M-Sama: Don't ask me what made me work on this now…if the following makes no sense, it is because it was written in the dead of night, the night before a math test, by one who should have been asleep hours ago. Thank you so much, you people who review. It makes all the difference in the world to me, and this thing is so hard to write I NEED constant encouragement or I wonder what the point of it is.
Sorry, enough wining from me. On with the show.
Chapter 8: The Seraph
Like I have said before, there is no time in the shadow realm. No space either, so I don't know where I was, or when it was, but sometime between my first and second encounters with the crowned sleeper, I saw another who stands out very clearly in my mind (it's hard to hold any memories for an eternity in this bending ocean of unreality, especially for me, so it's quite an event that I remember any incident for any mentionable length of time).
What an apparition he was, face framed by a lion's mane of snow-white hair. Another thing that struck was how similar he seemed to the crowned sleeper. His eyes had a similar fire to them, framed by razor-eyelashes. These eyes were wide open, though they saw nothing, and he clutched his wiry body with his small, almost feminine hands.
There was cruelty in those eyes. And utter ruthlessness. Courage like the serpent, which lies in wait for it's prey, hiding but ever-watchful. It made my blood run cold.
"You, your face is that of a seraph, but your eyes are alight with a demon's flame. What manner of fallen angel are you?"
While most of those locked in the shadows live blindly, holding on to their illusions of the world they left behind, dreaming, I have found myself by studying my fellow lost souls. Perhaps I have never slept because the instant I entered the shadow realm, I abandoned all hope of ever leaving it. Well, perhaps not immediately, it takes time for one to become used to the idea of eternal wandering, life without reason, even for one like me, who (although I had a fondness for the world) never really felt a part of it. Because I live without hope, I never feel the sting of need, or the throbbing ache of disappointment or failure. One may argue I never feel happiness either, but this is a small sacrifice, don't you think?
Please forgive me, this story is not about me, but it is necessary for you to understand why I respond to things the way I do, or my narration cannot possibly make sense. While others have closed in on themselves, I have expanded, letting my identity drift away in favor of the vision to see others. This vision is what had saved me. At times, living through the life of another helped alienate the only pain I can feel…the ache of loneliness…
The seraph didn't see me. His eyes stared at his goal, and only at his goal. But he heard my words, perceived them somehow through the muffle that plugged his ears and blinded his eyes to the reality of his condition. He smirked, his mouth twisted into the most malevolent sneer I have ever seen on any creature.
Power. He desired power. Why? What good could it possibly do him in his condition? Didn't he see he was trapped?
No. Maybe he didn't know why he desired this power so desperately anymore. Maybe his veil was weakening ever so slightly. Maybe that's why his sneer faded and his demonic dark eyes blinked, as if, for one instant, the blind fog shifted and he saw me…
It's just as well that look faded. I've become so accustomed to invisibility I don't know what I would have done if someone had actually seen me after all this time. No, if his blindness of purpose and desire will keep him functioning all these years, who am I to take it from him? One instant, one blink of an apparition beyond the veil, that's all he will get for thousands of years.
Golden chains. He was covered in them; steel-hard chains of golden fog. He was bound hand and foot to something in the material world.
This startled me. What could exert such a binding power that not even one's soul could escape it?
Desire, of course. Most of these chains were of his own making, created by the want and need in his heart. Something had merely made them tangible.
I had a sudden vision of a golden ring circling a pyramid-symbol, five pendants dangling from it like claws, taken as trophies off some slain golden animal…
It chilled me through and through, this demon-seraph, this ring that turned want into tangible bindings…
I had seen enough. I fled as quickly as I could, and by the time I stopped to look back he had already vanished into the fog and lightning that is the realm of shadows.
There was another story on the wall that bears mentioning.
If you read the previous chapter carefully, you read that Seto had come to Memphis to investigate complaints about a thieving spirit. He found no traces that any spirit had been there, and was angry to have been disturbed over the overactive imaginations of some temple maidens.
All this didn't change the fact that something was eating the offerings left for the gods on the steps of the false doors, and stealing idols from the false door alcoves; idols which later turned up in the bazaar, hidden beneath the foodstuffs in smugglers wagons.
The temple's protectors rigged traps. The thief found a way around them. He stole food to eat. He stole trinkets to get money. The temple's high priest issued a proclamation stating whomever the thief was, he would never find peace in death. A curse was on his soul forever, and Ammit the Devourer would feast on his heart!
The thief couldn't care less. Did they think he was just anyone? That fate would turn on him just because a gaggle of silly bowers and scrapers said to? It was laughable.
