The rats, the rats, the rats. They had left him to the rats. They had locked in a room, a cage, and peered on him and watched as the last threads of his restraint, finely spun and pulled too-taut already, were gnawed away by the sharp teeth and clicking claws of the rats, the rats, the rats. They stole his food. They climbed over his straitjacketed form at night and chittered in his ear. They nipped at his cheeks, his lips, his toes, hard enough to sting and he bled, he bled, he bled, gold painting the cold floor of the cell, but always it was gone by morning and no amount of anything–no shouting, no screaming, no crying, no begging, no bargaining–could work to convince them that the rats tormented him so when the doctors went away. He had cried until the salt in his tears had dried his face into leather, until he could call forth the water of them no more, and still they refused to believe.
But this, he became convinced, was the burden of a god. Divinity in secrecy. Quiet torments, small but innumerable, impossible to bear, and no sign of suffering despite their best efforts.
The rats, the rats, the rats.
The fools.
They left him be too long, too much time alone with the rats. Rats are not asps. They are scavengers, not predators, they can be whispered to, reasoned with, if one is willing to open oneself up to the divinity whose power it is to touch the instinct of all living things. He was Dionysus reincarnate, Dionysus divine: to seduce the rats to do his bidding was no great feat. He whispered promises of ambrosia and wine and they gnawed, gnawed, gnawed through the straps of his restraints rather than his flesh.
He broke their neck before he fled his cell.
Stone and mortar cannot hold a god.
Just ask Pentheus–his head is with his mother yet.
Shaking and alone and bleeding and blind, as insensible now to the mortal world as he was removed from the warm skies of Olympus, the god stumbled down alleyways and fumbled around turns, snaking his way–like the asp, the asp, the asp–through the seedy streets of London. He was in no state to tend to himself, but he was better out and walking and able snap the neck of those things which would gnaw on him now than he was locked high away for the rats to nibble on.
Lost, and cold, and fading, his legs at last gave out beneath him, and Dionysus slid into a terrible cold puddle beneath a terrible cold wall on a terrible, cold side of the city. The edges of his vision were black. They had poisoned him too long with enemas and pills and lies; his divine life was fading, fading, fading fast, his thread stretching thin, ready at last to yield to the shears of Atropos.
Twice born, once dead. He had a balance in blood to pay.
And yet a figure loomed in his flickering vision. Tall. Grand. Bold. Broad. And dark, dark. Dark even against the overcast skies of the city and the unwashed bricks of the slums. Godsend. Hades come for him personally. He smiled in spite of himself, mustering what little remained of his strength to lift one frail hand to him.
“Blood…of my blood. It has been too long. Take me…home.” Please he almost said–but could not, not as the light faded…faded…faded away.
And all blackness. And all was peace. But none was restful.
The call that reached his ears was nearly too sure to doubt, though it was delivered by the personification of London’s unfortunates. The monster should have doubted and even dismissed, as he had been taught by Men who thought themselves his betters, for it was at best confusion and at worst a scam, but he had long nursed in secret the kind and loving heart which his creator stitched within him. And though it was unlikely that any grave-robbed part of him was family to this fainted Man, or that he would have so eagerly reached for him if the recognition were true-- for it would have been marred by death and the ugliness of Victor’s work, the creature could not resist the invitation of familiarity... of acceptance.
He waited only a moment, only long enough to be sure that the man was well and truly without consciousness before looming over him, lifting him up from the stinking puddles ever fed by London’s perpetual rain. Left to the elements he would likely soon die, the cold sapping away his life little by painful little until he breathed his last. Caliban, ever quick to attach himself to the miserable and wretched like himself, refused Death this soul and hauled him away to the only sanctuary left him.
Cities like London were hardly repositories of abandoned buildings and lonely acres. Quite the opposite, the city was crowded-- overly so, teeming with starving hopeful poor who if they accomplished nothing else replenished their dying ranks all too regularly. That said nothing of the immigrants come from far and wide, seeking a plethora of dreams and opportunities. Lately even the rich and noble classes felt the discomfort of this crowding, which they naturally turned into a sport of sorts, inventing the trend of slumming since they were forced to share space with the unwanted. Indeed, few places were left at all for a monster of so frightening a visage to take shelter in. He’d been driven off from tenements and alleys alike by the fellow homeless who could not stomach the sight of him. The Guignol remained closed to him and too dangerous to visit often and he would not even in desperation return to the trap that had been the Putney’s... Gray’s home might have been a sanctuary if they had not been pulled so far apart by their own circumstances but that place too was temporarily shuttered to him, leaving only the lower levels of a run down little church where surprising superstition and the occasional performance from Caliban had rendered the lower levels “haunted” and thereby left alone for his use.
It was there that the man would wake, if he woke at all, surrounded by ancient paintings of Christian saints and low burning that cast more shadows than actual light. There the creature would be, clinging to those shadows, tending to the few personal belongings still left him-- one of which this man now was.
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