Two Eyes Cenote tiburon

morning broke, though soto could scarcely see it. he knew by the rhythms of the earth: the cessation of hoarse-throated frogs, the cadence of birdsong — he raises his head from the dark floor and begins. 

first he’d sang for safiya — but now the full-throated croon that crescendoed in that dark crypt sang for @Khusobek. 

filled to brimming with the ribald humor and machismo of his kind, soto’s song arcs and searches — where is the father?  

and packed around his feet is a new gift.

heartsick and wearied, the crocodile had slept not an iota. no measure of contemplation had assured him that this was not his fault. it was, and he bent his neck beneath that knowing yoke.

desert doves raised their voices as the captive turned his own upon the listening ear. khusobek stood with his back to the cell, watching the shafts of light grow more beautiful as the sun rose slowly in its morning glory.

sand slipped from his heels, evidence of an early walk when the watches had changed.

"o, Ra. have you come to witness this great hour?"

his smile was neat. kind. relieved. he turned and strode to the prison door, knowing that the thorned vine hung still in shadow. nothing was said; only the observational and detached look of an anatomist rested there upon the father's face.

he too, had his own gift.

earlier that morning, soto briefly considered presenting khusobek with a steaming pile of his own rancid shit: here is what i think of you; here is the measure of your worth, reduced to filth and excrement — 

a satisfying scenario, but not one which soto envisions would turn in his favor. soto gets the impression this hardened man was not one for sentimentality; it’s in the way his eyes glitter like the back of a beetle. armored. hard. 

his ballad ends as the man’s figure is haloed by aureate slants of light. the pleasantry in khusobek’s eyes reminds soto of the genial look sell-swords come to master. 

khusobek, he motions to the objects at his feet. 

a hideously large grub, rudely unearthed and curled around itself. around it, in a painstakingly placed circle that mimics early hominid drawings of the sun, were the white bands of machiavelli’s hair that soto had spent all morning collecting.   regalo, 

he offers, curious to experience the man’s reaction — and waiting, hoping almost —  for the captor to strike his prisoner. 

he had yet to learn soto’s pleasures, but he would come to know them soon enough.

hearing his own name in that ugly mouth twisted rage inside khusobek. "beautiful, soto," he heard himself say softly. "it resembles you."

he lunged, shoving the man's face with brutal force down, down, the grub popping audibly beneath the pressed nose.

and he held soto there, applying a steadily greater weight to the back of the man's neck with his heavy paw; he lowered himself by inches, crushing the captive in a controlled way which kept just enough breath in the hateful songbird lungs.

"i am tired of your singing."

a rough cackle pressed like gravel from soto’s throat as he sees khusobek look upon his art; khusobek must know the prisoner’s offering was an interpretive reflection of himself. 

soto knows. he knows a scared man cannot wield power, same as he knows a scared man cannot love. without love or power, khusobek was one of the thousand faceless. a soft-spined worm that wolves swallowed without second thought. 

his captor moves against him. soto shoulders round, his thick neck rigid under the press of the crocodile’s teeth. pain — in all its beautiful rays of arousing pleasure — erupts under his skin.  

held forcibly against the ground, soto feels a stirring come to life below his belly. khusobek’s breath, acrid with twisting adrenaline, rolls over him — a miasma so potent a constellation of microscopic reactions surge to life within soto.

with the captor’s grimacing face pressed close to his, soto exhales in a wheezing laugh, dragging his hungry tongue across the salty plains of khusobek’s wrinkled nose in a gesture that could be called intimate were it not for the contempt darkening his gold eyes. haz lo peor, khusobek. 

there was one thing khusobek could not  inspire in the warped halls of soto’s soul —  and that was fearing pain.

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a kiss.

it sauntered through his blood and lit to boiling-point the remnants of those things eset had left behind; it spoke to him, the laughter, the kiss.

soto was to pain as he was to her power.

o, Ra! you have joined me in this bloodied matrimony.

in answer khusobek licked blood in deliberate linger from the edge of soto's ear; a hot huff of copper-toned air spoke of the captive's delectation. "i kept a flayed man alive for nine days." let the brute's cell be his confessional; there was no one here to understand.

