1 INTRODUCTION & PART 1

It burns.

If nothing else, it burns. In the dark … in the dark, I cannot see it. But I can still feel it. Even after all of these years, the memory of it remains … burned upon the stygian depths of my expanded being like a brand upon my chest. To be marked by one's deeds … if my deeds were to be judged by the mark that I carry, I would deserve the fate that has befallen me.

My fate … an ongoing divine Comedy of Manners—a dialogue of dry wit, intrigue, and cleverness long since gone trite with its latest telling. I sit upon a great throne in a chamber that is all my own—a part of a vast empire whose reputation of fear will endure the ages, if not the power behind it all. My domain spans the distance with pure, unadulterated power, and cold, immoral expansionism.

This was a story begun with violent ambition—an ambition that consumes all in its path. It was … it is an ambition that burns. But like all flames, it shines brightly, spreads across barriers, destroys them, and reduces all into ashes. When born, fire consumes its womb to ashes, but eventually to those ashes must it return. Then there is darkness—the cool, soothing blackness that cocoons me, protects me … and suffocates me.

It is the source of my strength, you see. To call down darkness upon my enemies, and to blot out the very light that I once loved … and now hate so much. Although, now that I ponder over this conundrum, I see that distinctions between hatred and love, darkness and light, tend to blur together in my mind and cancel each other out. Was I blinded by the blazing light or arrogance, or made sightless by the darkness that is my power?

Whatever the casualty of my existence, I still have one mote of humor left even after all this time. Namely, I still possess my sense of irony. What is it, you ask? I will tell you—that I, a Lord of Darkness—am as blind as the drones under my command. Only in my element can I see the black blood of this pen purging me of my painful years of brooding, staining the purity of the parchment that will spread, surgically divide, and consume the white. A fitting analogy considering that I finish the last page of the story in that fashion. A story ends in darkness. Of course … it can begin from darkness as well …

Part 1

Ol-arys khyl' altai

The Book is oneself infinite,

Word stronger than sword,

the Pen possibility incarnate.

A story does begin with but a single word. Words are powerful things, although for the most part they are indeed taken for granted. Most simply use them to communicate with as minimal difficulty as they can—appreciating only their most pragmatic and utilitarian of uses. However, there are very few who can understand that words are the outlet of one's innermost ideals—an expression of an idea, or its form, while the meaning or idea behind it is its essence.

When used properly, they can be great and persuasive enough to create and preserve governments, philosophies, and religious movements. But then there are a select few individuals in all the Realms who have an inherent understanding, that there are some Words whose essence makes up a greater whole than anyone could have imagined—representing grand and ancient cosmic powers undreamed of.

So yes, words are important. But over time, a word or even its cosmic equivalent can lose its meaning. Governments grow corrupt, faulty and weak. Philosophies are used so many times that their essences become lost in the sophisms that become their forms. Religious institutions, once founded on open spiritualism, become hollow, and intolerant. It was from the latter that I came—trapped and blinded within the clutches of the fanatical, religious zeal that was my birthright. So maybe I was wrong. Perhaps my story did begin in light―a searing and unforgiving one.

I do not remember the exact name of the Realm I was born in, but I remember what it was like. The buildings of my city were enormous and oval shaped, made from a stone of the purest white, and their windows were crystalline and multifaceted. Everyone called it the City of Light. It was beautiful and pristine, I will grant you. At night, the city glowed with a radiance that would have fooled many foreigners into thinking that it was in eternal morning.

Yet the Great Temple of Oru dwarfed even the purity of the Realm's capital city. It was a monolith of an alabaster cathedral with a multitude of glimmering rainbow lights refracted from the Crystal Spire which lay in its center—an ornate dagger embedded within a sinner's soul. It also served as the heart of the Theocracy of Oru.

And when I had my migraines, I remember having to hide in the darkest, deepest chamber I could find in order to keep away from that infernal, incessant light that everyone else loved so much. Otherwise, the glow of the buildings and walls would blind me, and the shining light caught in the diamond edges of the windows would pierce my skull like thousands of tiny, white-hot shards of pain. The very sight of the Great Temple to the Realm's patron deity itself would have probably induced a seizure in me in those days. So I hid from that light.

Perhaps that was only a small part of the reason my father despised me so much—a small, yet essential part.

