Chapter Seven, Phantom Communion

19th of Snowcrest 19th year AD, Tower of Azar-Drakon

The Tower pushed its height into view. Its spire brushed the border of the sky, darkened by the coat of winter’s breadth. An alabaster pillar to the heavens, standing against the bleak besiegement above. Drakkon knew this monolithic form as the grandiose testament of his glory, of Azarra’s reign & the spiritual dimensions they lay claim to. Borne of that supernal, or eldritch, material fallen from the heavens. Built with the fury commanded in ‘divine grace, then painted white to match the imperial majesty it was to project upon the world. But its daunting appearance this day only embodied the terrible anchor railing against him. Its crowning color, a falsity. Perhaps the same as his eminent birthright & holy coronet. A palace of a pillar housing his mother, the one he feared confronting more than his men or any foe.

He marched on alone, having left his battalions behind on his rapid journey. He dared this even as they were inches from brink of desperation or perhaps even mutiny. But Mordaunt, one of the few men he could trust, held the means to keep them in line, even if by whip & thorn. Ill omens were abundant with little progress in putting down the rebellion. They razed homesteads indiscriminately in the ravenous hunt for Baron and his captains. Yet while many were trampled under hoof, these sadistic displays seemed only to embolden their rebellious hearts in justified loathing as it starved the Drakoni stomachs. Encouraging an enmity in his ranks for not being allowed to reap the plunder & food stores earnt in conquest. Ash, no apt seasoning.

Always the bellicose mutineers whittled away at the Living Legions from the shadows. Rarely risking annihilation through confrontation on the open fields. When battles did surface, they were savagely won, but never gained them any ground, no closer to true victory. With little morale to be gained from the slaughter of their enemies, many who were once kin. Foes with faces still too familiar, even blooded by this war. Loss crept in under his mantle, made itself his new talisman of leadership. His Aegis, a curse of ailment.

The spirit of Nature felt alive in its deadly push against his cause. Breathing hostility, the trees themselves waved to shoo him away, snapping embittered branches. The land seemed cursed, the Imperium damned. A fissure deepened within every heart he knew, including the one writhing in him. The gulf of unknowing cleaved a terrifying silence inside his soul – when asking it the question of his very nature, this life shrouded in constraints of title & conspiracy. Where once housed hope, the lair of despondency encroached. He wondered often to himself in those nights of sleepless tension, as the shades beyond the campfire glow grow fuller, if somewhere along the lines he’d lost, relented his spark of divinity. If ever even there.

The winds sang an alto promise in their whirling tune. A song of doom battering his ears and the tower door, even as hooded Azarine guards allowed the Lord in & sealed them off. Neurotically, Drakkon gripped the mess of parchment in hand. So tightly his rage bled into their sharp ink, smearing this missive & challenging his meaning. He thought of burning it at the first brazier, that the contents might shake from his head but halted. As much as he wished it a ruse from Baron (for who else but the bard, a sage or son of Ferali would know the runic scrawl of such a tribe?) his sockets were seared from that awful truth etched there. He could not burn away its implication nor the damnation to come should it be affirmed but had to face it.

Grappling with his birth, his being and base for ruling - for living - a corrosive madness in him hungered. For & yet fearful of the answers he demanded. He grasped at anything else which might distract him from this nauseating spin within. Noticing now how odd that this grand locale attended to his imperial, if unannounced, presence only by a meager duo in coven robes. Who, scowling beneath their hoods, bowed, and soon skittered off. He found the innards of this spiraling symbol his mother’s scepter offputtingly empty. The flock of her disciples must have been sent away. Tis for the best that there not be too many ears around for what I must ask, he thought woefully.

He encountered only a few scattered servants idly attending to their business inside the tower of phantoms. His heart hammered the rings of his ribcage while he grappled to keep his will intact against this storm of psychosis & the rift of unknowing. Unsure of himself and what might happen when he finally did encounter his mother, the source of his life and perhaps much of his suffering, should the smut be confirmed true by her tongue. Somehow the lack of people here made the walls more menacing, as if their impenetrable stone faces enclosed him in sneering dismay. The further into this cyclopean menhir, the greater his dread. He made his way up the snaking staircase to the highest strata where his mother might be.

Befouled breeze bit through the sparse apertures that occasionally broke up the monotony of the pale farce. Wisps slit through his mane, contorting with his emotions, and reminding him the threads fate could unwind in an imminent singularity of abjection. The more he tried to convince himself that his ‘friend’ only sent him this - possible forgery- to undermine his will the more distant he felt himself. Drifting from faith and from his mantra. Feeling innately empty. Thoughts squirmed and screeched against their bearer, their creator in him, crying for negation. Among these an inkling that his tread up was in denial of where the head of truth lay.

He knew the uppermost chamber unoccupied and could no longer humor this reticence. So, he swept down the stairs, to those which went beneath, into the earth where spring drew into thermae. His trek to Azarra’s favored fount halted before unexpected creaking & unlatching of its door. Turning, he met a strange & macabre sight. A doctor cloaked & masked with long, bird beak, passed over Drakkon for a wary moment. Eyes hidden, expressionless and unblinking.

Then the masked alchemist-physic extended his long spindly arm in salute. His crooked, hollow bow and nasally voice dismissed himself before fleeing down the hall. “Good day unto you, my Lord.” As the man fled smoothly from view Drakkon caught sight of several strange emblems sown into the protective coat including the sign of Azarine Coven, bone saw insignia and what appeared a personal calling card: a gilded spider with gryphon wings and avian face poised in a web of purple & yellow silk.

The sound of the bolt clasping, scent of feminine perfume and faint splashing of quiet waters beckoned him. An ethereal call tugging his soul. Dissociated but entangled in all too tangible and inescapable reality. Just as the maw of dreams swallows sleeping mind, this gruesome fate sank its fangs into his soul’s tendons. Trickling blood along tainted stream of pained determinism. He watched his body pass through the threshold into destiny & discovery.

…

The warm bubbles churning caress Azarra from top to toe. Inviting her into transcendent relaxation. The tower’s heights may embrace the sky but so too do the aquifers below funnel the earth’s refined waters through to the thermae where she lay comfortably, hugged by heat. Enjoying another rough puff from the hookah at the bath side, she partakes of her doctor’s newest personal experiment for her – the perfect mix of effects. Lusts more than ever to slip from the cell of her consciousness. In her left hand slightly rocking in the heated waters rests one of her trusted man’s most potent elixirs. He called it in his nasally, detached manner something along the lines of the “Green Enchantress”. A drink to bend the currents inside and invite spirits to dance. The fresh liquid filling the glass winks with emerald sparkle. Gleeful as she spins it lovingly, sipping when she rises above the exulting, vivid plumes of the pool.

The sorceress-mother’s idle hand subsides beneath the pool. Splashing up waters of intimate bond with nymphaeum, nature and those aspects long escaping her. Basks in reflection atop the rippling surface, blossoming memory cast back in her face. Her beauty, accursing as much as aiding, retained by oils & alchemy; staving off at least two decades of the age which ails her. Yet that countenance shining back was of a different sort than this one which became a prison to flee from. Weightlessness sprouts wings, granted by smoldering leaves & special swill of her good doctor friend. Suspended above the pool, her bare self, unbound to the stark boulder she’d been chained to. Flight of euphoria from herb & wine opens such sights. Nebulous impressions form from the undulating mirror; dreams of pasts and futures never to be lived. Her desire to escape circumstances transmutes pain into sculptures of suds & secret hopes.

These dream shards and their gloss of optimistic fantasy, as clear as sparkling glass. A mélange of parallel memories, too bright and pure to be from her current existence, stream into her pores. Ghost samples from a life untouched by the pain that entered her so young and stripped away what she should have been. She glanced an alternate world where she had never even been marked – or cursed, as it were – by the gods. Never sent to the Temple. Beamed enviously at her natural, but forlorn, nobility and wholesomeness in spirit granted by being around a true and loving family, among and alive with the people & the land. But too distant to not be dream. Another wave carried theory of different joy. Teased aloof path of remaining true to Oracle rites, committed only to the gods & mastery of magick, never ruined by Kassan’s intrusion.

But these fanciful wisps did not engender lasting wistfulness. Even in her delirium Azarra could not shake from her subconscious the roots tying her to the life she truly had, the person she was. Every pleasure, melts to misery. Every luxury about her, a glaring irritation, boring back to her eyes the emptiness lurking under her maimed heart. These baubles of untouchable ecstasy and unrealized innocence only riled up her inner coil with envy. Abrasion scraped against her as she scrubbed, pushing back shame of herself but only eroding her wings. She plunged into the pool which received her coldly (as if its heat refused to embrace her withering frame and be tainted by her temperature). Tears fall, dissolving into phantasms.

Mirage breeds of her state. Blood pours from her womb. This spot stains the spring hue to crimson & black. From the site where sin pierced her and out sprang birth of such wickedness. Red pigment turns to pitch & witch-fyre oil, immolating her naked vessel. Floating in the flames, broiling basin of impurity becomes her. Cooking in the soup of shame, her cauldron of self-mutilating sorcery. The blood wax congeals. Though she scrubs herself, never cleans that fiery kindling. Yet she flees not from thermal lake. Knowing she’d crash against cold crags the moment she steps from steam to drape in robe. Everywhere else so frigid and fiercely uncaring.

Azarra partook of the green elixir once more. Puffed upon the pipe hoping the spirits before her should be banished and spites invoked instead to better keep company her aching mind. She bent her neck to stare out into the tower’s atrium across the way hoping the tilt in her view would steer her perception to someplace brighter. Yet the shades and spirits invoked by the smoke were tainted by her guilt. As she lazed, she heard the echoing residue of screams and suffering whimpers throughout the walls. Spectral howls of her echoing voice and those hers had damned, commanded to death. That terrible purging of her number leaked phantom streams to douse her oils with further evil. Those less loyal disciples executed by her most loyal; those who sought to flee to join that witch, Corinna’s coven, or Dahlia’s splinter brood. Her once feverish acolyte refusing communication or entry into the forest shrine Azarra gave her which now drained her tower of life. How many had been slaughtered in the sleeping night before their escape could see daylight? Their sins of whispering a little too loudly of their desire to leave the High Mother’s flock led them join ghostly chorale.

The blood of those suspected traitors surged up into the pool painting clots therein. The bath coagulated, entrapped Azarra in the colour of her sins. Blue blood. The noble substance of the slain. Vitae of azure fused with the shrine of herself. Yet this augury one she had sown and knew one day her life too would be harvested. The scroll of her fate, one long litany of tragedy & atrocity. Both done unto her and acted by her hand, stitched together in the tattered tapestry of her life. This curdling crust caught her in web of all her guilt & the rue of the world. Dismal sheen of horrors inflicted & replicated through echoed cries those sacrificed upon altar of pride.

She thought of Delphine, sentenced to die for her own accord. The High Mother (a delirious mess held aloft by idle bubbles and luxurious crypt) granted her lifelong friend the task of delivering a barrel of poisoned wine – the drink’s aroma only the subtlest hint of its morbid shade. She knew to garner Corinna’s false trust into indulging the deathly drink Delphine would have to pose as a friend and offer it not as a political gesture but as a shared toast. Delphi must drown in that very venom for Corinna to finally be removed from play. More of the noblest blue blood would be stilled by special red to halt the course of the one too long a curse upon her, whose garden seeds corrosion and civil strife to cause these high walls & deep basins to lurch.

Let us all sink in damnation! I never asked for any of fate’s punishments! Nor vaporous reward! I never had anyone to prop myself up on, yet I built this. Azarra’s eyes grazed over the tower’s underbelly and all the ornate decorations around the bath. If ever I find something to content my spirit the world declares it unfit and topples it against me! I am cursed! Tis some affliction that denies me happiness at every turn! But Delphine…She stood by me, warming me during the bitter cold of early days. Always bared her heart to me. Yet that happy heart must fly all the same from me!