"she asked me to do it, hatshepsuun did. he was not a treasonous man. he was not a corrupt noble; he was not even a base thief or rapist. he was, soto, a merchant who sold to her handmaid a gemstone that was found to be fake."

he deftly stepped; he rolled the man to his side and sent a blow there, hard beneath the ribcage; "i found him. i brought him. 'teach him what it means to deceive a god.'" another blow. another, harder still. he listened for soto's wheeze of breath. "the first day i stripped the flesh from his arms. the second, his legs. i salted him on the third. on the fourth, his back. on the fifth, soto, on the fifth, salt again. it preserves the wounds, you understand."

he let the man go; he aimed a kick and stood over the captive. "on the sixth, i let him taste water. on the seventh his face, the eighth, his eyes. i did not kill him on the ninth day. i put him outside for the vultures."

"he stole from a god. you looked at my daughters." khusobek's smirk was a bleak unfurled thing; "how much more you deserve than that."

down there in the dirt, soto knows who he is.

a laugh forces its way through his chest. this man with all his words, his violence -- he’s met many like him. every one of them terrified to acknowledge their own mortality. the captor was far removed from the dirt but even he could not scrape the sludge from his soul that betrays his origin.

 there on the prison floor, there's no delusion. every card stacked face-side up, every move mapped four steps in advance. soto grunts beneath the first kick, so forceful it claws right through his lungs. fuck.  

for all khusobek's talk of gods and righteousness, soto might ask: what kind of god gets deceived by a merchant?

another kick. brutal. violent. each blow another weight to the tilting scale. soto quivers, but does not yelp. 

he wheezes a spray of blood and wonders if this man's soul runs blacker than his own. how does one as lovely as his dulce lluvia de verana spring from such basic filth? perhaps beautiful souls are what pearls are to oysters: the shell, the slurping moving guts that live their lives in the dark, the parsing of rot and filth and excrement all to produce a single, exquisite pearl.

more words. many more. blood tickles soto's ears. his sides heave in exertion.  every receptor in his body is fired, the pain forcing its blade-like talons up his spine. bad villains and rough-shod thespians share this in common: the world's their reluctant, enduring stage. how many men's heads are lopped off mid-monologue? did they love anything more than the wagging of their tongue?

every blow fuels the budding power growing beneath the python’s underside. every strike feeds that hungry, lonesome thing as it coils, waiting for its moment.

his captor stands above him, righteous violence spewing from the hateful thing he calls a mouth. soto's bloodied face pans upward to hold the view: a proud stag unaware of the hunter's notching arrow --

soto lunges for the near leg, pushing from the dirt to forcefully unbalance his posturing captor. his jaws snap shut with an archosaur's heavy clunk, intent to wrap around glistening bones and twist in a thunderous death roll --

there, on the prison floor where both belong, the crocodile meets the biding strength of the python.

it would be days before khusobek knew the true effect of the python's power; teeth sloughed from the bone thin peelings of tissue. his exhale was a hot intake of volcanic pain; he knew the bone would break if he resisted.

captain went down with shipwright; pitched on the writhing sea of that filthy body, he pounded blow after blow into whatever part of soto he could reach, his own blood trickling between snake-teeth; he drove the heel of his other hand into the orbital grind of the nearest eye.

and all the while, he bit the inside of his own cheek to keep from so much as grunting in pain; it was not what eset gave him, but khusobek tried to use those same trials of endurance to hold himself now.

every moment added to soto's punishment; every moment would be tallied by Ma'at in a final hall, when at last the crocodile delivered there the shreds of this man.

he would shred the ear and take the eye in the next moments to come; disfigurement did not mean the end of life, and khusobek meant this to last long.

o Ra, put out your hand to turn this fire under my skin.

their blood mingled on the filth of the prison floor.

