The Strangler In The Wild

Amid the epiphytes and strangler figs of this new ancient world, the breaths of beasts was all a heathen mingle.

And the Civilizer felt his alien pallor become stained with a delectable dark dirt from her fingerstips that streamed down the sides of his heaving brow. And he felt atlast- a oneness- a long illusive acceptence. She was a hungry embrace of the nature he sought to conquer.

This is what it was to run with the raven hairs, thought he as they both embodied a most angry moan. It was a sound made him feel forgiven for his most imperial arrogance. The Civilizer was stricken first by those two blinding gems within the her dark skin. They pierced through the furious colors of the sari which veiled her face, wrapping about her skin like the vines of the strangler fig on these hapless trees, like his insatiable hands and arms, like his greedy western thoughts. 

He came here to change the unenlightened. He came here to shine his hope in in the darkest places. And here She was- his fiery eyed- apocalypse come to burn him in the flames of his own unholy desires. He wanted to drench them both in rain and sweat.

And here he was... nothing more than another one of the nameless epiphyte come to grow his seed upon her land. He saw himself truly reflected in those black irises. He saw his best intentions revealed to be no different from the hardened vines applying a life-killing pressure.

And as she arose, she once again covered her face, with that cursed veil that might have been every color in the rainbow of furies and thus, she and took his leave. The forest went dark and cold behind her, all around him, and she left him alone there... in the shade of the strangler fig vines, in the shadows of the knowing old Banyans.

And he couldn't bear to look upon his dirty hands or take solace in his once predicted braggadocios. For he felt her still- squeezing tightly around his manly accomplishments until his crusading pride had all but rotted away. And there was only his defeat as he looked out from within her wrapped roots, twining terrors, and impenetrable twistings as though they were the bars of his new eternal cell.

And The Civilizer wept now... knowing full well whom the real savage was...

Enjoy a Time-lapse and the telling of a latest little ghost story. This is an illustration for my newest tale "The Strangler In The Wild". It was drawn first with pencil sketch which took a bit of planning and then with the 'dipping fountain pen'.