This book is called 'Whose Candle Is The Sun' and takes place in the other world.
Graphic Warning
__________________
‘Whose
Candle is the Sun”
#1
I watch the
funeral flames wreath around what was left, the skull bursting with a
steamy pop that signals the old monster is finally gone. He’s gone.
My crazy brothers are gone. Mother droops artistically under her
widow’s weeds, all ostentatious Dowager Empress in mourning for her
beloved husband. He beat and abused her as he did us. The feckless,
indulged, drunken young sot who is my idiot brother stands, blinking
at the flames as if he cannot believe that he’s free. The old
man is dead, Arnziel.
I am not free.
Even with the old man dead, he lives in my mind. He lives behind my
eyes. I will never be free of him. In the years that he tortured me,
he gouged out a space there, gathered all my evil together in there
as a most comfortable nest for himself. I gave up my soul to him and
his whip and his pain and his rape years ago and he made me a pimp
for Scorching to the deepest pits of hell.
The fire hisses
as I turn away, releasing everyone to scuttle into their gilt
apartments in what is now my court. At least after the official
period of mourning. Vipers. Scum in high, red heels and silk and
brocade. I’ll make them remember the old man. Oh, yes. They’ll
compare our reigns, they'd pick apart every moment, every breath.
They are all dogs that roll onto their backs and widdle in fear to
power.
I will be in
mourning on the battlefield. The enemies of my Empire will see me
wreak my mourning for my father out on them. So funny. I killed the
old man and I will pretend to have loved him all these years. Behind
my eyes I can feel his glee, my glee, at the lie. Who am I trying to
fool? My glee. I am become the old monster.
**
I wake in the cool
darkness of this dungeon where my captors have me incarcerated. The
nightmare of the funeral fades slowly. It was better than the never
ending nightmares of searching for my mother, searching for safety,
hearing someone weeping for me. I thought I’d buried those dreams
under the scars in my mind years ago.
But these people.
These vile, petty people who don’t have the guts the God gave a
woman, they locked me up here in the lamplight in the basement where
I can’t see any natural thing, any true light, not a ray of the
God’s own divine Sun. I am dying here. These stones press into
me, closer and darker, hammering spikes of despair and the Demon’s
darkness into my spirit.
Help me, Burning
One, Tiger Master save me from these Demon-eaten, Drowned horrors who
keep me here in silence and lamplight. Out of my depths of
despondency and desolation I cry to the divine, and thus break my vow
to my father. In anguish greater than any inflicted on me before, I
am reduced to pleading with the Deities of my innocent childhood,
before pain made me a man.
Of course I taught
what I learned. Over the years I passed on my father’s wisdom. As
any child who screams in uncontrolled rage and stamps its feet,
ultimately acknowledges the astuteness of the parent’s acumen, I
acknowledged father’s understanding and passed that wisdom and
strength on.
At least my captors
are not cruel enough to leave me in the dark. But I might as well be
in my grave here. I breathe.
I drive the nib of
the pen into one finger so that the prick of pain and my own tiny red
reflection in the drop of blood reassures – or horrifies me –
that I still live.
My cell. It is four
steps across one direction and ten in the other. A bed with a
peasant’s rope mattress, and feather bed upon it. A feather bed
for a coverlet. Two feather pillows. A peasant’s bed. The bed
might as well be made of nails for all the comfort it gives me. A
table with turned legs and no sharp edges. A chair.
The table is fixed
tight to the bars of the cell since the light from the lamp falls
upon this page only from the shelf in the hallway, well out of my
reach. Even if I were to be answered by the Most Holy God, he would
not have been able to burn me out of here. The flame of the lamp
never wavers, much less answers me.
To the left there
had been a cellar window, now bricked up as far as I can see. To the
right was the second door, just as locked as my cell door. There is
a pass-through in my door so that a tray can be rotated through in
such a way that I never touched the guard.