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juarez liked his women writhing on the floor. soto, well… he liked his women willing. there were times his hands traveled over their soft flesh as if mapping out a new world. he marveled at the grace of their bodies, likening their feminine curves to the gently rolling hills of his home. between their parting legs grew a garden ripe with indelible fruit. making love to them was an exquisite dance; safety and security the rhythm of their tango. soto enjoyed the fertile paradise their bodies readily prepared for him. 

but men's bodies were hardened hellscapes. graveyards of crumbling trees and dried thorns. their fields produced a hateful crop, their seed tasted of ash and poison. soto enjoyed this dance, too.

they writhed on the prison floor, sharp ends and bludgeoning teeth set to one another. khusobek aimed to maim, and he did so expertly -- a hard cuff here, a rip of flesh there. soto's neck and face bled profusely. as khusobek’s teeth rend his ear, a lacework of crimson splattered against soto’s cheek. 

oh, it fucking hurts -- but soto is alive with thrilling passion. pain. the smell of blood, the taste of salt and iron. the hard scuff of grit and dirt. teeth violating him. the burn of claws scraping his chest. there is something deeply wrong with him, because he basks in every counterstroke. 

khusobek might notice too late that where he mangled, soto sought to only disarm. his blows are just as hard, but their gritty power is premeditated. first, he kicks at khusobek's gut to wind him. he pulls him close, the hot press of fevered body igniting his skin. he brings sharp elbow to solar plexus, and when khusobek cuts his eye, soto's teeth aim for the bounding pulse beneath his jugular. submit to me, he urges between shuddering breaths fed by a cocktail of reprehensible pain and pleasure.

disarm. subdue. defile. against khusobek's bucking body rises the slender spear of soto's truest weapon -- waiting for the perfect moment to plunge into soft pockets of unwilling flesh. and the pain -- the glorious, electrifying pain -- throbs deep in soto's aching pelvis as he presses his pining flesh hard against his captor's body.

constricting himself around khusobek, pulling himself so close that the blows are softened by his tightening grip, soto knows the crocodile is where he belongs; where he might make a meal of his whetted appetite.

his breath hitches in ragged excitement as he begins to explore the charred landscape of the crocodile's ardent body. khusobek did not know when he placed soto there that this was his home soil, his native ground -- soto had spent his life among denizens of the dirt, and an eye paid for entry seemed as sweet a deal as any.

any moment know he knows the guards will burst in to save their fallen captain -- and he will pay dearly for the harm meted upon his captor. but he knows this, too: he will die shortly, so the memory of this moment will be sweet up until his execution. 

but to khusobek, this moment would last the rest of his lifetime. he would chase the one thing that soto ensured would be forever stolen from him — the extinguished star of his manhood.

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khusobek's mind created fractals of this image, neatly sliced and laid aside in transparent sheets, to be loaded into the mind for new torment.

swiftly, swiftly, and for the first time in many years the crocodile felt the true brusqueness of a licking fear. it had not come at the clutch of teeth to the juncture of his neck, but in the moment before, python wrapped in sibilant coils around his brawny forearm.

between them in vampiric draught they threaded the needles of their own pain, fed it back and forth in some hellish barter. prisoner gripped and he rained down his blows in sanctimonious and violent resolution.

this dance, it had an end. in his own throat died the names of the other fellahin, smothered by the hot-oil pouring of his own pride. all the justification he had to kill now was here, kill as he had killed before. murder to feed the hunger which yawned in the crocodile's hungering gut.

breath! knocked from him with a kick of the rangy, monstrous limbs. blood-offering cut from the delicate flesh at the corner of one hateful eye was not enough to soothe khusobek for what —

for what —

in sick sibilance sang heartbeats meant never to be strung in such cadence; his pulse thudded in thunderous terror, the faint salt of vomit tightening in his throat. soto's blood rained down upon him and he drank it. another heave of his body; he knew inherently where the windpipe lay and how much pressure was needed to cut through the thickness there; ear to ear.

in the society of men there existed a creed of violence punishable by that most fel, a schrodinger's tarot of who was deserving, and how an ultimate pain might be exacted. he was enraged with himself for believing this only to be an exchange of mutual agony, captivating them both with a rampant race for what limit might be first broken.

this had not been part of it, his mind snarled in dark protest, milliseconds of time stretching to hours, to eons, twisted and spun by harpies on some far-off mountain. better to die a man.

before khusobek could acquaint himself with this notion of death, soto lanced the dream. hatshepsuun had bled him of so very much that he could scarcely comprehend this new wounding to that spirit which he had thought was eaten.

once he brought his wounded arm up, noticing how slowly blood arced through the air as he slammed it with futility into the straining shoulder above his body — choked to mist as his mind mercifully began to blur, leaving behind only an animal's instinct to be still.