If the Pharaoh was seen as the son of a god, then this boy must be the son of a demon. He seemed to have no father. His mother was a concubine in the palace of a great lord in Thebes. She was a beautiful woman, but had a harpy's soul; she hoped this child would convince her lord to kill his wife and banish his other concubines, so he would marry her and she could slit his thought some night and inherit all his estate. She begged him to marry her, for the sake of "their child" but the lord took one look at the boy and knew he could not be the father if this, this thing. The boy's hair was white as snow and his skin was so pale it seemed luminous in dim light. He never cried, even at birth, and his dark brown eyes glowed with a kind of demonic knowledge.
The mother herself knew the child was not her lord's but didn't care, if it would give her the lever she needed to manipulate him. Finally he sickened of her scheming and banished her. She immediately threatened to become a whore and use his name "as advertising." He struck a bargain with her; he would have his magicians teach the boy the duelist magics, if she would never mention his name again, indeed, forget she had ever known him. To this she agreed.
For ten years things went as planned. She whored, leaving her son alone for days at a time, and the little boy would head off at every opportunity to the palace, to learn magic. By age six he was already an accomplished pickpocket. This was all well and good, but he wanted more. Much more.
He caught on to the ways of magic quickly, and the magicians would murmur that it was as if he had been born to do it. He would always smirk, eyes peering from behind those snow-white bangs, like a heavenly assassin, an angelic hunter.
His mother was a mistress of seduction of all kinds, but that which she found most alluring was the seduction of the blade. She indulged in such things often, there was something so passionate about the red life, flowing. She sold an Asian trader exclusive privileges for a month in exchange for a slim, beautiful steel sword. A kodachi, the trader said, from far away Japan, "an island at the end of the world." They made the best swords in the world there, and she believed it. The blade of the kodachi was fine enough to slit hairs, and the feeling as she drew it across her skin was nothing short of delicious. However, no one would buy a woman who was sliced up like a fish net, which meant she couldn't really cut herself the way she wanted to. It was fortunate no one cared about the slices on her son; she could take his blood all she wanted. It gave her such satisfaction, drawing a line across the boy's scalp, watching the silver white turn glistening red. The foolish boy, he endured the blade, but didn't seem to love it. He'd stand there, sullen, glaring at her with those eyes, unmoved by the blood that flowed down his face in those beautiful crimson cascades…those eyes. She shrunk from those terrible eyes, dark as the Nile's sacred mud by starlight, but cold as the chill desert winds in the winter nights. She hated him when he fixed her in those eyes, and raved at him, cutting deeper, but he sensed her fear and smirked. A tributary of the red waterfall entered the corner of his mouth, and he licked it.
His mother left. She went to her usual business haunt and was killed, caught in the middle of a drunken soldier's brawl. If he felt anything at this news, it was only a mild relief. Any compassion he might have felt, any emotions besides that that he might have had, had long since been crushed out of him, by his mother's cruelty, by his teacher's hate…One had to be deadly to survive.
The next day, he went for his magic lessons. The twins who were his teachers had abused him since he was little, groping their slimy fingers through his hair, down his legs, while making comments on how beastly but, oh, so divine his mother was, did she pass that on to you, boy? He'd fix them in those eyes and whisper in his rushing voice that he would destroy them all. They'd laugh. He'd endure it, because he wanted to learn the magic.
No more. This day he hid his mother's kodachi beneath his tunic, and when one of the twins moved to stroke the hairs on the back of his neck. Suddenly the man was missing a hand, holding a bloody stump and screaming. The other snarled and leaped for the boy, who sliced the man's crude dagger in two and buried the Japanese blade in the man's big belly.
He stayed in the city long enough to exchange the sword for as much gold as he could get his hands on. Never mind it was his mother's treasure. It was full of memories of her, and he couldn't wait to be rid of it.
He went to Memphis, figuring he would lay low there, in case anyone was looking for him after what he'd done to those two scumbag magicians. It was in Memphis he heard rumors of the core, the source of all the shadow magic: seven items, older then humanity itself, each possessing it's own, unique power…
The concept intrigued him. Because of his training by the magicians, he could read and write, strange abilities for a peasant boy. He was soon using some of his gold to bribe scribes-in-training to smuggle magic texts out of the classrooms in the temples. He scowered these, looking for any mention of the Thousand Years treasures, and although there was only the most passing reference, the little tidbits he found made him all the more egger to possess these things. If he could possess the power spoken of here, he would wield power unheard of since Mentuhotep I. Let the world try and ignore him then. Let his mother draw her blade across his hair while telling him he was beautiful then. Let her just dare do that. Let those filthy twins make mockeries of him when he wielded the power of the gods. Let them all just try.
Peasant boy? Hardly. He was a demon from hell.
And everything was going just peachy until the night he was caught.