My family were devout worshipers of Oru, much like everyone else in most, if not all, of the Realm. However, let me explain that when I say 'devout', I am really attempting to create an understatement. Perhaps the words 'obsessive', 'fanatical', and 'small-minded' would better suffice.

Oh yes, and the only difference between my family and other citizens of the City of Light was that we were more 'devout' than even they. Or at least it seemed that way when you were a member of the family of a Priest of Oru. My father was the patriarch of our family in every sense of the word—ruling over our minds, bodies, and souls as he did with the rest of the populace. My mother, although she was subservient to his whims, was just as pious—if not gentler. She had to deal with the whims of my two other siblings—a bunch of miserable, whining brats.

I remember my mother most of all. She was tall, and willowy, her long hair was brown—almost black. Those born with black hair in the City of Light were usually shunned as creatures of darkness, and killed when they are born. My mother, however, belonged to a noble family and she was saved from this tradition by being put into an arranged marriage with my father—a man almost twice her age.

Sometimes I wonder whether or not she wished for the death they denied her. There were times I thought I saw roots of black in her coiled brown hair.

Her life was not that much more merciful. My Priest father ignored her for the most part, letting her three children drain the life and vitality out of her like the little blood-sucking leaches we were at that age. While I grew out of infancy all too quickly, the other leaches grew up to be full-fledged vampires—little monsters that grew stronger off her growing weakness. There were times I would look at the deep lines engraved onto her visage and see some semblance of the beauty she must have possessed at one time.

I must have been my mother's favorite, even though she never spoke about it. Then again, she never spoke much of anything. Long ago, something must have happened to her throat. I knew this because I saw a fine slash scar on her throat where her voice box was located. Indeed, as with many organized patriarchal cultures modeled for a 'male god' by 'pious' men, one general rule is that a woman should be seen and not heard. Another tradition in our Realm was that if a woman speaks out against her patriarch, or shows any evidence of learning something she should not know, he has the right to rob her of her voice.

Perhaps he did that to her, but whether it was successful or not was a mystery. Indeed, there were many whisperings about such things among the servants when they thought that I was ignorant or unhearing. Of course, such talk was rare because they wanted to keep their voice boxes intact. But when I looked into my mother's eyes, I saw a keen intelligence behind her submissive facade. In case you are wondering, despite the fact that she did not talk, I knew her to be a pious woman because I always saw her silently praying, and bowing before our altar at home. Most likely that was all she had ever known. She needed someone to pray to when my father became angry with her—to pray to for mercy ... and to pray to for forgiveness to have made the first prayer. If her voice was undamaged, she learned to hide it very well. Able to speak or no, she protected me from the worst of my father's wrath.

In the eyes of the citizenry, my father was a divine figure—a living incarnation of Oru's power in the mortal plane. In his robe of purest white and woven gold symbols, he recited his sermons, his blessings, and occasionally curses, for the masses. They believed him and the other Priests to be deified saints made flesh once more—wise beings that needed to be venerated without question.

In reality, my father was a solid, stout man with thinning iron-gray hair, and a perpetually dead-set expression on a pockmarked face. The robes and the headdress made him look like some divine saint, but underneath the pristine facade he wore in public I knew him to be an intolerant, black-hearted and petty tyrant. In other words, the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing. I will not go into the kinds of actions he committed in his so-called 'divine' role nor will I waste anymore paper and ink to record down his mad rambling. The only ranting that you will see here is mine—for at least mine has a method, and a reason of origin behind it.

At any rate, it was custom (as were many other things) for the eldest born of a Priest to follow in his sire's footsteps in the worship of the Almighty Oru, and my father had high expectations for me. Or at least he called them 'high'. I called them impossible. My other siblings were left alone and nothing was expected from them, but since they were the children of a powerful Theocrat certain allowances were made for them. In other words, they did whatever they wanted to whomever or whatever they wanted. But such was not my case.

I was, at best, a frail child. When I think about it, my father had considered killing me when I was but an infant. His rationale was that he wanted a strong, healthy heir, not a weak, pathetic, little wretch like me. Somehow, perhaps because of my mother's good graces, I was spared—allowed to live a life of indoctrination, abuse, and neglect when I was not needed. Obviously, I was never really that talkative.

Early in my life, I learned that talking back to my father brought consequences. His physical abuse became less constant as I got older, and it began to transmute more into mental and verbal lashings. Every day I learned his prayers, the ceremonies, and the rituals.

