Avarice Secret Unquiet Ch 01

Welcome readers to book three, Secret Unquiet in the Avarice series. This book will be in excess of thirty chapters. I will be releasing a new chapter at the close of every week. I hope you enjoy my world, and the lives of my characters as they draw nearer to their purpose. For those who begin reading here, there is a previous series called Avarice Desperation Valley that details the events leading up to this book. Enjoy.

Perfect is the Son

The world was certainly not what it had once been. The rhythms of nature had been very much interrupted. The weather was beyond strange, and the humans who had survived the calamity were sure it was they who had caused the upheaval. True, they had not been so kind to the earth they inhabited, raping the wilds for resources, manufacturing detritus which lay in the environment for decades or more, and waging ceaseless wars that seared and desecrated a once beautiful world.

However the real threat remained largely unseen, and if discovered, unidentified to most. An enigma to all those who still led some semblance of civilized life and embraced science.

*****

Somewhere on another continent, in a large metropolis that had survived the conflict, alley cats fought and litter blew through the untidy streets on the cold north wind. People huddled in drab trench coats pulled their collars up about their faces and hurried on their way, eager to be inside out of the icy tempest. They had been the victors, the lucky ones, and yet their hedonistic way of life had suffered since the fall of globalism. Even the victorious had not been left unscathed.

Deep beneath this city landscape down in the endless cistern of sewers something nameless and otherworldly black seeped forth, as it touched the fouled waters that flowed from the plumbing above the reaction was violent.

*****

A great stag paused on the edge of a forest clearing, Cernunnos personified. His magnificent antlers crowned with tines like a spreading oak, the velvet shreds hanging. He grunted in a low growl calling for challengers as he appeared from the treeline and scented the air, haunches quivering awaiting the specter of challenge. The moss was a vibrant green on the rocks that lay scattered across the open sward. The stag sniffed the air again and this time instead of calling a challenge, made a growl of alarm. His neck arched and he pirouetted gracefully about on his hind feet and vanished back into the safety of the primordial forest.

In the clearings' center lay the fast emerging blackness eating away at the earth. A strange umbral haze sat above it and rounded gems rolled across the moss like living creatures spilling from the fissure.

*****

The beach was stark, bright and beautiful. The gulls swooped and whirled high above. A vista of clean blue and white, a feast of purity for squinting human eyes. The grizzled, white haired fisherman made his way to the shoreline and prepared to cast out his line. He shielded his eyes from the brightness, and as he did so he noticed an irregularity in the oceans azure continuum. Blackness like an oil spill rising from below, dead and dying fish littered the shore. He frowned and decided he would cast his line for today's catch elsewhere.

*****

The lone polar bear's white coat looked yellow against the icy backdrop of its habitat. It paused briefly scenting the air at the edge of the glacier shrouded in the pristine icing sugar dust of new snowfall. The majority of earth's glaciers in recent years had melted, but a few holdouts remained. Little had changed here for thousands of years and humans rarely visited. This continuous world locked in ice, a place of bright whites and every delicate shade of soft blue, now blighted by the emergence of a black stain that rent the world with an unquiet hiss.

*****

The oasis in the desert had once given life and respite. Now it stood surrounded by the deceased skeletons of trees and the beasts that had drunk of its waters. An ode to death as it once was to life. Large the spreading black pool of impossible darkness even beneath the harsh sun's glare.

*****

The native tribesmen sat, clad in no more than belts of bright shells and headdresses of vibrant feathers. Boars tusks through their noses, and faces painted jet. They pondered this strange newness that had emerged almost overnight near their village. They watched the birds and beasts that came too close to the dark nothingness vanish, or weaken and die.

They feared their god Areop-Enap was angry, and they too would be imprisoned in the darkness of the giant clam shell just as their spider god had been before human creation. They went home to their families and prayed, and made sacrifice.

*****

In the past these unions would have been different between he and Sheharizade. The pair had often dallied here away from the eyes of his court. White flesh entwined with sensuousness, senses filled to overflowing. Sometimes joined by their servants, or Lords and Ladies in an orgy of tactile bliss and sumptuous pleasure.

Though for many centuries the denizens of the under-earth had largely lost the capacity for procreation, they had not lost the desire for great pleasure. Perhaps immortality had rendered this ability almost obsolete, or per chance it was the product of their own wickedness, for their species was decidedly cruel to anything they believed to be lesser. This lost ability was often the subject of great debate, the sharpest minds among the Nethris could not rightly say why this physiological change had befallen them, or when it first began. Simply a child of pure demon blood had not been born for many centuries.