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in the dull light of the cell soto had hissed out a promise to safiya. 'voy a follarle los sesos a tu padre mientras miras.' 

soto coils that promise around khusobek's throat, an abhorrent garrote poised for its moment to slice through rigid skin. he thinks of safiya as he holds a far less lovely image: the remnants of her fading father.

it was khusobek's mistake to bring soto here. his mistake to trust that the serpent would not strike his heart, thin fangs dripping out waxy venom between pumps of gristly muscle. his mistake, and it would cost him everything.

a spume of blood wreathes them both as soto tightens his grip, sensing the captain's raw muscular power wane. khusobek's blows send a mosaic of pain etching white against his skull, but pain is soto's provenance, and he drinks hungrily from the burst of eruptive erotica delivered by khusobek's pounding fists. each time the crocodile pulls back a limb soto slithers into that empty space -- each time he exhales soto's rough coils mold around him, constricting the lifeblood from a man who seconds before tangoed atop of him.

a dance of both ritualistic violence and terrible beauty.

soto has always seen beauty in violence: it is the redemptive color red. pure. unadulterated. it is the spray of blood from khusobek's arm as it splatters the black walls, gravity scything patterns of merlot welting. it is the frothing dirt beneath their claws and under their fur. it is the muffled sound of masculine hate, poured out like scalding poison from a cauldron so vile the contents corrode all it touches.

and it is the sound of fading consciousness, the sweet warmth of slick blood hot against his throbbing belly. were it not for adrenaline's hellfire tonic scouring his blood-stream, he might have joined khusobek in restless sleep. even now, his own blood's run away from him in a river that informs him he's dangerously close to death.

but no. he'd made a promise. he ekes out another routing of strength.

voy a follarle los sesos a tu padre mientras miras.

he smacks roughly at khusobek's listless head; you are not allowed to be asleep for this.

the python wedges his knife deep with a satisfied groan. his muscles grit, his tiring arms protest the burden of their new motion, his eye seeps visceral fluid -- but it is he that has won.

he's won and he knows that victory is that electrical taste of power, blood, and fear. khusobek promised stripping soto's flesh from him in such a way that he would beg for death  -- soto has so much worse in store. he is filth come to make a mockery of khusobek’s pristine temple. he is the black mark that cannot be erased  -- he will leave indelible stains on khusobek's soul with every forceful motion.

first, he would show his captor what a man truly felt like at his most raw, his most savagely androgenic -- and then bit by bit, he would strip away the things this man loved.

it is then that something behind him strikes the back of his skull. soto's vision swims in ghastly white, and he sinks to the floor alongside his envenomed enemy.

Cameo.

Kiyya’s small, light footsteps echoed softly against the cold stone floor of the prison corridors. His curiosity, stoked by whispered stories and half-heard rumors, had pulled him away from the comforting chaos of his sisters’ world. The promise of seeing something remarkable, something secret, was too tantalizing to resist.

His sisters had ventured into these depths before, and their tales had only added to his fascination with the mysterious underbelly of Muat-Riya. He knew, vaguely and innocently, of this thing called a pervert which Tiye had mentioned; he knew also that Safiya had been on-guard here before her sudden departure, but beyond that Kiyya was oblivious.

Kiyya hesitated just outside the stone arch of the doorway, his heart pounding with both excitement and fear. He wasn’t supposed to be here, and he knew it. But he had promised himself he would be brave, like the heroes from the stories he so adored.

The scene before him was nothing like he had imagined. The cell was a brutal tableau of violence and anguish of which he had no context. A foreign body—their form a grim symphony of dark fur and bloodied muscle—was locked in a savage embrace with the shape he did know. Kiyya’s eyes widened with terror and disbelief as he saw his father—the man he idolized, this perfect man who was strong, noble, and invincible—battered and bloodied.

Pinned in place.

His father’s face, usually so proud and commanding, was now a mask of pain and defiance, while Soto’s face was a twisted portrait of grim satisfaction. The contrast was almost too much for the young boy to process.

The young boy remained hidden, watching the scene unfold with a mix of dread and morbid curiosity. The chaotic dance of violence before him, Soto’s relentless assault on his father, and the stark contrast between the blood and the stone seemed to meld into a nightmarish tableau that Kiyya would not easily forget. As his father’s struggles weakened and Soto’s ferocious grip persisted, Kiyya’s small frame trembled with a fear far beyond his years.