She must be a final sacrifice! A great soul for one lesser yet glamorized by tiara! To trade one closer than a sister and more loyal than any lover, that flame which could stand to embrace me, to end that pagan bride’s wretched wrapping about my son. That trollop Corinna would defile the shape of my soul if her cloud dwells any longer! Only the love of one truly beloved is an offering considerable enough to gather the favor of the gods and of fate’s threads.

Perhaps I am not right to burn bright while her light is given up for mine? Mayhaps the fates that loom over us all with unfaltering Eye set upon me with pity & sorrow. Demand my candle be snuffed along with hers? Her life, which I offered though not mine to give. If any gods be there above, or below, leave me my fate! Silence the Hels! I may deserve my loneliness but not their bloody laughter!! Tremoring fist disturbed the lush waters. The swift splashes of subconscious made manifest her thoughts. Taint of guilt momentarily awakens her from entrapment of her inner monologue and returns her to the shifting textures of the scene her life embodied. Let me be damned or else restored.

Azarra reached to inhale more of the peculiar burning concoction. Strange alchemy conjured by this leafy mixture transmuted Fyre of Fae and blood tide into swaying sea of golden wheat. A field offering motions of kind breeze. Her soul sprang up this joyous plain to cover guilt with ambience of fantasy & addled memory, entwined as one sheet. Enraptured by the soft, gentle hands of the plants lifting her in levitation. Hovering over the length of golden field, occasionally dipping into the reef to touch her body tenderly before ethereal gust swept her from all form not astral. Suspended in foam, flowering to field, the guise of this place shined lantern of plane reminiscent of Erosian Heath, the meadow of free folk and shared spirit. With a comely dash of feeling near to her other homes in Hearthfarrow and Ty-Drasil at once.

She surrenders to this euphoric possession. Aches with the promise of fate’s flow, sifting in dimension where thought took form. The occult substance delivers her from the pressure of her living mold. Her wilted skin molts, unveiling a metamorphosis that paints her soul with hope. Though just as the bubbles of the bath rose only to burst, ephemeral flashes of optimism proved fleeting. Disperse to summon darkening specter in place. The beautification rituals that adorn & preserve the cadence of deceptive youth & grace about her countenance could conceal none of the want & loathing behind her painted eyes and ointment anointed veil. So too did glimpse of Erosia mock her when spurned to shape of evil. False face & ugly truth.

Elderath, as she envisions, groans. Condemns this lot with trembling sign. Azarra plummets back into simmering pool. Returns to herself, greeted by candlelight licking at her face as if to tempt deeper trance. Their flickering casts luminosity about the chamber stones. Glow dances about pillars and corners. Symphonic shadow play erstwhile paired succinctly with the rhythm of her center, till the elysian heath in her scape breaks by waltz of blighted beacons & tremors to overtakes her radiance, shake off dream. Wheat whittles into thorny prongs. The hinge about her gate grows a long body of black ether, with long Watchful face bearing three-fold stare.

A colossal shape intrudes on her seclusion through the Watcher’s belly. Illuminated in hulking silhouette against the frame of the nearest pillar. Long raven mane droops over tensed massive shoulders, echoes eerily the ursine frame of Kassan. For a blink all fell to whimpering reprise of that horrid midnight of everlasting despoilment. Peering over at this monstrous shape, she beheld with horrid pangs an apparition of the Bear. But the face of the man leering at her was not his but that of his son – her son - Drakkon…

His visage, as graven as stone totems with grim runes. The mask of misery adorned. Death, Malderath’s mantle, the cloak which hung about her son’s spectral shoulders. A haunting aura shrouding prized pristine vision of that childhood field in burn. Yet these orbs of fire were enveloped by darkness which befell her from his stare. The gravity there, the weight of truth heavier than curtain of nocturne. The shadow loomed over her.

“Hels, mother! Have you left this tower at all since you returned to it? Why is your courtly cult here so threadbare, to find you so alone and uncatered?” Posed the ghost of her son.

“Mother,” his sweltering tone chewed her marrow, while a wintery chill filled the chamber by his course. A stormy squall, only slightly tempered, emerges from his lungs, though he did not want to unleash it himself. “I must confer with you… we must speak of the naked truth.”

Azarra moaned annoyance, sifting away from the horned shade. “The demon asks truth!? What truth is there, save this wish to be rid of the seed of that moment which spawned this wretched wraith! Yet would words transmute truth, free me of it? Must I speak more of this stain? Relive it for a dark dream’s amusement?”

A peculiar glint manifested in her son’s scrutiny. He analyzed her drunken seclusion in the bathhouse and the jaded expression bedecking her face. That subtle scintillation lit scorn brought along his surface. “What is this? You soak here in idle luxury while the land of our Dominion atrophies away in immeasurable plague of strife?! How “High” you are now, hiding in this sunken pit that beclouds the plights of our people.” Consternation smothered any kindness or faith his heart held for his mother. In awe of her audacity. How it hinted at the horrible implication that this mysterious ‘revelation’ carried truth, when what he wanted to be assured simple duplicity. To know it a lie of an enemy and not treachery from his maiden mother?

Azarra refused his gaze directly. Averting any meaningful exchange their souls might share. But her apparent apathy at his shouting only stirred the martialed storm. “You are sprawled out over the drowned graves of all those who followed us here without care! Looking more a funneling half-spider than a matriarch with this liquid cobweb cauldron! Look at me, mother. Am I not the “living light” of your life? Yet you will not even meet mine eyes with your own? Will not look to me when there is naught but shadow surrounding us?! Will you not face what you hath created?? Look into the soul hemmed of your flesh & blood?!”

“Look into the soul of the one who hemmed ye, O Shade of Sin! Ye know my sorrow yet claw deeper into me with mockery!” A repressed tear escaped Azarra’s seal.

Drakkon arches as a toppled tree grazing the low surface of a glade. His eyes close enough to almost abrade hers, as if, perchance, to see the radiant reflection of his “divine soul” thrown back by her windows. Yet instead of infusing any remembrance of intimacy and maternal love Azarra meets her progeny with distraught cackle. A terrible screeching laugh, of a witch possessed by lunacy, reverberated about the subterranean swim. Hysteria of mocking incising his chest, bleeding with aberrancy of his mother’s guffaw. This derisive mania effusing from her jaw marks overture of madness and the dissonant tune of tragedy’s invocation.

