The King's Dilemma [Night, the Manticore, Mt. Hades - in Hell]

By: Dennis Siluk
Submitted: 2007-01-17 11:30:21
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The king of Atlantis, Phrygian could meet death at its own terms, bravely enough, but when it came in the form of everlasting bestial hell, demonic figures so familiar, on a daily—if not hourly—scheduling watching your every move it became uncanny and hideous. It was the face of death facing you every minute, the mind never resting. There was no way in which he could direct his course in life, or if he did, he could not hold it but a millisecond, being always observed, and an object of scorn.

As it was, he found no pleasure in existence anymore, if only he could have stumbled on a way to extinguish himself once and for all, he would have tried. Furthermore, there was no way to make a break for freedom, and there was nobody to rescue him—; God was not present or if He was, He was sleeping. This primordial world in which he found himself, plus seclusion, with in the hills, mountains and caves of Mount Hades, the interior of Hell, was the most crude of all places in existence. It was a brutal looking with a harshly treaded civilization, it was called Hell, and it was named properly he thought: no noble, chivalrous or lovable creatures in it at all.

He said to himself aloud (sitting on a rock, chin in hand, overlooking the mountain, to its valleys below, outside his cave): “I simply made the same mistakes most of us do—people do in selecting the road we wish to follow along in life, a course, perhaps given to us at birth, or thereafter, and often the least resistant; thus, I was no different than the majority.” (But of course he was different, he was the king, ruler of most of the known world, he could and did make a difference, more so than most people).

He was mostly correct in his thinking that he had taken the wrong trail in life, and now he was retracing it, step by step, day after day. His problem perhaps was he had no divide in life, and total rulership of the world was his only solution on earth. When he was first made king, the lure of discovering that he had it all in his hands was too much, in consequence, he decided to proceed, take the short distance, not turn back that was his signature for Hell: he wanted it all.

[Hell’s Surroundings] There were no clumps of trees where he was, there on Mount Hades—like what surrounded Atlantis; the landscape here was decayed growth—between him and the dock, much of the land was swampy, muck, but right in front of him it was dry up to the tip of the mountain. On a clear day one could see the restless waters of the gulf advance and retreat.

Curiosity pushed him to take walks down the mountain for a different scene, but not too far down, for there were sentries posted here and there, watching, waiting to torture him, should he leave his prescribed area. The guards eyes seemed to be able to penetrate the dark, the mist, everything.

[Night on Mt. Hades] Hell, whose forbidding walls did not allow any human beings, not cast into hell, to enter, was a strange world for the king to discover—a mysterious land indeed, and he was on its bosom—sort of speaking, at night it was even sores, the land was thence invisible to most inhabitants, accept for the formidable beasts, the demonic beast watching and waiting for savage delights.

At night he often thought about the land, almost with a fascination, if not speculation, it fell upon him as other mysteries of life did, as when he was human, and admired the dark poetry and power of the night.

The whole land of Hell was as if it was brought back to the birth of time, and stamped: ‘So it shall remain,’ (the outer world may advance, and grow but not here, it must remain untouched by God, after He evidently created it; perhaps the first day of creation. (Yes, the king dwelled upon these thoughts and dreams.)

[Fossilized] It was odd, very odd thought the king, pacing his cave one day, thus, he discovered the fossilized remains of something that seemed to have been human, at first he took only a single glance at it, and then it moved, and he examined it closer, it looked to be long-extinct (perhaps as far back as the Triassic Formation). And it moved, and there he was straining to look at these compressed, bones, bones of some demonic-half human, half lion creature, its head like a human, and its lower parts like a lion, it was an ancient Manticore—so he estimated. And it moved again, a third time. To his understanding he must had been cast naked into this stratum of rock mysteriously sometime in prehistory; unquestionably, he could not escape, or he would have; and perhaps to his advantage, and for the better.

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