Aedile
Magistrate
As the evening gave way to twilight, teams of slaves fanned out along the rows of crosses that dotted the fields outside the city walls. They peeled the day’s dead off of their respective crosses, hauled the corpses to the grave pits, and dumped their burdens unceremoniously into their final resting places.
The woman, the so-called prophetess, had put on a show to remember, even if she didn’t even make it into her second day on her throne. From the moment the militia led her out of the gates, with the bag of execution implements hanging between her wobbling tits, she had cried and wailed and begged.
“I said no! I rejected this!” She kept crying out. She begged for the onlookers to save her, and she wailed with utter despair as the laughing militia nailed her to the wood.
Even on her cross, she fought harder to survive than anyone the slaves had ever seen. She sucked down water from the sponge they held in front of her. She thrashed and wiggled and danced on the cross, looking to stave off suffocation. She cried out for ropes around her arms, for a sedile, or even a cornu to rest on. The militia laughed at that, played with her a bit. They told her to beg for a cornu, so she did.
“No, not us, bitch! It’s Rome killing you, not us. You want Rome to fuck you while you die, you ask it.”
So she begged Rome, and Rome said no.
All the crying and thrashing tired her out, though, and in the heat of the late afternoon, her lovely legs cramped too bad and she couldn’t push up to get a breath. Her fight to cling to life only killed her sooner. Some of the crucified went away quietly, as if falling asleep. The prophetess was one of the ones who died gurgling, gasping, and struggling.
The last slave to leave looked down at the broken body of the prophetess, dumped in the ditch not far from the cross she had died upon. She looked peaceful. The slave hoped she might indeed find some solace in the next life.
The prophetess did know the exact moment when she died. It felt like a slow awakening from sleep. She was warm, but it was not the same warmth as the sun she had baked under, naked, for the last day of her life. The sweat and blood were gone, and so was the crown of thorns they had given her when her robe, the last clothes she had ever worn, was pulled away.
There was something amazing ahead of her. She could almost see it. A glowing light, the promise of everything her creator had ever promised her. Her heart lept. She was forgiven! She had made the sacrifice anyway! He had not abandoned her! She took one jubilant step, and then the brightness winked out. A single voice tore into the very core of her being, “You rejected me, and I reject you.”
Suddenly the prophetess was falling. The warmth around her began to grow hot. And the darkness became all-consuming around her.
Another voice emerged from the darkness, a whisper, a tickle in the ear like the tongue of a snake. “Welcome, my love,” the serpent said. “How shall we begin?”
Last edited by a moderator:
