The Book of Weston

The man is stripped and shackled and led out of his cell by towering royal guardesses across a cold marble floor. He does not remember his crime, or if there was one. They pass under an archway into a throne room where the shadowy rafters reverberate with the chants and moans of an unseen choir and the Queen sits dead ahead on her obsidian throne, flanked by Amazonian guardesses in bejeweled lingerie, holding bone-tipped iron spears and diamond shields that sparkle like moonlight in a disturbed pond. He is forced to kneel before the Queen's alabaster legs, and the ancient gong is struck, and he does what he is compelled to do while the shrieking voices ascend, begging the stars to return, and the queen leans back, cold veins pulsing, and the guardesses beat the floor with their weapons, and the planet seems to tilt off course. He remembers now: the sinful forgetfulness, the confining structure of his former life. They did not put him in his cell; he built it and they freed him. And when his mind begins to bend, some kind of fingers clutch his hair and lift his gaze to meet the Queen's cluster of black arachnid eyes. She licks her lips and pronounces the sentence: Guilty! There is a burning, a rolling, a fading to red, to the warm afterglow of duty well-served.