Elizabeth Haydon - Requiem for the Sun

Down the familiar passageway he descended, his feet finding their way automatically in the blackness. A left turn, then three more to the right; his eyes closed to slits.

His body flooded with warmth when the greenish glow in the distance became visible. His steps quickened as he called into the darkness.

“Faron?”

From the floor of the catacomb steam began to rise, thin tendrils of twisting vapor hovering over the glowing pool.

The seneschal smiled, feeling the heat rise inside his own body.

“Come forth, my child,” he whispered.

The gleaming mist thickened, writhing in waves that reached outward, above, into the blackness that surrounded it.

The seneschal peered into the vapor.

Finally, from within the glowing pool bubbles of air crested the surface of the incandescent water. The meniscus roiled, then broke open, causing the ghostly mist to swirl and vanish.

From the center of the pool a head emerged, human in shape though not appearance. Wide, fishlike eyes occluded with milky cataracts blinked as they came into sight from below the surface, followed by a flat, bridgeless nose; then the creature’s mouth, or near lack thereof, appeared, lips fused in the front, open over the molars, black horizontal slits through which small streams of water gushed. Its skin, golden, sallow, appeared almost a part of the pool from which it had been summoned.

The gleaming water surged as the creature, with great effort, pulled itself up on forearms that curled and bent under the weight of its torso, its limbs misshapen and mutable, as though they were formed not of bone but only of cartilage. The silky garment that draped its body bulged slightly in spots to cover both nascent male and female bodily traits, set in a slight, buckling skeletal frame, grotesquely twisted and soft.

A fond look came into the eyes of the seneschal, eyes that burned red at the edges in excitement. The demon spirit that clung to his physical form, recognizing the presence of its own, crowed in excitement, scratching at his ribs.

“Good evening, little one,” he said softly. “I’ve brought your supper.”

The creature’s cloudy eyes burned red at the edges in response. With a forward movement of its twisted arms it drew nearer, its lower body hovering in the shining green water of the pool.

The seneschal drew forth the blade he wore at his side and opened the cloth sack. Reaching inside, he pulled out two marinus eels, blind, oily creatures, black of flesh and thick of heft, that bit wildly at his forearm, lashing about as they dangled over the pool. He tore the heads off and tossed them into the darkness, chuckling as the creature’s eyes widened hungrily.

Then, with exquisite care, he sliced the still-twitching bodies into thin slivers and tenderly fed them to the creature through the side openings in its mouth, eliciting grisly popping and slurping sounds as the soft teeth ground the flesh to bits.

When the creature had consumed the eels it backed away from the pool’s edge and began to sink slowly into the green water again.

The seneschal’s hand shot out and caught its head gently under the chin; the layers of loose, wrinkled skin reverberated, sending ripples through the glowing pool.

“No, Faron, tarry.”

He stared down at this child of his creation, the end result of one of his favorite and most brutal conquests, an Ancient Seren woman who fell quite literally into his hands a thousand years before. The atrocities he had committed upon her still made his blood burn hot with pleasure; impregnating her had been well worth the diminution of power that he had suffered as a result. The innate magic she and all those of her race possessed—the element of ether left over from Creation when the Earth had been nothing more than a flaming piece of a star streaking across the void of the universe—burned in Faron’s blood, just as the fire from which his own demonic side had come did. There was a perverse beauty in their misshapen offspring, this denatured entity, its features at the same time old and young, all but boneless in its deformity, yet still his child, and his alone.

The creature’s enormous eyes fixed on his face unblinkingly. “I have need of your gift,” the seneschal said.

Faron stared at him a moment longer, then nodded.

The seneschal released the mute creature’s face, caressing it gently as he did. Then from an inner pocket of his robe he brought forth a square of folded velvet and opened it carefully, almost reverently.

Beneath the folds of cloth lay a lock of hair, brittle and dry like straw, hair that once was golden as wheat in a summer field, now yellow-white with years, tied with a black velvet ribbon that had decayed almost into threads of dust. He offered it to the creature floating in the pool of soft green light and watery mist.

“Can you see her?” he whispered.

The creature stared at him a moment longer, as if gauging his weakness; the seneschal could feel it searching his face, wondering what had come over him. He contemplated the same thing himself; his hands were shaking with anticipation, his voice carried a husky note of excited dread that he could not remember it having before.

Probably because he had not considered the possibility in more than half again a thousand years that she might still be alive.

Until this night.

The creature apparently found whatever it was looking for in his face; it took the lock of ancient hair, then nodded again and slipped beneath the surface of the pool, reappearing a moment later.

In one of its grotesquely gnarled hands it carried a thin blue oval with tattered edges that gleamed iridescently in the reflected light of the pool water. Each side of the object’s surface bore an etching; it was the image of an eye, obscured by clouds on one side, clear of them on the other, the engraving worn almost to invisibility by time.

The seneschal smiled broadly. There was something so pleasing about seeing the scale in the hands of his child that he could barely contain his delight. Faron’s mother had been the last in a long line of Ancient Seren seers to possess some of the scales, and her power to read them had passed through her blood into Faron’s. Imagining the horror she must be suffering in the Afterlife made the demon that clung to his soul shout with joy.

He watched reverently as Faron plunged the ancient scale beneath the surface of the gleaming green pool. Clouds of steam from the heat of the fire that burned naturally in Faron’s blood began to rise, white vapor that filled the air like ghosts hovering above, longing for a view.

Earth, present in the scale itself , the seneschal mused, staring through the billowing mist. Fire and ether, ever-present in Faron’s blood, water from the pool . The cycle of the elements was complete but for one. Given the distance over which he wished Faron to see, great power would be needed.

Slowly he took hold of the hilt protruding from the scabbard at his side, and with great care drew Tysterisk. A rush of wind whipped through the catacomb, stirring clouds of mold spores from the floor as the blade came forth from its sheath, invisible except for a shower of sparks of flame as if from a brushfire in a high breeze,

A deep tug resonated through both his human flesh and his demonic spirit, the bond of connection to the elemental sword of air within him blazing as it always did when the weapon was drawn. Holding Tysterisk in his hands was the most powerful pleasure of the flesh he had ever experienced, an orgiastic sensation that dwarfed all others his body had felt. He held it over the glowing green pool, sending waves crashing over Faron where a moment before there had only been gentle ripples.

The elemental circle was complete. Beneath the surface of the green water the scale glowed. The clouds in Faron’s occluded eyes cleared; their bright blue irises shone like stars in the reflected brilliance of the pool. The seneschal noted the change, the demon within him crowing with excitement.