Amid the incessant cackling Azarra gave answer to her son’s intrusion. “Of all the wretched things my mind could conjure it chose the bloody worst! The culmination of all my bloody woes! The seed of my most loathsome hour made flesh from mine own! Ah. The irony is not lost on me, oh ye gods of Infernae. O, Dark Delusion! How I wish this shadow would be gone from me, be lost to Lethean undertow!”

Her chortling persists alongside interludes of taunting & carousing. An inane sound emitting from her every pore, bouncing over every curve, and refracting through Drakkon’s ear. It was as though she did not believe he were truly here before her with fatal purpose written in his smoldering stare. Her frenzy, a maelstrom of pitiful misery and dejection, accompanied by the sadism derived from one believing themselves to be untouchable. Even as his shade spoke, she shuddered not. “You are my mother, I know. Yet my father is unknown. Doubtful tis the star of mine accord. Yet I shall not be gone till these delusions are done and truth unearthed!”

“You think yourself so strong, so firm in righteous purpose! Yet you are the spawn of tyranny & the progeny of all my sodding rue! You are as a feckless pup without me to hold your leash! Ha. This you must know – even with that thick skull of yours! How pitiful you are, posing as if you could harm me more than I am already wronged by this vile world. Into which I was tossed screaming, blind. All my dreams were stolen by you the moment you were conceived! What more do you think to pilfer from me?! What more of my soul is left to despoil?!”

She gave a heartless imperial salute then drooped her fingers, that cast the sign of Living & Light in dual L’s, down her course. “I have nothing, but this body left. Do you not see?” Azarra’s palms slather soap about her. Running along her skin as she raises herself from the depths. Exposes tender flesh of thundering chest while she whips admonishment. “Is the ghost wanting for reunion with the body of blasphemous communion? To take more of the vessel ye raked by coming into being?”

“Oh! My brave boy of Moon & Star blessed birth! ‘Blessed’ issue of my sunlit womb! Is there more of me you seek to take? Have you come to ruin this vessel as your existence has the rest of my being? Come you to complete your father’s curse?” Simpering coquettishly, one hand soaks beneath the bath while the other tussles fluff of her mane then reaches for his whiskers to rip them out. “You look just like him, save the wintry beard! You should shave it, become yourself! The white there seems more stress and age than snowfall. Quite unbecoming for a demigod! Look more a Ferali berserker than kingly being, I say!”

He pulls away, shoving her noose arms away. His irritated retort starts, singed by shame. “I come for truth. To know myself & past revealed. Not to banter about such perverse intimacy- “

The deranged matriarch grasps letter-knife near her pipe and fumbles a throw at this phantom. The sly ivory stabber slaps the glass of her familiars’ special fence. Her sleepy serpents awake at this crack in their container. Against the warped lens of the glass their faces conjoin into hydrae; a wiggling nest of hundred-fold tonsils, hissing from forking heads. “What know ye of intimacy? But then you couldn’t please that poor ‘empress’ enough! She had to visit that traitorous cur, Baron! Ah yes, I heard the rumors through the reeds of your Corinna, prancing about in sly dalliances with a certain lascivious fop – one finally banished. The one that yet comes back bashing upon our doorstep and who, even in exile, mocks all our efforts dreamt up! He shames us as she shamed ye! Consorting with traitor skalds and their leashed whores!”

“That she flopped on her back and gave herself to him so readily doth beg the question of whether you are even capable of such pillaging. Of satisfying that pretty little flower you plucked from a field of sod!” That deplorable wail assaulted the air as she threw back her head for another bout. To her this senseless screaming & guffawing served as a surreal catharsis for all the tensions erupting from her bust. She perceived this appearance of her son not to be literal, nor did she fully care at this point if it were real, but a hallucination conjured from blend of her servant offered and the fiber of her tumult. Thereby, to transcend this mental state she must beat back these dreadful phantoms towering over her sovereignty and curse all that had been wrought upon her through the ages. To her this was but another delirious spell shaped by deepening ill.

Yet her son’s sudden claw amputates at her shriek, throttling her throat with fixated fury. She squirms and shifts beneath steadfast clutches. Ever reminiscent of his father’s cruel grasp that ripped away her purity and helped form the fold of the hands choking her. Her eye’s transition from leering hostility to desperate realization. Seeing that she was still yet mortal and in very real danger from her brood, she’d berated arrogantly. Stunned gasps escape her chords, replace reviling hysterics. Monster of flesh! Abomination of defiled tomb! Curse these Ferali hands! Depart, Drakkon, or deliver me from breath!

He clasps her to brink of asphyxiation. Strangles the dream state separating her from reality. “How dare you mention Corinna! How dare you needle & thread my heart as though it were a hollow doll, a personal plaything! This ‘whore’ is infinitely more worthy of everything- of anything- than you! You-you- spiteful witch! She genuinely cares for the world, for its people and for me! Whereas you… I thought you were my mother, I thought you carried the divine spark of inspired love. But all you hath shown me is an abhorrent labyrinth of self-circling lies. This maze of confusion in which mind is lost. All for what wanton end? Who are you?!”

Drakkon relaxes his stranglehold as confusion grasps him. “I came here seeking honesty yet am met with more duplicity and animosity from she whom I thought cherished me above all else?! She who raised me! Who I raised to the splendor of Azar-Drakon & Majesty!”

