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The Labyrinth was a myriad of ghosts, lost souls and forgotten lives. Those who opened the box to enter into this world did so of their own free will, even though some fought tooth and nail to escape their torment, to no avail.
The screams and groans of their suffering and unbearable agony and rapture was much louder and more passionate for some reason this particular time, echoing throughout the maze as the Cenobite Prince sharpened his tools within his dimly-lit chambers. Ordinarily, such screams would be glorious music to the Cenobite's ears, but this day he paid them no heed.
Their agony was nothing. Nothing compared to what the pin-headed creature felt. Their torture was child's play, as far as he was concerned.
With such irony, the Dark Prince of Pain...was in pain. Such unbearable pain.
As he'd always known with the exquisite pleasure would come pain beyond imagining, a glorious blend of the two sensations, and pushing flesh and nerve ends to their limits; just as he had found much forbidden pleasure with his deceased human lover, the pain he felt over her unfair and ill-timed demise was tenfold.
No, a thousandfold.
He remembered the agony of his own transformation from an ordinary human man he once was decades earlier, to the enigmatic, immortal force of nature he was now...long before Kirsty Cotton's very own birth.
The pangs of agony when each of the numerous hot-tipped pins were hammered forcibly into his skull was utterly unbearable. But this one human woman's death, his mortal lover's death, oh the agony to that was much, much worse. And he despised feeling this way, in the throes of such agony, when usually he would usually take pain within his stride. After all, pain had become a huge part of who he was, and he would practice it as well as preach it.
But this...this was unfair, so unnecessary, so intense.
He often wondered about the limits, and this had to be it.
He honestly thought he'd experienced the very pinnacle, and an overwhelming severity of loss and heartbreak when Merkova had been so cruelly and violently taken from him decades before, and in the exact same manner, but evidently not.
A full year had passed him by since the...incident...he would rather forget had occurred, the very thing that caused him - the Prince of Pain - unbearable agony. An untold agony he wished not to indulge. Every attempt at smothering this unpleasant event from his tormented mind was a very much hopeless failure.
Far from fading to nothingness, the wretched memory of that awful day his lover - his chosen consort - fell so unfairly, dying within his arms, grew stronger and stronger, bombarding him until he could stand it no longer.
His very heart, one he thought to be as cold as the Labyrinth, would flinch and wrench in his chest whenever he pictured his Kirsty...his lovely, sweet, tenacious, fiery Kirsty, within his mind; her dark brown hair bobbing above her shoulders - shiny in the golden glow beneath Leviathan, her gentle coffee brown eyes filled with such sorrow and pain of her own life but smiling into his own onyx orbs as she gazed into them. Her smooth hands, he remembered, would gently stroke and caress his cheek, making his flesh tingle in a peculiar fashion...but he would have it no other way. For only her would he indulge such mundane, human pleasures.
Only she, and she alone, had held the honour of taunting and teasing him with her touches, her caresses, and succulent flesh which was still consumed with such sweet innocence though bordering on dark, twisted corruption. He had made certain of that. Though, as much as she had begun to fall into the darkness of her own hidden desires and curiosity of this world, there was still a fragment of her - a sweet and endearing side - that would look upon him, a mutilated being, with such hope and love, that she wanted to believe there was a side of him that was still good. A huge part of her had wished to help him recover his humanity, as much as she had been seduced by the majesty and wonders of his world.
He could never begin to fathom the rather forbidden and more human pleasures she would tempt him with in return. Such pleasures he would enjoy but despise at the same time. He had been truly in conflict over his feelings. Whenever her lips of gentle pale rose met with his ice cold lips of purest white, his heart would leap and race until he felt it would burst in his chest; it was an action no Cenobite within existence would enjoy feeling nor would be ever allowed to, including himself. But he would make an exception for her...and only her.
When in her company he was much more accommodating, more tender. Of course, he had not seen this coming. He had not paid it any heed, and he was powerless to stop it from devastating him and flooding his senses like a turbulent ocean.
How could he when it had crept up on him before he was even aware of it?
He had fallen in love...so irrevocably, desperately and humanly in love, and with this...human, this delicate mortal female who he had known since she was a seemingly innocent teenager, a young slip of a girl on the cusp of womanhood, who had become entranced by the Lament Configuration she had acquired from the skinless hands of her ill-satiated and depraved uncle.
He couldn't help but truly admire this resourceful and strong-willed girl, for outwitting not only her wicked uncle, but he and his cohorts also, not realising he was slowly falling into a rather deep obsession for her as the years passed by.
And now she was dead...dead as his evident broken black heart, and she was never coming back.
'If only I had transformed her before-'
But no; he could never dwell on it, on her. He refused to.
Despite the grief, he could never dwell on the what ifs, or imagine a life where she was safe and well...and Cenobiticised, at his side as the Dark Queen he had envisioned her as.
All he could do was focus on his task at hand for the time being; the sharpening of his tools, the torture implements he kept upon his belt at all times. If not for the tasks needing completion, he would have gone mad.
'Tis best to revel in the pain of others, rather than your own,' he concluded solemnly.
The End...