Death is Persephone. The King sensed the caress of death as the stone knife part his flesh and he flailed in the combined agony of climax and death. Persephone the haunter of the shadows of winter. The older woman sat on the lightning split oak of the throne seeing the world with other eyes than her own. They stripped the king to his pelt, cast off his robes and armour, tossed his weapons into the dust and washed him with linen cloths soaked in the waters of the river Styx. His heels felt cold on the stone and a chill entered his heart, the chill of preternatural fear. A man comes to hear the foretelling, a king of the Hellenes, a bringer of our doom. A man comes to hear the foretelling, a king of the Hellenes, a bringer of our doom. The noose tightened and gripped his throat with its authority; it tightened, pulling him to the tips of his toes as he struggled to escape those legs, that cunt, that fatal grip of the noose.