Outside that hall
door, that second locked door, is always a guard. They’d told me
my guards were deaf and mute. Whether they’d told the truth I
could not tell. They are disciplined enough not to flinch if I made
a sudden noise so perhaps they’d told the truth. They... them...
his wife, that muscle-bound warrior with female parts and that
dirty Cylak, who explained everything.
Cowards. They knew
what a warrior I might be. They knew enough not to try and fight me.
If the milk-sop, sucking on his momma’s teat, diaper swaddled,
beloved, oh-so-perfect leader of their civilized world was anything
like me they were correct to be so very careful.
If he were anything
like me. That’s enough to make me laugh. Who is to hear? I write
that and lay my pen down and laugh and laugh until I roll off my
chair and onto the floor, holding myself together with my arms. I
laugh until I am tired, then I lie on the floor, limp. Do I even
care what the low-born peasant guard thinks?
Master of
Lightning, what nightmare must I have done for this to happen to me?
I suspect that the much reviled Gods might exist since I am where I
am. I have no other explanation for this. My tutor, dried up old
stick, quick with a rod, always insisted that the simplest
explanation was the most likely.
How else could I
have come to this twisted, evil, benighted and Demon eaten world
where my Empire does not even exist?
#2
The click of a key
in the hall door brought Ahrimaz Kenaçyen, one-time Fire Lord,
Emperor of the Dominions and Possessions of Inné, to his feet. It
wasn’t a meal. The putative mid-day meal had just been cleared
away.
The guard let the
robed man in, closed the door behind him without a sound except for
the click of the lock. He wore the distinctive multicolour,
predominantly green robe of an Imaryan healer. His brown hair, kept
back off his face in one of their patterned braids fell to his waist.
Ahrimaz lunged for
him, stretching his arm through the bars fast as a striking cobra,
his narrow features twisted in rage. “You stinking anal-smear! You
dare show your smug and oh-so-superior pacifist,
I-don’t-even-kill-the-plants-I-eat pride to me? You supercilious,
arrogant, condescending, patronizing, toffee-nosed, fit for nothing
but spending my seed into every hole you have and every new one I can
cut, haughty, full of yourself, self-righteous sack of Scorching
shit! I’ll kill you. You and every one of your people. I did it
in my world and I’ll do it here!”
“I invaded your
oh-so-sacred island and slaughtered every single soul there, many with
my own hands! I raped until I could not any more and then used my
weapons and not one of them did anything but kneel and accept. They
didn’t even scream! Only the babies who had not yet been
inculcated into your foul, weak-willed, spineless grass eating cult
screamed in protest before they died.”
The calm face of the
Imaryan didn’t change as he stood just beyond Ahrimaz’s reaching
fingertips as he listened to the vileness pouring out of the man in
the cage. He waited quietly.
Ahrimaz raged and
swore and turned to strain one arm the extra bit that might give him
grip on the healer, but all he could touch was the heat of his cheek
with the tip of his longest finger and he could not even dig a
scratch onto that hateful face. When, at last, he'd gone hoarse and
then silent and finally merely clinging to the bars to stand,
glaring, the healer spoke softly.
“My name is Limyé
Ianma. I am the physician of the family of the Hand of the People of
Inné. As well as my posting here, I have a life-long calling
attempting to discern the roots of illnesses of consciousness. If
you will speak to me, I will be able to compare you to your double,
whose care I have had this past ten years.”
Ahrimaz's voice was
reduced to a harsh rasp. “No. Find someone who cares to help you,
you turd under my horse's hooves.”
“It may be,” the
Imaryan continued. “That I might be the only company that can bear
being anywhere near you. None of the family, on my recommendation,
will speak to you.”
“Unless you can
find a way to put me back in the world I belong piss on you. Piss on
your demon-fucked 'Hand of the Lunatic Mob' even if he is me in this
world.”
“Very well.”
Limyé passed a hand through the barred window in the locked door and
waved to get one of his guard's attention and they let him out.
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