Her eyes register him with mortal comprehension. Knowing the graveness this visitor posed. Knowing his touch to be solid past the haze of drugged stupor. Her pupils dilate with fresh dosage of understanding. That he could snuff out the flame of her life near instantaneously. Dismay swells in the pool, surging pressure into her. But Azarra did not flinch or writhe in terror but hardens the whetted aim of her gaze. Driving it deep into her son’s. She confronts potential death, unfaltering in the wraith’s presence. “Your beloved witch – squirming harlot, she is – is not long belonging to this world! Death’s emissary is already at her threshold. Why should I permit so ignoble a creature to discolor the bequest I carved from nothing, save mine own will and the fire of mind which hath breathed vitality into this ‘Majesty’? When all she sings for is envy, lust, and unwarranted trophies? Are you so blinded by your loins to not see her for what she is: the source of all this strife? She- “

Drakkon tersely whips his mother about beneath the broth of the basin. She swallows her sentence. He, a vacuous thrall to volatile emotions, swept up colossal tempest. A deluge of tears disgorges from his tremulous lids, shielded by wet stains. After a minute, stretching to forever, he wrangles enough self-discipline & restraint to retract his clutches from her trachea.

“-she struck forth my death knell! Tis the reason I accurse her so…” She coughs, continuing to wield her tongue. “She becomes the bane of your heart and the destroyer of all our foundation! That succubus and her wicked collusions against my life and the kingdom you built should be cast back to the infernal pits below our dimension of decay. Suffer the foulest penance those cruel gods can grant her, in righteous penance – and I am messenger unto that justice!”

“You should thank me, son of sin. As I am your deliverer too, towards true freedom! For I have saved you from her and restored you to yourself – you may be sovereign without her and fight off the rebel hordes that ride here to claim my head from these shoulders…” Azarra brought her legs about him to draw him in. She flees not from the ire in his glare but leans in to kiss his lips. A kiss infused with the poisonous bite, gnawing slime. “If you only held your eyes & ears to me, let your mouth serve me, we would not be in such dire poise; bound to death bed. Yet you let connivers & courtesans be crowned beside you, while I wilt. Oh!”

But her trap fails to snare him. The Astraean hammer of Azarra’s hate, in the instrument of her hookah, falls without bashing its target. The glass slips beneath the bath, impotent and unbroken.

In an infinitesimal yet infinitely pairing moment Drakkon slaps her back. He rises from the bath, refusing her (yet not evading anger). Pacing erratically in frantic search for sense. All the while her ceaseless laugh-wail bobs about the acoustics, lashing his eardrums. Rage casts red veil over vision, crimson with loathsome lust boiling in every vein and every synapse. Till every blood vessel above brow screams simultaneous sonata of indignation. His hand summons his blade. Commands its edge at his accuser. The blade glowers with his grimace. Bears rabid hate at his mother. Inches from piercing her flesh and bleeding her out into the soap & soup. The cruel tip of infamous sword (consecrated in the blood of hundreds of foes, real or perceived) skims her face. Traces red line along ashen cheeks.

But in the face of death’s apparition Azarra siphons clandestine vigor of hidden dignity. Despite the immediacy of her usher, ready to beckon her through death’s door into unknowing eternity or its absence, fear did not flood her spirit. A hungry, feral malice emerged, that her passion burned brighter when encompassed by full gloom. Her focus locked on him with noxious lucidity. All the embers of perdition’s blazing tongue licked at him from the portal of her hate. “You are the spitting image of your scoundrel father! Ursine sireling! Sludge of un-want!”

“Bastard of Bear!” From Azarra’s warped perspective Drakkon sprouts horns. Antler crown akin to that of Bellieus springs from his temple. She feels across urchin canal of time, that garb of Selene cling to her skin as had during the ritual. Eye of crimson moon lit her mind and again Kassan’s barbarous hands grope and tear beneath the gown. That same ebony mane, arctic eye, and swarthy scowl. “Perhaps the gods deem it fit that the seed should grow to resemble so uncannily the shape of the tree from which it fell. The Ferali tree, that is. Plunge the murderous edge into me and embrace the shape, the shadow of your father, Kassan! Let his heir release me into air!”

Audible shock slips out in timorous sob. A screech scuffs the back of his throat. Surroundings spin and plummet, as inner ground quakes. Bereft of all but the ruin of soul shattering truth. “Bar-Baron spoke true… I am the spawn of rape!” The ghastly screech soars in full, livid colour. Its sire reduced to wriggling pile of disbelief. The sword veered, wobbling weakly. “I am kin of Kassan?! I-am a kinslayer and purveyor of patricide?! A murderous son am I, marked by the lineage of tyrants?! Marred by birth!”

“You are his mirror image! His inheritor! O, horrible apparition! How utterly loathsome!” Azarra’s frightful look illuminates the truth of her statement. Stabs him with aberrant dread. “You are his living reflection in flesh and action! You are his curse I carried inside, in torment and agony. Truly you must have surmised as much during those dark nights of doubt when the soul coils about itself in suffocation? Or are you that naïve?”

“I am nothing… not to the world, to the gods, nor to you…” his eyes swell. Sobs stream arduously from the untapped reservoirs of this life-long deception. His being eviscerated; spirit, scattered to the winds. The trembling of his knees and spasms of nerves overcomes him with flurry of impotency. Then morphs into glacial paralysis, as his corpse freezes.

“I wish I strangled you with the cord of your detested birth! Burned hideous plump with the afterbirth! It would be penance to fate for sin not of my evocation. Filth fed from demon’s seed. Son of perdition! Oh, you blind slave of malice! What mercy I forwent to not rectify Kassan’s transgression - his marring of my soul’s tapestry – by putting his son to stone. Should’ve smashed pulp of bloody creature against sacred slab!” Bearer of curse & mother of monsters, Azarra sends jar of olive crystals along with her scream. Colliding to shards with her familiar’s pen, her hydra brood of snakes. The proud, but caged, songbirds above flock to agitated whirl.

Drakkon stumbles. Discovering the task of response to her stabbing remarks (incised in the carapace of his brain & being) insurmountable. His spine lapses as hollow trunk collapsed against brunt of nearest pillar, colliding with the weight of his downcast spirit. Horrid disconnection wanes as harsh reality caves in to entrap him. He seizes his hastily oscillating chest. Suicidal winds and mad rush thrash his heart. Hoping for it to burst and liberate him from life and innate nature. A nature so long denied, now roaring as a draconic snout of hellish fire.

