Mark Flynn... Eyes twitching. Focusing.

He stands... Shuddering... focusing every ounce of muscle in his body into the act of maintaining stance... As he does so, the act slowly becomes less strained… Less painful… And more natural.

He exhales calmly... As the minutes tick by... He gets stronger... He gets faster... Everything's getting easier, bit by bit... His legs buckle mechanically... And work to gingerly lower him into his seat at a square dinner table. Surrounded by darkness... An all-consuming heavy blackness... A low, slowly, gently rattling chandelier hanging just a few inches above the level of his eyes... A ghostly ethereal light... Drawing attention to that point, obscuring the world around it... Like a fog had rolled into the dining room...

Dressed to the nines. Suit and black tie... Immaculate. Instead of his usual, decaying, fraying outfit... Not a button is out of place. Shoulders fitted perfectly. Sharp. Lovingly crafted.

New. Yet familiar in design. Much like the old tattered suit so associated with his appearances. Yet thicker... Made of tougher material than the original...

The skin of one reborn… Like a risen phoenix…

His hand stretches, knuckles traveling, rotating, feeling out in physical darkness...

Flynn's hand carefully grips the fork sitting on the table with his left hand.

And in a flash, he plunges deep into a steak, sitting on a clean, porcelain plate. Cooked rare, bright pink in the middle.

As the tines of the fork press into the fat of the meat... Red lifeblood runs along edge of the metal... Drips down the edge alluringly… Urging the devourer to do as he came to do…

His jaw stretches... A reflex... An act his body still remembers even after all this time...

Despite staying dormant for years... His mouth... Drips... salivating...

Flynn takes his knife with his opposite hand... And begins carving into his meal...

He cuts his first piece large... And weaves it carefully through the air as it dangles, less than inches from his starving, salivating mouth.

He's waited so long for this meal...

Over a year.

He tilts his head upward, like an anxious shark, as gravity drags the morsel's weight against the tines of the fork... It slips with the shift... Dangling over the abyss...

Then.

A pause. Flynn's eyes open. And he stares across the table. Deeply perturbed... Even... Concerned... He whispers, earnestly afraid for his guest's comfort...

"Is something wrong, Eli? Something bothering you? Anything the matter?"

"I only ask, because you haven't touched your food this week..."

Across the table. Was a skeleton. Dressed in a black suit and hat. Like a minister… A preacher... Skull balanced against the tabletop, body lying forward towards his dining companion. Bony arm outstretched to the center of the table... For an empty glass of water... Once life-sustaining… Now barren.

"Oh Eli. Trying to drown out your appetite? Perhaps you're nauseous? Or maybe you've had your fill already? I just don't understand why you're having such difficulty biting into this chunk of flesh."

"When all you've talked about for the last year how delicious this meal was the last time you had it..."

"The feeding that made you famous... The first kill you list when telling the locals of your legend..."

Flynn sighs... Disappointed. Then, in a flash, he pops the bite off the fork and into his mouth.

The thickest meat slipping into two against his teeth.... Like hot butter...

"I hope you don't mind if I eat in front of you then, Eli... Savoring this chance to feed... I think it's only fair."

"After all."

"You spent a year devouring me while I was gone... Slowly... Playing with your food for months on end..."

"Every few matches, pulling my corpse back out of the ground to desecrate it, to have it song your praises and dance at your whim, to entertain does you deemed worthy of my name... Like a marionette... Clicking my heels and whistling as a slave for my master in death..."

"Dancing for the likes of World-1 International and John Austin... Turning over my corpse and describing with glee how you plunged a dagger deep into the MidCard King's back... Sticking your finger into my wound, and gliding your knuckle against what was once MY spine..."

"I wish I could say that death calmed the hatred ever present in my soul, the loathing that coarses through every inch of my veins..."

"However, death has only cemented my desire to avenge myself... My suffering after my demise, my only salvation the chance to one day make you experience the same damnation..."

"My soul burning in the worst agony, the deepest level of Hell... Unimaginable, unreachable by the binds of human creativity... Forced to every second, every conceivable thread in the fabric of time... Experience my memory being violated by your silver tongue..."

"Feel my legacy, my immortal spirit itself, twisted and torn, ripped asunder like tissue paper and re-crafted and molded into a sculpture dedicated to your greatness... My soul STOLEN and USED to suit your fleeting temporary material needs, week after week after week..."

"All my work... My entire career in the XWF... Rising from the very bottom... To toppling the invincible tyrant king of the XWF... To dominating both peaks of this organization's mountain for four months..."

"All shifted into a one-line footnote, a second thought of an obituary that reads, 'Defeated by Eli James IV'... 'Never seen again...'"

"All my accomplishments became your accomplishments. All my struggles, all my pain and suffering accumulated over years in the ring, you wrapped around your wrist and claimed as your own in a split second..."

"Every time you needed to chase down the weakest in the pack, to feed again... You called out my name in victory and I felt an inferno burst in the remnants of my spinal column, every cell left living a half-life in my burned twisted charred carcass regurgitate and die, only to still live so a millionth of a second later, I COULD STILL FEEL THAT EXACT UNDYING AGONY EVERY INSTANT OF THE REST OF TIME!!!!!!!"

"..."

"...Or."

"So I thought."

"Now, I'm back."

"I'm a little older."

"I'm a little calmer about certain things."

"I'm looking for a nice girl I can drop $4,000,000 for that will settle down with me..."

"And yet, when I look across this table, this ring... and see you... The one who sent me into that state of being… In this weakened state of yours?"

