pull back their covers and reveal in a moment of silence the faces of men who have destroyed the earth across the eons and will stop at nothing save for feasts of flesh. They live as gods and sacrifices of bloodlines whole serve as appetizers. You know who they are. The men throughout history whose appetites can never be quelled. You know who they are. Men who view quarter as weakness and kindness in contempt and revel only in domination supreme. They are the reason the good suffer meekly on earth and the reason the willing reign down in wraths of fury over those who carry sacred clemency held so dearly within their hearts.

These are the men I am being called to join. And if I fail their test hell is just a word. It will be shaped and attuned to my suffering alone.

This is the power they wield.

These are the rulers of those we think rule.

The man and woman chained at the neck on either side. My maker in the middle. I pick up my sword. There Will Be Blood. They drink your milkshakes. They drink all milkshakes. The woman looks up at me with eyes crystal and blue and conveying a message and the mans sobs do the same and my father, at the apex, smiling. My sword raised and it strikes and now I know the truth. 

There is no escape unless the castle appears to you and you do what must be done too.