Xonereth reclined on a plush divan of the most inky blackness. Elegant alabaster hand draped idly by his side, carelessly clasping a silver goblet about the lip of the most beauteous design. An ebon vintage pooled within half drunk, nectar to his lips, yet fatal to mankind. Sheharizade, lay quietly at his side in her voluminous robes. Xonereth was looking up to the high cupola of the basalt roof above. Mind on upper earth, and all he had witnessed there during his recent sojourns by night...

So many places of secret unquiet the dark ruler had discovered in his quest for knowledge. No longer did he attend the upper reaches and walk among humankind to sow mischief and discord in the ears and minds of the unwary. He passed by those places where he would have once lingered and indulged his salacious lusts, for humans and their intrigues to demons were as irresistible as candy to a child.

Misery and suffering crowded the upper spaces, palpable in the very air and every living thing. Even to demon kind the world of the humans felt cloying, crowded with a veritable cacophony of sadness and despair.

It was not just the emanations from the human world that reviled his senses, all the other creatures that inhabited this place were suffering unspoken misery in a similar fashion. Demons were usually drawn to these emanations, and were themselves often the causation of such events, but this was something far more sinister than anything Xonereth had ever felt in his long existence.

As he passed among those mortal souls whose lives were to him ephemeral, he overheard their concerns. He listened to their theories, fables, and fears, and the sadist in him chuckled as he understood how wrong their feeble minds were. The humans believed they had done this to themselves, with their bombs, wars, and hatreds. Admittedly they were a rather hateful and careless species, but Xonereth knew there was something greater at work. Something inextricably broken in this world and his own.

The demon King had encountered in his travels numerous sites where the substance of his own plane had bled through into this one. Some no more than mere tiny puddles almost completely hidden from sight, others dark and large, scarring and searing the landscape.

The ink dark water that the humans had mistaken for all manner of things such as oil, radiation, or the black rain seeping forth, were in fact the seas of his world. The living gems of his earth that the skilled Grishak so lovingly and beauteously crafted into weapons and jewelry of great design lay scattered in the red sands, the dark primal forests, or about the snowy tundras. They were things that did not belong there. Wrongness was afoot, and he felt a great disquiet burden him.

The proud ruler snatched himself away from his troubles, all he seemed to be doing was going about in circles without any kind of resolution. It was very unlike him. Tenderly he touched the shrunken form huddled by his breast. He loved her still his scintillating Princess, though her withered form was hard for him to reconcile. The sensuality of flesh Xonereth had withdrawn, though he would never depart from the caress of Sheharizade's wonderful mind.

He lay dwelling on millennia past, of overflowing wickedness, desire, and rampant narcissism. He and his own people drowned in such sensations, and sought them to excess. The Nethris were truly a pride filled people.

None though more so than Xonereth's twin brother, Valefor, who had desired it all, adoration, excess villainy, a cruelty unmatched. Nothing short of God status would appease him. He took what he wanted, defiled the tenets of Nethrizil with impunity, and created what should never have been created in his black wake, and Xonereth wondered, did Valefor have something to do with all these recent events and the tearing of the worlds?

Though of identical flesh, Xonereth realized very early in his existence that his brother was fundamentally flawed. However Valefor was the first born by only some moments, and by default held the paramount right to rule.

Their mother was the highborn consort Ardat Lili. She was lover of the ruler at that time, the dour Semiazas. Though he had many consorts, Ardat Lili was quite the beauty, arresting in her charm even by demon standards, and she fast became his favorite. The irony was that the humans associated her with the ghost of a young woman who had never experienced any sexual desire before her life was cut short, causing her in death to revisit men to attain that which she had never experienced in life. Xonereth found this quite amusing the human's ignorance.

Xonereth's Father Semiazas was a careless ruler who was more interested in his charges, the fallen and misguided angels, who in those days surrounded the Gods that lived, breathed, and cared about their newest creation, the human planes above. In absence of her Sire's direction, Ardat Lili groomed her beloved first born to rule, and she was as many mothers, blind to his shortcomings. The Nethris could not be flawed, least of all her royal son.

Over the millennia Valefor did as a cruel prince was want to do. Wreaking his cruelties on upper earth by the light of the stars, pestilence and plague were his handmaidens, and a cloak of misery was his lot. His treacheries were both large and small. Pauper, Prince, or King, all fell like ripe wheat before his grandiose depredations.