“I did not deserve what happened to me, a fetid fate forced upon me! Why, I made the most of it, till that seed sprouted into the tree which would hang me!” Azarra rambles hysterically. Riled tears cascade into the warm pool covering her convulsions. “I would have hung you then and left you for the birds of carrion to peck out your revolting eyes, were it not that you were so useful to me. Oh, and my dear, Delphi! Wisdom to wield inversion of your perverse purpose, to turn the father’s seed into sword to skewer him. How glorious for you, my blade, to be the one slew the Black Bear. Left him bereft of his tyrannical coat! From my womb Kassan’s scourge was born and then wrought vengeance upon his head! But, alas, his crown grows again of your brow!”

“Inheritance of ruin!” Azarra joins another fit of insane chortling. Pulsating volume twists through wan stream & pounds Drakkon’s drums. “You, my willing puppet have laid low mine enemies! Made them corpses upon which I strode to pedestal of sovereignty. Ah, my small reward, such a good and obedient warrior. Yet how ironic that my greatest of enemies and the one still refusing to die - and allay my misery - is the one conceived of my body. Ha! You, the cause & culmination of all my grief. Embodiment of the worst! You are my nemesis, just as you are my son. What a cosmic punchline our lives are!”

“Blind patricide?! I committed so grave an atrocity! The worst of all affronts to high heaven! For dead dogma I desecrated this land and it’s people’s long lines. Tainted the blood of all tribes with stain of my soul… I have no grounds upon which to rule. No claim. No spark of the divine. Only the black pit which the soles of my feet perturb to march for. Only a heart devoid of any reason to have ever lived.” Drakkon mutters as boiling plasma pours over the barrier of stasis in his seams. Ignites sightless ferocity against the one who forced him into this wicked world, only to drag it along further to despair. “You let this be! Made it so, as I!”

“So grievous a sin and so full of disdainful pride! That you could be so smoothly convinced of your ‘divine birth’ reveals an innate arrogance in you. Presumably Kassan’s vile essence still lingers in that blood of yours.” Azarra gulps the length of her glass, holds it as if it were a precious crystal. A crystal-ball glass to peer into what would be, to scry the future in green wine. She sighs, contemplatively. “Perhaps I should applaud myself with what I accomplished through you. Accursed earth mangled my dignity. Malderath & Elderath conspired to take all from me. Rape & wretchedness stole everything I ever was. Yet through the fires of my Will, I earnt rebirth from the ashes of misery. I have cultivated this triumph, my crown.”

With this boast Azarra’s fingers rose from her abdomen up towards the top of her head, holding and fiddling it as though an invisible crown rested there. Drakkon’s fury then magnifies beyond restraint at his bearer’s jabbing derision. At the woman who delivered him to life and shaped his views of the world and himself belittling him as though he were the lowliest degenerate alive. His mood now less saturnine and more infuriation ready to erupt. “As I am a fraud, only posturing at godhood which was never belonging to me you, Azarra, are no true mother! False woman, of fake love! Not woman but witch! Not even a human being. Nay! You are a heinous spider weaving only death and schemes from silk of deceit!”

“Ah, emperor of deceit! Chieftain of Malderath! Let ye, born damned, damn the world in your wake! Let it burn for the wretchedness it roused in me, launched against me when so fresh and kept me from any ripe season!” She swore, sundering all precaution to fling vows of perdition.

He pushes himself from the pillar and clasps the nearest beacon. Tossing candles and kindling in his hands as his mother’s words inflame ire beyond reparation. “You make yourself a monster, O wicked sun! I named you a god to lift my curse, to save myself! But, proving yourself a Living Blight, tis you who hath made this fate for us all. Listening to wyrms and whores while appraising yourself a god. A deviant fool borne of blasphemy. With no sight save for swords! You should be put to the pyre and writhe in agony before the gods and the people you hath aggrieved for your avarice! Blasted by Helwinds or eaten by vipers!”

This venom spat upon his face, Drakkon heaves the light across the room. The sparks hurl out to scathe the edges of Azarra’s while her son wrenches another ornate flambeau and shatters it in exasperation. The wrathful embers skitter about the floor and shoot into the tub as apocalyptic comets. Several sparks singe her neck and hair. Suddenly, tilting up to look at her son in fear. Appearing to her abhorrent phantasm of Kassan, resurrected to drag her to perdition.

“You are nothing but an odious charlatan!” He wades into the water, slithers through the spring-well. Clamps moribund fingers about her throat, constricting her breath and prohibiting anymore vile taunts. He thrashes her about, tightens about her esophagus. Addresses her with unrelenting contempt fuming in his pupils and cords alike. Drakkon’s rage split throat-tearing thunder. His retaliatory curse threatens to shatter stone with battering scale. “Fuck your bloody, insipid vanity! All this vacant luxury cannot fill the vapid hole in your heart! You could have stitched yourself together with honesty and woven threads of understanding. I could have grown in the light instead of this deepening deceit! Tis you who deserves to be burnt to a cinder and scattered to the winds!”

Death’s dark needle touches Azarra. The morbid specter, taking her son as its agent as she once did, pokes at her through final embrace. Doom upon her soon, yet she does not stir in macabre distress or whimper in excess. Rather, resigns herself to the approach – her release from the gilded prison her life became. But then the assault relinquishes. Enough for her to gasp and wheeze a drunken cry. She offers Drakkon the wine glass with trembling hand. Her arms outstretched to be taken by her son, carried across the dark river, through the gallows, and to what (if any) shores should lay beyond the seas of oblivion.

“You will never be whole, not even with all the shallow glamour this world possesses! Look at me! This. Is. What. You. Hath. Wrought… Since you denied me light and real warmth to lock me in this cage of masquerade your eyes will never glimpse sun again! And as you trapped me in a world of hollow lies you will be entombed here for the world no longer warrants the stain of your existence! I will be your deliver to the darkness that becomes you now!”