"A wounded animal... A shadow of the monster you once were... Singing nursery rhymes and making promises you can't keep to your dwindling flock..."

"The last of your breaths, weakening in strength... Becoming less and less frequent as the light in your eyes, once seemingly eternal, fades into dust..."

"As I sit here and watch you die..."

"All I want to do..."

"Is place my foot on your throat."

"And press down my weight unto I hear your saliva collect in your trachea, as you choke on your own spit... Closing your airway tight. Denying you a peaceful exit into your afterlife. Tasting, savoring your fear as your tired muscles struggle and writhe for the very last time... To escape the inevitable..."

"Stealing from you what little I can still take... One minute... Nay, even one second that you would have stayed alive on this meaningless planet on which you’ve collected the false idols you worship... Your victories in the ring… The names you’ve collected and soiled frivolously"

"And avoided for just one more sweet instant of existence... The knowledge of what happens to monsters like us as the maggots of age finish eating us from the inside out... Until we're hollow... Until we have no venom left in our fangs to inject into this Earth... And are left to fruitlessly bite onto adversaries we previously could have unlatched our jaw around and swallowed whole… Until something eventually younger and stronger in that moment rolls around… And continues the circle of life."

“Do you know what happens, Eli?”

"We leave this world."

"And enter... A void of nothingness. The agony of non-existence."

"You've sent so many there, Eli... And you've proudly waved a flag sewn from their very flesh..."

"Neonero... Stevie Tyler... LJ Havok… Andrew Morrison... Cam Lang... John Raide… Angelus."

"...Mark Flynn."

"Every combatant you have felled in battle to ‘never be seen again’… to ‘disappear’… They live on, Eli. Oh, do they live on…”

“They live on in a twisted macabre parody of non-life... Bleeding without blood,, screaming without mouths, suffering without rest... Begging for a death they were already given..."

Flynn’s fingers deftly slide along the steak, his eyes still focused across the table… As the meat sizzles, crackles… Begs to be devoured… Flynn’s eyes close… His sense of smell more potent than ever… The scent traveling deep into his nostrils. He wets his lips…

“The dead are not silent, Eli. The gone are forgotten, but not absent… Not blind to the sins committed upon them after the shuffle off this mortal coil… Nor do they forgive the transgressions that sent them to the grave… Or those thereafter…”

“I am sent by the spirit of wrath itself. I am the harbinger of your slow, painful descent into Hades. I am the embodiment of the lost and the voiceless’ rage in disappearance… In their lives, their very existence, only recalled in failure, in the day they came up short, to promote the message of a FALSE PROPHET… A DECEIVER… Their messages, their beings, their very souls forced to serve as your criers... To a message they know in death is a sweet lie…”

“My only wish… Was that I was dragging you into death at your full strength…”

“Yet. Look at you.”

Quote:June 4th, 2014
You all have a disease. You all have a fever. You are not well.

The only prescription ya need is...

More cowbell... hehehehehe."

“You’re no longer the invincible warlord I was sent to drag back to Hell… You’ve lost your way. You’ve lost your purpose. You’ve lost the power of your message… Instead of correcting the paths of the sinners…”

Quote:June 5th, 2014
Maybe you just did the wrong homework. You did, after all, call me a former general manager. Heh. I was the former owner.

“You’ve resorted to fact checking. You’ve allowed the weight of your words to wither, the power of your speech to fade…”

“You’ve allowed yourself to be corrupted by sins of the flesh. Pride in your meaningless material earnings… Your string of victories, earned months ago… Sloth in the content of your sermons… You’re no longer a bearer of the truth. You’re an entertainer.”

Quote:June 4th, 2014
Mark.

Flynn.

Talks.

In a few words.

At a.

Time.

Like a fu.

Cking Robot.

Must make a complete sen.

Tence.

Dammit. I didn't ma.

Ke it.

Breathe Mark.

I did it!

Fuck yeah. Now I can talk a little bit longer before I run out of breathe because.

I'm out of shape. I need more coke.

Quote:Your XWF Family Matters: Coke Edition. Or your XWF Full House. The heart warming music. The audience laughter.

“And a bad one at that.”

Flynn rises slowly from his seat… Walks along the edge of the table. And stops at the center, where the skeleton rests. He leans in to the back of the laying skull… Whispering the truth…

“I was sent by the one you sent you. TO remind you… To correct your path… The old Eli? The one twelve months ago… That set the XWF on fire…? Would have a message for you...”

Quote:June 12th, 2013
There's still time for you, Eli... there's still time for everyone to listen and accept the Voice of the one in the wilderness. IF YOU CONTINUE TO IGNORE... the Good Lord will shut his eyes, deafen his ears, and seal his lips.. and the beast within the messenger will arise.

“And unless you can head the warning of your heavenly master. You will continue to decay. Your belly will distend, your flesh will dry, sag and leave... The only thing left a skeleton. A shadow of what you once were.”

"Hopelessly defenseless..."

"..."

“Your best days are behind you, Eli...”

Flynn reaches down and lifts the skull off its perch on the table… The skeleton’s spine twists upward…

“You’re bulbous, obese, collections of fat so heavily accumulated in your face, that you can’t open your eyes and see the truth…”

“That I don’t need to kill you.”

Flynn’s hands shoots up.

And the skull’s neck cracks in two…

The body collapses back against the table with a quiet rattle. The skull fits perfectly in its new owner's palm...

The hand rotates the bony head... until its eyes meet Flynn’s.

“You’re already dead.”