billion book
Chapter 21
Amelia continued dredging through the darkest, most harrowing epochs of her turbulent past. She revealed to Philip how she had descended into heavy drug addiction and self-destructive behaviors as a way to numb the ceaseless pain, emptiness and self-loathing that consumed her. With her friend Ruby having given up trying to steer Amelia towards a better path, she felt utterly unmoored and adrift, stripped of any last thread of self-worth.
The drugs – weed, pills, alcohol and eventually harder substances like heroin and crystal meth – provided fleeting escapes and glimpses of oblivion from her emotional abyss. But the highs became diminishing, never enough to silence the self-loathing voices berating what a worthless, irredeemable person she had become. Amelia craved something stronger and more mind-numbing to finally extinguish her will to exist altogether.
In this unraveled, nihilistic state, Amelia stooped to unconscionable lows and boundaryless depravity just to secure her next high. She engaged in prostitution, gang-bangs, amateur pornography, and allowed herself to be violated in grotesquely sadistic ways, all in exchange for drugs. Amelia was trapped in an unending cycle of self-destruction, haunted by beliefs that she was worthless and any form of oblivion was preferable to confronting her bleak reality.
The drugs helped place Amelia into a dehumanized, detached fog where she could endure unspeakable levels of physical and psychological torment with a semi-consciousness removed from feeling or morality. Disturbing flashes played through her mind of waking up amid squalor surrounded by bodies, or reduced to a shuddering wreck after sadistic clients had their ways with her.
One particularly depraved individual preyed on Amelia’s addictions and brokenness – a self-proclaimed “dom” named Malkom who ran an illicit underground BDSM club catering to the darkest fetishes and depravities that money could buy. Malkom had a knack for luring damaged, desperate souls like Amelia by promising them their long-sought chemical oblivion… in exchange for surrendering themselves as his personal “pleasure slaves.”
Over many months, Malkom systematically broke Amelia down, dehumanizing and deconstructing her into a hollow, barely-sentient form. She existed in a waking-nightmare state, routinely subjected to ritualistic degradations, torture and defilement by Malkom and his cult of sycophants. Amelia’s sense of self, autonomy and even physical boundaries completely disintegrated as she was molded into a “living masterpiece” – an artfully corrupted installation designed to indulge Malkom’s sadistic visions.
She remained in that macabre, subterranean world of unending torment for what felt like an eternity. Any last vestiges of Amelia’s humanity guttered out, her existence reduced to a vacant cipher awaiting its next desecration at the hands of her tormentors. There was no future, no hope, no foothold of selfhood to cling to anymore. Only a perpetual maelstrom of violation and anguish that Amelia delusionally accepted as her eternally-damned reality.
Until one fateful night when she awoke amid the reeking afterbirth of an atrocity so depraved, so paradigm-shattering in its cruelty, that it sliced through the dense fog of Amelia’s dissociation like a white-hot blade. She had been injected with a cocktail of exotic psychedelics and psychotropics, then ritualistically brutalized by Malkom’s entire cult over many agonizing hours as they took turns desecrating her mind, body and spirit.
When Amelia finally regained full consciousness alone amid the visceral, sickening aftermath, something profound ruptured open within her psyche. She looked upon the detritus surrounding her defiled form – sanguine streaks and various unholy excretions intermingled with the instruments of her debasement – and a shocking clarity washed over her with the force of a tsunami.
In that blinding epiphany, Amelia understood with scorching resonance the finality she was spared, and it both shattered and resurrected her in the same breath. If she didn’t fight and claw her way back from this nadir, if she surrendered the last infinitesimal embers of her sense of selfhood, she would simply cease to exist as anything beyond Malkom’s glorified torture-artwork. A profane carcass raised up on a pedestal, an empty centerpiece to be slavered over by morally-bankrupt voyeurs for decades to come.
That prospect – oblivion’s perpetual, airless void as both martyr and masterpiece to Malkom’s sadistic revolution – detonated something primal and indomitable within Amelia’s very marrow. Some unbowed spark, kept smoldering through years of invasive trauma and subjugation, revolted with every last ounce of wrath against the obliteration being imposed upon her identity.
Where numbness and passive surrender had reigned for so long, a conflagration of sacred self-reclamation and rebellion now roared to catalytic life. Survival instincts ossified into Amelia’s very bones were abruptly resuscitated, their awakening an all-consuming supernova purging the ashes of nearly three decades’ worth of defilement from her essence.
With each rattling inhalation, Amelia’s drive for self-preservation hardened into something more rapacious – a lust for retribution against the perverted architect responsible for constructing this waking-hell she had been trapped inside. All at once, her prime existential directive recalibrated: to not only scourge away every last vestige of violation and reclaim her embattled autonomy, but to also deliver a reckoning upon Malkom that he would profoundly regret inflicting.
After all, he did not merely create another martyr for his sickly cause when he strapped Amelia down and orchestrated that ritualistic crime against her body and spirit. No, through his transcendent acts of cruelty, the master sadist had instead awoken something vastly more ancient, remorseless and all-consuming from its eons-long slumber.
Like a specter of Old World vengeance cloaked in billowing sable and crimson, the Furies had been summoned forth from the ashes of Malkom’s most unforgivable atrocities. And they now turned their searing, feral individuations towards the object of their cosmic recompense.
Amelia welcomed whatever fresh agonies she would need to pass through to fully stoke these remorseless flames of her regenesis. Because they were worthy, sacred sacrifices to purge the lingering rot of her defilement once and for all. To resurrect her true self – blazing, unbreakable, reborn – from the smothering miasma it had been so systematically entombed inside.
As she turned that piercing, raptor-intense focus onto Philip, Amelia proclaimed with chilling finality that Malkom’s transgressions had not succeeded in creating some hollow, empty-eyed martyr for his cause. Through his acts of depravity, he had instead awoken the all-devouring tempest of the Furies lying dormant within her.
Those two words alone – “The Furies” – radiated with the vow of retributions yet to unfold. Whatever form Amelia’s metamorphosis and vengeance would ultimately take, one thing had been irrevocably forged from the cosmic crucible:
Her spirit was no longer a sputtering ember to be mercilessly snuffed out by any means. It now blazed with the renewed, righteous radiance and remorseless hunger of a supermassive phoenix, powerful enough to immolate any remnants of its former subjugation until only the purifying essence remained.
The only lingering question was how much more darkness and sacrifice would be demanded from Amelia before she could bathe in the cathartic rebirth agonizingly heralded on that gruesome night when her past’s chokehold was finally broken…