In that moment, Kiyya’s innocent world shattered. The stories of valor and heroism he had clung to felt distant and hollow compared to the raw, painful reality before him.

He saw weakness in his father for the first time. He saw this thing which could not have been a man, pressed too close. He smelled the blood. His mind buzzed as he tried to justify what he was now witnessing, and out of him shrieked a child's barrage:

GET OFF MY DAD!

At the same time he was lunging in to the space, pushing off of the nearest wall and throwing all of his too-soft pudge against the demon, his warrior blood burning inside of him.

what measure khusobek had not known could be taken was robbed a thousandfold at the crying sound of kiyya's warring voice.

around him the python's suffocating grip slackened; the crocodile had kicked the body aside and seized hard for his son, up onto aching limbs jellied by air-loss and dragged there by instinctual terror; his pupils stood black and wide in the shellshocked gaze, body moving rote to drag kiyya bruisingly in iron limbs and thrust him out the door.

an automaton, blank, quivering;

by now the cries, the grappling; they had drawn others who poured —

his chest was heaving; he could not breathe —

"kiyya," weakly, weakly over the din of —

there, there, the good stone of the wall behind his tormented spine, and the agony that filled his body now was unfamiliar, violating; adrenaline fading in titers until he comprehended the —

— vision narrowing as he clutched for the wall, as vomit at last swam up his throat; mercifully he turned away and felt its splattering over his forepaws, his elbow sliding down as he sank near the putrid puddle.

get up! get up!

the breath simply would not stay inside him; he gasped draughts of the air in the corridors beyond, crying to the gods for so much as a glimpse of starlight.

you have never been so weak, urged the toxicity of man's mind, the only life-rope to which khusobek might now cling. he yanked himself with all might upward, back onto the waver of his stumbling legs. they gained strength only as he thought of kiyya again, whirling, whirling, shouting wordlessly in a terror too bleak to utter the boy's name lest the demon in the cell hear it.

blood dripped slowly from his torn wrist; he noticed not in limping fright to find kiyya, to whisk him up into the furthest reaches of the palace, away, away.

all violence has its eventual conclusion, and for most petty bits of savagery, it ends simply in death. 

he might have had the good sense to fear it, had he not seen so much of it.  

be it by karmic justice or the cutthroat hand of his own kind, he knows peace will be a forever elusive concept. for this reason he embraces the dissolution and his part he’s played in this world’s malice. knowing he is one segment of a thousand-headed hydra, replaceable and indistinct, keeps the fear away. there’s not just one soto; there’s thousands of them. and they die for the cartel every day. 

death was simply their final transaction. 

now, reckoning comes for him in the pudgy shape of a pigeon-colored boy. it’s lights out and he’s lost too much blood to make a fuss of it. he’d shown khusobek true fear and that’s all that matters. a gutted laugh presses from his throat as he recalls this memory, his appetite so close to being sated —

he’s sinking. the world falls away from him and somewhere close to where he’d left his body he feels khusobek stumble away. run, little piggy — right to the jaws of the waiting abattoir.

mazoi pile into the cell. they bustle across stone roach-backed, their long gazes dark with solemn question. they probe the blood-matted air and scuttle around him, shielded backs rounding in alarm, in outrage, in mutual conspecific hate for the slouching heap on the prison floor that erroneously believed itself a ‘man’. 

numb and so thirsty. something scrapes, something drags. soto’s eyes roll to the cavern where blood hangs in perfect constellations of red. he murmurs something, drunken by exsanguination. ‘khusobek maybe, but the words mumble from him like the soft babble of riverwater. 

he’d enjoyed beating the shit out of one another, but this is worse. the mazoi close in with hard kicks that overwhelm him and send his consciousness spinning into black orbit. 

when the dust settles he’s left seeping in his own unraveling fluids. he groans as he shifts. there’s rib protruding against sluicing organs. something wet dribbles from his ruined eye. breathing hurts. hell, existing hurts — he’ll be lucky to make it to morning. 

he’d shown khusobek that there were things out there far worse than death; this alone keeps him alive a little longer.