Drakkon grapples the dwindling goblet from her sloth like hold. In fit of impulse gulps down the entirety to drown the rue of the present’s tunneling horror. Yet the desperate libation did not allay his wrath, for then the hue of his face became as flustered & inflamed as the tinge of droplets coating his lips. A gangrenous green & carmine sheen steals his look. Instead of this drink delivering him from this ruinous nightmare it drives him further into its reality. His veins throb with fire and terrible temper through his temple and throat. Threatening to rupture as his derision bursts. “Your false ‘love’ is as corrosive as serpent’s toxin! If I must rip out these tendons to rid myself of this blood pumping through me, this aberrant taint, so be it. I am to be damned with you, mother. I deserve to reap nothing but death! For that is all that I have sown throughout my life… All for a cause more fragile than glass!”

His hook clamps with such turbulence that the chalice shatters. Splinters serrated edges into his palm. Holding the remnants of the glass, jagged shards penetrate his skin. Blood leaks into the bath, pollutes balmy waters around Azarra’s bare body. Colors a scarlet aura about her.

His body, a shambling thing so alien. Hostile to his own existence. Trapped inside of it. Another aspect within, a demon of fear & shame, prompts Drakkon to slash a shard along the contours of his wrists. A tempting promise. To release his life’s blood into the basin which ached with yearning for the taste of tragedy’s clot to feed fully and escape himself. But though his flesh and the mind moving it desire lethal cleanse from ashen streaks he could not strike true. With world painted pale by discord wrought by the dark truth of his birth, he refuses to succumb wholly to such a harried suicide.

Instead, tarrying not on self-annihilating urge, the humbled & hurting emperor threw the traces aside. Violently they pierce the barriers holding Azarra’s pet serpents. Giving Fate more footing, not committing fully to death yet for himself or his guileful maker, Drakkon leaps to kick the menagerie of snakes from their house. Galling them, the pestered & shaken reptiles slither about; some into the pool while others coil about in corners to pose for strike, hissing. Then their liberator returns his attention to their captor and himself to the poisonous pool.

“Too weak to Will yourself away?! I understand though, I do. Even when we know what a wretched thing is life, with its many uninvited guests & baleful blows, tis hard to turn it all away in bane. But this world would be better without us both. If you might do the honor? Oh, must I call your lady the harlot that she is to inspire you? Must I remind you that, even being what you are, that mud-borne wench is unworthy of you?!” Azarra glares into the invidious eyes of her son. Even now, with her mortal fiber threatened to be cut, her gaze challenges him. Pleading not for mercy but beaming back the same malicious intent he bore upon her. “May your own son come to be such a villain against ye! Cut the cord of blighted birth & sever the line!”

Drakkon succumbs to command of blinding wrath. Surrenders to cathartic and uncontrollable current. Becomes that vessel of fury unleashed upon she who endured him into existence. Raises his hands to her throat, refusing to relent anymore against the woman who raised him under dubious dogma and swathed his story in myth for survival’s sake. “I deny you! I deny the gods! I deny myself! I am your progeny, I am nothing… ‘Tis nothing we shall become! Abyss our only absolution!”

Azarra plunges in and out of consciousness’ pool. Bereft of her breath, she just manages to keep sliver of awareness pried open enough to witness, in disbelief, her destruction. The monstrous brood who marked her fate, kept her from ever again touching true joy, sinks bloody claws into her. The shard lodged in his grip forges fresh homes in her neck. Excruciating pain becomes her, all the while the vestiges of death burn in his sight. His throttling inadvertently tears grim hole. Mangles the lining that spurts out to mix with serpent waters.

That last defiant look remained along Azarra’s visage, even sullied with retch & red. Writhing attempts to scream supersede her mad laughter. Shaking the depths of the reservoir with morbid tongue. Yet as this banshee bemoaning repels her assailant, she slips into gurgles to stifle the foul brunt of wailing curse. Aghast, she fades in sporadic flutters as her son soars out of the water, fleeing in haze out through claustrophobic corridors leaving her to solitary agony. Thinking her death to be etched in tableau of the Fates.

Azarra barely floats on a while in this basin soaked with her lifeblood. Lingering symptoms of drug induced delirium pour out with it. Her avian angels scream in their silver shelters; trapped in cage of lament. Their wings, impotent furies. Mirage drapery, her curtains. Mystic threads line the pallid blanket wrapping her soul in mantle of desolation. Oozing trail from the wound, which she half-dressed with tatters of her gown, congeals and solidifies. The end’s approach embodies in serpentine shape.

This morbid vision intensifies with her loss of essence. Slinking apparition manifests sanguine scales and a spiral tail that wound along the maddened route of Drakkon’s hasty retreat. It slithers up readying to devour what remained of her corporeal shape. The worm-thing flashes forked tongue at the gaping chasm of her injury. Coming to feast upon her cornea and dying sight. To lap up her cursory life till slimy coil asphyxiates her entirely and her chest rises no more. Wide, monstrous jaw stretches out for the void to engulf her dwindling light.

A voiceless gasp crawls from her throat. Though without sound to summon them or sight to see, the Hels seek her then. Claiming Azarra among their kin, to rule as a Queen of the Dead. Within the thermae chamber a malevolent gale births itself of her breath. A wraith maelstrom wrenches the flambeaus to fling them with fury. Near all lights lingering in the tower, snuffed simultaneously by gust of her spirit’s curse. Without her words to carry wrath, winds from everywhere & nowhere come to aide her, hailing her with cacophonous song of Hel.

Banishment

Minutes following

Drakkon stumbled a sprint out of the dead-silent halls. The tides of restless discontent drowning out any light outside his husk. There could be no rest from the pursuit of this harrowing tragedy but the gallows mark looming over in blackest cloud. Cobwebs concealed any kind memories and all notions of the morrow. Soul spun with his sins, wound together in casket. Their fibers followed him as he fled the towering tomb, encased in dark. That place where bitter reflections of his mother’s fatal revelation, of the lie that was his life. Her haunting laughter twirled maddening loops through the narrowing airwaves. Winding woeful strings to tether his thoughts to accursed form – the monstrous blood slithering beneath his skin and the scales of guilt inherited from the curse of his birth. That blood which wore upon his makeshift bandage, torn from his mother’s foregone gown.