In the classroom at the Great Temple, my education continued along with those of the other children.

"And so Oru came to our people aeons ago to end the blasphemies that kept our Realm a warring, heathen backwater. We learned of how He had no physical form, and that He had told our people to gather the wisest and eldest of men together so that He might bestow His divine knowledge upon them," I remember our teacher explaining with a stern face. "Can anyone tell me what the role of the female is in the Realm of Oru?"

A girl raised her hand, "Woman cannot learn how to read or write because we shed blood monthly. Blood begets blood. To teach Those Who Shed Blood," she recited one of the laws of Sacred Text dictated to her by word of mouth, "would be to allow the bloodshed and division to rise anew. Only can a true Handmaiden, ordained by Oru, be considered pure, and even she is not taught how to read or write," she ended off, and our teacher nodded approvingly.

The female students, who were usually Handmaidens to be ('divine concubines' in the making), were taught orally. Only males could have this knowledge and enforce the Will of the Light—for they were closer to Him, made in His image, and did not go through menstruation. We males were taught through reading and writing. But even we had our limitations.

I also learned that those first High Priests and their lesser brethren had been oath-bound to reproduce with the purified Handmaidens of their Lord and teach their oldest male heirs the wisdom of Oru—to read and write only of His greatness and nothing more. I learned and recited these things under my father's stern, cold dark eyes, and his equally cold iron fist.

And every day I felt my soul waning. It was though a fist closed over it—suffocating the life out of it. Perhaps that was my first taste of darkness—the suffocation and the inflicted blindness. Yet I did have one mode of escape—a mode that even he could not control.

My writing ...

I wrote of imaginary places, of strange creatures, and people much different from our own. There was no mention of Oru or the Theocracy in those writings that I held dear. It was an outlet for my imagination, and my imagination alone. I could build worlds for myself—worlds born from infinite possibility. Each of these stories or writings also helped ease my headaches—pains in my skull that would grip me when I hadn't written anything in a long time. No one knew about my little transgression against one of Oru's commandments.

As I became an adolescent, I ventured outside more often and explored the rest of the city—particularly its marketplaces. I bought books from the other Realms—material that was legally censured by the Theocracy under the strictest of penalties. After I read the books, I generally sold them back to some traders, furtively glancing around to make sure that no one recognized me and that I was not being followed.

One day, another person, a girl, sought some books from a trader that I also desired. We bartered over those books, and she was furious at me for getting in her way, "I want these books," she hissed at me, the fire behind her eyes all too evident. "Some of us need to read so that we can survive another day."

"For this book? Oh spare me, please. It is a bloody storybook."

"Some of us," her voice was still fierce, but there was an odd catch in her throat. "Some of us need all the fantasy we can get our hands on ..."

I closely examined her face. That was perhaps the only important thing that my father did tell me was that if you stared hard enough into a person's face, or their eyes, you could divine their intentions, or at least get an idea of what they were feeling. It helped him when he had to go manipulate the masses.

The girl was smaller than me; almost petite. I cannot describe her body's appearance even now. It you were to compare her to a structure, an architect would say that she possessed very few angles, and was mostly composed of curves.

Indeed, her arms, legs, and hips were shaped and connected in smooth, fluid curves. Her skin was smooth, slightly darker than mine, and her pearl white teeth bit into her ruby lower lip. Her reddish copper hair was shaped into curls, and a strand of it hung over her left eye. When I looked into her large, brown eyes ... I was transfixed by the feral nature behind them, the raw need for something more, and the voraciousness for learning ...

I knew that one look from those eyes would allow me to commit the ultimate blasphemy. She was both a Blooded One (not blessed by the Theocracy to be a Handmaiden) and she looked like she had exotic, foreigner origins. She wasn't even part of our religion.

"How much do you know how to read?" I asked her.

"Huh?" she looked surprised; her gaze suggested otherwise.

"Well?"

"Um ... a little, I guess. Why?"

"I can help you," I offered.

Her eyes seemed to devour my own, and I thought for a second that her face softened. "It's been a while since someone has come to talk to me. Who are you? You don't seem to be from around here."

I gave her my name. And she gave me hers.

"I-I will see you again. Here," I gave her the book and paid the trader.

"You didn't have to ... thank you," and she ran off.

Victorie was her name.