The Un-Becoming: Bell, Book & Candle Pt. 3

The shades of night fell over the bay.
Darkness cloaked the sky in its inky phosphorescence as the stars began their nightly dance quiring to their ever attendant cosmic audience. Serena spied the very first one to trill out to her and she sang back sweetly to it,

"Star light, star bright; first star I see tonight.
I wish I may, I wish I might... have the wish I wish tonight."

The old childhood ditty taking her back on a walk down memory lane.
All magnolia blossom-lined and honeysuckle-scented.
She could fairly hear the chirruping of the cicadas and see the liquid-flashed lovelight of an amorous firefly flickering through the sweetness of a midsummer night....

Only they weren't exactly her memories, were they?
Serena smiled as she realized that it had happened again, quite unconsciously.
Not in the usual way that she invoked her powers.

Her native Pyrenees held many charms, including starlit evenings and fragrant flora, but no such saccharine-soaked musical pleas of youth were part of her past. No, she thought while chuckling to herself, that quaint picture burning like incense in her mental retina came from quite a different source.

Her mind held many such thoughts in proxy, that spun kaleidoscope-like in their random patterns, but they were not her own memories. They were the residual energy she had appropriated over the eons , a byproduct of the assimilation of her victims. 

Sadly in these modern times of Twitter and Play Station 3, most of her prey was so provincial in their worldly knowledge & so limited in their mental capacity that they offered very little pure entertainment value as they un-became.

Serena sighed wistfully, moving away from her expansive bay view, sat down on her Ruhlmann club chair, reached for the glass of reposado on the Mies sidetable & sipped slowly. Drinking deeply from the font of the agave nectar as she began to muse...

She licked her lush lips in contemplation of more interesting times; feeling the phantom taste of her very first victim. Such ambrosial essence did that beloved Queen of the Nile exude the night Serena took her. The many-headed supposed it was just an ordinary asp that drained the lifeforce from Cleopatra's milk-soaked body. 

Never realizing it was just a parlor trick, really, an easy bit of transmogrification into a lower beast.

Serena still remembered the creaminess of her first dip into immortality; the excitement of suddenly feeling every hope, every dream, every tear, every scream flood out of that woman of the Nile and into Serena's own empty being... This emotional napalming nearly annihilated her at first. Prior to that Serena had been just an empty vessel, an inanimate thing, needing to be filled.
The un-Becoming of a victim was like no merely visceral orgasmic experience ever known. The KNOW-ing that came subsequent to the un-Becoming was something many an ancient Eskaran poet had tried & failed to describe. It was an intellectual & emotional smorgasbord. The feral hunger for it, a terrible need when left unsatisfied. 

It was the oldest parasitic force in the galaxy and the most creative...
Certain human scientists, like the famed Professor Hawking, had come close to revealing their truth. They were stopped, of course. 

No such lower life-form could hold such a sacred trust.

Serena did take pity on him, though...
She coveted his brain, but loved his spirit and allowed him to live, though in a sadly incapacitated way. Still, he was allowed to continue his work but was slightly misdirected by her gentle molding into the soft clay of his grey cells. He never knew it was she who persuaded the others to allow him to live or that she had ever so slightly derailed his life's work. Allowing him glimpses of "heaven" but no real promise of the milk & honey that he had merited on his own.


She took quite a bit of ribbing for her rank sentimentality, but her wishes prevailed, as usual. She was a remarkably persuasive creature.

Funny to her how the pages of human history were nothing more than incoherent scribblings, really. Mythologizing the most important truths. And turning the myths into what they called empirical facts. Why the Eskaran race ever deigned to descend upon this third rock from a rather ordinary sun in a such a dull spiral galaxy that was peopled with such cosmic mutants was beyond Serena's ken. Many of the original pilgrims, the Elders, (the ones who didn't assimilate into this race of glorified monkeys) joked that it was likely some accident, some existential joke that landed them here... The old we ran out of light fuel on our way to the Virgo Cluster.

Yes, every Eskaran was taught the hard way:
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong...."





Blogophilia 49.2 Topic: "Walk Down Memory Lane"

Bonus points:

(hard, 2 pts): incorporate a Murphy's Law

(easy, 1 pt): mention a species of poisonous snake

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