Never could he relent this knowledge of his mortal invention. Himself a glorified abomination. To be propped up to godhood only mocked him in mauling manner. For that high plinth he sat upon toppled and with it cast him to furthest pits. He was but a pitiable worm before his own darkness drenching him. To drowning in the festering bile of his true, muddy matter.

His soul wrenched his pulse in wretched contortions. Knowing that forever would his steps resound with the revolting devil’s chord of his core. His materia raw with the liquid flame of wicked genes. His mere human heart held not an ounce of divinity within. Every fiber enflamed with loathing for the body & persona holding it. In that pyre of pure detestation Drakkon fed this derision against all the world. But ever more so he damned himself. Cursed the veins that contained the blood of Kassan. Swore off every vessel & sinew – these anchors to the crime which gave him life. Hitched to this baleful tide inside, he welcomed waking only to oblivion, should stream of ceaseless sleep erase the dye of his breath. Struggling against temptation to tear out those carmine canals. To reject this damned bloodline and being. A few serrations & lifelines torn seemed the only prospect for freedom from the horror of self-awareness. Every second veered into tortuous infinity of winding dark halls and eclipsing stone encasement, spurning these fiery torrents which walled his sight & spirit into inferno.

Punishing phantoms stalk from every skulking shadow. More demons drape about his shoulders. The more fervently he claimed resilience - struck straight posture and pretense of carrying on his grand charge - the tighter the noose wrestled him in. His need to be estranged from himself and of savage circumstance aroused whimpering and sobbing gasps, emerging as low outlandish yowls. His feigned stoicism crumbled against the nearest pillar, clutching to it for support. Sinking into umbrage & architecture. Over & over again involuntary frenzy slams his shoulders against the harsh stone. Raving inanely as wild tears flee his ducts and dampen the floor. Knuckles, a bloodied brown.

Hushed but hurried murmur of voices rushed the hall ahead. Creaking of doors preludes the shuffling of boots hastening towards. Swiftly Drakkon propelled himself up from the pillar – not yet feeling the breadth of his marred hand due to the intoxication of vile emotions churning in his gut. He drew up black cowl, concealed his face in anonymity as not to be seen by the skeleton crew of Azarra’s remaining disciples. They passed by as an ensemble of wraiths, whispering in a language that (while still in his tongue) he could not process. They glided through the halls as ghosts. Their humble procession charting to the bath house from whence he’d come.

Terror gripped him. For the ramifications of his matricide were something he wished to consider. If she truly had perished and not become a living ghost with more hate than ever. Nor his chaotic brain capable of clutching the full multitude of possibilities that could lash back from his act.

Fear swelled up further as the robed reverent disappeared into the dim chamber beyond. With their voices inaudible by distance, the dead silence spoke an eerie malevolence. This hollowness berated, this lack of rustling noise and absence of life further concentrated bleak finality. As he fled by the ever-burning braziers, submerged in shade, there was but one left whose flames were not eaten by frost-winds from within. To the last of them Drakkon committed the parchment on which impossible truth was inscribed. With a sidelong glance he saw the letter which incited this confrontation convert to ash in seconds. He envied how easy the thing burned, partially wishing he himself would be consumed by balefire.

Perturbing stillness broke by a sudden Helwind from the depths, which killed the light and commanded the doors open for Drakkon’s crossing from out of the vast, gutted spire. The howling air outside snared him in urgent winter storm. The weather reflected the dismal visage tearing beneath lustrous veil, façade of fleeting beauty. The white paint bled by the winds.

He lumbered out into biting clime. Caring not for the danger the inclement cold imposed upon his journey. Stumbling onto his steed he forced the beast onward. The way to his base camp would be harrowing and prolonged by merciless conditions, yet he drove on as billow snowfall surrounded. Storm gales roar as an infernal dragon, hoarding the skies’ azure gilt. Arctic trill of solitude snared; winter’s shroud coveted him & decaying grounds. Alone with his hate, accompanied only by blasted & befouled elements. Though he flew with dire pace there was no inner haste to return to his men. Little urge to speak to those whose loyalty largely lay in the false pretension of his divinity – untwined as sadistic sham. How could he face them honestly?

Wailing snowstorm encircled him in deafening howls. Accursed tempest afflicting sky & soil rivaled the maelstrom within. He could not hope to garner what the future held for one who damned himself in the eyes of the gods. But he could not bear to remain near the scene of the barbarity befallen of his conceit & intemperance. Not even the prospect of his love, Corinna could recapture the unwound strands of hope. For to him her glaring luminosity of form & essence taunted the taint of his corruption. Knowing atrocious truth, he didn’t deserve to hold her in his arms ever again. Her glowing flower should wilt, were Drakkon to graze her with his accursed touch. For this he further cursed himself.

Sepulchral shade of storm seized every meter of skyline. The winds of evenfall’s wings, as foreboding auguries of calamity conjured from corpses & gusts haunt the horizon. A cyclopean current surged across the brim of the firmament. Effused flow of forebodings into his aquifer of spirit. Witch-laughter rode along the white & grey of pale dusk. Wan residue of departed Mother’s chortling jinx won lingering voice in wraith gusts over vista. While her tower disappeared by distance & post-Yule coat, the throat of her sorrow & malice still sang.

So too did sinister whim cry to his depths. A pulsating orb calling from the abyss to capture Drakkon’s psyche and draw forth his steps to his woeful command. Just as the tides are bid move by the moon, this hellish whim guided him onward through the heart of perdition. This impulse, one of murderous intent and blackest fire: to sever the cords of Baron’s life. To slay the traitor who held up a mirror to shine horrid vision of true self. The lord longed for life no longer, slaughtering any idle hope of another summer of golden luxury. Nor did he covet his sovereign authority, knowing undeniably how his rule blighted the people. But with lethal gravity he longed for death; a monsoon of mortality, to rend more than his enemy in himself. The death of his former skald seemed the last strand left to sever of the foul band binding him. No redemption waited on him. Only the smoldering determination and dominating desire to see Baron’s head cleaved clean off and stuck onto a pike. He, and all knowing of this conspiracy, must be culled.