If it pleased him to destroy an entire city he did so, if a maiden of such fairness spurned his evening dark advances, she too would fall in the most terrible fashion possible. From fire and disease he brought forth creatures of blight. The ill informed humans labeled them the scourge, but to Valefor they were his children, and simply a reflection of human fears made manifest.

Xonereth though he could be equally cruel in his own right, often toying with humankind, found his brother's penchant for twisting of the earth's creatures and the resultant ugliness an abomination. Yet Xonereth was not to be Regent. Relegated to a Prince of the court, and that should have been his destiny. Until Sheharizade...

Though their first meeting was eons distant Xonereth starkly recalled her beauty, a mortal man could not encompass all that was Sheharizade and not have his vision scored by bloody tears and irreversible blindness.

However beauty was not what had initially been Xonereth's attraction to the diminutive Princess the first he lay eyes on her at court. It was instead her brash personality. Though young among the Nethris she would dare to have her voice be heard. Audacious enough to speak directly to the Regent or his consort if she felt she must, on any issue of the moment.

Most of the highborn females were quiet and demure, preferring to let the male nobility decide the course of justice as they watched on mostly indifferent. Sheharizade was passionate and burned with an emotional short fuse. Xonereth was smitten with the Princesses' at times uncourtly displays, and he had decided then he would woo her for his mate.

Xonereth was never sure if his brother had truly loved Sheharizade for the reasons of his own mind, or if he had in his avarice simply decided he would hurt his sibling and take what another desired. Merely because it was in his power to do so.

It was not long before both Princes were seeking the attentions of the same demoness. Though Valefor would be crowned King someday and would be the logical choice to have the edge in courtship matters. It was Xonereth that impressed Sheharizade and committed to her heart.

In the company of such vast egos throughout the history of his race, there were many individuals who had teetered dangerously close on the path of conflict. However with such powerful beings any act of war was strictly forbidden. To make hatred on another Nethris was the highest wrong and punishable by the most heinous sentence. Death was not readily possible in the world of immortals, unless of course the sentence was banishment to the light; however there were other sentences that could still strike fear even into an immortals heart. The most feared being immobile, yet cognizant exile.

Xonereth sighed when he thought of all the past hatreds that his royal blood had brought to his kindred. It was a terrible legacy, and still very much unfinished.

He was about to rise and return to his pressing studies, petting Sheharazade gently on her bony shoulder when one of his courtiers Nysrogh, one of the lesser caste of demons bowed to this lord in the doorway. His long tresses raked the floor before him mimicking a nest of black serpents. Xonereth cast his imperious gaze at the courtier, who remained bowed and motionless in his ruler's presence awaiting acknowledgment. The demon King noted though that his courtier was somewhat agitated even in his suppliance.

"Rise and speak." Xonereth's voice was rich and embodied darkness and all its mystery.

Nysrogh rose with a beauteous fluidity, his dark eyes averted from his Regents gaze as was deemed appropriate.

"My King, there is something you must see... immediately."

Xonereth raised a questioning eyebrow, it was rare anyone told him he must do anything, let alone immediately. He could sense the handsome demons palpable panic, this was usually reserved for the lesser of his kind. The ones who did not speak, the ones who tore their hair and remonstrated in the dirt. An unseemly trait this anxiousness in one of his highborn. He liked it not.

He rose and followed Nysrogh swiftly through the high basalt corridors of his palace, the crippled Sheharizade somehow keeping pace by his side. They reached the entrance to the palace grounds proper, and made their way down the moon white colonnade, the columns entwined with black vines that bore large open flowers that looked like magnolias, with lush petals that appeared to the passer by to be cut from the finest sable velvet cloth.

Xonereth averted his eyes from the distressing spectacle of the leafless Nethrizil, and the depleted seabed that lay beyond. He found he no longer had the courage to look at that which ailed his world, a sentiment that he found distasteful for one of his supposed might. He did not wish to be ruled by his feelings, and yet he found he was.

He was surprised to see many of his citizens were assembled at the end of the colonnade. Princesses in their diaphanous finery that left nothing to the imagination. Princes resplendent in midnight robes trimmed with every beauteous design in stunning silver brocade, bowed courtiers swathed in the finest black velvet, and the lesser demon kind crowded about the end of the terrace. All shielding their faces. Some spoke in frightened whispers, but most remained silent. Sheharazade plucked at Xonereth's sleeve and he shot her a glance full of meaning and concern.

Before him in the far distance he beheld it. Something of such disturbing ugliness, a blight on his world, something to demon kind that was composed of the purest horror. An enormous pillar of light shone from an indeterminable point in the night sky and crashed into the lands beneath. The above was now below.