Diruktober Day 2: Prophet

 Diruktober is a DIR EN GREY themed inktober challenge by re_be_ka_f. I chose to use them as writing prompts to join in on the fun. 

Upon pressing into his eyelids, he could see the reflection of his skull peering back. His shoulders arched with the weight of the chains around him. 

He'd been celebrated, those who spent their whole lives searching for proof of the damned, of angels and demons, all vindicated by he who had ripped a demon from the underworld in the middle of a suburban street. 

That was only the first time, as a middle-schooler who’d heard voices his whole life finally seeing the face of one of them. The beast left a cavernous cleave through the street and every dog in the neighborhood started howling after the half-horse-half-man-all-rot being. 

He was touted on tours of the country to prove the existence of celestial evils, and the desperate— hell, nearly all of them— took that as proof of their saviors, too. 

What did it all mean? Well, he certainly didn’t have answers. All of the creatures would quickly decay, falling to a pile of bones and ash in a few moments and leaving animals to avoid the space for weeks. 

When he’d exhausted himself of being dragged around for the sake of religion, he began to do it for the sake of performance art, his audience expanding to skeptics, believers, and even worshippers of himself, having long abandoned their ideas of what it meant to believe, to have faith. 

With that worship came responsibility that he wasn’t prepared for. 

Groggy and strapped down to a chair, still bound by the theatric adornment of pearls and bastardized religious garments, intentionally ripped and stained, he choked. Before him laid a pile of the same familiar bones and purple ash from each failed attempt as his captors howled at him to bring forth something to prove their side, to prove that there was sacred goodness in the afterlife. Behind him shone a giant, gilded cross. 

He wondered how they would have known, how this could possibly be a way to summon something like that. 

He started to wonder, flecks of spit hurled onto his nose by a half toothless devout follower of some god or another, if he only brought forth horrible things because it was he, himself who was horrible. Was it worth it for that to be recognized by others? To be related to? Or was it simply putting more darkness into this increasingly alarming world? 

He didn’t have the answers to any of this, he said it again, blood and drool sliding from between his lips as he looked up at the bright light being shone in his face. 

A being appeared, just like usual, but this time it was so bright that it scorched and scrubbed his captors, and the bones on the floor, the ash they nestled among washed away in a flourish. A ball of light bound by its own chains and straps pulsated and bubbled before him before gently fading away. 

Then, he was alone again, perhaps a prophet after all.