More Than Four Hundred

Ron Koppelberger

More Than Four Hundred

Rey Tribe downed the viscous glass of blood with a relish abandon rivaling the needs of a starving peasant. The walls of the room were a thick gray brick and motor covered with Persian tapestries from his errant youth. The strawberry stain coating his lips marked the coming of the four hundred and the rule that would pervade the province perhaps even the entire country, possibly the world.
Rey read the passage from the book “Nocturne”.

“By the demons roost and the will of what’s

Bought by the silver of a dead man’s troth,

We convoke and conjure the four hundred

For the promise of a kings desire to

Rule the realm of man and beast,

From lesser to least!”

Rey finished the glass of blood and looked to the wash basin in the corner of the room. She lay there, her life blood leaking from the open wound in her neck. She had been a virgin brought to him by his secret guard. Licking his lips he whispered, “Yer a tasty morsel for a future king my love.” Smiling he waited for the four hundred.
In the end Rey was overwhelmed by the four hundred demons he had conjured. They pulled out his entrails and ate his eyes as he screamed the screams of the damned. The kingdom fell to darkness and smoke, a hundred years of slavery unto the demons rule.
One day in hell Rey spied a great oak, longing for his youth he climbed it, near the top he slipped, the smoke and darkness of hell was his undoing for he did not see his precarious height. Rey fell to the ground in a heap and suddenly the land, the kingdom was blessed by light, the four hundred returned to hell where Rey lay by the tall oak. In the end they would test him for the better part of an eternity.
Near the edge, the outer boundary of time Rey pondered his fate as fires ravaged him, “If only I hadn’t slipped, if only I hadn’t called the four hundred.” he whispered as he was seared from top to bottom.