The twisting of your body as you are dragged across the raw earth, mixed with rhizomes and broken branches, maul and blister your white skin. You never imagined to be in this position. To be helpless and without hope of reprise or release. When you can focus your eyes for the briefest of moments you see a figure of almost inhuman nature.

When the shadowed figure finally pauses you are too weak to look up. But you are not granted a moment of respite, you feel one hand on your neck, the other between your legs and you are lifted from the ground. Before you can struggle or think you are dropped like something worthless, a thing in a process of which you have no understanding.

The circle you find yourself in is stained with blood, what seems like an age of suffering has taken place here. You want to get the putrid blood off of your body, to be free of the dirt and filth, but you know to show any sign of distress would only result in brutal torment.

Your eyes focus through your tears on the figure again, crouched down, his back to you, immersed in some inner process. Everywhere around are markings, signs of some unknown purpose behind the violence and rage.

Suddenly, as if from nowhere he stands and moves towards you at high speed, grabbing your wrists and tying them above your head with coarse handmade rope. The tightness starts to cut off circulation as he proceeds to bind and secure your ankles and waists.

The knife he removes next appears pure black in the moonlight. You don’t know if it’s from age, blackening, or the blood of countless victims. He places the point at the centre of your upper chest. He holds it there for what seems like an age, before slicing into your flesh revealing to you the horrific sharpness of this ancient looking blade. Cut after cut, your blood travels the channels of each wound.

The first marking is complete, but without hesitation he moves to the next. This time on your right thigh. Cut after cut, the blood now forming a pool between your legs, he moves to the other thigh.

The pain intense in your mind, the bleeding filling you with dread that you could bleed to death.

The figure moves to the centre of the clearing, and begins to circle, as if building himself into a frenzy. You become dizzy watching him in the half light as he takes the knife to his own body and drags it across his chest, letting out an animalistic cry, so primal it is beyond the sound itself. All around the shadows seem to move, like there are others there watching. You try to focus your eyes to see if these others are real, or some figment of your imagination, but your vision is blurred and your mind spinning, there is no way to know.

He crouches down to ground level, his fingers clawing into the soil, with each movement your focus becomes more blurred. The next thing you are aware of is his hands on your body, rage in his eyes. He is covered in his own blood, and is now forcing himself inside you, running his hands over his face, your blood mixed with his own. The raw clay from the ground, and the sweat on his body glistening.

He never removes his gaze as he rapes you, his blue eyes highlighted by the deep red of the blood covering his face. With each thrust you feel his hands crushing your breasts, clawing across your body, and closing around your throat.

His mouth bites and covers the wound on your chest, blood covering his tongue and jaw. As his frenzy builds more intense, he bites into the base of your neck, releasing more blood, and making you even weaker and more helpless to his wants and purpose.

At the peak of the process all around you the sense of other shadowy forms seems to intensify, it’s like their hands are on you too. Are you hallucinating from loss of blood, or is this really happening? You feel like you are watching from above, as you are raped by multiple dark figures at once.

You seem to watch and feel at the same time as one takes branches from a Birch tree, and begins to beat you with them, while another is inside you, filling you fully, and yet another takes a flaming torch from a fire and singes your flesh with it over and over.

Your attempts to scream are met with silence, you are beyond the point of crying out. Nothing is left but pain, and suffering in the name of some mysterious mysticism.

The figures begin to circle again, your body is forced onto the ground, and without pause wood pegs are nailed through your hands and feet. Each in turn then climaxes inside you again and again. While the first of the dark figures mixes their seed with blood and marks your body with sigils that seem to float into the atmosphere around you. Energy seems to build to new heights, your awareness of who you are is lost. There is nothing left of you, you have become a vessel for some dark god.

…When you awake there is no sign of the clearing, just the sound of morning birds singing, and the green of the grass and trees. You look across and see me sitting there next to a simple camp fire. As you sit up you look at your body, and you see the scars of marks cut into your flesh, yet they are fully healed and unrecognisable. I smile without looking at you, a look of knowing on my face.

You have been born anew, separate, unknowable to the commonplace world.