. . .
“May the oceans run dry… may the earth shatter as the sun extinguishes itself. May the distant stars fall upon Your Name!”
-Bea Blessing
. . .
When Elle wakes up again, it’s to a group of men on each side of her, roughly pinning her by the arms, forcing her hands to lie down flat against the flat slab of rock underneath her. It’s a raised altar of some sort, she realizes now, because when she sluggishly lolls her head to the side, she was at face-level with some of them.
Her body feels so raw, so used.
The cold wind gushing over from time to time suddenly alerts Elle to the fact that she was naked as the day she was born and… and it feels like her entire being has just been dunked underwater judging by the salty taste coming from the droplets of water still rolling down from her face.
She’s freezing.
Is that what had waken her up?
Something cold and sharp presses into the center of her left palm and Elle’s frantic mind couldn’t quite make sense of what it means, what could they possibly intend to do to her now after everything until her eyes swivel up from the hands forcing her still and then up, up and up to the full moon just shining so brightly overhead, its eerie glow instinctively reminding her of the lone eye of ocean blue staring down at her once, cold and just as uncaring of her plight.
With it, she sees the glint of the hammer rising high up into the darkened heavens until everything suddenly starts to make an awful sense.
Elle feels her fingers uselessly twitching in a bid to raise them up to cover herself, to shield herself from the pain that was surely bound to come but she doesn’t have the strength to so much as move, let alone pull her hand away.

“No… don’t do this,” a quiet sob worms out of her mouth when she sees more than feels the hammer descending on to her now, “Please, please no–!”
Her throat feels so dry, and her voice is so hoarse, so weak and so hurt from the bouts of screaming she hardly remembers doing when each and every one of them had their way with her for what seemed to be hours on end and it doesn’t matter now, she could barely hear herself so how could they?
Even the sounds of the crashing waves feel so far away. And she wants to be as far away from here too…
“Please don’t do it, oh God, please–!”
The hammer goes down.
…Down, down the nail goes.
For a horrifyingly blessed moment, everything turns dark. She feels her mouth opening into a scream and she knows, she can tell she was screaming and they were cheering for it but she–
Elle still couldn’t quite hear herself.
The nail was hammered down, tearing through skin, through flesh and bone as easily as cutting through paper as her gaze snapped right back into startling focus, now shakily locked upon the nail sticking oddly through her open palm.
Her blood looked so thick and red, so horrifyingly red beading and dripping against the paleness of her skin, against the nail now jutting out in the center of it.
It doesn’t look quite real.
It feels like a dream gone horribly wrong.
Could she… could she still wake up?
She wants to wake up.
She has to.
Wake up wake up wake up WAKE UP–
The nail glints coldly, almost mockingly at her and Elle has never known pain that could actually drive someone mad.
Again, the hammer strikes.
And she feels more than sees the nail sinking in even further, the glint driving in deeper and deeper into her flesh.
In a sudden bid of desperation, Elle attempts to snatch her hand away but the nail holds fast to where her hand has been pinned down and it only uselessly shifts but doesn’t budge, doesn’t move and it was painful she couldn’t move, she couldn’t even get away. It hurts, oh GOD IT HURTS SO MUCH–!
In her useless flailing, she doesn’t see, doesn’t even realize the hammer bearing down on her again until the last second. A choked scream went past her lips, the sound of a dying animal.
Down, down, down it goes.
Elle stares almost unseeingly at the agonizingly slow ooze of blood pooling then dripping at the very center of her left hand while another tip of a nail presses into the center of her right. She doesn’t notice even after the hammer comes back down again.
Left and right.
Right and left.
Left… then right.
Does it matter which one goes?
On and on, it goes.
She thinks she mercifully passes out somewhere while they’re grasping on to her left leg, tugging free at the chain wrapped around her ankle only so that they can nail down her foot.
And then, she wakes up while they were hammering down on her right foot, eyes blown wide open and mouth parted into a soundless scream, the sound of the hammer was lost to the sudden roar of the crashing waves. The ocean sounds so loud, like its getting close now.
Good.
That’s good enough.
She closes her eyes and shakes.
…And prays.
It hurts.
It hurts so much.
Everything hurts that her mind seems to drift away from everything and anything that hurts, further and further away and on it goes to the sound of the sea like a moth drawn to a flame in search of a relief, a salvation that she knows now will never come for her in life.
Looking down at herself, watching, as if seeing the torture happening to someone else in a movie, Elle has never felt so sorry for herself than anything else in this one, awful moment.
She was just praying she dies now–
And that’s when she sees it.
…The ocean.
She has been hearing it from a distance all this time, has even smelled the salty taste of the sea and can practically imagine its taste on the tongue from the first time she woke up but she has never seen it actually anywhere near her.
Any other time, she would have been pleased to see this view up close. Elle has always liked the ocean, has always been fond of swimming when she was younger…
It’s been so long.
When was the last time she’d been to the sea?
It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter now…
The waves are getting bigger, she thinks, numbly.
The tide is even reaching them now, splashing and pooling at their feet but the small crowd of people she can still see didn’t seem to notice–or if they did, they didn’t seem to really care even if they do get wet as they carried on with what they were doing to her–as the waves are gathering down and up, down and up, a push and pull like dance that gives way to a sort of calm she doesn’t really feel as she blankly watches the writhing mass of darkness moving in rhythm to the sound of her still-beating heart somewhere beneath her feet.
To be honest, Elle doesn’t really think much of it.
With the numbing and striking pain she was in, she was far too tired to care about that–about anything else.
It was in that moment when she sees more than feels another piece of something sharp piercing through her–this time going right over her chest and then, straight to her barely beating heart that she blinks, trying to look down and instead, catches the sight of a bejeweled handle of a small, polished blade… the shiny blue gem gleaming almost mockingly right back at her.
She feels the cold seeping in through her, like the cold was making itself at home within her, feels herself falling in further like her mind was being torn apart from her broken down body.
Darkness easily creeps into her vision.
Only this time around, Elle knows she won’t probably wake up any time soon or ever again. So she allows her head to lay back down on the altar as she closes her eyes, a tired, relieved sigh seeping past her bloody lips as she embraces death wholeheartedly without another thought…. because death means no more pain, no more feelings of helplessness and fear.
Death means salvation.
As Elle feels her senses slowly shutting down one by one, she heard what seemed to be a voice speaking somewhere above her, beautiful but haunting, a lilting sort of sound, almost feminine but deeper, older… like forgotten lullabies coalescing together into a steady, single hum.
It slithers and reaches her still bleeding ears and yet, despite the ruptured vessels within it, Elle could have sworn that the hum of about a dozen people murmuring its hymns were fading in the background along with the sound of the crashing waves as if to make way for a sound that doesn’t supposedly make sense, a sound that wasn’t supposed to be heard in this world.
But as clear as a summer day, Elle can hear it though; can feel the sadness and anger seamlessly coming together as one, can even understand the words that had been spoken.
It said–
“They have failed me yet again…”